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Comment by adrianN | Hacker News Reader

American cities definitely don't look nice as a tourist. SF for example is terrible if you don't Uber everywhere.

Really? SF is one of the best, IMO. You can actually take long walks, it actually has a subway (plus busses, trams), it has sidewalks almost everywhere..... sure, less parks than one would like/ a bit too much concrete, lots of homeless people, etc. but hey, it's a big USA city, what did you expect?

Compare it to e.g. the nearby San Jose - SF is so much better that it's not even funny. What US city would you consider more "walkable"/ tourist friendly? MAYBE NY, if we only include Manhattan and nothing else.

Agreed.

For a week or so tourism SF, Manhattan, Seattle downtown, Boston. Cities I can think to not be very walkable are LA and DC perhaps.

You can walk in SF, I also did it, but the difference is that you don't really see much of the city if you do, compared to Berlin, London, or Tokyo. In those cities you can go from pretty much anywhere in the city to anywhere in less than an hour with public transport and on foot. Less than half an hour if you restrict yourself to the touristy center area. That is just not possible in SF.

>You can walk in SF, I also did it, but the difference is that you don't really see much of the city if you do

What are you talking about? The first time I visited SF I just stumbled upon Haight-Ashbury and Japantown by walking around.

Anecdotal, but as a visitor I found it far harder to get around than, say, London. There's a public transport system, but in terms of frequency and reach it was not what you'd find in a large European city.

>MAYBE NY, if we only include Manhattan and nothing else.

Yep, NYC is not very walkable if you leave Manhattan island. One big difference though with NYC is the naming and the political boundaries. NYC is very unique in America because it's one really big city with different "boroughs", all very different from each other. If it were any city, it wouldn't be like this: all those places would actually be separate cities, all part of the same metro area. (NYC has this too, with Jersey City, Newark, Stamford, etc. all being part of the metro area, but it's remarkable that so much of the metro area is actually one city.) Just look at LA for instance: LA itself is a pretty small part of the metro area, with many other towns and cities comprising it.

I didn’t particularly love SF, but this is a weird view. We spent 5 days there walking most places with the occasional (unimpressive) PT trip. It was fine. The Tenderloin is certainly sketchy, but the city is very walkable and quite nice to walk around due to the hills and they way they reveal views of the bay.

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