The thing is it just doesn’t seem like the average person is willing to give up single family houses to gain walkability. For me, I would never go back.
A small city still has a walkable downtown core with apartments around which there is a small area of single family homes within walking distance to the downtown area.
A suburb is just tracts of single family homes and nothing else for miles on end. No real 'business area', certainly no walkable one.
We could just talk a normal suburb, rezone some homes to business districts and take cars off that street. Voila. Now you have a mini downtown near a bunch of single family homes. Oh yeah, and you have a nice business district that's cheaper than the real downtown that is a good launching place for local businesses. win win win.
Now do that everywhere, and then connect the little townie areas via rapid transit and you have something lovely.
What I love about living in the city is literally _everything_ I need is within walking distance. I have not used a car or any form of public transport in months and have felt no need to, I can buy anything within walking distance and all offices for any job I would take in this state are within walking distance. You just can’t have that with houses because each house takes up a significant space which you have to walk past to get anywhere.
Source: the town I grew up in: https://www.google.com/maps/dir/51.2413047,6.9602975/51.2481...
Population is 36,000 or so. I've added the walking distance from the outskirts to the very center, which is 2.3km. You'll note that there are supermarkets distributed throughout, usually within a few hundred meters.
If you need anything special, it takes 30 minutes by public transport (https://www.google.com/maps/dir/51.2413047,6.9602975/K%C3%B6... ) to a shopping district in the next larger town, which has any type or brand of retail that exists in this country (Streetview: https://www.google.com/maps/@51.2254878,6.7800095,3a,75y,64....)
Other suburbs, especially those huge “communities” with lots of cookie cutter homes seem really isolated. You have to drive.
But if you go farther out into newer developments, they just abandoned this lovely system and made awful cookie cutter burbs.
Before this I lived in San Rafael and larkspur in Marin county which also have nice downtowney areas surrounded by single family homes. Old Marin county had just this pattern of walkable enough neighborhoods with tiny downtowns. I don't see why this sort of thing isn't possible. When I lived there I walked everywhere
I didn’t spent a ton of time there and admittedly it was January so it was quite frigid, but the distances can still feel quite long between things outside of downtown. Portland made a few mistakes when they embraced car culture including getting rid of their street cars like many American cities. They also annexed a lot of less walkable areas around the city. There is no subway and the light rail seems well run but it doesn’t exactly cover the whole city. My sense is that most people who want to walk will end up biking or taking some form of transit in many neighborhoods because of the distances between things. In the winter it was quite hard to find lively streets and public squares to be quite honest. I suspect it’s because it’s easier to just drive when it’s cold, things are a bit far, etc.
Marin is lovely but most of it is extremely spread out. There are a few towns like you mentioned that one could conceivably get by without a car but it’s not easy. Looking at San Rafael, Google Maps shows 4th street is a walking area (denoted in beige) and a very small area a few blocks south near the Safeway around 1st and 2nd streets but it isn’t a very big area. Usually a giant chain supermarket is a pretty clear sign that things were designed for cars and not for pedestrians who would typically be better served by neighborhood markets and small shops near their house to grab some essentials. Zooming in near the walkable areas of San Rafael, Google Maps instantly highlights many car oriented businesses like at 2nd street and D street where we see a Chevron gas station, an Arco gas station, and an O’Reilly Auto Parts store all on one corner. I don’t know about you but even if it’s technically walkable that’s not what I want to walk through every day when I go outside especially if I need to walk past it to get to the train to commute to work, etc. A major highway cuts through the east side of the city which also limits expansion of pleasant walking areas and litters the area with on-ramps and other car-centric design.
Marin county famously blocked BART from expanding north in order to keep out the “riff-raff”. These sorts of decisions had major consequences and while you can find a few blocks here and there that are walkable, the county as a whole is largely long drives through tree covered asphalt in order to get between areas.
If you’re happy with a few blocks of downtown then admittedly some of the towns probably meet your needs but it’s not exactly designed for most people to live a car-free live. Even the Bank of America ATM there proudly shows on Google that it’s a drive-through ATM which I’ve never seen once in Europe (or San Francisco for that matter)
My wife and I frequently took public buses into San Francisco for date nights, and would come back late (last bus arrives past midnight, IIRC).
> Marin county famously blocked BART from expanding north in order to keep out the “riff-raff”.
Really good idea. Marin is a lovely place, and BART is famously terrible. Until the other cities in the bay area manage to enforce some semblance of law, I don't blame Marin for wanting nothing to do with them.
> Zooming in near the walkable areas of San Rafael, Google Maps instantly highlights many car oriented businesses like at 2nd street and D street where we see a Chevron gas station, an Arco gas station, and an O’Reilly Auto Parts store all on one corner.
Living in a walkable area does not imply removing every reminder of a car LOL.
> They famously drew a circle around the city and said development can’t go outside of that area which forced a certain density and allowed transit to be planned well in advance.
This is not why Portland developed this way. There are many places within the metro area that have not. Portland developed this way because it started as many small towns that merged, similar to Marin. The difference between PDX and Marin is that PDX is today much denser, but the basic layout is the same.
I'll also note that you're getting really bogged down with the fact Marin has no public rapid train transit, as if thats necessary for walkability. Marin is walkable because there are so many downtowns, if you live nearby, you just go to your downtown, and the downtowns it does have are spectacular. Downtown San Anselmo, Fairfax, etc are IMO the definition of an American downtown. They are so charming it's painful.
Not to mention almost all the grocery stores in San Rafael are east of the highway while the Google-labeled walkable areas are west of the highway. So in practice people probably don’t walk to the grocery store on a regular basis unless they go to the Safeway. You may have a different view but Safeway is a terrible grocery store by Bay Area standards so it’d be a real shame for that to be your only realistic option without resorting to bus rides.
Bus transit is less reliable than metro for a number of reasons, most notably getting stuck in traffic. It’s fine if it works for your particular usage pattern but a bus that runs once an hour and doesn’t have an exact arrival time isn’t the most convenient. I’d much rather have a metro that comes every couple minutes like almost every major city in Europe and Asia.
You seem to hate BART but I’m not really sure why and why you believe the cities outside the North Bay are full of lawbreakers. San Mateo has a higher household income and SF is tied with Marin. Marin is just full of more NIMBYs. It’s not like their shit doesn’t smell just because they live in a less populated county.
As for why I focus on public transit, it’s because you can only walk so far before you need another mode of transit. If you don’t find a convenient one, then most likely you’ll take a car. If people take cars a lot, then the city will be designed to support those cars which makes it harder to walk. Then fewer people can reasonably walk to all their needs so even more people buy cars creating induced demand as the highways and roads constantly need to be widened over the decades.
Maybe you’re happy with a tiny little downtown like those in most of the Marin cities but for most people from a major city they would be bored with what they could easily explore on foot in one of those towns in probably a few weeks. Without a way to connect to other cities, you’re basically just trapped in a tiny little area without resorting to once an hour bus service and cars.
A “small” SFH lot is 0.15 acres. That’s over 6,500 square feet! You can comfortably build a >2,000 square foot house with a front and back yard, off-street parking, garden, trees, etc in that space. Simultaneously, it will only require about 50 ft of sidewalk length.
My wife and I share one car, which we primarily use to visit friends in the suburbs. I walk to the grocery, dining, bars, coffee shops, parks, greenways.
Our house is nearly 100 years old. We would have loved to buy something newer, but American neighborhoods haven’t been designed in this sensible way for a long time.
Also a hundred years old. They don't build them like this anymore.
One car as well. For further out things or things I need to get to fast, I bike. The car is used to visit grandma and grandpa about 15 miles away, to go shopping for big items, and that's it
Suburbs don't have to be car-dependent; most of Tokyo's suburbs are transit-oriented (some of them were actually planned by railroad companies) and are generally walkable.
The Not Just Bikes channel semi-recently did a video on "streetcar suburbs":
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb
It's how things used to be built pre-WW2.
The wild thing is that it was direct public policy that lead to the death of extensive public transit there.
Groceries are about 2 miles away. Which would be bikable if the infrastructure was there. In my experience it would be easier to reach bikability than walkability. Most suburbs are already somewhat bikable aside from the infrastructure.
There the lot sizes aren’t big so there’s density, but at the same time no high rises so it still feels pleasant. And every few blocks is zoned commercial
As other comments have mentioned, you can have both. In addition to that, the reason that people choose single family-houses is not necessarily entirely by preference: almost all of the land zoned for housing in the U.S is zoned for single family-homes. Add onto that some arcane rules about minimum parking amounts, minimum setbacks from the street, and the fully absurd standard to which suburban streets are created (too wide, essentially mini-highways), and you get the mess that exists right now.
By addressing these problems, you'll go a long way to improve walkability.
> As other comments have mentioned, you can have both.
Absolutely. As an example, much of London offers both.
This happens with cities too, but the tax base is greater to spread the cost over and there is a higher likelihood of more qualified people working, rather than on individual condo boards.
Maybe follow the news a little more. Several MSM outlets over the last month have done in-depth stories about the fundamental problems with the condo model of ownership and maintainance. It has nothing inherently to do with construction methods; the evidence is that what happened in FL is a risk in an awful lot of condos all over the US.