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Comment by hdfbdtbcdg | Hacker News Reader

> How often do you realize you can't go from point A to B because it's impossible to street walk anymore?

Never. Literally never. I live in a European city though.

Edit: In the City I live in there are literally no cases where I can't walk if I have time and inclination. Norway has taken a different approach to city planning to the US.

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As much as we can rightly poke fun at Americans over here in Europe about this I've found Europeans really underestimate how much we're adopting American-style suburbs because they just haven't been to those areas.

Case in point, here's a 30 minute walk (5 minutes by car) for someone to literally cross the road in Oslo: https://goo.gl/maps/PFTnTrprKjiDrE7y8

Sure you can walk that if you have time & inclination, but unless you're willing to spend an hour just on crossing the street you're going to drive there.

This wasn't even hard to find, I just zoomed in pretty much the first freeway in the Oslo area I could find and saw what it would take to cross it for someone living on the other side.

Google maps routing is rubbish for walking and cycling in Oslo. There is a tunnel under that road...

where? can't see it

OsmAnd recommended a 15 minute walk that goes under the road.

That's a pretty peculiar example - the big box furniture store in your example is actually outside Oslo and you have farmland as the closest neighbor north and south of both locations.

Nobody is talking about banning cars from areas like that, just from the city center.

Some of Europe went whole hog on emulating US suburbs. Sadly Dublin is a fantastic, walkable city surrounded by seas of unwalkbale suburbia.

I’m jealous. I’ve lived in California oregon and Washington my whole life. You basically can’t walk to most nearby locations because of freeways, interstates, etc. In my current city there’s only two stores I can walk to because I’m walled in by major streets/freeways

To be clear, there is no way to pass those streets/freeways on foot or by bike? As in no pedestrian crossing?

That's shitty planning. I've never seen such a place in Europe.

There's a lot of amusing YouTube videos of tourists attempting to holiday there without a car, here's a good one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEAVSGYuhCY

This sort of thing exists in Europe too, try walking out of an airport sometime, you can in some countries, but e.g. in Malaga I had to run across a highway because there was literally no way to get out of there otherwise, there simply aren't any footpaths.

In Copenhagen the airport has bike racks - its a 20 minute cycle to the city center.

Sure, and similarly you can easily bike to the airport here in Amsterdam. But let's not jump from "in Europe" to the two cities widely recognized as having the best bicycling infrastructure on the continent. I've spotted somewhat of a trend here on HN of Europeans generalizing about the whole continent based on experiences in a relatively small part of Western Europe.

My comment was meant more in the spirit, "It doesn't have to be like that. There are better solutions".

I was talking about a french city, so it still happens. Depends.

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