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Fantastic cultural divide. This is one of the reasons why I read HN. Most of Europe is more or less walkable - one reason is that the largest urban centers pred

by fsloth 5y ago

Fantastic cultural divide. This is one of the reasons why I read HN. Most of Europe is more or less walkable - one reason is that the largest urban centers predate cars, but intentional design AF (anno ford) is also a factor. I can bike or walk everywhere, and the only reason I have a car is that it makes grocery shopping much, much easier. I am not very green or anything, I just like to keep things simple. You can check out my hoods in Helsinki in Google maps and streetview (not giving my actual address but close enough). There are has several high quality universities, and several well known startups and game studios operating within the view I linked below. All of it is walkable/cyclable/public transportable. https://www.google.com/maps/@60.192987,24.8679369,10181m/data=!3m1!1e3 https://www.google.com/maps/@60.192987,24.8679369,10181m/dat... Most of Scandinavia is similar, as you get to mainland Europe with bigger population density the story diversifies, but we don't really hear "only rich people can walk" stories here.

jseban 5y ago
> I can bike or walk everywhere, and the only reason I have a car is that it makes grocery shopping much, much easier. Yes, you still want a car for such things, sure it's quaint and nice to have a "walkable" neighborhood, if you're a tourist, but if you live there and have to schlep around by foot with your groceries every day, in all weathers, it's just annoying. I want my neighborhood to be functional and efficient, I already have access to several parks for taking a walk if I want to. Also in urban environments, making a lot of "inviting" public spaces for people to hang around and loiter is not always a great idea.. this also attracts a lot of crime, drugs etc
- dsign 5y ago
  > Also in urban environments, making a lot of "inviting" public spaces for people to hang around and loiter is not always a great idea.. this also attracts a lot of crime, drugs etc That's just a problem of having crime and drugs, not of having inviting public spaces.
- crooked-v 5y ago
  If you're living somewhere urban that's built out properly (e.g. not a residential-only section of suburbia pretending to be a proper neighborhood) your schlepping shouldn't be any longer than a 15-minute walk either way, at which point instead of doing the periodic bulk shopping that cars incentivize, you just pick up a limited amount of stuff as you need it every day or every other day. A lot of U.S. cities have gotten this fundamentally wrong by just not being dense enough to support businesses like this and/or zoning strict residential instead of allowing natural development of small stores, so you end up with neighborhoods that are nominally walkable but that are still pointless without a car because there aren't any businesses at all within a mile radius of your home.
  - jseban 5y ago
    I grew up in such a properly built out environment, and I just think it's a complete waste of time and effort to insist on such inefficient and inconvenient modes of transportation, and I hate wasting time and effort on recurring daily chores, I just want it to be as efficient as possible. You rely on cars/trucks indirectly anyway, that bring the groceries to your closest store, and deliver your packages so what's the different if you drive all the way to your doorstep, or make a pointless boring schlep for the last 15mins every day. You can also just put every public transportation stop 15mins away from everyones house so you're forced to walk the last bit, look walkable paradise!
    - crooked-v 5y ago
      > inefficient and inconvenient Just the other day I was about to start cooking but realized I was out of butter, so I walked about 5 minutes to a nearby store, got some, and walked back. It would have literally taken me more time and effort to drive to a store nearby with parking than just walking. The same holds for most household basics (paper towels, garbage bags, etc), for which I have about a dozen options within 15 minutes of my home, ranging from cramped bodega-type stores to large grocery stores. > You rely on cars/trucks indirectly anyway, that bring the groceries to your closest store, and deliver your packages so what's the different First, basic efficiency of scale when it comes to general impact on the environment; second, as I mention above, it would literally take me longer to do it all with a car than just walk.
- rekado 5y ago
  I've never owned a car in my life, never got a drivers license. I live in a walkable city (Berlin, close to the border). When I need to haul things around the city I take the cargo bike. For decades I simply carried groceries in a big backpack and walked to the markets on foot (they are all within a 10 minute radius from where I live). I'd call the layout of my neighborhood functional and efficient. Adverse weather has never been an issue for me. It's not like I regularly have things to haul that cannot possibly be rescheduled to a time after a thunderstorm. Some drizzle is barely even an inconvenience. Having to share the road with cars is the most annoying part of being mobile in the city. > Also in urban environments, making a lot of "inviting" public spaces for people to hang around and loiter is not always a great idea.. this also attracts a lot of crime, drugs etc I'd like to have more convenient access to drugs, but our parks don't seem to attract enough dealers. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Seriously, though: when drugs and crime become a problem, making public spaces hostile to all people seems like a solution that should not be among the top ten.
  - jseban 5y ago
    Yeah and if you stopped doing that and instead used a car to buy your groceries or ordered them delivered to your doorstep, you would have more free time and more energy. People want free time and energy. Just because it "works" for you to walk in the cold rain carrying groceries in a backback, doesn't make it the best solution. If there are better solutions, why insist on doing it the worst possible way?
    - matkoniecz 5y ago
      Walking for 10 minutes with an umbrella to the shop takes about the same effort as packing all this things into car and later unloading it and driving. Or even less if shop is 300m away.
    - rekado 5y ago
      Oh, you misunderstand. Involving a car would most definitely not make it a better solution. I have no interest whatsoever to involve cars in my life. Having to share the roads with them is bad enough. (The arrogance of space is ridiculous.) Deliveries: these cost little because people aren't paid properly. If I wanted to pay them properly, I wouldn't be able to use their services much. So instead of normalizing exploitation in the name of convenience, I prefer not to use delivery services when it can be avoided. And with different supermarkets in almost every direction, within 10mins on foot they most definitely can be avoided. I don't mean to moralize, and I'll step right off this soap box, but keeping bad jobs alive is a disservice to my community. More energy / more free time: neither the time nor the energy are wasted. If you want, you can see the time spent as an investment into health and focus, a tool for stress-reduction, an active period of mental rest, but really: this is not a zero sum game. I don't think any of this will convince you, and I'm not trying to. But perhaps you can see that your view on the "best solution" is hardly universal and well-established alternatives exist that work for a surprisingly large number of people.
- CalRobert 5y ago
  Having a grocery store five minutes away is wonderful, and a pram helps with the schlepping. As far as crime - that doesn't seem to be a big problem in places popular and busy with residents. Personally I'm more worried about a driver (the leading killer of children) hurting my child than someone selling weed.
- toto444 5y ago
  You can get delivered in most cities now.
  - jseban 5y ago
    Yeah this is what I do, and I think it's great! But it relies on there being a driveable street outside of the house, and not a stupid walk path.
    - matkoniecz 5y ago
      Road/driveway next to a residential buildings is standard and not contradictory to having a walkable access.
    - crooked-v 5y ago
      Delivery people can and do walk the last stretch, the same as they do when delivering to apartments and townhouses that don't have streets or parking directly adjacent to individual units.
- somnic 5y ago
  >Yes, you still want a car for such things, sure it's quaint and nice to have a "walkable" neighborhood, if you're a tourist, but if you live there and have to schlep around by foot with your groceries every day, in all weathers, it's just annoying. Depends on your lifestyle but I'm quite comfortably car-free. Shelf-stable stuff like tins, rice, beans I get delivered once every few weeks. Meat, veg, eggs and milk I want fresh so I rarely buy more than a couple of days in advance. If it's less than ten minutes walk to the supermarket, or on the walk home from the train station. >Also in urban environments, making a lot of "inviting" public spaces for people to hang around and loiter is not always a great idea.. this also attracts a lot of crime, drugs etc Crime and drugs happen where there aren't lots of people to witness them. If you're walking at night and can choose between a busy street and a quiet one, which do you choose?
- matkoniecz 5y ago
  > but if you live there and have to schlep around by foot with your groceries every day, in all weathers, it's just annoying Even with quite large family walking for 10 minutes with groceries seems to be not problematic. Unless you live on South Pole or something.
- sammorrowdrums 5y ago
  I live in the Netherlands. We bike rather than just walk everywhere, and generally people do more frequent small shops rather than big weekly shop. It takes some imagination and a lot of urban planning work, but quality of life improves dramatically, it’s life-changing. Much Urban planning was involved in making it better for cycling though, and it wasn’t always great for it. Off-road cycle paths being a mainstay for the country with separate lights is the biggest differentiator, and took a lot work to get there, but now you can safely cycle the entire country! Even Cambridge in England where I used to live (and is famous for thousands of cycling students and locals) Is laughably bad compared. Northern Ireland where my family live has also transformed large parts with Greenways projects and it has been transformational, I ran along them, walked along them to shops and cycled a long way and it was amazing I thought. https://nigreenways.com/ https://nigreenways.com/
  - jseban 5y ago
    > We bike rather than just walk everywhere, and generally people do more frequent small shops rather than big weekly shop. It takes some imagination and a lot of urban planning work, but quality of life improves dramatically, it’s life-changing. Yeah which means that you spend a lot more time and energy on grocery shopping. That is for me directly inverse to quality of life. The more time I spend in traffic (cycling is also sitting in traffic) and queueing in crowded grocery stores, the lower my quality of life is. Who are you to decide that cycling and grocery shopping is automatically the best quality of life for everyone? Some people prefer to play tennis, or paint, or read books or whatever. No freedom, only inefficient transportation.
    - crooked-v 5y ago
      > The more time I spend in traffic Where I live, walking to a small grocery store is literally faster than driving plus the ancillary annoyances of driving (finding parking, loading and unloading, etc). To come out ahead in the time side of the equation while driving I would need to make significantly larger shopping trips spaced further apart... which would each then eat up significantly more time in loading, unloading, carrying, and putting food away. > and queueing in crowded grocery stores Walkable neighborhood grocery stores have smaller queues than big-box stores, as a mostly-even distribution of customers across multiple stores and floors on staffing (e.g. you can't have less than one register) mean an average of more staff per customer.
- slifin 5y ago
  I live in a walkable urban location and have never drove, in order to shop without having to worry about carrying heavy milk etc I just use a trolley capable of going up steps it cost me £35 and allows me to carry a lot more comfortably Before that I used deliveries a lot, I notice people with cars don't think very hard about alternatives like they can't even imagine a world without their car Which means there's parts of the city that are just inaccessible to the rest of us and permanently degrades the experience of walking in most other places
- matkoniecz 5y ago
  > Also in urban environments, making a lot of "inviting" public spaces for people to hang around and loiter is not always a great idea.. this also attracts a lot of crime, drugs etc Maybe in some third-world crime infested countries? At least in Poland it is not a real problem at all. Some parks are locked for night and that is all. If making nice park is instantly resulting in crime/drugs/etc then something went really wrong.
  - will4274 5y ago
    > Maybe in some third-world crime infested countries? Like Seattle and San Francisco? This isn't a third world problem, unless you consider these cities to be third world.
    - matkoniecz 5y ago
      OK, I was unaware that USA really had such runaway crime problems. I thought that it is an exaggeration. (and still suspect this)
      - will4274 5y ago
        Almost every single park in downtown Seattle and San Francisco is covered in drug users. It's been this way for about ten years now.
- FriedrichN 5y ago
  Walking with groceries in the rain won't kill you, I promise. It's a small inconvenience but in my opinion you get a lot back for it, everything just becomes more village like and friendly. Being in a car does not tend to make people more friendly. And just because there are nice places to hang out does not automatically mean there will be drugs and crime. That is not my experience at least.
  - jseban 5y ago
    Yeah but why do you want to turn back time to a village and make things less efficient, what's the point of pretending to be poor. Americans are the friendliest people in the world and they drive the most, the more people cycle and walk in the cold rain, the more depressed and unfriendly they become
    - FriedrichN 5y ago
      This may be a controversial opinion, but not everything is about efficiency, especially when it comes to social interactions. But even if your life's aim is to impose rigorous efficiency on every aspect of your life, I doubt you'll be more time efficient if you do your groceries by car compared to living in walking distance of a supermarket.
      - jseban 5y ago
        Society is about efficiency. Social interactions are voluntarily and can be organised around any random activity such as games, sports, hobbies etc. It's really inflexible and incredibly limiting to force inefficiency of transport, because that increases social interactions. People had the same argument when banks went online, all the retired people want to still go and pay their bills at the bank, because they get to go outside, meet people etc.
        FriedrichN 5y ago
        I can tell that we're very different people. Society to me is not about efficiency at all. I like a bit of randomness to my life and not live an absolutely regimented and organised existence. But I guess that's not for everyone.
- Jedd 5y ago
  > ... schlep around by foot with your groceries every day, in all weathers, it's just annoying. You seem to be either contradicting your position, or not accepting other people's comments in good faith. Here you are arguing against carrying groceries every day, whereas I expect most people would - even in the proximity of markets and grocery stores - do perhaps 2 or 3 trips a week. In a comment below you fixed upon someone's en passant claim that they're happy to carry 20kg groceries a short distance (a few hundred metres). Of course, no one is doing 20kg of grocery shopping every day, and there's clearly a happy medium in there between mass/volume and frequency. Obviously the grocery shopping by foot continues to work well for an awful lot of people through Europe and elsewhere, and seems to be well correlated with a higher (perceived) QoL - so I don't understand how you can argue against these realities?
  - jseban 5y ago
    How can you argue against the reality that it's better to use a car or delivery for 20 kg, than to carry it when walking. And since it's already delivered by a truck, why walk the last bit it's pointless. It's just a middle class virtue signalling competition oh look who can be the most neo-amish and eschew modern conveniences. I churn my own butter, because that's better for the environment! Everyone should make their own butter, it only takes 4 hours, that's "nothing" Ban butter factories!
    - crooked-v 5y ago
      > How can you argue against the reality that it's better to use a car or delivery for 20 kg, than to carry it when walking. If you're really going to have trouble carrying 20 kg on your back for a couple of city blocks, you can use a folding rolling cart instead to do the same at the same speed and with negligible effort. > And since it's already delivered by a truck, why walk the last bit it's pointless. One truck carrying twenty tons of groceries is not the same as one car carrying a few cases of bottled water.
      - erik_seaberg 5y ago
        Half a bag of concrete? A cart is definitely the way to go. 51 lbs (23 kg) under ideal conditions is where National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health says manual laborers should take precautions against back injuries. Being able to deadlift it doesn’t make schlepping it all the way home a good plan.
- peoplefromibiza 5y ago
  I am in no way an activist of any kind, but especially when the weather is bad (think about rain) going around with the car is a nightmare where I live, that's why I prefer to buy my groceries everyday walking to a local supermarket. It takes a few minutes, it's a break from work, walking in the fresh air clears my mind and I avoid the traffic jams or having to park where there is no parking space available.
- timeon 5y ago
  > Also in urban environments, making a lot of "inviting" public spaces for people to hang around and loiter is not always a great idea.. this also attracts a lot of crime, drugs etc This not problem for inviting spaces per se. But spaces where you can hide. If you have this in ordinary "inviting" public spaces the that is sign of dysfunctional society. Most parks and town squares in cities I have lived are safe (at least if you are man).
- stephen_g 5y ago
  Making places inviting does the opposite for crime if you do it right. You get what’s called ‘natural surveillance’ that is, where there tends to be enough people around, seeing what’s going on that it discourages crime. This is talking serious crime - obviously things like pickpocketing can still happen.
- cjfd 5y ago
  I live in such a walkable neighborhood and for groceries I use a rather big backpack and I can get groceries for multiple days that way. For the my two-person household it is possible to get enough groceries by going to the supermarket twice a week, so either of us only needs to go once a week. Actually, I do not walk the 1 km to the supermarket but go by bike stead.
nivenkos 5y ago
The walkability comes at the cost of tiny housing though. Like here in Stockholm even 60m2 is getting very pricy (~350-450k USD). The main issue is that there is just nowhere near enough housing to keep up with population increases, seemingly anywhere in the Western world. And housing has become a "store of value" against inflation for investors, driving up prices and becoming a retirement fund for landlords and homeowners so governments can never let the prices drop (e.g. by embracing the abundance of development proposed in this article).
- fsloth 5y ago
  'And housing has become a "store of value"' 'Not become' but 'has been' for decades. You only now start to notice it as inflation and wages have not kept up. This is by design in most post-WW 2 western economies as an economic policy to "increase national wealth". That's why housing loans are subsidized and whatnot.
  - nivenkos 5y ago
    Well post-WW2 there was a huge boom in construction in Europe at least. Especially since many cities were almost completely destroyed. Even where my grandparents lived in England, the Blitz destroyed a lot of homes and meant mass construction was inevitable. It's really been since the 80s, that all infrastructure and construction projects have been slowed down and hampered by NIMBYism - and it's all about just pumping up the existing prices through artificial scarcity.
- dr_dshiv 5y ago
  If you use price per square meter to compare European housing to American housing, Europe seems super expensive. But, if you compare by the functional space (# bedrooms), Europe is cheap. I moved from San Diego to Amsterdam and was very happy to find 3-4 bedroom apartments to buy (the bank accepted my self employment income and gave a 1.6% interest rate). Apartments are well designed so you don’t need as much space. I live half a block from a grocery store and still get a lot of groceries delivered. We have 3 kids and no cars. Cheap and easy to rent if we want one for the day. I love this life style where the kids can walk and bike everywhere themself. Son: “Dad, I have to go to guitar, but it is raining” Dad: “Here are your rain pants. Hurry, but be careful biking in the rain”
bambax 5y ago
> the only reason I have a car is that it makes grocery shopping much, much easier How large is your family?? We are five (2 adults and 3 kids) and we do most grocery shopping by bike.
- scandox 5y ago
  Think the double question mark is a tad disingenuous there. Everyone will have their own peculiar circumstances. We, for example, are a family of 4 and our shop for ten days is I would guess 30/40 kilograms. The grocery is 2.5 kilometers away and the journey includes one very dangerous roundabout. So I think a car is reasonable.
  - matkoniecz 5y ago
    > The grocery is 2.5 kilometers away and the journey includes one very dangerous roundabout. Well, if city is so poorly designed that it requires cars, then you will need a car. For comparison, I have small supermarket 250m away (on the ground floor of an apartment block) - and I do not need to cross road to get there. And withing 250m there are several other shops like bakeries, pharmacies, haidresser, convenience shops, clothes shop, fast foods...
    - ivanhoe 5y ago
      >Well, if city is so poorly designed that it requires cars, then you will need a car. It also very much depends on the geography of the area, some cities simply sit on steep hill slopes and bikes are just not an option unless you're young and super-athletic. Most of "bike-cities" are in completely flat areas and it's not a coincidence.
      - germinalphrase 5y ago
        Increasingly less true with the adoption of electric bicycles.
    - treis 5y ago
      I'm guessing you pay significantly more for food at these local places than you would at a big box grocery store. Plus, you're less able to buy in bulk to get those time&money savings. The other big factor that people miss in these comparisons are schools. Generally speaking housing in dense places with good schools is usually very expensive. People that can't afford that typically have the choice between crappy urban schools or good suburban schools. Most of them choose the good schools.
simonebrunozzi 5y ago
> AF (anno ford) Nice reference to Brave New World, I suppose?
- fsloth 5y ago
  Oh, yes, I actually forgot the original reference. While Ford did not invent the automobile, he can be rightfully to be considered the icon of affordable automobile for the masses and hence a clear demarcation line on the design constraints of inhabited areas.
  - CapitainEvident 5y ago
    If so, in my view that’s a feature as most large European cities have wide enough roads for cars and the new neighbourhoods that were designed with cars in mind have never outperformed the old areas, where people actually want to live. London Canary Wharf being the epitome, where no one wants to live so badly the people that work there will pay more to live further away and suffer the horrible commute to go live in a walkable, older area.
null_object 5y ago
Walkability isn't uniform across Europe, Scandinavia or even within a single country: other people have mentioned Stockholm - which is still a walkable town, even though car-traffic is prioritized over cycles and pedestrians[0] - but other towns in Sweden are definitely not modelled for pedestrians. Nyköping is a town I need to visit regularly, and there pretty much all of the grocery and larger stores have been placed in out-of-town complexes, which means that everyone takes the car for almost all activities: I was there at the weekend and sat in a car-queue myself (I was part of the problem) for about ten minutes just to get past one of the roundabouts that accesses one of these shopping areas (which are vast car-parks and ugly buildings effectively cut-off from the town and inaccessible to anyone without a car). So any characterization of USA vs Europe positing Europe as some sort of walkable-heaven is really just idealized bullshit. [0] I've received (Swedish?) downvotes for this contention before - Swedish-speaking readers can see https://www.cyklistbloggen.se https://www.cyklistbloggen.se for good documentation.
- marginalia_nu 5y ago
  I do think there is an ambition to be pedestrian- and bicycle-friendly, but at the same time it seems very appealing to build sprawling American-style suburbs with big-metal-box-style commercial districts that are only accessible by car. In smaller cities, you often have the same people setting lofty ambitions to become the bicycle capital of united federation of planets while at the same time greenlighting yet another massive mall at the edge of town because "oh my god $BIG_CHAIN_STORE wants to come here, we're gonna be like a big city now!", usually at the expense of the stores that are accessible by foot or by bicycle.
  - rsj_hn 5y ago
    The problem is that to go from not needing a car every day to not needing a car at all is a huge leap that has a lot less to do with the geography of daily tasks and more to do with the geography of everywhere you'll go, as well as things like crime and pleasantness of local spaces, etc. That's why 85% of German households own a car, even though many of their cities are more walkable. Being more walkable doesn't get you to being car free, it gets you to fewer miles driven. But if your goal is to be car free then you need to focus on a lot more than getting groceries. But as long as a large majority have cars, you are going to have a car focused city, which is exactly what most European cities are once you get out of the touristy downtown areas. So at best the walkability metric will give you a small downtown area that is not car-focused. That downtown area will be populated primarily by tourists, and most locals will live outside it, in a more car accessible part of the city.
the__alchemist 5y ago
Related: Most European cities are comparably beautiful compared to North American ones. Pick a random European city, and it's probably more aesthetically interesting than any in NA. I'm curious why this is the case (Older / less centrally-planned? A subjective difference in tastes?)
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  Well, the USA is only ~250 years old and most of its planning was done in the past ~150 years, whereas most European cities date back to the middle ages or even before that, growing much more organically, often around a castle, wall, church, or all of the above. It's only in the past 100 years or so that cars are a thing. But the other is just different approach to planning. I live in a relatively new, so-called "vinex" suburb [1], a neighbourhood built according to certain specifications - relatively small gardens, bike- and pedestrian safe, the only cars you see are the ones heading to- and from their house, the rest is redirected to a ring road. And, very low uniformity in housing designs; common themes, but a lot of diversity. That said, at the moment we have a massive housing crisis - we need 100K houses in the next decade, probably more - and I feel like the only way to solve it is to build boring houses, big apartment complexes, that kinda thing. The alternative is population reduction, but nobody wants that. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinex-location https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinex-location
  - wongarsu 5y ago
    > we need 100K houses in the next decade That's a lot for a country with 17M inhabitants. Is that mostly driven by urban flight (not enough flats where people want to be) or is it more about population increase or less people living together (no enough flats anywhere)?
    - tobylane 5y ago
      The UK has the same issue. One cause is the house builders have permission to build a lot, but only do so slowly to not affect the price. Another cause is the market and government’s mess with mortgages. The southeast has it worse but it exists everywhere that employs enough people densely (ie multi storey offices often reached by public transport).
deleted 5y ago
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dudul 5y ago
"Most of Europe is more or less walkable" Europe is not just Berlin, Helsinki and Paris. There are a lot of very rural areas where you need a car to get things done.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago
Finland is beautiful, one reason for that is very low population density (1/2 of US and 1/10 of other european countries).
refurb 5y ago
Finland has fewer people in the entire country than Singapore. I’m not exactly shocked that it’s capital city is walkable.
iammisc 5y ago
This will be solved in the United States, the moment our cities have proper policing. Finland is a lot safer than the united states. Unfortunately, enough of my fellow Americans are dead set on preventing proper safety protocols from being implemented. Thus cities will forever be seen as dangerous, and not wholly incorrectly. Look, I live in a neighborhood like the one described here and constantly sing its praises. I love walking, and biking everywhere. Love knowing my neighbors. Love having beautiful outdoor spaces. However, when other parents in the neighborhood recount how they've been in random shootouts, have to deal with deranged vagrants exposing themselves to their daughters, etc... no amount of car-free lifestyle or beautiful tree-lined streets is going to overcome those fears. If strong towns truly wanted to bring about an urban American revival (And I think they do), the first thing they'd support is properly funding, training, and equipping the police. There has been talk in my well-to-do beautiful slice of Portland of hiring our own police force. This is the fundamental cultural gulf between city dwellers and suburbanites. Where my parents live in the suburbs, there is no issue of funding our police. No large group comes out to destroy property when the issue of public safety is brought up. My parents (who are the epitome of American when it comes to home choice) always tell me they love where I live, and would love to live there... but there's not enough police. And frankly, at the present moment, they are right. There are no shootouts where they live. I myself have considered moving. A friend of ours just had to duck under a car with their 2 year old because we defunded our gun violence reduction team.
danans 5y ago
> but intentional design AF (anno ford) is also a factor. Unintentional design, or rather emergent structure (as extolled by Jane Jacobs who was/is a guiding light for urbanists), is also a reason. So things like not destroying neighborhoods for multi-lane expressways, and not doing exclusive residential zoning, thereby allowing small scale non-industrial businesses to be interspersed with housing.
fatnoah 5y ago
>I can bike or walk everywhere, and the only reason I have a car is that it makes grocery shopping much, much easier I've lived in the center of an older US city, and one thing I loved was how easy grocery shopping was. I went to the market almost daily, so I never needed a vehicle to get 10 bags of groceries home. Friends who lived outside the city always asked if it felt limiting to not have a car, but I actually found it very freeing. I walked or took transit, and while the transit wasn't usually time-competitive with driving, it was basically free time for me to read, think, etc.

by fsloth 5y ago

jseban 5y ago

> I can bike or walk everywhere, and the only reason I have a car is that it makes grocery shopping much, much easier. Yes, you still want a car for such things, sure it's quaint and nice to have a "walkable" neighborhood, if you're a tourist, but if you live there and have to schlep around by foot with your groceries every day, in all weathers, it's just annoying. I want my neighborhood to be functional and efficient, I already have access to several parks for taking a walk if I want to. Also in urban environments, making a lot of "inviting" public spaces for people to hang around and loiter is not always a great idea.. this also attracts a lot of crime, drugs etc

dsign 5y ago
> Also in urban environments, making a lot of "inviting" public spaces for people to hang around and loiter is not always a great idea.. this also attracts a lot of crime, drugs etc That's just a problem of having crime and drugs, not of having inviting public spaces.
crooked-v 5y ago
If you're living somewhere urban that's built out properly (e.g. not a residential-only section of suburbia pretending to be a proper neighborhood) your schlepping shouldn't be any longer than a 15-minute walk either way, at which point instead of doing the periodic bulk shopping that cars incentivize, you just pick up a limited amount of stuff as you need it every day or every other day. A lot of U.S. cities have gotten this fundamentally wrong by just not being dense enough to support businesses like this and/or zoning strict residential instead of allowing natural development of small stores, so you end up with neighborhoods that are nominally walkable but that are still pointless without a car because there aren't any businesses at all within a mile radius of your home.
- jseban 5y ago
  I grew up in such a properly built out environment, and I just think it's a complete waste of time and effort to insist on such inefficient and inconvenient modes of transportation, and I hate wasting time and effort on recurring daily chores, I just want it to be as efficient as possible. You rely on cars/trucks indirectly anyway, that bring the groceries to your closest store, and deliver your packages so what's the different if you drive all the way to your doorstep, or make a pointless boring schlep for the last 15mins every day. You can also just put every public transportation stop 15mins away from everyones house so you're forced to walk the last bit, look walkable paradise!
  - crooked-v 5y ago
    > inefficient and inconvenient Just the other day I was about to start cooking but realized I was out of butter, so I walked about 5 minutes to a nearby store, got some, and walked back. It would have literally taken me more time and effort to drive to a store nearby with parking than just walking. The same holds for most household basics (paper towels, garbage bags, etc), for which I have about a dozen options within 15 minutes of my home, ranging from cramped bodega-type stores to large grocery stores. > You rely on cars/trucks indirectly anyway, that bring the groceries to your closest store, and deliver your packages so what's the different First, basic efficiency of scale when it comes to general impact on the environment; second, as I mention above, it would literally take me longer to do it all with a car than just walk.
rekado 5y ago
I've never owned a car in my life, never got a drivers license. I live in a walkable city (Berlin, close to the border). When I need to haul things around the city I take the cargo bike. For decades I simply carried groceries in a big backpack and walked to the markets on foot (they are all within a 10 minute radius from where I live). I'd call the layout of my neighborhood functional and efficient. Adverse weather has never been an issue for me. It's not like I regularly have things to haul that cannot possibly be rescheduled to a time after a thunderstorm. Some drizzle is barely even an inconvenience. Having to share the road with cars is the most annoying part of being mobile in the city. > Also in urban environments, making a lot of "inviting" public spaces for people to hang around and loiter is not always a great idea.. this also attracts a lot of crime, drugs etc I'd like to have more convenient access to drugs, but our parks don't seem to attract enough dealers. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Seriously, though: when drugs and crime become a problem, making public spaces hostile to all people seems like a solution that should not be among the top ten.
- jseban 5y ago
  Yeah and if you stopped doing that and instead used a car to buy your groceries or ordered them delivered to your doorstep, you would have more free time and more energy. People want free time and energy. Just because it "works" for you to walk in the cold rain carrying groceries in a backback, doesn't make it the best solution. If there are better solutions, why insist on doing it the worst possible way?
  - matkoniecz 5y ago
    Walking for 10 minutes with an umbrella to the shop takes about the same effort as packing all this things into car and later unloading it and driving. Or even less if shop is 300m away.
  - rekado 5y ago
    Oh, you misunderstand. Involving a car would most definitely not make it a better solution. I have no interest whatsoever to involve cars in my life. Having to share the roads with them is bad enough. (The arrogance of space is ridiculous.) Deliveries: these cost little because people aren't paid properly. If I wanted to pay them properly, I wouldn't be able to use their services much. So instead of normalizing exploitation in the name of convenience, I prefer not to use delivery services when it can be avoided. And with different supermarkets in almost every direction, within 10mins on foot they most definitely can be avoided. I don't mean to moralize, and I'll step right off this soap box, but keeping bad jobs alive is a disservice to my community. More energy / more free time: neither the time nor the energy are wasted. If you want, you can see the time spent as an investment into health and focus, a tool for stress-reduction, an active period of mental rest, but really: this is not a zero sum game. I don't think any of this will convince you, and I'm not trying to. But perhaps you can see that your view on the "best solution" is hardly universal and well-established alternatives exist that work for a surprisingly large number of people.
CalRobert 5y ago
Having a grocery store five minutes away is wonderful, and a pram helps with the schlepping. As far as crime - that doesn't seem to be a big problem in places popular and busy with residents. Personally I'm more worried about a driver (the leading killer of children) hurting my child than someone selling weed.
toto444 5y ago
You can get delivered in most cities now.
- jseban 5y ago
  Yeah this is what I do, and I think it's great! But it relies on there being a driveable street outside of the house, and not a stupid walk path.
  - matkoniecz 5y ago
    Road/driveway next to a residential buildings is standard and not contradictory to having a walkable access.
  - crooked-v 5y ago
    Delivery people can and do walk the last stretch, the same as they do when delivering to apartments and townhouses that don't have streets or parking directly adjacent to individual units.
somnic 5y ago
>Yes, you still want a car for such things, sure it's quaint and nice to have a "walkable" neighborhood, if you're a tourist, but if you live there and have to schlep around by foot with your groceries every day, in all weathers, it's just annoying. Depends on your lifestyle but I'm quite comfortably car-free. Shelf-stable stuff like tins, rice, beans I get delivered once every few weeks. Meat, veg, eggs and milk I want fresh so I rarely buy more than a couple of days in advance. If it's less than ten minutes walk to the supermarket, or on the walk home from the train station. >Also in urban environments, making a lot of "inviting" public spaces for people to hang around and loiter is not always a great idea.. this also attracts a lot of crime, drugs etc Crime and drugs happen where there aren't lots of people to witness them. If you're walking at night and can choose between a busy street and a quiet one, which do you choose?
matkoniecz 5y ago
> but if you live there and have to schlep around by foot with your groceries every day, in all weathers, it's just annoying Even with quite large family walking for 10 minutes with groceries seems to be not problematic. Unless you live on South Pole or something.
sammorrowdrums 5y ago
I live in the Netherlands. We bike rather than just walk everywhere, and generally people do more frequent small shops rather than big weekly shop. It takes some imagination and a lot of urban planning work, but quality of life improves dramatically, it’s life-changing. Much Urban planning was involved in making it better for cycling though, and it wasn’t always great for it. Off-road cycle paths being a mainstay for the country with separate lights is the biggest differentiator, and took a lot work to get there, but now you can safely cycle the entire country! Even Cambridge in England where I used to live (and is famous for thousands of cycling students and locals) Is laughably bad compared. Northern Ireland where my family live has also transformed large parts with Greenways projects and it has been transformational, I ran along them, walked along them to shops and cycled a long way and it was amazing I thought. https://nigreenways.com/ https://nigreenways.com/
- jseban 5y ago
  > We bike rather than just walk everywhere, and generally people do more frequent small shops rather than big weekly shop. It takes some imagination and a lot of urban planning work, but quality of life improves dramatically, it’s life-changing. Yeah which means that you spend a lot more time and energy on grocery shopping. That is for me directly inverse to quality of life. The more time I spend in traffic (cycling is also sitting in traffic) and queueing in crowded grocery stores, the lower my quality of life is. Who are you to decide that cycling and grocery shopping is automatically the best quality of life for everyone? Some people prefer to play tennis, or paint, or read books or whatever. No freedom, only inefficient transportation.
  - crooked-v 5y ago
    > The more time I spend in traffic Where I live, walking to a small grocery store is literally faster than driving plus the ancillary annoyances of driving (finding parking, loading and unloading, etc). To come out ahead in the time side of the equation while driving I would need to make significantly larger shopping trips spaced further apart... which would each then eat up significantly more time in loading, unloading, carrying, and putting food away. > and queueing in crowded grocery stores Walkable neighborhood grocery stores have smaller queues than big-box stores, as a mostly-even distribution of customers across multiple stores and floors on staffing (e.g. you can't have less than one register) mean an average of more staff per customer.
slifin 5y ago
I live in a walkable urban location and have never drove, in order to shop without having to worry about carrying heavy milk etc I just use a trolley capable of going up steps it cost me £35 and allows me to carry a lot more comfortably Before that I used deliveries a lot, I notice people with cars don't think very hard about alternatives like they can't even imagine a world without their car Which means there's parts of the city that are just inaccessible to the rest of us and permanently degrades the experience of walking in most other places
matkoniecz 5y ago
> Also in urban environments, making a lot of "inviting" public spaces for people to hang around and loiter is not always a great idea.. this also attracts a lot of crime, drugs etc Maybe in some third-world crime infested countries? At least in Poland it is not a real problem at all. Some parks are locked for night and that is all. If making nice park is instantly resulting in crime/drugs/etc then something went really wrong.
- will4274 5y ago
  > Maybe in some third-world crime infested countries? Like Seattle and San Francisco? This isn't a third world problem, unless you consider these cities to be third world.
  - matkoniecz 5y ago
    OK, I was unaware that USA really had such runaway crime problems. I thought that it is an exaggeration. (and still suspect this)
    - will4274 5y ago
      Almost every single park in downtown Seattle and San Francisco is covered in drug users. It's been this way for about ten years now.
FriedrichN 5y ago
Walking with groceries in the rain won't kill you, I promise. It's a small inconvenience but in my opinion you get a lot back for it, everything just becomes more village like and friendly. Being in a car does not tend to make people more friendly. And just because there are nice places to hang out does not automatically mean there will be drugs and crime. That is not my experience at least.
- jseban 5y ago
  Yeah but why do you want to turn back time to a village and make things less efficient, what's the point of pretending to be poor. Americans are the friendliest people in the world and they drive the most, the more people cycle and walk in the cold rain, the more depressed and unfriendly they become
  - FriedrichN 5y ago
    This may be a controversial opinion, but not everything is about efficiency, especially when it comes to social interactions. But even if your life's aim is to impose rigorous efficiency on every aspect of your life, I doubt you'll be more time efficient if you do your groceries by car compared to living in walking distance of a supermarket.
    - jseban 5y ago
      Society is about efficiency. Social interactions are voluntarily and can be organised around any random activity such as games, sports, hobbies etc. It's really inflexible and incredibly limiting to force inefficiency of transport, because that increases social interactions. People had the same argument when banks went online, all the retired people want to still go and pay their bills at the bank, because they get to go outside, meet people etc.
      - FriedrichN 5y ago
        I can tell that we're very different people. Society to me is not about efficiency at all. I like a bit of randomness to my life and not live an absolutely regimented and organised existence. But I guess that's not for everyone.
Jedd 5y ago
> ... schlep around by foot with your groceries every day, in all weathers, it's just annoying. You seem to be either contradicting your position, or not accepting other people's comments in good faith. Here you are arguing against carrying groceries every day, whereas I expect most people would - even in the proximity of markets and grocery stores - do perhaps 2 or 3 trips a week. In a comment below you fixed upon someone's en passant claim that they're happy to carry 20kg groceries a short distance (a few hundred metres). Of course, no one is doing 20kg of grocery shopping every day, and there's clearly a happy medium in there between mass/volume and frequency. Obviously the grocery shopping by foot continues to work well for an awful lot of people through Europe and elsewhere, and seems to be well correlated with a higher (perceived) QoL - so I don't understand how you can argue against these realities?
- jseban 5y ago
  How can you argue against the reality that it's better to use a car or delivery for 20 kg, than to carry it when walking. And since it's already delivered by a truck, why walk the last bit it's pointless. It's just a middle class virtue signalling competition oh look who can be the most neo-amish and eschew modern conveniences. I churn my own butter, because that's better for the environment! Everyone should make their own butter, it only takes 4 hours, that's "nothing" Ban butter factories!
  - crooked-v 5y ago
    > How can you argue against the reality that it's better to use a car or delivery for 20 kg, than to carry it when walking. If you're really going to have trouble carrying 20 kg on your back for a couple of city blocks, you can use a folding rolling cart instead to do the same at the same speed and with negligible effort. > And since it's already delivered by a truck, why walk the last bit it's pointless. One truck carrying twenty tons of groceries is not the same as one car carrying a few cases of bottled water.
    - erik_seaberg 5y ago
      Half a bag of concrete? A cart is definitely the way to go. 51 lbs (23 kg) under ideal conditions is where National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health says manual laborers should take precautions against back injuries. Being able to deadlift it doesn’t make schlepping it all the way home a good plan.
peoplefromibiza 5y ago
I am in no way an activist of any kind, but especially when the weather is bad (think about rain) going around with the car is a nightmare where I live, that's why I prefer to buy my groceries everyday walking to a local supermarket. It takes a few minutes, it's a break from work, walking in the fresh air clears my mind and I avoid the traffic jams or having to park where there is no parking space available.
timeon 5y ago
> Also in urban environments, making a lot of "inviting" public spaces for people to hang around and loiter is not always a great idea.. this also attracts a lot of crime, drugs etc This not problem for inviting spaces per se. But spaces where you can hide. If you have this in ordinary "inviting" public spaces the that is sign of dysfunctional society. Most parks and town squares in cities I have lived are safe (at least if you are man).
stephen_g 5y ago
Making places inviting does the opposite for crime if you do it right. You get what’s called ‘natural surveillance’ that is, where there tends to be enough people around, seeing what’s going on that it discourages crime. This is talking serious crime - obviously things like pickpocketing can still happen.
cjfd 5y ago
I live in such a walkable neighborhood and for groceries I use a rather big backpack and I can get groceries for multiple days that way. For the my two-person household it is possible to get enough groceries by going to the supermarket twice a week, so either of us only needs to go once a week. Actually, I do not walk the 1 km to the supermarket but go by bike stead.

nivenkos 5y ago

The walkability comes at the cost of tiny housing though. Like here in Stockholm even 60m2 is getting very pricy (~350-450k USD). The main issue is that there is just nowhere near enough housing to keep up with population increases, seemingly anywhere in the Western world. And housing has become a "store of value" against inflation for investors, driving up prices and becoming a retirement fund for landlords and homeowners so governments can never let the prices drop (e.g. by embracing the abundance of development proposed in this article).

fsloth 5y ago
'And housing has become a "store of value"' 'Not become' but 'has been' for decades. You only now start to notice it as inflation and wages have not kept up. This is by design in most post-WW 2 western economies as an economic policy to "increase national wealth". That's why housing loans are subsidized and whatnot.
- nivenkos 5y ago
  Well post-WW2 there was a huge boom in construction in Europe at least. Especially since many cities were almost completely destroyed. Even where my grandparents lived in England, the Blitz destroyed a lot of homes and meant mass construction was inevitable. It's really been since the 80s, that all infrastructure and construction projects have been slowed down and hampered by NIMBYism - and it's all about just pumping up the existing prices through artificial scarcity.
dr_dshiv 5y ago
If you use price per square meter to compare European housing to American housing, Europe seems super expensive. But, if you compare by the functional space (# bedrooms), Europe is cheap. I moved from San Diego to Amsterdam and was very happy to find 3-4 bedroom apartments to buy (the bank accepted my self employment income and gave a 1.6% interest rate). Apartments are well designed so you don’t need as much space. I live half a block from a grocery store and still get a lot of groceries delivered. We have 3 kids and no cars. Cheap and easy to rent if we want one for the day. I love this life style where the kids can walk and bike everywhere themself. Son: “Dad, I have to go to guitar, but it is raining” Dad: “Here are your rain pants. Hurry, but be careful biking in the rain”

bambax 5y ago

> the only reason I have a car is that it makes grocery shopping much, much easier How large is your family?? We are five (2 adults and 3 kids) and we do most grocery shopping by bike.

scandox 5y ago
Think the double question mark is a tad disingenuous there. Everyone will have their own peculiar circumstances. We, for example, are a family of 4 and our shop for ten days is I would guess 30/40 kilograms. The grocery is 2.5 kilometers away and the journey includes one very dangerous roundabout. So I think a car is reasonable.
- matkoniecz 5y ago
  > The grocery is 2.5 kilometers away and the journey includes one very dangerous roundabout. Well, if city is so poorly designed that it requires cars, then you will need a car. For comparison, I have small supermarket 250m away (on the ground floor of an apartment block) - and I do not need to cross road to get there. And withing 250m there are several other shops like bakeries, pharmacies, haidresser, convenience shops, clothes shop, fast foods...
  - ivanhoe 5y ago
    >Well, if city is so poorly designed that it requires cars, then you will need a car. It also very much depends on the geography of the area, some cities simply sit on steep hill slopes and bikes are just not an option unless you're young and super-athletic. Most of "bike-cities" are in completely flat areas and it's not a coincidence.
    - germinalphrase 5y ago
      Increasingly less true with the adoption of electric bicycles.
  - treis 5y ago
    I'm guessing you pay significantly more for food at these local places than you would at a big box grocery store. Plus, you're less able to buy in bulk to get those time&money savings. The other big factor that people miss in these comparisons are schools. Generally speaking housing in dense places with good schools is usually very expensive. People that can't afford that typically have the choice between crappy urban schools or good suburban schools. Most of them choose the good schools.

simonebrunozzi 5y ago

> AF (anno ford) Nice reference to Brave New World, I suppose?

fsloth 5y ago
Oh, yes, I actually forgot the original reference. While Ford did not invent the automobile, he can be rightfully to be considered the icon of affordable automobile for the masses and hence a clear demarcation line on the design constraints of inhabited areas.
- CapitainEvident 5y ago
  If so, in my view that’s a feature as most large European cities have wide enough roads for cars and the new neighbourhoods that were designed with cars in mind have never outperformed the old areas, where people actually want to live. London Canary Wharf being the epitome, where no one wants to live so badly the people that work there will pay more to live further away and suffer the horrible commute to go live in a walkable, older area.

null_object 5y ago

Walkability isn't uniform across Europe, Scandinavia or even within a single country: other people have mentioned Stockholm - which is still a walkable town, even though car-traffic is prioritized over cycles and pedestrians[0] - but other towns in Sweden are definitely not modelled for pedestrians. Nyköping is a town I need to visit regularly, and there pretty much all of the grocery and larger stores have been placed in out-of-town complexes, which means that everyone takes the car for almost all activities: I was there at the weekend and sat in a car-queue myself (I was part of the problem) for about ten minutes just to get past one of the roundabouts that accesses one of these shopping areas (which are vast car-parks and ugly buildings effectively cut-off from the town and inaccessible to anyone without a car). So any characterization of USA vs Europe positing Europe as some sort of walkable-heaven is really just idealized bullshit. [0] I've received (Swedish?) downvotes for this contention before - Swedish-speaking readers can see https://www.cyklistbloggen.se https://www.cyklistbloggen.se for good documentation.

marginalia_nu 5y ago
I do think there is an ambition to be pedestrian- and bicycle-friendly, but at the same time it seems very appealing to build sprawling American-style suburbs with big-metal-box-style commercial districts that are only accessible by car. In smaller cities, you often have the same people setting lofty ambitions to become the bicycle capital of united federation of planets while at the same time greenlighting yet another massive mall at the edge of town because "oh my god $BIG_CHAIN_STORE wants to come here, we're gonna be like a big city now!", usually at the expense of the stores that are accessible by foot or by bicycle.
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  The problem is that to go from not needing a car every day to not needing a car at all is a huge leap that has a lot less to do with the geography of daily tasks and more to do with the geography of everywhere you'll go, as well as things like crime and pleasantness of local spaces, etc. That's why 85% of German households own a car, even though many of their cities are more walkable. Being more walkable doesn't get you to being car free, it gets you to fewer miles driven. But if your goal is to be car free then you need to focus on a lot more than getting groceries. But as long as a large majority have cars, you are going to have a car focused city, which is exactly what most European cities are once you get out of the touristy downtown areas. So at best the walkability metric will give you a small downtown area that is not car-focused. That downtown area will be populated primarily by tourists, and most locals will live outside it, in a more car accessible part of the city.

the__alchemist 5y ago

Related: Most European cities are comparably beautiful compared to North American ones. Pick a random European city, and it's probably more aesthetically interesting than any in NA. I'm curious why this is the case (Older / less centrally-planned? A subjective difference in tastes?)

Cthulhu_ 5y ago
Well, the USA is only ~250 years old and most of its planning was done in the past ~150 years, whereas most European cities date back to the middle ages or even before that, growing much more organically, often around a castle, wall, church, or all of the above. It's only in the past 100 years or so that cars are a thing. But the other is just different approach to planning. I live in a relatively new, so-called "vinex" suburb [1], a neighbourhood built according to certain specifications - relatively small gardens, bike- and pedestrian safe, the only cars you see are the ones heading to- and from their house, the rest is redirected to a ring road. And, very low uniformity in housing designs; common themes, but a lot of diversity. That said, at the moment we have a massive housing crisis - we need 100K houses in the next decade, probably more - and I feel like the only way to solve it is to build boring houses, big apartment complexes, that kinda thing. The alternative is population reduction, but nobody wants that. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinex-location https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinex-location
- wongarsu 5y ago
  > we need 100K houses in the next decade That's a lot for a country with 17M inhabitants. Is that mostly driven by urban flight (not enough flats where people want to be) or is it more about population increase or less people living together (no enough flats anywhere)?
  - tobylane 5y ago
    The UK has the same issue. One cause is the house builders have permission to build a lot, but only do so slowly to not affect the price. Another cause is the market and government’s mess with mortgages. The southeast has it worse but it exists everywhere that employs enough people densely (ie multi storey offices often reached by public transport).

deleted 5y ago

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dudul 5y ago

"Most of Europe is more or less walkable" Europe is not just Berlin, Helsinki and Paris. There are a lot of very rural areas where you need a car to get things done.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago

Finland is beautiful, one reason for that is very low population density (1/2 of US and 1/10 of other european countries).

refurb 5y ago

Finland has fewer people in the entire country than Singapore. I’m not exactly shocked that it’s capital city is walkable.

iammisc 5y ago

This will be solved in the United States, the moment our cities have proper policing. Finland is a lot safer than the united states. Unfortunately, enough of my fellow Americans are dead set on preventing proper safety protocols from being implemented. Thus cities will forever be seen as dangerous, and not wholly incorrectly. Look, I live in a neighborhood like the one described here and constantly sing its praises. I love walking, and biking everywhere. Love knowing my neighbors. Love having beautiful outdoor spaces. However, when other parents in the neighborhood recount how they've been in random shootouts, have to deal with deranged vagrants exposing themselves to their daughters, etc... no amount of car-free lifestyle or beautiful tree-lined streets is going to overcome those fears. If strong towns truly wanted to bring about an urban American revival (And I think they do), the first thing they'd support is properly funding, training, and equipping the police. There has been talk in my well-to-do beautiful slice of Portland of hiring our own police force. This is the fundamental cultural gulf between city dwellers and suburbanites. Where my parents live in the suburbs, there is no issue of funding our police. No large group comes out to destroy property when the issue of public safety is brought up. My parents (who are the epitome of American when it comes to home choice) always tell me they love where I live, and would love to live there... but there's not enough police. And frankly, at the present moment, they are right. There are no shootouts where they live. I myself have considered moving. A friend of ours just had to duck under a car with their 2 year old because we defunded our gun violence reduction team.

danans 5y ago

> but intentional design AF (anno ford) is also a factor. Unintentional design, or rather emergent structure (as extolled by Jane Jacobs who was/is a guiding light for urbanists), is also a reason. So things like not destroying neighborhoods for multi-lane expressways, and not doing exclusive residential zoning, thereby allowing small scale non-industrial businesses to be interspersed with housing.

fatnoah 5y ago

>I can bike or walk everywhere, and the only reason I have a car is that it makes grocery shopping much, much easier I've lived in the center of an older US city, and one thing I loved was how easy grocery shopping was. I went to the market almost daily, so I never needed a vehicle to get 10 bags of groceries home. Friends who lived outside the city always asked if it felt limiting to not have a car, but I actually found it very freeing. I walked or took transit, and while the transit wasn't usually time-competitive with driving, it was basically free time for me to read, think, etc.