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Comment by foxpurple | Hacker News Reader

You can kind of have it if you mean walkable to just the general store, a cafe and a few other things but you can never have everything because many kinds of stores can only exist with a certain population close enough.

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.

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Even with single-family housing, the density is high enough to support a supermarket and other stores that are visited at a rate of once per month within walking distance, easily.

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....)

I guess it depends on which suburb. Some suburbs in Sydney are fairly liveable. Especially where there is a mix of housing, or, as much as I hate them, large apartment complexes. You can get all the things you need and have a few restaurants, all within walking distance.

Other suburbs, especially those huge “communities” with lots of cookie cutter homes seem really isolated. You have to drive.

I just disagree. I live in the very environment you claim doesn't exist

Where is that? You may have a different idea of walkable than the other poster. As soon as you have tons of parking spaces, mandatory setbacks, etc. you’ve taken much of the room away from pedestrians forcing them to walk much longer distances (often in bad weather) to get to where they want to go. That’s why the two are at such odds.

Then don't do that. You only need tons of parking and mandatory setbacks if you've designed the area for lots of cars going too fast. If you just don't, then suddenly a lot more ends up being in walking distance, and you don't need as much parking because more people are walking or biking.

Well of course this is what I prefer. But the other poster was saying they didn’t see why cities can’t be designed for cars AND for pedestrians. My point is that the policies put in place in almost all American cities for cars (mandatory parking requirements in new buildings, lots of street parking or parking lots, mandatory setbacks from the street for buildings, highway entrances, etc.) work directly against making a city dense enough to be able to easily walk to enough things that you don’t end up resorting to cars.

I live in Portland city limits but not downtown. Where I live was built as a suburb but the city grew into it. Actually Portland has a lot of these downtowney areas and they're surrounded by blocks and blocks of single family homes and small apartments

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

Portland is a pretty unique place. 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.

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)

Close-in marin, so Sausalito, Marin city, Larkspur, Corte Madera, San Rafael, and the 'Sir Francis Drake corridor' (San Anselmo, Kentfield, etc) are very walkable. I don't really understand the consternation about bart, the bus service is reliable, and both the marin transit and golden gate transit are the gold standard in american public bus service IMO. Clean, WIFI, nice seats...

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.

People can only walk so far especially if the weather is bad, they are older, etc. The point is if I have to walk past multiple gas stations and a car service center with broken down cars and fumes then it’s not a nice place to walk. I have lived next to a car service center before and even though it was tiny it was a constant blight on the neighborhood.

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.

Well if businesses are clustered together for the convenience of drivers, it will also be especially easy to access for the people living close enough to walk. But the math may hold be that this cannot be so possible for everyone.

So do I! I’m kind of baffled reading this thread - folks are discussing my neighborhood as if it’s a theoretical impossibility.

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.

We must be twins. My lot is 0.14 acres. My house is a two story colonial plus finished basement. Easily > 2500sqft with room to spare.

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

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