Sun Belt Cities Are Dangerous Places to Walk | Hacker News Reader

Sun Belt Cities Are Dangerous Places to Walk

bloomberg.com

44 pointsmxfh68 comments

I don't live in a sun belt city, but rather a smallish town (60,000 pop) in the US. I live less than half a mile from the nearest grocer store, but it's too dangerous to walk. No sidewalks, no shoulders. I have to drive.

I live 0.1 mile away from my kids' school, but cannot walk over there to pick them up, I have to get in a queue of cars that leads almost to my house. It's ridiculous.

Just moved to a smaller city in FL to take a new job. Sadly while there's some walkability around where I live it slowly degrades into unwalkable where the office is. So I'll just continue to shell out several hundred a month to Uber commute

Curious if you'd be willing to share which city ... I'm in Orlando, FL, and outside of a few areas, this applies here too.

I'm in Lakeland a bit west of you

Have you worked out how long you'd have to be in that situation for leasing or buying a car to be cheaper than Uber? At several hundred a month for Uber, I'd not be surprised if you could do better with your own car if you are going to be there a couple of years.

Yeah long term I've considered it, but I dont have a license and funding behind the wheel driver training that works with the schedule of a working adult is the first hurdle.

Just as an anecdote, but as a Dutchman visiting the US on a few occasions I was pleasantly surprised to find that San Antonio's center was actually quite pleasant to walk around in. Get anywhere away from the center and just crossing the street became impossible again, though.

San Antonio is a bit unusual as it is both tourist oriented and had a very intentional reworking downtown when they diverted the river, iirc.

San Antonio's River Walk is cheating

Since when is urban planning cheating? :)

I don't mean just the river walk though, the leafy streets a bit farther around it are quite lovely.

In many places, it's not that difficult to get into local politics and start making a difference. And it really is easier to get things done than at a national level.

This group has a lot of good ideas for how to start improving your town: https://www.strongtowns.org/

I understand what you're saying, but using eminent domain to seize part of people's property to expand the size of roads and add sidewalks is no small (or popular, or cheap) task.

That's why a lot of places prefer the hands off approach: Legal mandate sidewalks for all new builds/major changes, but grandfather in all existing property and let the "problem solve itself" over tens of years.

It kinda works if an area is naturally undergoing development. As farmland gets more urbanized and developers build housing they're forced to upgrade the roads to add sidewalks.

Road right of ways in most places are way more than sufficient to provide adequate space for sidewalks, so eminent domain isn't really a big part of the equation.

It's really a question of political will to stop making everything all about cars all the time.

Nothing more American than taking a politically expedient position and then kicking the can down the road for future generations to deal with.

I wish, but the fact is the average citizen probably doesnt care about walkability or walkable infrastructure and would likely be hostile to any such project because "tax dollars".

Right now people are fighting like hell to get a municipal internet in place (with much of the infrastructure already existing) to break the Specturm monopoly, but most people are apathetic or apprehensive to any sort of public spending

A small group of determined people can make a surprising difference.

Also: sitting around doing nothing is a great way to ensure that nothing at all happens.

There's a certain demographic in the US that is largely apathetic toward most issues until there's a price tag associated with it, at which point they leap to their bedroom office chairs to post incessantly on facebook about it.

> In many places, it's not that difficult to get into local politics and start making a difference.

I've recently discovered this. You are are absolutely correct. I'm helping make my "small" City more walk and bike able.

Even in a larger city like Atlanta, I never had trouble getting access to my city council member. Their staffers were even more accessible. While I wasn't always able to get them to do what I want, they were always open to having a discussion as to why or why not something was possible. Once you start going up the government ladder, things quickly get much more difficult.

> I live 0.1 mile away from my kids' school, but cannot walk over there to pick them up, I have to get in a queue of cars that leads almost to my house

Can you elaborate? This is beyond ridiculous.

Pretty common , here is a reference to one school district in TX:

https://www.click2houston.com/news/parents-upset-about-new-m...

That sounds like a different issue. Parents who still drive but don't want to wait in line so they park in the surrounding neighborhood. Trying to find a loophole.

I'd like to hear why someone who lives a few blocks away can't walk from their house to school and pick up their child.

It's a really convoluted system which requires the kids to essentially be penned up and allowed to walk to their parents cars in a controlled way. They have a policy against walking since there are no sidewalks for most of the area around the school.

It's probably safer given the fact there are no sidewalks, but it still sucks.

I walked to school everyday in middle school and so did everyone in the neighborhood. There wasn’t even a bus that would come and get us. My parents still live next door to the same school and everyday lots of kids walk. Some have a bus option but refuse it.

Every morning I go by an elementary school and parents walk their kids. They even put a special cross walk with a button to make it easier.

Sounds like an issue with your school or school system.

I'm confused by this comment. How does your experience in a walkable neighborhood suggest that the school system in the parent commenter's unwalkable neighborhood is in any way at fault?

I live in a sun belt city. It's terrifying. People routinely run red lights and blast through turns even when pedestrians have the crosswalk with a green light. I am nearly hit at least a few times a month.

Phoenix resident and daily cyclist / pedestrian here -- can confirm the above holds in my city. The red-light-running / distracted-driving epidemic is completely out of control.

Also, the phenomenon of disappearing sidewalks mentioned above is frustratingly true here -- not a safe place to walk or bike without knowing your route 100% beforehand -- goes double for kids

Any idea why? Are the drivers in your city more aggressive and/or are driving laws more lax compared to other places?

In Phoenix anyway, I speculate that it's down mainly to :

1) Urban planning that does not much consider the pedestrian or cyclist whatsoever and therefore encourages unsafe driving practices;

2) Distracted driving being nearly universal.

Not op, but in my experience the root cause is too many vehicles, which leads to horrible rush hour traffic. So know traffic management is overloaded, and so people push into a lane/run a red/etc. I don't know how much time it saves, or if it just gives people a feeling that they're getting there quicker. Meanwhile police are also overloaded, so don't issue traffic fines for minor infractions, which normalizes it. So then drivers get more brazen and pedestrians are likely to think twice about walking, and it's a bit of a self-fulfilling cycle at that point.

Sunbelt areas became attractive as the air conditioner became prevalent after WW2, and these places transformed from sleepy backwaters to growth engines. Miami metro had like 75k people 100 years ago!

A big part of the design ideal is to stay in the air conditioning, and urban areas were designed around the car and AC. The engineering priority is throughput.

There’s tons of evidence that wide roads induce people to drive fast. If you want walkability then you need drivers to be scared they might scratch their side mirrors.

Tom Vanderbilt’s excellent book “Traffic” goes into depth about this.

I visited Scottsdale, and at first I was wondering why so few people were walking despite the weather being so nice. Then I tried to walk somewhere and it felt more like Frogger than walking.

Pedestrian infrastructure in the United States, on the whole, is awful. Yes, there are initiatives and improvements happening in urban cores, but actually walking a few miles to get from A to B is downright dangerous in many locales. Sidewalks arbitrarily vanish or degrade into rubble, unsignalled and inaccessible crossings in front of malls and retail outlets are rife, and in more places than I can count I’ve ended up having to walk in the road.

This is understandable, given that many modern cities around the globe have grown explosively around the automobile - Kuala Lumpur, for instance, is spectacular in its pedestrian hostility - crossing town feels like a fever dream after playing frogger and pitfall all night - pits in the sidewalk into sewers or jagged rebar, bridges to nowhere, unshielded electrical cables dangling at face height, and even the occasional fence to hop over.

We need to drastically rethink urban design around walkability - more and more folks in urban cores are choosing to eschew cars in favour of public transit and pedestrianism, as a result of congestion and consciousness about environmental impact.

Simply put, cities which prioritise these values will attract the urban professionals that drive growth. Those that do not will not. It’s not just a nice thing to have, it’s a necessity in sustainable development.

Not sure why you were downvoted, but i totally agree with you. On the positive side, I'm seeing an increased awareness of how bad automobile-centric development is, which is a good first step.

Not all cities want or need to optimize for urban professionals. The people moving to places like Florida aren't there for hip job opportunites; they go to cash out the 401k and play golf for 10 hours a day. To those people better pedistrian accessibility just means more things to dodge while driving the Grand Marquis to Cracker Barrel.

> It also suggests that our Sun Belt cities, built around the automobile, aren’t designed for pedestrians at all. The trend of fatalities could worsen as more people take to walking and cycling where they previously had not.

This goes for the classic morality play that "cars bad, walking good" which, like, I get and agree with. One of the reasons I moved to Seattle and live in the city is specifically because I wanted to be somewhere more pedestrian and bike friendly.

However, I also grew up in the South and the reality of the climate there is that it will never be very pedestrian friendly. When I lived in Orlando, I tried really hard to avoid using my car. I moved to one of the more pedestrian friendly neighborhoods (College Park). But, when it's 95+°F six months out of the year, it sucks to walk. You will show up covered in sweat. With the humidity levels, you will sweat just standing still in the shade.

Florida was barely developed at all until air conditioning and the automobile were invented. Seriously, look at the population graph [0]. While the rest of the US thinks of those technologies as social ills, in Florida they are critical enablers of livability. If it wasn't for those, the state would still be an uninhabited sweltering swamp of mosquitos and malaria. (You can argue that maybe it should be, but most of that population explosion came from the Northeast and Midwest, so who's really to blame here?)

This is another example of a pattern I see really frequently in the US where the North throws shade on the South. Yanks have decided that (a) you're bad if you drive a car (b) you're gross if you show up somewhere covered in sweat, and (c) you're unsophisticated if show up in flip-flops and shorts.

Then they make people in the South feel bad for not upholding those values, despite the fact that the climate is massively different there. My impression is that places like India and Thailand have cultural norms around clothing and perspiration that let you actually function outdoors in hot climates. But here in the US, you're obliged to pretend like you're in Los Angeles or Boston even when it's thirty degrees hotter where you live.

[0]: http://worldpopulationreview.com/states/florida-population/#...

I suppose you're right. I've lived in GA, SC, and now Florida and have decided to give up attempting any sort of walking lifestyle outside of leisure or small trips. Dripping in sweat after 1 mile of walking doesnt seem very practical

What does that have to do with people dying in those cities? Are pedestrians falling over in a haze? And isn’t the west coast the land of sandals and hoodies?

No, but the article attributes the higher number of deaths in part to the design of sunny cities being primarily for automobiles. And while many (including other chains on thos thread) seem to suggest building more infrastructure for civilians, the comment above me makes a point about the practicality of that solution (albeit with a bit of a tanget included)

Also my point about the customs (which I've removed as it was more related to the aforementioned tangent) was more about cultural response to sweat and BO than the clothing part.

Somehow there’s no discussion of the article here, nothing about traffic fatalities per metric or from the pedestrian point of view. It’s people in their respective cities who are dying, being killed by their metaphorical neighbors.

When you make lots of room for driving fast and parking you’re pushing buildings farther and farther apart and imposing the costs on pedestrians. Postwar American cities are unwalkable by design. Hot places should have narrow streets and three or four story buildings so there’s always shade somewhere on the street (as was the norm nearly everywhere before cars).

> Hot places should have narrow streets and three or four story buildings so there’s always shade somewhere on the street

If you do that in Florida, your city will now flood every afternoon in the summer monsoon season.

Florida has zoning laws that require a certain percentage of non-paved land so that the ground is able to drain rainwater fast enough. Again, this is another example of tacitly assuming the way Northern cities do it is right and that Southern cities doing it differently are because they're stupid and not because, just maybe, they understand their particular climate.

> Postwar American cities are unwalkable by design.

Yes. Another way to say it is that they are drivable by design. And in an area where driving is significantly more comfortable than walking, there is a good argument that that indeed optimizes for human needs better than transplanting Philadelphia circa 1834 to Central Florida and then wondering why the buildings keep sinking, flash floods keep washing everyone away, and the downtown corridor is dead because there's no parking and still no one wants to walk there because it's too hot even for a dozen blocks.

Nope, the Netherlands is one of the densest countries in the world and it’s below sea level. Sprawl is not necessary.

> it’s below sea level.

Sea level has nothing to do with it. Orlando is 82' above sea level.

Average July temperature in Amsterdam is 54-68°F. In Orlando, it is 76-92°F. It feels good to be outside in the Netherlands. It definitely does not feel good to be outside in Florida most of the year, unless you're in a swimsuit in the shade.

As far as water goes, as I said in my comment, what matters is rain. Peak precipitation in Amsterdam is December, with about 2.4 inches accumulating in the month. Peak in Orlando is July, with 6.0 inches accumulating.

But the important number of urban planning is peak rainfall. Florida has a monsoon season which means intense but short-lived rain. You can get flash-flood levels of rain and then have it sunny two hours later. The highest single-day rainfall in Orlando was 8.19 inches. In most places, a couple of inches of rain in a single day is a 100-year storm. In Florida, that's a Tuesday.

There are plenty of walkable cities that manage monsoon rains in Japan and Korean. It's completely possible for people to get around without having to move five thousand pounds of metal with them.

There's a paywall, so im missing some context, but seeing what I see every day from cyclists, which can best be surmised as "I'm a car when it's convenient, I'm a person when it's convenient," I'm hesitant to chalk cyclist incidents up to something more than hubris.

A cyclist is neither a car or a pedestrian. They are a cyclist. There are more than 2 kinds of things.

Maybe because roads are designed without cyclists in mind, so sometimes you’re forced to be a car, and sometimes you’re forced to be a pedestrian.

I bike. Not every day, but enough. I obey lights, I signal, I don’t do anything overtly stupid. At the end of the day, I weigh maybe 170 and I’m moving next to objects that weigh maybe one to two tons moving anywhere from five to 45 miles per hour. In any bad interaction, I’m the one who’s probably ending up dead. So I’m really sick and tired of this goddamn bickering back and forth. Everyone should follow laws, yes, but roads should be designed to be not deadly for cyclists, and drivers (which includes me) should understand that they’re moving a very heavy object very quickly, and the onus is on them to do it safely. If that’s not possible, maybe fewer people should be allowed to drive.

Right - when's the last time you saw a cyclist t-bone a minivan and kill a family?

Yep. I stay on the road and act like a "vehicle" whenever I feel like it's reasonably prudent, but many streets / blocks in phoenix are straight up suicide for a solo cyclist -- no bike lane, motorists not looking, fast and heavy traffic -- so I end up on the sidewalk probably 20% of the time. [Biking with a group, it's not so bad because you're much more likely to get seen / not run off road or cut off]

'Course, in Phoenix, there are verrrry few pedestrians and so colliding with them is not very likely provided one goes at a sane speed and uses bell / voice to alert folk you're behind them, but still, it'd be nice to not be more or less compelled to encroach on pedestrian space while cycling.

Cyclists don't belong on usual car roads, not the usual roads that aren't wide enough so car can pass the bike safely without crossing the center line. The problem is, to all other motorized traffic, bikes are not part of the traffic but an obstacle that has to be avoided, usually in very limited space with a lot of things happening all around you. Many cyclists unfortunately don't ride with that in mind (changing lanes without looking back, 2 cyclists riding next to each other etc.).

It doesn't matter if you are a pedestrian walking 5kmh or biker going 30kmh, when cars drive 50/60 kmh. Not even going into topic of roads outside of cities, those fools riding in 90kmh traffic when there is 0 extra space on the side of the roads are basically asking to be killed by somebody not momentarily paying enough attention to the road. Even if 99.9% of the drivers do drive carefully, that 1 out of thousands drivers can become a real event pretty quickly on popular roads. Emergencies and morgues have visitors because of these.

Now how to achieve a good situation for everybody in Dutch/Danish style is a great question, especially in congested centers of the towns that are already designed and there is often no extra room for dedicated bike lanes. I don't claim I know the proper answer that would be OK with majority of the population of average western country.

Even a narrow yellow bike lane on the side of the road would be great but I don't see them as often as I should, meaning there are not enough continuous bike paths that take you to most part of the cities. At least not around the place I live.

I am all for fewer people driving. I also agree that US cycling infra needs to be drastically improved and that would save a lot of lives and frustration. I hadn't considered the poor state of infra.

Angry motorists kinda do the same thing. They complain that cyclists don't follow the rules of a car, like stopping at stop signs, as if it is a major injustice. But then complain when cyclists take full width of the lane or are on the road, because they are not cars.

> like stopping at stop signs

This doesn't seem like a good example to me because it seems totally right and reasonable to actually stop at stop signs. Being predictable in traffic is vital no matter what type of vehicle you operate.

Pedestrians and runners don't stop at stop signs and it doesn't seem like a problem, so it seems clear to me that "everyone is required to stop at stop signs all the time" is not the only workable legal solution here.

In Oregon we just passed a law that lets cyclists treat stop signs as yield signs. I ride a bike as my main form of transportation and additional visibility and low speed of bikes makes this a no-brainer--it's quite obvious whether cars or pedestrians are approaching as you approach a stop sign.

I think it is more of a yield and slow down situation rather than a complete stop like a car. The broader point is that a car running a stop sign and a bike running a stop sign are NOT equal in severity. The former adds tons more danger to the system than the latter.

Don't worry, both cars and pedestrians seem to think we don't belong on the road or the sidewalk.

Anyway the great thing is that I seem to make some drivers angry just by being on a bike.

All cyclists are people, mate.

That last sentence is a doozy. I live in Chicago, I take public transit, I see a few cyclists do insanely stupid shit almost every day, but even seeing that I know the layout of the city is not remotely conducive to cycling. And Chicago is pretty bike-friendly compared to many other cities in the US! Even with major streets getting bike lanes I've seen too many cyclists get hit through no fault of their own, because of poorly thought out infrastructure.

Even in Portland, a city which would be considered quite bike-friendly, a lot of the bike infrastructure seems insane. Signs indicate that bicycles are expected to drive in the middle of traffic Lanes half the time, as if that is somehow going to work out for everyone.

Given the choice between a narrow shoulder and the middle of a traffic lane, cycling in the middle of the lane is much safer, as long as drivers don’t intentionally try to hit them.

My dream would be to have dedicated bike lanes not shared with automobile traffic.

Concerning the rule thing - my observation is that if the rules are stupid people won't follow them. Riding a bike in even in Germany prepares you pretty well for driving a car in some of the more chaotic countries, since the mindset is pretty similar.

> I'm hesitant to chalk cyclist incidents up to something more than hubris.

Luckily we don't have to rely on gut-checks for things like this, there is a ton of related study. Notwithstanding the occasional bone-headed move by cyclists, the single largest factor seems to be poor infrastructure.

There's a well painted cycle lane for me going to work, but I've gotten in an accident on it while completely obeying the laws (nearly twice in the same spot). Drivers need to cross a blind intersection with limited signage, so even with the painted lane its dangerous at certain spots. Also a lane that goes to a freeway on-ramp crosses over the bike lane as well, and that's never stopped to amaze me in its short-sightedness.

Yeah. Painted lanes slapped on the edge of a road are often worse infrastructure than just a few "cyclists may use full lane" signs and "sharrow" indicators center-lane, for exactly the reasons you point out.

Ok ok, hubris wasn't the right word.

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