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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

• 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.