4 ms·

We live outside of Boston with two kids, now 3y and 5y. We're about 10min from the subway, and we've never had a car. We do a lot of walking with our kids, and

• ekianjo 7y ago
  The difference is that most people can't afford to live just a few minutes away from the subway. City centers are very expensive. You can't expect people to live with the same standards if they have to walk for 1 hour to get to the nearest public transport.
  • jefftk 7y ago
    My parent post is saying that even in situations where walking is very practical it stops working after you have kids, and I strongly disagree there. As for the question of how generalizable this is, the US situation is much worse than other cities around the world. Boston has very good public transit for the US, but it's still pretty minimal globally, and we could build out transit far better. It's also only expensive to live near transit, or generally to live in cities, because we've massively restricted housing construction. Allow people to construct tall dense buildings, use the tax money to build out transit, and for the price of an apartment in the cheapest part of Boston today you can have something better that's a short walk from a transit stop that will get you all over the city faster than the T does today.