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Comment by thethethethe | Hacker News Reader

Edit: modified the list of cities based on comments

Is your neighborhood truly walkable though? Do you walk to the grocery store? What about the hospital? dentist? Physical therapist? Pet store? Restaurants? Is there transit nearby?

Afaik, there are only a few cities in the US (all costal) which are truly walkable in the traditional sense, SF, NYC, Boston, DC and maybe Philadelphia and only limited parts of the cities are actually walkable. These are the only cities with limited single family zoning and didn't boldoze their city centers to build parking lots and freeways in the 50s like the rest of NA cities (see https://www.vox.com/2014/12/29/7460557/urban-freeway-slider-...)

Many cities and small towns in the US and Canada may have walkable elements in limited areas, but they are still very car dependent in most cases

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Boston is /very/ walkable, the whole city can be walked end to end in a few hours and Somerville is one of the densest neighborhoods in the U.S.

I'll also say D.C. (and to some extent Northern Virginia and select parts of Maryland) makes car ownership optional, the transit system does a good job of covering a lot of neighborhoods.

I've been to a few college towns that also, by necessity, are dense and are walkable or at least bikeable oasis in otherwise rural areas.

Thanks for the info, I added an edit to my comment

BTW, Boston did pretty much bulldoze the center of the city (the West End) for a freeway but spent some $10 billion (much of it federal money) to rectify the problem with the Big Dig. It was walkable before the freeway was dismantled but less so in Boston proper. (As with other US cities, it was also less safe in general a few decades ago.)

The thing with college towns is that you tend to have the campus and, if it's in a rural area, generally a few streets of associated town. Technically walkable but, once you're not a student any longer, the campus is less interesting/useful and there probably isn't a whole lot in the ten or so blocks of the town that you can walk to. You can doubtless survive but the options are probably limited without a car (and most of your non-student friends in the area probably have one).

Just providing a non-coastal example - Pittsburgh is pretty decent for walkability and transit. It is a dense, small (in area) city. Trips by bus are often comparable to the same trip by car. I would say that most neighborhoods in Pittsburgh are walkable, but getting between neighborhoods is best done by bus, due to the big hills.

Some figures:

- 10 percent of Pittsburgh residents commute by walking [0]. 17 percent commute by public transit [1].

- "According to the U.S. Census Bureau, public transportation commuters in Pittsburgh spend an average of 32 minutes traveling to work, the 11th-fastest transit commute time of the 136 cities in our analysis. That is also just nine minutes slower that the average commute time for drivers, the fifth-smallest difference." [2]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_most_... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_high_... [2]: https://smartasset.com/mortgage/best-cities-for-public-trans...

edit: formatting

The core of Boston is more walkable than SF is. Especially if by "walkable," you really mean walkable and with easy access to expansive public transit to easily get to all the other things you won't have in a small town center or otherwise within a 30 minute or so walk.

To the sibling comment, walkable means different things to different people.

Walk to a hospital or a grocery store that isn't a small market/convenience store? You're already talking a city at that point. And, in the hospital case, probably not all the medical professionals you might conceivably want to see are likely to be within a one mile or so radius.

A ton of places are walkable in the sense that you can buy a house/condo and walk to a restaurant or two and pick up a few groceries. But, as you say, very few cities in the US are walkable in the sense that you really don't need a car without a lot of compromises/depending on others/using personal transportation services a lot.

Added an edit to the comment based on your info, thanks

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