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He complains it is all parking, but there's solutions to that. Here in Santa Monica there's a whole row of public parking buildings a few blocks from all the po

He complains it is all parking, but there's solutions to that. Here in Santa Monica there's a whole row of public parking buildings a few blocks from all the popular downtown areas (beach, pier, 3rd street promenade, mall, etc.). So if you shell out the money, you can compress the parking into one block along the otherwise active walkable downtown area. In this case the developer must have just calculated it's cheaper to have parking lots. As someone who grew up in Manhattan, though, I do kind of laugh that he considers that development plan non-walkable. I was always happy to walk across the island east/west and only took subways north/south, so his impossible to walk to shopping center part of the development looks trivially walkable to my Manhattan self...

atombender 7y ago
"Walkable" doesn't mean you can't walk (although it sometimes means that, too, of course). By most measurements, walkability refers to a pedestrian's ability to reach amenities such as grocery stores within a short time (e.g. 5 minutes). By that metric, almost all of Manhattan is extremely walkable. Manhattan does have many isolated "deserts" where you can find yourself surrounded by just residential buildings (parts of UWS and UES, for example), or a heavy concentration of businesses, parking, industry (e.g. 11th-12th Ave around Hudson Yards, for example). Until a decade ago or so, the Finance District used to be pretty dead at night. And so on. There's fairly low "pain threshold" in the US before people discard walking as an alternative and just go in their car. We all know the satiric image of the American who jumps in their car to go one block; in my experience (as a European living in the US), there's a certain amount of cultural indoctrination that has persuaded Americans that transportation by car is absolutely necessary.
- bluGill 7y ago
  If 99% of your trips cannot be reasonably made by walking you don't think to walk for that last 1% either

atombender 7y ago

"Walkable" doesn't mean you can't walk (although it sometimes means that, too, of course). By most measurements, walkability refers to a pedestrian's ability to reach amenities such as grocery stores within a short time (e.g. 5 minutes). By that metric, almost all of Manhattan is extremely walkable. Manhattan does have many isolated "deserts" where you can find yourself surrounded by just residential buildings (parts of UWS and UES, for example), or a heavy concentration of businesses, parking, industry (e.g. 11th-12th Ave around Hudson Yards, for example). Until a decade ago or so, the Finance District used to be pretty dead at night. And so on. There's fairly low "pain threshold" in the US before people discard walking as an alternative and just go in their car. We all know the satiric image of the American who jumps in their car to go one block; in my experience (as a European living in the US), there's a certain amount of cultural indoctrination that has persuaded Americans that transportation by car is absolutely necessary.

bluGill 7y ago
If 99% of your trips cannot be reasonably made by walking you don't think to walk for that last 1% either