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Comment by DanielStraight | Hacker News Reader

I think the best point here is that American cities are not walkable. We tend to prefer long main roads with lots of business off of them to central areas where all important businesses are in walking distance. Main squares are more conducive to public transit than main avenues, because once you get there, you can walk. This is, in my mind, one of the hardest problems to solve for American public transit.

The expense and environment I think would both almost solve themselves if public transit became more common. If it were the main way to travel, then the distribution of people on buses would match the overall distribution of people.

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I agree, that's the main barrier. A subway line might cost a few billion, but reorganizing a major urban area to be walkable takes decades.

Part of it is that most American cities are very new in comparison to their European and Asian counterparts.

London, Paris, Barcelona, Tokyo, Kyoto, Seoul, etc. all have Ancient, Roman and/or Medieval cores which by default are designed for walk-ability. The modern cities are by and large extensions of those cores. The only American cities that have similar levels of walk-ability are ones that were founded and largely settled before the car like New York, Philadelphia, D.C. -- basically mid and north atlantic cities. Otherwise you simply can't walk by design.

Fixing that requires essentially rebuilding an entire city, which really isn't going to happen anytime soon. Imagine rebuilding something like say, L.A., at ~500 sq miles of broken sprawling urbanity, to be mass-transit ready.

> reorganizing a major urban area to be walkable takes decades

It seems to take about 15 to 20 years. The dense walkable urban areas in Northern Virginia and Maryland grew up around the metro system in that time frame.

Large areas don't actually need to be reorganized, just refurbished. Many cities including philadelphia, baltimore, and DC to some extent have loads of developed space that's just low rent and crime ridden. Just put back in the streetcars that were ripped out in the 60s, fix-up the buildings, and price out the gangsters from living there. That's basically the story of NYC's rehabilitation in the 90s, except they didn't need streetcars.

I think that your point about places like Philly and Baltimore being easy to rehabilitate in 15-20 years makes sense. But there are still large areas along the D.C. orange and red lines that are virtually unwalkable without putting your life in danger. For example, I used to live what would have been a 15-20 minute walk to the Vienna station on the D.C. Orange line, but to get there, most of the trip was next to fast roads, with no sidewalks, and a trip over two overpasses. I made that trip twice before giving up (and after almost getting hit by a handful of cars both times).

There are parts on the blue line that are pseudo-walkable once you get off the system, but places like Franconia-Springfield are death traps.

I do agree though that even those areas are better than they were when those stations were built. However, outside of a very limited "walkable" area of a couple of blocks in the best cases (like Dunn Loring or the Two Falls Church stations), you'd be hard pressed to live anywhere but immediately next to the station and not drive.

I really think that it's because most of the D.C. area grew up post-automobile and is designed as a vast urban sprawl. Things that might have a positive influence, like new lines on the system, have taken 30 years to get started on (Silver Line).

I'm however, happy to see new developments along that line, where those lessons have been learned and they are basically rebuilding parts of the urban infrastructure to make it more downtown, like Tyson's Corner and Reston.

Everything in from East Falls Church on the orange line is walkable. It was car dealerships and gas stations 25 years ago. Silver spring on in on the red line is walkable.

My point about DC was more that the district itself has tons of ghetto that could easily be re-gentrified. The middle class left the row-houses in the 60s in many cities, they turned to ghetto, but this is not necessarily a permanent state of affairs.

To repeat, this is basically what has happened in NYC. The former ghetto inhabitants are now driving up the crime rate in northern Pennsylvania and other areas.

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