21 ms·

Surveys show Americans want more walkable cities

553 points by jseliger 5y ago

doit4thebitties 5y ago
Have to build cities European-style then with shops and residences closer together. Also, Davis CA is extremely walkable anywhere near downtown and the UCD campus.
foxpurple 5y ago
I recently moved from a house in the suburbs in Australia to an apartment in the city. Got rid of my car and now I just walk to everything I need. I couldn’t be happier. Driving was such a huge stress on my life that is now gone. I can get anything I need within a 10 minute walk. The thing is it just doesn’t seem like the average person is willing to give up single family houses to gain walkability. For me, I would never go back.
- iammisc 5y ago
  Or... hear me out. You could just build walkable suburbs. Why there is a distinction between 'suburb' and 'smaller city' is beyond me, but there really is. A small city still has a walkable downtown core with apartments around which there is a small area of single family homes within walking distance to the downtown area. A suburb is just tracts of single family homes and nothing else for miles on end. No real 'business area', certainly no walkable one. We could just talk a normal suburb, rezone some homes to business districts and take cars off that street. Voila. Now you have a mini downtown near a bunch of single family homes. Oh yeah, and you have a nice business district that's cheaper than the real downtown that is a good launching place for local businesses. win win win. Now do that everywhere, and then connect the little townie areas via rapid transit and you have something lovely.
  - foxpurple 5y ago
    You can kind of have it if you mean walkable to just the general store, a cafe and a few other things but you can never have everything because many kinds of stores can only exist with a certain population close enough. What I love about living in the city is literally _everything_ I need is within walking distance. I have not used a car or any form of public transport in months and have felt no need to, I can buy anything within walking distance and all offices for any job I would take in this state are within walking distance. You just can’t have that with houses because each house takes up a significant space which you have to walk past to get anywhere.
    - KarlKemp 5y ago
      Even with single-family housing, the density is high enough to support a supermarket and other stores that are visited at a rate of once per month within walking distance, easily. Source: the town I grew up in: https://www.google.com/maps/dir/51.2413047,6.9602975/51.248182,6.9768629/@51.2462608,6.9656488,2688m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m2!4m1!3e2 https://www.google.com/maps/dir/51.2413047,6.9602975/51.2481... Population is 36,000 or so. I've added the walking distance from the outskirts to the very center, which is 2.3km. You'll note that there are supermarkets distributed throughout, usually within a few hundred meters. If you need anything special, it takes 30 minutes by public transport (https://www.google.com/maps/dir/51.2413047,6.9602975/K%C3%B6nigsallee,+D%C3%BCsseldorf/@51.2345467,6.8034804,21513m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1!4m14!4m13!1m0!1m5!1m1!1s0x47b8ca3d06b68227:0x81883aefd77f96ec!2m2!1d6.779266!2d51.2220574!2m3!6e0!7e2!8j1628322060!3e3!5i2 https://www.google.com/maps/dir/51.2413047,6.9602975/K%C3%B6... ) to a shopping district in the next larger town, which has any type or brand of retail that exists in this country (Streetview: https://www.google.com/maps/@51.2254878,6.7800095,3a,75y,64.26h,101.02t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sgCUtbmOSmEj7fzVV20t-yA!2e0!7i13312!8i6656 https://www.google.com/maps/@51.2254878,6.7800095,3a,75y,64....)
    - 2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
      I guess it depends on which suburb. Some suburbs in Sydney are fairly liveable. Especially where there is a mix of housing, or, as much as I hate them, large apartment complexes. You can get all the things you need and have a few restaurants, all within walking distance. Other suburbs, especially those huge “communities” with lots of cookie cutter homes seem really isolated. You have to drive.
    - iammisc 5y ago
      I just disagree. I live in the very environment you claim doesn't exist
      - mrgordon 5y ago
        Where is that? You may have a different idea of walkable than the other poster. As soon as you have tons of parking spaces, mandatory setbacks, etc. you’ve taken much of the room away from pedestrians forcing them to walk much longer distances (often in bad weather) to get to where they want to go. That’s why the two are at such odds.
  - linguae 5y ago
    Exactly. I lived in Kawasaki, Japan, which is a large suburb of both Tokyo and Yokohama. Much of Kawasaki is walkable and has amenities such as restaurants, grocery stores, and shopping centers within no more than a 15-minute walk from most residences. Kawasaki is also served by many commuter train lines; once again, the majority of residents live within 15-minute walking distance from a train station, and there are local buses that serve those who live too far to easily walk to a train station (and even in these places a train station is generally 30 minutes away walking distance). Suburbs don't have to be car-dependent; most of Tokyo's suburbs are transit-oriented (some of them were actually planned by railroad companies) and are generally walkable.
    - ulfw 5y ago
      Kawasaki has a population of 1.5 Million people. Hardly just a "suburb"
  - throw0101a 5y ago
    > You could just build walkable suburbs. Why there is a distinction between 'suburb' and 'smaller city' is beyond me, but there really is. The Not Just Bikes channel semi-recently did a video on "streetcar suburbs": * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0 * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb It's how things used to be built pre-WW2.
    - kasey_junk 5y ago
      I grew up on the south side of Indianapolis perhaps one of the worst walkable places there is. There are major streets there still named for street car service “Stop 11/Stop 12/etc”. The wild thing is that it was direct public policy that lead to the death of extensive public transit there.
      - alanbernstein 5y ago
        Not just public policy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp....
  - xputer 5y ago
    Amen to that. Actually getting it done is a big hairy problem I'm afraid though :(
  - bcrosby95 5y ago
    Our suburb has some medical and dental offices in the center of it. Yay, something I do a couple times a year is within walking distance. Talk about useless. Groceries are about 2 miles away. Which would be bikable if the infrastructure was there. In my experience it would be easier to reach bikability than walkability. Most suburbs are already somewhat bikable aside from the infrastructure.
  - ericmay 5y ago
    These are called walkable neighborhoods. And when you start building them and connecting them to one another you get…………. Walkable cities!
  - granshaw 5y ago
    This exists in some areas for example the closer Chicago “suburbs” like Lakeview There the lot sizes aren’t big so there’s density, but at the same time no high rises so it still feels pleasant. And every few blocks is zoned commercial
  - bnralt 5y ago
    That seems to be the direction things are moving in. There was a move a few decades back away from malls and towards "town centers," which were basically a mix between a mall and a downtown area - a few blocks of pedestrian friendly streets filled with shops, surrounded by a ton of parking buildings. The current trend (from what I've seen) seems to be to try to integrate nearby single-family homes into the development, as well as increasing the density a bit. Now they're starting to feel like small downtown areas in the middle of the suburbs.
- jackson1442 5y ago
  We need more apartments for purchase rather than renting in America. That's practically unheard of in Texas- just about anything in a shared building is only for rent.
  - foxpurple 5y ago
    That seems to be the norm in Australia. When a building gets approved, the developer puts all the apartments up for sale before it gets built. Of course most of them get sold to landlords but it’s not one company that owns the whole building and there is nothing stopping you buying one as they are always selling.
  - brighton36 5y ago
    I think the problems of governance are non-trivial in tenant-owned apartments. Not that they can't work, obviously. But, I think the ability to 'vote with your feet', is a bit more powerful than the ability to reconcile disagreements between owners.
    - Gigachad 5y ago
      I think for things to work, we need to seriously cut down the fees for selling a house. The fees and laws are set up for someone who buys/sells once every few decades. So if you move frequently, there is no way you could be a owner without taking serious losses.
      - brighton36 5y ago
        That's not a bad idea.
  - standardUser 5y ago
    Landlords hoard housing and sell it back to people for a profit. It's arguable that most people would be better off buying their housing directly, but like you say the options are extremely limited.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
- masterof0 5y ago
  I have the same experience. I live in a city where every place I need to go to is at walking distance. Rarely I take an Uber , an even then , is way cheaper than having a car loan, car insurance and gas expenses. Every time I mention this topic here in the US, people seem to get a little bit defensive, and say: "America is so great, that everyone can afford cars and no one takes the bus".
- occz 5y ago
  >The thing is it just doesn’t seem like the average person is willing to give up single family houses to gain walkability. As other comments have mentioned, you can have both. In addition to that, the reason that people choose single family-houses is not necessarily entirely by preference: almost all of the land zoned for housing in the U.S is zoned for single family-homes. Add onto that some arcane rules about minimum parking amounts, minimum setbacks from the street, and the fully absurd standard to which suburban streets are created (too wide, essentially mini-highways), and you get the mess that exists right now. By addressing these problems, you'll go a long way to improve walkability.
  - aix1 5y ago
    >> The thing is it just doesn’t seem like the average person is willing to give up single family houses to gain walkability. > As other comments have mentioned, you can have both. Absolutely. As an example, much of London offers both.
- jandrese 5y ago
  Kids are a problem. Areas in the city with good walkability often have horrific school districts. You also get trapped renting.
kory 5y ago
I want to live in a walkable streetcar suburb: * Reasonably sized (2-3k soft) lots * Homes built with a variety of beautiful architecture * Area is not overbuilt to the point where all greenery and sunlight are gone and replaced by large buildings * alleys behind the lot, with garages hidden, to keep a single car (which is still really necessary in modern life) * small, thin, tree-lined streets * within walking distance to locally-owned bakery, a grocery store, coffee shop, public transit, etc. The problem with living in these desirable, walkable, neighborhoods is that once they're built up enough, there is intense lobby to fill the the area with higher density housing because of the critical mass of services available. Of course, that's necessary, but buying in these areas put you at big risk of having to move away if you don't like massive density increases, whereas buying in a suburb protects you from that change.
- iammisc 5y ago
  > The problem with living in these desirable, walkable, neighborhoods is that once they're built up enough, activists lobby to destroy what was built to fill it with high density housing because of the critical mass of services available to the area. You're absolutely right. I live in one of these neighborhoods (actually literally was built as a streetcar suburb) and we have historic district protections so we're safe. However, the impetus to build the 'high-density' housing is because we stopped building neighborhoods like mine with a corner store, bakeries, grocery store and restaurants within walking distance. IMO, new developments of tract homes should mandate that within the housing tract, the developer makes a business district with space for local businesses. It's simply the fact that we have a massive business shortage in this country that people feel the need to build high-density housing near the paltry number of business districts we have. Or, I mean, we could not, and everyone else can just subsidize my housing appreciation. Personally, I'd like to spread the joy of my life, but housing activists seem hell-bent on driving my home price up, so whatever.
  - Schiendelman 5y ago
    Everyone is subsidizing your housing appreciation when you don’t allow more housing to be built. The activists who are driving up the price of your property are the activists trying to stop upward growth. It’s pure supply and demand.
standardUser 5y ago
Add up the roads, parking spaces, parking garages, gas stations (not to mention auto shops, drive thrus and car washes) and the total urban footprint is a gargantuan 50-60% by many calculations. That's not automatically a bad thing, especially if you are a car, but all of that space creates massive buffers separating all of the other stuff that humans want to walk to. To make it worse, those buffers are far and away the most dangerous thing in any urban environment. On the bright side, the pandemic seems have enabled many cities to finally reclaim some of that car land for use by people. Though it's not clear how long that will last.
- kiba 5y ago
  I often joke that aliens would mistake the cars, not people, to be the dominant intelligent species of this planet.
  - nickff 5y ago
    That joke is made early in "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" (by Douglas Adams), and is why one of the major characters is named "Ford Prefect".
  - makerofspoons 5y ago
    There's a great Canadian cartoon that explored that idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFaHArkYLsM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFaHArkYLsM
    - frosted-flakes 5y ago
      > "The National Film Board of Mars presents: WHAT ON EARTH!" This is great, what fun!
    - aix1 5y ago
      Amazing, thanks so much for sharing! P.S. The section on reproduction is hilarious.
  - whatever_dude 5y ago
jackson1442 5y ago
I like my car and I like driving. That said, I don't like driving _everywhere_. When I moved to university, it was incredibly freeing to just be able to walk somewhere I wanted to go rather than getting in my car and driving miles to get anywhere. I grew up in a suburb in Texas so walking anywhere except _maybe_ a friend's house was entirely out of the question. I visited Portland recently and it was lovely to be able to get around the whole city without a car. We didn't rent one, save for one day when we went > 100mi out of the city. No Ubers, no Lyfts- just walking, buses, and lightrail. Just my experience as an American.
- iammisc 5y ago
  Same.... I love driving. But I'm not driving to work ever. Haven't driven to work in years, and I never will. Just not into it.
- version_five 5y ago
  What's hardest to find, and what I prefer, is somewhere it's easy to walk and drive. I've lived in walkable places where if you do have to drive, traffic is a nightmare. And then of course there are places where you can drive without traffic but there is nowhere to walk to. I think I prefer the latter with my lifestyle, though it becomes more frustrating for meeting friends, going our for dinner + drinks, etc. For sports / leisure, "driveable" areas are better for getting out of town and into nature faster. In bigger cities (in Canada) I never would have considered going skiing after work, but it is possible in smaller places. I find it's also easier to go to league sports in a driveable place. For running, walkable is obviously better, and one reason I like living in the city is that I can step out my door and safely go for a run, where as further out that option doesnt exist. Anyway, just my experience.
  - yellow_lead 5y ago
    Where have you been that has both? From my reading, it seems like cities need to prioritize walkable / bikable OR cars, but I've never seen example of a city doing both well.
cletus 5y ago
No, they don’t. This is a classic example of listening to what people say vs observing what they do. And it’s a good lesson in product development. Ask your users “do you want X?” And the answer is inevitably “yes”. Ask them “do you want A or B?” And you’ll start to get a better approximation of user behavior. Better yet is observing actual behavior. In this case Americans have chosen the suburbs in droves. Americans want walkable areas in close proximity to the exact kind of house they live in now with all that entails: large single family house on a large lot with their 2+ cars. People would don’t love in the US may not realize just how large the lots are most Americans live on. In Australian cities a quarter acre block was once the dream. More typical now is half that. You will find areas in Atlanta where the lot size is one or even two acres. It’s only the older typically East Coast cities that have anything remotely approaching the density you might see in Europe.
- reportingsjr 5y ago
  It's not a hard choice when suburbs have been subsidized like hell for about 70 years while money has been drained out of cities to pay for said suburbs. Here in Ohio there is this garbage designation for "rural farming areas" called townships that get huge infrastructures subsidies/grants, even though they are all just suburbs/exurbs. Look at any of the areas around Cincinnati, Columbus, or Cleveland and check out how many of them have township in their name. It's pretty incredible and absolutely disgustingly dishonest.
  - Rapzid 5y ago
    Drained out of the cities? Nearly all of Texas is what most people would consider "suburb". Even the "urban" areas are mostly sprawl. Very little of Texas is walkable by any stretch.
    - whalabi 5y ago
      Out of curiosity, is Austin an exception?
      - 5y ago
DoreenMichele 5y ago
I think one of the things we need to do is actively work at decoupling parking from specific buildings. We currently require x number of parking spaces per residential unit or per commercial venue and it helps keep us trapped in a situation where you need a car to make your life work. We need to find ways to accommodate parking in a way that helps us be flexible and let's people who prefer cars keep them without making them a privileged class pushing out all other options. We don't really talk about that. We talk in an either/or fashion rather than talking about how to make it genuinely optional and a personal choice. We expect everyone to get on the same page and agree rather than working on saying "We don't really need this much parking. The parking lots are never full. Let's scale back the parking and make it shared somehow so there's enough parking, not too much parking and it no longer strangles mixed use, walkable development."
- tadfisher 5y ago
  When visiting family in Germany I really enjoyed the practice in smaller towns of having one large parking facility outside of the city center, and having basically no parking available in the city center itself. The psychological sensation was uplifting, because normally when walking in a city I am subconsciously aware of the ever-present danger of death by automobile and all of my movements reflect that.
dkhenry 5y ago
If you want more walkable cities you have to stop subsidizing the suburban sprawl that has been paid for with debt spending. The infrastructure that is falling apart around us is happening because its unsustainable, and if we just print 1T dollars every few years to kick the can down the road all you do is create a bigger problem to be solved in 20 years.
- zdragnar 5y ago
  If the full 1.2T were actually on roads, we would have much nicer roads. Quite a bit of it goes to not-car spending.
  - dkhenry 5y ago
    If that specific bill was the only debt we were printing to subsidize car dependence it would be bad enough, however the majority of spending is done by municipalities which sits currently at 4T and its estimated we need to add 6T to that over the next 10 years to keep up with repairs. After we have spent that 10T we will then have to repair all the roads built in the past 20 years which is growing at about 500,000 miles of roads per decade.
- foxpurple 5y ago
  American suburbs are largely a Ponzi scheme. They start out with loads of funding to build out all of the infrastructure and then in 20 years they can not afford to replace it all so they are funded by building another suburb. Eventually most of them will fail or some economic trick will be pulled to fund them.
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mancerayder 5y ago
Walkable cities or walkable towns? The cities are losing population and this started before Covid. Now, with working from home possibilities, it has been revealed, in NYC at least, that many people only were living here to be close to work. It's evident from the house sales behavior in more suburban and rural areas, and while things are coming back, it seems to be skewing towards a younger demographic and 'new people' rather than people-who-had-left. Moreover, a lot of people are downgrading apartments and buying weekend homes with fresh air and birds in trees. Let's forget cities for a second. A lot of American towns could be a little more pedestrian friendly. They should copy European cities like France and Netherlands and Germany, where even smaller towns have public transport that doesn't suck, safe sidewalks with safe crosswalks, and separate bike lanes. Instead we have roads with people's driveways, commercial stuff, people walking, all intermixed making traffic slow and dangerous. The evidence that Americans want more walkable towns is in the fact that these towns are so much more expensive and often populated by white collar professionals who can afford them.
guyzero 5y ago
My belief is that Americans want walkable cities except they fundamentally hate other people. Not personally, just existentially. Other people take stuff that the average American wants - a parking spot next to the door, getting a coffee right away, being seated instantly in a restaurant. Or simply having to see people they dislike. So the drive, which means they have to see even fewer people.
- Minor49er 5y ago
  What a bizarre take. I've experienced Americans doing the following for me as a stranger: - Waving hello as I walk past - Holding open doors as I approach, despite being able-bodied - Creating an opening for me in busy traffic when they don't have to - Picking stuff up for me that I've accidentally dropped The list goes on. The reason why Americans drive is that they have a large population living across a sprawling landmass. Trains used to be the norm as American cities were being developed in the 1800s through the early 1900s. But because the scale of cities grew, they became less efficient than cars for most people to get around
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Giorgi 5y ago
They want but will never walk.
MattGaiser 5y ago
How many are willing to give up a detached house for it though? How many are willing to deal with shortsighted neighbours who refuse to fix their condo building? I’m someone who nominally wants walkable neighbourhoods, but as soon as it requires compromising those two, I’m out.
- xputer 5y ago
  No need to give up single family homes at all. Just make sure every suburb has a dense multi use zoned core with shops and apartments above the shops. Then make that core easy to reach from all across the suburb by walking/cycling/bus/rail (yes that will take away some of the space allocated to cars). Then as a bonus, connect those cores to each other with rail. This is essentially how Dutch suburbs work.
elevenoh 5y ago
I want to live in a healthy, beautiful, walkable city. Vancouver BC was the only primary fit for this in USA/Canada.
gerdesj 5y ago
A family member landed a job about 17 odd years ago in Plano, TX (EDS). The family across the road drove over to say hi.
specialist 5y ago
There are ~1.2 billion cars globally. Expected to grow to ~1.8b by 2050? About the time many carbon zero targets are supposed to be achieved. And yet. Any proposal that a tiny fraction of all the cheddar supporting automobiles be repurposed for nefarious questionable uses, like maybe add a few bike lanes, triggers a violent reaction accompanied by charges of being an anti-car jihadist.
yazaddaruvala 5y ago
I’d love to see mega blocks: Specifically, make a mega mall underground (with parking under that), with a single 10 story building above for office space (open offices already don’t really have windows). You can build the building to have gaps where the roads should be, but more like tunnels. Then another 10-15 huge 50-80 story towers above the office space. Between the towers on the “roof” of the office space, a giant park with bike lanes and scooters. It’s a mall (with everything you need), an office, parking spots, a park and “a neighborhood”. I also think North America needs more apartments that are 3000-4000 sqft (4 bedroom 6 bathroom multi-story condos).
haolez 5y ago
I've been to a few cities in the US (I'm a foreigner), like Denver and Atlanta, and they are very pedestrian hostile. Almost no sidewalks, every street looks like a roadway (large) and every shop seems to belong to these islands where you can park your car and do your stuff. Not saying this is good or bad, but it's very different from every other country that I've came across. An exception in the US would be Las Vegas.
- chronofar 5y ago
  In both cities you will find new developments in the city that are imminently walkable and highly desirable (more expensive than other parts). I think these cities are actually great examples of the shifting preferences indicated here. They were built to sprawl, but are finding large success when they improve pedestrian infrastructure.
gullywhumper 5y ago
To make cities more walkable, changing driver behavior needs to be a significant focus. Minneapolis consistently ranks as one of the better cities for pedestrians, but even here the drivers here are really aggressive towards pedestrians to the point that some don't even care if you're pushing a stroller. Bike lanes, trails, and enhanced crosswalks are great, but they can't protect you from drivers that ignore traffic laws and drive dangerously. The city knows it has a problem. This picture taken today is of a sign posted on one of the main bridges into downtown: https://imgur.com/gallery/NsLGfk4 https://imgur.com/gallery/NsLGfk4
- reducesuffering 5y ago
  Easier said than done. My Bay Area City is implementing city planning measures to reduce traffic fatalities; things like bike lane protectors and removing right-turn yield passages into a sharp right turn that forces drivers to be slower. You would not believe the amount of sheer vitriol from many folks....
- noahtallen 5y ago
  Road design has a huge part to play here. Places with very safe streets have very few lanes, lots of traffic calming, smarter signals, and design which makes drivers slow down and pay attention. The road in that picture is broad and open, so it’s no wonder cars feel like they’re the priority: the design promotes it. I agree that cultural change is necessary too, but there are so many relatively cheap things we could do to improve streets for non-cars! And if we do, they’d end up being able to move more people anyways, because cars are incredibly space expensive.
tmccrary55 5y ago
I want more bikeable cities.
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atum47 5y ago
Back in 2020 I moved to São Paulo to start a new job, fresh out of college. I knew the biggest problem people that live there face is the commute, so I was smart about it. I rented a place 30 minutes walking from the job and bought a electric scooter. My day started at 10, so I could wake up at 9, walk or ride the scooter to work (São Paulo have some great bike lanes). On raining days I would call an Uber. Back in the day they would offer a "shared" ride, where the driver would pick up anyone in their routes. It was extra cheap, sometimes less then a dollar to go from work to home. Then, everything changed when the Covid attacked
arsome 5y ago
Now ask them if they'd rather have walkable cities and condos or detached homes and cars. I think you'll find the conflict rather quickly.
mostertoaster 5y ago
I think the inside of a downtown should only have one way streets and parking on the side, and have big centers with plaza like things. Then you mostly drive on the outside until you’re parking. I hate how the roads are in our downtowns ever since visiting Italy and seeing these huge plazas all over in the cities.
PrisonerofWS 5y ago
It's absolute pie in the sky to think Americans will give up their cars. Walkability is great for a sunny Saturday morning farmers market. But that's not going to move the needle on carbon in any significant way. Living in a "walkable" neighborhood with two cars in the driveway is like recycling. It makes us feel like we're doing something meaningful to rationalize all the junk we buy on Amazon. But one car per household would make a significant difference. It's not just carbon emissions. It's also the energy required to manufacture and ship the second car. You can still drive anywhere, anytime but one car forces you to coordinate and make choices. Gotta start somewhere.
- newobj 5y ago
  It’s actually possible for walkability to have nothing to do with environmentalism.
- generalizations 5y ago
  > one car forces you to coordinate and make choices Choices like, "oh, I can't live in the country because my spouse can't go anywhere while I'm at work an hour away." One car per household is a great way to lower the quality of life for a large fraction of households.
  - BoxOfRain 5y ago
    I think a lot of city dwellers fail to realise not everyone is attracted to urban life and some people actively disdain it. I really don’t like being in built up areas for more than a few days, if I lived in one I’d be a miserable alcoholic within a month. If you listened to half the people in discussions like this they’d pile us all into Warhammer 40k style arcologies! Urban life genuinely holds no appeal at all for me, I’m just not wired for it. I know this isn’t true for everyone or even the majority but it is for a lot of people, I’d honestly rather emigrate to a foreign country with all the stress and work that entails than live in a city even for a year. My dream house would be an old stone cottage somewhere overlooking the sea with no light pollution and the nearest neighbour at least half a mile away! It’s not that I’m antisocial, it’s just that cities are sensory overload par excellence and I just feel really uncomfortable after a while of that. I’m social enough, but I prefer to have the choice to keep the world at arm’s length if necessary.
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pgustafs 5y ago
One point that seems to be missing from this discussion is climate. Walkable cities: NYC, Chicago, SF, Boston, Seattle Urban hellscapes: LA, Houston, Atlanta, Phoenix Simple explanation -- people don't want to walk around in the heat.
aroundtown 5y ago
I wouldn't mind more walkable if it didn't come at the cost of being around many more people. Every walkable city I've been to is either filthy, cramped, loud, over run, and/or very very expensive. I don't want to live so close to people to hear them, smell them, or be bothered by them or their pets.
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- rdedev 5y ago
  You could get something like this if there is good public transport between points. Like the place where I am staying now, its relatively less crowded than the inner cities. I can walk and get any essential items like milk or meat. If I need something that I cant get, just take a bus and shop in the city. Most of the time, my daily needs are met near my home itself
Pxtl 5y ago
People say this until you explain the details. Sure they want walkability, but density? "I don't want to live in some awful human hive". Parking? "why would I go anywhere where I have to pay for parking?" Walkability flows from density, And NIMBYism has killed that.
btheshoe 5y ago
Honestly this stuff is part of what makes me want to move to Shanghai, or another city in east Asia at some point in my life. The public transport there was just incredible - super efficient, super clean, extremely accessible. I'm in tech though, so probably stuck to the bay area :/
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beardyw 5y ago
On one of my relatively few visits to America, from my hotel room I could see the zoo less than half a mile away. In reception I asked the best route to walk there. There was a stunned silence and outright puzzlement, as if I had asked what trains I needed to catch to get to Patagonia[1]. No one was even certain it was possible. In the end I worked it out OK, only having to wait at a level crossing for a seemingly infinitely long freight train to pass. The zoo had more food outlets than animals, but that's another story. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Old_Patagonian_Express https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Old_Patagonian_Express (recommended)
- GordonS 5y ago
  Hah, I had a really similar thing happen the first time I went to the US, something like 10-15 years back in Houston! The office was only a mile or 2 from the hotel, so I thought I'd walk. On my way out, the receptionist asked where I was going and if I'd like her to call a cab. I replied that I was going to walk to somewhere close by, and her eyes just about popped out of her head - "you can't do that, it's far too dangerous to walk!". I walked anyway of course, looking out for anything even tenuously dangerous, and found nothing. It was most puzzling! I later conferred with local colleagues in the office, who reiterated what the receptionist had said - nobody walks anywhere! Coincidently, one morning I too met an enormous freight train at a level crossing - it was actually pretty amazing waiting multiple minutes for such an incredibly long train to pass!
habosa 5y ago
Sometimes I think Americans don’t know how badly they want this. Americans will tell you how wonderful European cities are with their small streets and their public squares filled with great restaurants. They think we don’t have cities like that because we’re lacking some fundamental European-ness. No. We just put cars everywhere. Cars ruin everything. Now you have wider streets. Louder streets. More dangerous streets. Far less foot traffic which means very low chances of discovering a new favorite place. You have lower business density which totally changes the economics of an entire neighborhood. Etc. In this and so many other things Americans say they want what they see elsewhere but are uninterested in doing anything about it.
- wanderingmind 5y ago
  I was going to write almost very similar comment. A follow up question will be how badly they want it and are they willing to give up their cars to have a walkable City and you would immediately see how many are actually interested in it
  - loa_in_ 5y ago
    The sunken cost basically almost doomed the world by now (fossil fuel industry) so there's no way America gives up their cars (for less)
    - ethanbond 5y ago
      Of course there is. Just get rid of parking and/or put up bollards.
      - johannes1234321 5y ago
        It's not that easy. For one there is a notable population which will complain and even for those who want to get rid of cars it is a long project: You need to change the city structure. If you have a resedential area without shops to run errands and no workplaces whatsoever people will need to travel long distances each time. Long travel time (whatever the means) means that you don't do grocery shopping for a day or two, but a week or two, which means you carry more and that's only viable by car. Transforming city structure and society takes time.
dmos62 5y ago
I think car-only cities sounded like such a good idea during urbanization. I wonder what current trendy ideas we'll look back on with regret.
sandworm101 5y ago
Has anyone done a recent survey of how many people want more free parking spots? More traffic lanes? More bridges and tunnels for cars? Do people want higher or lower speed limits? Cheaper or more expensive gas for cars? More or fewer lanes dedicated to busses/bikes? We should not jump to conculsions about what people want before asking all relevant questions. Everyone wants more walkable cities. Thats like asking if people want cleaner water or better hospitals. Such questions are meaningless on thier own.
miccah 5y ago
I'm happy to hear this statistic, but American cities need to change so much to make it happen - mainly removing cars as other commenters pointed out. A good start would be making public transportation more available through buses and trains, followed by limiting cars in already more walkable areas of the city. Not Just Bikes is a great YouTube channel that explores city planning and often compares American cities to cities in the Netherlands. He has a video on Strong Towns as well. https://youtube.com/c/NotJustBikes https://youtube.com/c/NotJustBikes
antb123 5y ago
Walkable is good... Bikeable is even better
heurisko 5y ago
I live in England. Our cities are walkable, but they are often a nightmare to commute to by car (and bus, train, even though this is getting better). What I think would work in American suburbs is light rail/tram systems. They aren't as popular in England, but are very popular in Germany. As a tourist, they made getting around very easy, even without a car.

553 points by jseliger 5y ago

Have to build cities European-style then with shops and residences closer together. Also, Davis CA is extremely walkable anywhere near downtown and the UCD campus.

foxpurple 5y ago

I recently moved from a house in the suburbs in Australia to an apartment in the city. Got rid of my car and now I just walk to everything I need. I couldn’t be happier. Driving was such a huge stress on my life that is now gone. I can get anything I need within a 10 minute walk. The thing is it just doesn’t seem like the average person is willing to give up single family houses to gain walkability. For me, I would never go back.

iammisc 5y ago
Or... hear me out. You could just build walkable suburbs. Why there is a distinction between 'suburb' and 'smaller city' is beyond me, but there really is. A small city still has a walkable downtown core with apartments around which there is a small area of single family homes within walking distance to the downtown area. A suburb is just tracts of single family homes and nothing else for miles on end. No real 'business area', certainly no walkable one. We could just talk a normal suburb, rezone some homes to business districts and take cars off that street. Voila. Now you have a mini downtown near a bunch of single family homes. Oh yeah, and you have a nice business district that's cheaper than the real downtown that is a good launching place for local businesses. win win win. Now do that everywhere, and then connect the little townie areas via rapid transit and you have something lovely.
- foxpurple 5y ago
  You can kind of have it if you mean walkable to just the general store, a cafe and a few other things but you can never have everything because many kinds of stores can only exist with a certain population close enough. What I love about living in the city is literally _everything_ I need is within walking distance. I have not used a car or any form of public transport in months and have felt no need to, I can buy anything within walking distance and all offices for any job I would take in this state are within walking distance. You just can’t have that with houses because each house takes up a significant space which you have to walk past to get anywhere.
  - KarlKemp 5y ago
    Even with single-family housing, the density is high enough to support a supermarket and other stores that are visited at a rate of once per month within walking distance, easily. Source: the town I grew up in: https://www.google.com/maps/dir/51.2413047,6.9602975/51.248182,6.9768629/@51.2462608,6.9656488,2688m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m2!4m1!3e2 https://www.google.com/maps/dir/51.2413047,6.9602975/51.2481... Population is 36,000 or so. I've added the walking distance from the outskirts to the very center, which is 2.3km. You'll note that there are supermarkets distributed throughout, usually within a few hundred meters. If you need anything special, it takes 30 minutes by public transport (https://www.google.com/maps/dir/51.2413047,6.9602975/K%C3%B6nigsallee,+D%C3%BCsseldorf/@51.2345467,6.8034804,21513m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1!4m14!4m13!1m0!1m5!1m1!1s0x47b8ca3d06b68227:0x81883aefd77f96ec!2m2!1d6.779266!2d51.2220574!2m3!6e0!7e2!8j1628322060!3e3!5i2 https://www.google.com/maps/dir/51.2413047,6.9602975/K%C3%B6... ) to a shopping district in the next larger town, which has any type or brand of retail that exists in this country (Streetview: https://www.google.com/maps/@51.2254878,6.7800095,3a,75y,64.26h,101.02t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sgCUtbmOSmEj7fzVV20t-yA!2e0!7i13312!8i6656 https://www.google.com/maps/@51.2254878,6.7800095,3a,75y,64....)
  - 2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
    I guess it depends on which suburb. Some suburbs in Sydney are fairly liveable. Especially where there is a mix of housing, or, as much as I hate them, large apartment complexes. You can get all the things you need and have a few restaurants, all within walking distance. Other suburbs, especially those huge “communities” with lots of cookie cutter homes seem really isolated. You have to drive.
  - iammisc 5y ago
    I just disagree. I live in the very environment you claim doesn't exist
    - mrgordon 5y ago
      Where is that? You may have a different idea of walkable than the other poster. As soon as you have tons of parking spaces, mandatory setbacks, etc. you’ve taken much of the room away from pedestrians forcing them to walk much longer distances (often in bad weather) to get to where they want to go. That’s why the two are at such odds.
- linguae 5y ago
  Exactly. I lived in Kawasaki, Japan, which is a large suburb of both Tokyo and Yokohama. Much of Kawasaki is walkable and has amenities such as restaurants, grocery stores, and shopping centers within no more than a 15-minute walk from most residences. Kawasaki is also served by many commuter train lines; once again, the majority of residents live within 15-minute walking distance from a train station, and there are local buses that serve those who live too far to easily walk to a train station (and even in these places a train station is generally 30 minutes away walking distance). Suburbs don't have to be car-dependent; most of Tokyo's suburbs are transit-oriented (some of them were actually planned by railroad companies) and are generally walkable.
  - ulfw 5y ago
    Kawasaki has a population of 1.5 Million people. Hardly just a "suburb"
- throw0101a 5y ago
  > You could just build walkable suburbs. Why there is a distinction between 'suburb' and 'smaller city' is beyond me, but there really is. The Not Just Bikes channel semi-recently did a video on "streetcar suburbs": * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0 * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb It's how things used to be built pre-WW2.
  - kasey_junk 5y ago
    I grew up on the south side of Indianapolis perhaps one of the worst walkable places there is. There are major streets there still named for street car service “Stop 11/Stop 12/etc”. The wild thing is that it was direct public policy that lead to the death of extensive public transit there.
    - alanbernstein 5y ago
      Not just public policy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp....
- xputer 5y ago
  Amen to that. Actually getting it done is a big hairy problem I'm afraid though :(
- bcrosby95 5y ago
  Our suburb has some medical and dental offices in the center of it. Yay, something I do a couple times a year is within walking distance. Talk about useless. Groceries are about 2 miles away. Which would be bikable if the infrastructure was there. In my experience it would be easier to reach bikability than walkability. Most suburbs are already somewhat bikable aside from the infrastructure.
- ericmay 5y ago
  These are called walkable neighborhoods. And when you start building them and connecting them to one another you get…………. Walkable cities!
- granshaw 5y ago
  This exists in some areas for example the closer Chicago “suburbs” like Lakeview There the lot sizes aren’t big so there’s density, but at the same time no high rises so it still feels pleasant. And every few blocks is zoned commercial
- bnralt 5y ago
  That seems to be the direction things are moving in. There was a move a few decades back away from malls and towards "town centers," which were basically a mix between a mall and a downtown area - a few blocks of pedestrian friendly streets filled with shops, surrounded by a ton of parking buildings. The current trend (from what I've seen) seems to be to try to integrate nearby single-family homes into the development, as well as increasing the density a bit. Now they're starting to feel like small downtown areas in the middle of the suburbs.
jackson1442 5y ago
We need more apartments for purchase rather than renting in America. That's practically unheard of in Texas- just about anything in a shared building is only for rent.
- foxpurple 5y ago
  That seems to be the norm in Australia. When a building gets approved, the developer puts all the apartments up for sale before it gets built. Of course most of them get sold to landlords but it’s not one company that owns the whole building and there is nothing stopping you buying one as they are always selling.
- brighton36 5y ago
  I think the problems of governance are non-trivial in tenant-owned apartments. Not that they can't work, obviously. But, I think the ability to 'vote with your feet', is a bit more powerful than the ability to reconcile disagreements between owners.
  - Gigachad 5y ago
    I think for things to work, we need to seriously cut down the fees for selling a house. The fees and laws are set up for someone who buys/sells once every few decades. So if you move frequently, there is no way you could be a owner without taking serious losses.
    - brighton36 5y ago
      That's not a bad idea.
- standardUser 5y ago
  Landlords hoard housing and sell it back to people for a profit. It's arguable that most people would be better off buying their housing directly, but like you say the options are extremely limited.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
masterof0 5y ago
I have the same experience. I live in a city where every place I need to go to is at walking distance. Rarely I take an Uber , an even then , is way cheaper than having a car loan, car insurance and gas expenses. Every time I mention this topic here in the US, people seem to get a little bit defensive, and say: "America is so great, that everyone can afford cars and no one takes the bus".
occz 5y ago
>The thing is it just doesn’t seem like the average person is willing to give up single family houses to gain walkability. As other comments have mentioned, you can have both. In addition to that, the reason that people choose single family-houses is not necessarily entirely by preference: almost all of the land zoned for housing in the U.S is zoned for single family-homes. Add onto that some arcane rules about minimum parking amounts, minimum setbacks from the street, and the fully absurd standard to which suburban streets are created (too wide, essentially mini-highways), and you get the mess that exists right now. By addressing these problems, you'll go a long way to improve walkability.
- aix1 5y ago
  >> The thing is it just doesn’t seem like the average person is willing to give up single family houses to gain walkability. > As other comments have mentioned, you can have both. Absolutely. As an example, much of London offers both.
jandrese 5y ago
Kids are a problem. Areas in the city with good walkability often have horrific school districts. You also get trapped renting.

kory 5y ago

I want to live in a walkable streetcar suburb: * Reasonably sized (2-3k soft) lots * Homes built with a variety of beautiful architecture * Area is not overbuilt to the point where all greenery and sunlight are gone and replaced by large buildings * alleys behind the lot, with garages hidden, to keep a single car (which is still really necessary in modern life) * small, thin, tree-lined streets * within walking distance to locally-owned bakery, a grocery store, coffee shop, public transit, etc. The problem with living in these desirable, walkable, neighborhoods is that once they're built up enough, there is intense lobby to fill the the area with higher density housing because of the critical mass of services available. Of course, that's necessary, but buying in these areas put you at big risk of having to move away if you don't like massive density increases, whereas buying in a suburb protects you from that change.

iammisc 5y ago
> The problem with living in these desirable, walkable, neighborhoods is that once they're built up enough, activists lobby to destroy what was built to fill it with high density housing because of the critical mass of services available to the area. You're absolutely right. I live in one of these neighborhoods (actually literally was built as a streetcar suburb) and we have historic district protections so we're safe. However, the impetus to build the 'high-density' housing is because we stopped building neighborhoods like mine with a corner store, bakeries, grocery store and restaurants within walking distance. IMO, new developments of tract homes should mandate that within the housing tract, the developer makes a business district with space for local businesses. It's simply the fact that we have a massive business shortage in this country that people feel the need to build high-density housing near the paltry number of business districts we have. Or, I mean, we could not, and everyone else can just subsidize my housing appreciation. Personally, I'd like to spread the joy of my life, but housing activists seem hell-bent on driving my home price up, so whatever.
- Schiendelman 5y ago
  Everyone is subsidizing your housing appreciation when you don’t allow more housing to be built. The activists who are driving up the price of your property are the activists trying to stop upward growth. It’s pure supply and demand.

standardUser 5y ago

Add up the roads, parking spaces, parking garages, gas stations (not to mention auto shops, drive thrus and car washes) and the total urban footprint is a gargantuan 50-60% by many calculations. That's not automatically a bad thing, especially if you are a car, but all of that space creates massive buffers separating all of the other stuff that humans want to walk to. To make it worse, those buffers are far and away the most dangerous thing in any urban environment. On the bright side, the pandemic seems have enabled many cities to finally reclaim some of that car land for use by people. Though it's not clear how long that will last.

kiba 5y ago
I often joke that aliens would mistake the cars, not people, to be the dominant intelligent species of this planet.
- nickff 5y ago
  That joke is made early in "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" (by Douglas Adams), and is why one of the major characters is named "Ford Prefect".
- makerofspoons 5y ago
  There's a great Canadian cartoon that explored that idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFaHArkYLsM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFaHArkYLsM
  - frosted-flakes 5y ago
    > "The National Film Board of Mars presents: WHAT ON EARTH!" This is great, what fun!
  - aix1 5y ago
    Amazing, thanks so much for sharing! P.S. The section on reproduction is hilarious.
- whatever_dude 5y ago

jackson1442 5y ago

I like my car and I like driving. That said, I don't like driving _everywhere_. When I moved to university, it was incredibly freeing to just be able to walk somewhere I wanted to go rather than getting in my car and driving miles to get anywhere. I grew up in a suburb in Texas so walking anywhere except _maybe_ a friend's house was entirely out of the question. I visited Portland recently and it was lovely to be able to get around the whole city without a car. We didn't rent one, save for one day when we went > 100mi out of the city. No Ubers, no Lyfts- just walking, buses, and lightrail. Just my experience as an American.

iammisc 5y ago
Same.... I love driving. But I'm not driving to work ever. Haven't driven to work in years, and I never will. Just not into it.
version_five 5y ago
What's hardest to find, and what I prefer, is somewhere it's easy to walk and drive. I've lived in walkable places where if you do have to drive, traffic is a nightmare. And then of course there are places where you can drive without traffic but there is nowhere to walk to. I think I prefer the latter with my lifestyle, though it becomes more frustrating for meeting friends, going our for dinner + drinks, etc. For sports / leisure, "driveable" areas are better for getting out of town and into nature faster. In bigger cities (in Canada) I never would have considered going skiing after work, but it is possible in smaller places. I find it's also easier to go to league sports in a driveable place. For running, walkable is obviously better, and one reason I like living in the city is that I can step out my door and safely go for a run, where as further out that option doesnt exist. Anyway, just my experience.
- yellow_lead 5y ago
  Where have you been that has both? From my reading, it seems like cities need to prioritize walkable / bikable OR cars, but I've never seen example of a city doing both well.

cletus 5y ago

No, they don’t. This is a classic example of listening to what people say vs observing what they do. And it’s a good lesson in product development. Ask your users “do you want X?” And the answer is inevitably “yes”. Ask them “do you want A or B?” And you’ll start to get a better approximation of user behavior. Better yet is observing actual behavior. In this case Americans have chosen the suburbs in droves. Americans want walkable areas in close proximity to the exact kind of house they live in now with all that entails: large single family house on a large lot with their 2+ cars. People would don’t love in the US may not realize just how large the lots are most Americans live on. In Australian cities a quarter acre block was once the dream. More typical now is half that. You will find areas in Atlanta where the lot size is one or even two acres. It’s only the older typically East Coast cities that have anything remotely approaching the density you might see in Europe.

reportingsjr 5y ago
It's not a hard choice when suburbs have been subsidized like hell for about 70 years while money has been drained out of cities to pay for said suburbs. Here in Ohio there is this garbage designation for "rural farming areas" called townships that get huge infrastructures subsidies/grants, even though they are all just suburbs/exurbs. Look at any of the areas around Cincinnati, Columbus, or Cleveland and check out how many of them have township in their name. It's pretty incredible and absolutely disgustingly dishonest.
- Rapzid 5y ago
  Drained out of the cities? Nearly all of Texas is what most people would consider "suburb". Even the "urban" areas are mostly sprawl. Very little of Texas is walkable by any stretch.
  - whalabi 5y ago
    Out of curiosity, is Austin an exception?
    - 5y ago

DoreenMichele 5y ago

I think one of the things we need to do is actively work at decoupling parking from specific buildings. We currently require x number of parking spaces per residential unit or per commercial venue and it helps keep us trapped in a situation where you need a car to make your life work. We need to find ways to accommodate parking in a way that helps us be flexible and let's people who prefer cars keep them without making them a privileged class pushing out all other options. We don't really talk about that. We talk in an either/or fashion rather than talking about how to make it genuinely optional and a personal choice. We expect everyone to get on the same page and agree rather than working on saying "We don't really need this much parking. The parking lots are never full. Let's scale back the parking and make it shared somehow so there's enough parking, not too much parking and it no longer strangles mixed use, walkable development."

tadfisher 5y ago
When visiting family in Germany I really enjoyed the practice in smaller towns of having one large parking facility outside of the city center, and having basically no parking available in the city center itself. The psychological sensation was uplifting, because normally when walking in a city I am subconsciously aware of the ever-present danger of death by automobile and all of my movements reflect that.

dkhenry 5y ago

If you want more walkable cities you have to stop subsidizing the suburban sprawl that has been paid for with debt spending. The infrastructure that is falling apart around us is happening because its unsustainable, and if we just print 1T dollars every few years to kick the can down the road all you do is create a bigger problem to be solved in 20 years.

zdragnar 5y ago
If the full 1.2T were actually on roads, we would have much nicer roads. Quite a bit of it goes to not-car spending.
- dkhenry 5y ago
  If that specific bill was the only debt we were printing to subsidize car dependence it would be bad enough, however the majority of spending is done by municipalities which sits currently at 4T and its estimated we need to add 6T to that over the next 10 years to keep up with repairs. After we have spent that 10T we will then have to repair all the roads built in the past 20 years which is growing at about 500,000 miles of roads per decade.
foxpurple 5y ago
American suburbs are largely a Ponzi scheme. They start out with loads of funding to build out all of the infrastructure and then in 20 years they can not afford to replace it all so they are funded by building another suburb. Eventually most of them will fail or some economic trick will be pulled to fund them.

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mancerayder 5y ago

Walkable cities or walkable towns? The cities are losing population and this started before Covid. Now, with working from home possibilities, it has been revealed, in NYC at least, that many people only were living here to be close to work. It's evident from the house sales behavior in more suburban and rural areas, and while things are coming back, it seems to be skewing towards a younger demographic and 'new people' rather than people-who-had-left. Moreover, a lot of people are downgrading apartments and buying weekend homes with fresh air and birds in trees. Let's forget cities for a second. A lot of American towns could be a little more pedestrian friendly. They should copy European cities like France and Netherlands and Germany, where even smaller towns have public transport that doesn't suck, safe sidewalks with safe crosswalks, and separate bike lanes. Instead we have roads with people's driveways, commercial stuff, people walking, all intermixed making traffic slow and dangerous. The evidence that Americans want more walkable towns is in the fact that these towns are so much more expensive and often populated by white collar professionals who can afford them.

guyzero 5y ago

My belief is that Americans want walkable cities except they fundamentally hate other people. Not personally, just existentially. Other people take stuff that the average American wants - a parking spot next to the door, getting a coffee right away, being seated instantly in a restaurant. Or simply having to see people they dislike. So the drive, which means they have to see even fewer people.

Minor49er 5y ago
What a bizarre take. I've experienced Americans doing the following for me as a stranger: - Waving hello as I walk past - Holding open doors as I approach, despite being able-bodied - Creating an opening for me in busy traffic when they don't have to - Picking stuff up for me that I've accidentally dropped The list goes on. The reason why Americans drive is that they have a large population living across a sprawling landmass. Trains used to be the norm as American cities were being developed in the 1800s through the early 1900s. But because the scale of cities grew, they became less efficient than cars for most people to get around

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Giorgi 5y ago

They want but will never walk.

MattGaiser 5y ago

How many are willing to give up a detached house for it though? How many are willing to deal with shortsighted neighbours who refuse to fix their condo building? I’m someone who nominally wants walkable neighbourhoods, but as soon as it requires compromising those two, I’m out.

xputer 5y ago
No need to give up single family homes at all. Just make sure every suburb has a dense multi use zoned core with shops and apartments above the shops. Then make that core easy to reach from all across the suburb by walking/cycling/bus/rail (yes that will take away some of the space allocated to cars). Then as a bonus, connect those cores to each other with rail. This is essentially how Dutch suburbs work.

elevenoh 5y ago

I want to live in a healthy, beautiful, walkable city. Vancouver BC was the only primary fit for this in USA/Canada.

gerdesj 5y ago

A family member landed a job about 17 odd years ago in Plano, TX (EDS). The family across the road drove over to say hi.

specialist 5y ago

There are ~1.2 billion cars globally. Expected to grow to ~1.8b by 2050? About the time many carbon zero targets are supposed to be achieved. And yet. Any proposal that a tiny fraction of all the cheddar supporting automobiles be repurposed for nefarious questionable uses, like maybe add a few bike lanes, triggers a violent reaction accompanied by charges of being an anti-car jihadist.

yazaddaruvala 5y ago

I’d love to see mega blocks: Specifically, make a mega mall underground (with parking under that), with a single 10 story building above for office space (open offices already don’t really have windows). You can build the building to have gaps where the roads should be, but more like tunnels. Then another 10-15 huge 50-80 story towers above the office space. Between the towers on the “roof” of the office space, a giant park with bike lanes and scooters. It’s a mall (with everything you need), an office, parking spots, a park and “a neighborhood”. I also think North America needs more apartments that are 3000-4000 sqft (4 bedroom 6 bathroom multi-story condos).

haolez 5y ago

I've been to a few cities in the US (I'm a foreigner), like Denver and Atlanta, and they are very pedestrian hostile. Almost no sidewalks, every street looks like a roadway (large) and every shop seems to belong to these islands where you can park your car and do your stuff. Not saying this is good or bad, but it's very different from every other country that I've came across. An exception in the US would be Las Vegas.

chronofar 5y ago
In both cities you will find new developments in the city that are imminently walkable and highly desirable (more expensive than other parts). I think these cities are actually great examples of the shifting preferences indicated here. They were built to sprawl, but are finding large success when they improve pedestrian infrastructure.

gullywhumper 5y ago

To make cities more walkable, changing driver behavior needs to be a significant focus. Minneapolis consistently ranks as one of the better cities for pedestrians, but even here the drivers here are really aggressive towards pedestrians to the point that some don't even care if you're pushing a stroller. Bike lanes, trails, and enhanced crosswalks are great, but they can't protect you from drivers that ignore traffic laws and drive dangerously. The city knows it has a problem. This picture taken today is of a sign posted on one of the main bridges into downtown: https://imgur.com/gallery/NsLGfk4 https://imgur.com/gallery/NsLGfk4

reducesuffering 5y ago
Easier said than done. My Bay Area City is implementing city planning measures to reduce traffic fatalities; things like bike lane protectors and removing right-turn yield passages into a sharp right turn that forces drivers to be slower. You would not believe the amount of sheer vitriol from many folks....
noahtallen 5y ago
Road design has a huge part to play here. Places with very safe streets have very few lanes, lots of traffic calming, smarter signals, and design which makes drivers slow down and pay attention. The road in that picture is broad and open, so it’s no wonder cars feel like they’re the priority: the design promotes it. I agree that cultural change is necessary too, but there are so many relatively cheap things we could do to improve streets for non-cars! And if we do, they’d end up being able to move more people anyways, because cars are incredibly space expensive.

tmccrary55 5y ago

I want more bikeable cities.

deleted 5y ago
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atum47 5y ago

Back in 2020 I moved to São Paulo to start a new job, fresh out of college. I knew the biggest problem people that live there face is the commute, so I was smart about it. I rented a place 30 minutes walking from the job and bought a electric scooter. My day started at 10, so I could wake up at 9, walk or ride the scooter to work (São Paulo have some great bike lanes). On raining days I would call an Uber. Back in the day they would offer a "shared" ride, where the driver would pick up anyone in their routes. It was extra cheap, sometimes less then a dollar to go from work to home. Then, everything changed when the Covid attacked

arsome 5y ago

Now ask them if they'd rather have walkable cities and condos or detached homes and cars. I think you'll find the conflict rather quickly.

mostertoaster 5y ago

I think the inside of a downtown should only have one way streets and parking on the side, and have big centers with plaza like things. Then you mostly drive on the outside until you’re parking. I hate how the roads are in our downtowns ever since visiting Italy and seeing these huge plazas all over in the cities.

PrisonerofWS 5y ago

It's absolute pie in the sky to think Americans will give up their cars. Walkability is great for a sunny Saturday morning farmers market. But that's not going to move the needle on carbon in any significant way. Living in a "walkable" neighborhood with two cars in the driveway is like recycling. It makes us feel like we're doing something meaningful to rationalize all the junk we buy on Amazon. But one car per household would make a significant difference. It's not just carbon emissions. It's also the energy required to manufacture and ship the second car. You can still drive anywhere, anytime but one car forces you to coordinate and make choices. Gotta start somewhere.

newobj 5y ago
It’s actually possible for walkability to have nothing to do with environmentalism.
generalizations 5y ago
> one car forces you to coordinate and make choices Choices like, "oh, I can't live in the country because my spouse can't go anywhere while I'm at work an hour away." One car per household is a great way to lower the quality of life for a large fraction of households.
- BoxOfRain 5y ago
  I think a lot of city dwellers fail to realise not everyone is attracted to urban life and some people actively disdain it. I really don’t like being in built up areas for more than a few days, if I lived in one I’d be a miserable alcoholic within a month. If you listened to half the people in discussions like this they’d pile us all into Warhammer 40k style arcologies! Urban life genuinely holds no appeal at all for me, I’m just not wired for it. I know this isn’t true for everyone or even the majority but it is for a lot of people, I’d honestly rather emigrate to a foreign country with all the stress and work that entails than live in a city even for a year. My dream house would be an old stone cottage somewhere overlooking the sea with no light pollution and the nearest neighbour at least half a mile away! It’s not that I’m antisocial, it’s just that cities are sensory overload par excellence and I just feel really uncomfortable after a while of that. I’m social enough, but I prefer to have the choice to keep the world at arm’s length if necessary.

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pgustafs 5y ago

One point that seems to be missing from this discussion is climate. Walkable cities: NYC, Chicago, SF, Boston, Seattle Urban hellscapes: LA, Houston, Atlanta, Phoenix Simple explanation -- people don't want to walk around in the heat.

aroundtown 5y ago

I wouldn't mind more walkable if it didn't come at the cost of being around many more people. Every walkable city I've been to is either filthy, cramped, loud, over run, and/or very very expensive. I don't want to live so close to people to hear them, smell them, or be bothered by them or their pets.

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rdedev 5y ago
You could get something like this if there is good public transport between points. Like the place where I am staying now, its relatively less crowded than the inner cities. I can walk and get any essential items like milk or meat. If I need something that I cant get, just take a bus and shop in the city. Most of the time, my daily needs are met near my home itself

Pxtl 5y ago

People say this until you explain the details. Sure they want walkability, but density? "I don't want to live in some awful human hive". Parking? "why would I go anywhere where I have to pay for parking?" Walkability flows from density, And NIMBYism has killed that.

btheshoe 5y ago

Honestly this stuff is part of what makes me want to move to Shanghai, or another city in east Asia at some point in my life. The public transport there was just incredible - super efficient, super clean, extremely accessible. I'm in tech though, so probably stuck to the bay area :/

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beardyw 5y ago

On one of my relatively few visits to America, from my hotel room I could see the zoo less than half a mile away. In reception I asked the best route to walk there. There was a stunned silence and outright puzzlement, as if I had asked what trains I needed to catch to get to Patagonia[1]. No one was even certain it was possible. In the end I worked it out OK, only having to wait at a level crossing for a seemingly infinitely long freight train to pass. The zoo had more food outlets than animals, but that's another story. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Old_Patagonian_Express https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Old_Patagonian_Express (recommended)

GordonS 5y ago
Hah, I had a really similar thing happen the first time I went to the US, something like 10-15 years back in Houston! The office was only a mile or 2 from the hotel, so I thought I'd walk. On my way out, the receptionist asked where I was going and if I'd like her to call a cab. I replied that I was going to walk to somewhere close by, and her eyes just about popped out of her head - "you can't do that, it's far too dangerous to walk!". I walked anyway of course, looking out for anything even tenuously dangerous, and found nothing. It was most puzzling! I later conferred with local colleagues in the office, who reiterated what the receptionist had said - nobody walks anywhere! Coincidently, one morning I too met an enormous freight train at a level crossing - it was actually pretty amazing waiting multiple minutes for such an incredibly long train to pass!

habosa 5y ago

Sometimes I think Americans don’t know how badly they want this. Americans will tell you how wonderful European cities are with their small streets and their public squares filled with great restaurants. They think we don’t have cities like that because we’re lacking some fundamental European-ness. No. We just put cars everywhere. Cars ruin everything. Now you have wider streets. Louder streets. More dangerous streets. Far less foot traffic which means very low chances of discovering a new favorite place. You have lower business density which totally changes the economics of an entire neighborhood. Etc. In this and so many other things Americans say they want what they see elsewhere but are uninterested in doing anything about it.

wanderingmind 5y ago
I was going to write almost very similar comment. A follow up question will be how badly they want it and are they willing to give up their cars to have a walkable City and you would immediately see how many are actually interested in it
- loa_in_ 5y ago
  The sunken cost basically almost doomed the world by now (fossil fuel industry) so there's no way America gives up their cars (for less)
  - ethanbond 5y ago
    Of course there is. Just get rid of parking and/or put up bollards.
    - johannes1234321 5y ago
      It's not that easy. For one there is a notable population which will complain and even for those who want to get rid of cars it is a long project: You need to change the city structure. If you have a resedential area without shops to run errands and no workplaces whatsoever people will need to travel long distances each time. Long travel time (whatever the means) means that you don't do grocery shopping for a day or two, but a week or two, which means you carry more and that's only viable by car. Transforming city structure and society takes time.

dmos62 5y ago

I think car-only cities sounded like such a good idea during urbanization. I wonder what current trendy ideas we'll look back on with regret.

sandworm101 5y ago

Has anyone done a recent survey of how many people want more free parking spots? More traffic lanes? More bridges and tunnels for cars? Do people want higher or lower speed limits? Cheaper or more expensive gas for cars? More or fewer lanes dedicated to busses/bikes? We should not jump to conculsions about what people want before asking all relevant questions. Everyone wants more walkable cities. Thats like asking if people want cleaner water or better hospitals. Such questions are meaningless on thier own.

miccah 5y ago

I'm happy to hear this statistic, but American cities need to change so much to make it happen - mainly removing cars as other commenters pointed out. A good start would be making public transportation more available through buses and trains, followed by limiting cars in already more walkable areas of the city. Not Just Bikes is a great YouTube channel that explores city planning and often compares American cities to cities in the Netherlands. He has a video on Strong Towns as well. https://youtube.com/c/NotJustBikes https://youtube.com/c/NotJustBikes

antb123 5y ago

Walkable is good... Bikeable is even better

heurisko 5y ago

I live in England. Our cities are walkable, but they are often a nightmare to commute to by car (and bus, train, even though this is getting better). What I think would work in American suburbs is light rail/tram systems. They aren't as popular in England, but are very popular in Germany. As a tourist, they made getting around very easy, even without a car.