Hacker News Reader

Comment by chasing | Hacker News Reader

Yup. It's the main reason many European cities and Manhattan feel so engaging and alive in comparison to other US cities (just using my experiences).

In walking cities you interact with the city itself -- you can stop and look at things closely, walk into a small store you've never noticed before, run into a friend and chat, or pause and just people watch.

In car cities everything's far off and viewed through glass, your only interaction being which direction you point your car and how fast it moves. And becoming distracted by something interesting causes expensive and dangerous accidents. Plus, driving is inherently frustrating and exhausting, in my experience, especially when compared to walking which is at least a nice bit of exercise. You just want to be where you're going and WHY IS THERE ALL OF THIS TRAFFIC?

View on HN

The crazy thing is a minor change could make many suburbs much more walkable: put the stores on the street and parking in the back. Not sure why they started doing the reverse. I've lived in a lot of California suburbs that are still within walking distance to shops (~1 mile), but the experience is so bad because of the way they've arranged parking.

I don't understand why in many suburban areas there will be sidewalk for miles, and then it will just cut off for maybe a mile or so, just to have the sidewalk pick back up again on that same road

Typically the road w/o sidewalks was put in earlier, when sidewalks weren't required.

Or there is a change of jurisdiction, and one didn't require sidewalks and one did, often city vs. unincorporated county land.

In suburbs, the sidewalk is supposed to be installed by the contractor who is doing the building. Some of them "forget" and the inspector doesn't notice/care.

Because laws requiring sidewalks went into effect after some land was developed, and the city would have to pay for the land owner to put a sidewalk in.

Unfortunately many shopping centers that build out to the sidewalk will display a blank wall with ventilators and so forth facing the sidewalk, and the real entrances are in the interior, facing the parking.

In one way this makes sense since almost all customers arrive by car but it certainly makes the street visually unappealing.

EDIT: I wrote "arrive by foot", obviously it is arrive by car in suburban locations.

This also means that if you arrive on foot you have to walk around to some back alley or something in order to access the building, which defeats the whole purpose of fronting the shop directly on the sidewalk. Or they'll drop or raise the sidewalk in relation to the walk-up entrance and put a railing up making it impossible to access any shops from the sidewalk. As much as developers think they're favoring sidewalks they're really just paying lip service to the idea.

Many centers have no entrances on the street. All of them face inwards to the parking area.

Lip service - just fooling the planning departments which sometimes seem to fall for the dumbest ideas.

Bait parking is the sad reason. People are more likely to park and go into the store if they can see from the road that there are available parking spaces.

Maybe they need automatically-updated signs in the front that announce the number of parking spaces available in the back.

What I noticed when I lived in Manhattan is that I CONSTANTLY ran into people I knew, everywhere. Despite living in San Francisco much longer, and the city being much smaller, I ran into acquaintances far less often.

Manhattan? Manhattan seems like a grid made for cars. Not place full of "nooks an crannies". I'm not saying it's not nice but it doesn't seem to fit the article at all. Most European cities are a wonderful mess of winding roads. Manhattan is mostly a grid. They don't seem comparible.

Manhattan's grid was laid out in 1811, a hundred years before the automobile.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commissioners%27_Plan_of_1811

Lower Manhattan has plenty of nooks and crannies. My father had a secret street that he would park on when he needed to visit Battery Park City. It was a little-known street maybe one or two blocks long that was perfectly legal to park on but that hardly anyone knew about because it didn't go anywhere. I went with him a few times, and we were the only car to park there.

Plenty of nooks and crannies can be found, even in grids. There are always irregularities and sacred cows to be worked around.

Also, Chicago has a lot of nice nooks and crannies. Including an ordinance that requires that a cattle path be maintained through some of its downtown skyscrapers, and an old barn at the end of an alley.

https://www.chicagoarchitecture.org/2009/04/08/the-loops-mos...

It isn't about whether the roads are in a grid or full of nooks and crannies per se, but that the city itself wasn't planned around the existence of the automobile, either deliberately or because the automobile didn't exist yet.

A good example of this is parking minimums, which make Manhattan-style density literally impossible in places like the SFBay.

The big thing about Manhattan isn’t that its built in a grid, but that the shopping/offices/living are all mixed together. People are coming and going all day long. A lot of suburbs are like deserts.

Still, the ratio of people to cars is striking when visiting from more suburban areas. Many places seem like a sea of cars and pedestrians are very out of place.

Lower Manhattan is older and European in style. It’s only a grid above Houston (pronounced ‘How-ston’, not ‘Hew-ston’ like the city in Texas.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commissioners%27_Plan_of_1811

Yeah Robert Moses had a big influence, but there are still some areas that are more like what the article describes. They just tend to be little pockets off the beaten path that you almost have to stumble into.

Downtown, like below 14th st, feels a lot more like that, and even more the further south (i.e. older) you go. Midtown and uptown not so much.

The premise of the movie Crash (Academy Award winner) is that these glass and steel objects insulate the various cultures and races from each other... until they crash into each other.

And people actually live in the cities.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com