Before I started working from home full time I had a 15 minute bike commute. There's a friendly coffee shop across the street. I can walk to the grocery store. There's an awesome microbrewery and restaurant across the street.
But you don't have to take my word for it, the numbers bear this out. Walk mode share in Germany's biggest cities are ~4x as high as NYC, which is the US' most walkable major city. That's a bigger gap than the difference in GDP per capita between the US and Portugal.
Compared to Germany, your average US city's walkability is a dumpster that fell off a train wreck, then got set on fire and shot into the sun. It's really that big of a difference.
> That said, walking in general is no problem, there's just not much interesting (besides parks) in reach.
I'm not thinking of things that are particularly interesting, mostly just errand-type stuff. In most US residential neighborhoods, commercial activity is banned, so the only things within walking distance are parks and schools, maybe a library if you're lucky. Oh, I guess churches too.
In contrast, near the outskirts of Munich in a relatively quiet neighborhood, I'm also within easy walking distance of a few bakeries, a few grocery stores, my local bank branch, my dentist's office, a drug store, a post office, there's a few small fitness centers, a book store, a locksmith, a florist, couple of clothing stores, a shoe store, a few hotels, and a few restaurants. All small examples of their categories, to be sure, but useful nonetheless.
And it's not just the distances and destinations, it's the design. I could go on if anyone's interested, but the street design in Munich (and really Germany as a whole, from what I've seen traveling around) is vastly more walk-friendly than pretty much anywhere in the US.
Like, my parents pointed out that a new shopping center near where they live in Santa Clara, CA (which is steadily becoming more dense and mixed-use, albeit more slowly than I'd like) is technically within walking distance. But, they admitted that they never actually walk there, even though both are into walking for exercise. They likely don't even realize, but there's an obvious reason for the this: the way there just doesn't feel comfortable for walking. I know the route well, and the streets and intersections just don't make it feel good.
Let's face it, if you don't find a remote job (and they are still difficult to find) then your reality is probably a lot more likely to look like mine than yours.
The US is a lot more car dependent than any other place on earth, like it or not.
I've only been working remote for 5 months - before that I biked to work for 10 years. In fact, I still do all of my errands, shopping, etc. by bike. No doubt it's not as easy as in some European cities, but it's a possibility for people who prioritize it.
First and foremost, lets be clear: I lived in small to medium-sized towns in the midwest. Two towns had taxi service, and one had a limited bus service. The town with taxis only... well, those taxis weren't reliable. You couldn't pre-order a taxi to go to work and the waiting time could be anywhere from 15 minutes to 2 hours. They weren't cheap: Taking a taxi to a minimum wage job would usually cost an hour of work.
Living outside of the small towns was no picnic without a car: You couldn't ride a bike on the shortest route, and it took more time. Biking was often unsafe: You were expected to use the road much like a car. Except lesser.
All of the places had a lack of continuous sidewalks to walk on and drivers that rarely slowed down for you. Pedestrians have the right of way in name only.
Not to mention... distance. In the small town, I tried walking everywhere for a while. I could not buy clothes outside of dollar general. Lots of things weren't possible to find in town. I was lucky enough to have a grocery store: Good thing, too, because there was a 20 minute drive to the towns with larger ones.
IN the larger cities, most residential areas were kept away from the areas with commerce. Wal-mart did not have sidewalks leading to it in one town.
IF you do it despite all of this, you still have to have the right job. Retail is going to expect you to be clean and dry when you get to work. SO will a restaurant. Some of these places have little to zero break room and no safe place to keep a bicycle or your helmet.
Oh, yeah: In almost all of these places, you were expected to only walk during "normal" hours. IF you walked to a 24-hour store at 2am or home after getting off work at 3am, you drew police suspicion, doubly so if you are young, look poor, a minority.
Some jobs won't hire you if you don't have a car or steady transportation. Walking and cycling did not count.
And sure, all this is still technically a choice, but not much of one. You have to reach a level of privilege before you can do this stuff safely and reasonably - at least in the states.
It was not just this - public transport was abysmal, nothing reliable, bus could be easily 1 hour late or just wouldn't show up. Many places simply didn't have a pedestrian path to them. It was 2004 but I don't think major shift happened since.
Moving to Norway was night and day, though. Busses that run basically on time. Pedestrian paths all over that cut through neighborhoods and are safe. Actual right of way for pedestrians. Bridges or tunnels over busier roads and in my city, they are slowly routing traffic away from congested areas to make them walkable. I can get to other cities using public transportation as well, including the airports. I am not legal to drive here. We own a car (Spouse drives), but we only use it a few times a month.
There's a reason few people bike for transportation in the US, and that's that biking in the US is mostly really terrible. It can be done, sure, but it sucks enough to where very few want to do it. Saying "well it's still a personal choice" is like looking at the cycle of poverty and saying, "yeah poor people in poor neighborhoods have some serious systemic problems, but if they really tried they could still make it work!"
The problem is there's a large, noisy cadre of bicycle enthusiasts who spend tons of money on their hobby and think it's the answer to the world's problems. They tend to dominate conversations like this.
It's really not. It has its disadvantages, sure, but there's plenty of advantages to it, too. In comparison to cars, it's healthier, kid-friendly, cheaper for the user, cheaper for the government, less noisy, less pollution, less danger generation, better for the community, etc. And it's quite pleasant with the right infrastructure.
You're exaggerating the downsides here. Climate? Tokyo has a high bike mode share with plenty of heat and humidity in the sumnmer, Oulu a high bike mode share even with near-endless winter. Hills? E-bikes are rapidly becoming cheaper and more common. Distance? Well, that's part of the land use/infrastructure problem. America in general has been designed to be hostile to anything that's not a car, and that hurts walking, it hurts transit, and it hurts biking. It needs to be fixed for all those.
Biking doesn't have to cover every person or every trip, but declaring that it's "terrible in general" is just projecting your own preferences onto the world. Reality begs to differ: we can see that places that have the right infrastructure and land use see high bike rates. Period.
Now, maybe you personally would still avoid biking in Copenhagen or Amsterdam, but that has little to do with whether it's good general policy.
> The problem is there's a large, noisy cadre of bicycle enthusiasts who spend tons of money on their hobby and think it's the answer to the world's problems. They tend to dominate conversations like this.
This is wrong for a couple reasons:
1. Biking is an excellent option for a variety of reasons. Most Americans are plainly ignorant of how it can work. Not that it's their fault, really: everywhere they've lived, biking is awful, so naturally it must be always be awful, right? Same thing with public transit.
2. The kind of people that would benefit most by things like protected intersections and protected bike lanes is not the lycra-wearing, dentist-bike-riding, "take no prisoners in the war against cars" crowd. The kind of people that benefit from Dutch-style bike infrastructure are ordinary people who do not think of themselves as cyclists, but just people who happen to bike.