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Comment by dont__panic | Hacker News Reader

I've seen so much anti-car, pro-walkability, pro-transit, pro-bikeability sentiment online recently.

I really hope this is proof of the younger generations -- Millenials, Zoomers, and younger folks even -- waking up to the idea that the USA in particular has become a toxic environment thanks to cars. WFH was a big wakeup call, I think -- once you step away from the commute for a year or two, trying to sit in traffic again seems insane. I guess it's a successful "unboiling of the frog," where we realized that car infratructure has been turned up for the last century to unbearable levels.

I hate cars. I don't want to use them on a daily basis. I'm cheap, and I don't want to own one, or maintain one. I try to do everything I can by biking or walking, or transit if those aren't feasible. It is nearly impossible in 95% of the USA.

Selfishly, I really want the USA to bring city centers back to livable levels by banning most cars and redesigning them for humans. Otherwise I'm absolutely going to end up moving to Europe eventually -- likely the Netherlands -- because driving a car is just so unpleasant for me. I'd rather not learn a whole new language and leave my family and friends so far behind, but especially since covid I've come to realize that driving makes me miserable, and I need other ways to get from my home into the world.

View on HN

One of the hardest parts about buying a home, apart from all the stuff that isnt fun about buying a home, is finding somewhere that is walkable to... anything. I've rented my whole life and spent my entire adult life in cities. The idea of having to get in the car to get milk or something from the corner store, or have to drive to ANY restaurant, or not have some type of walking/running path within a few blocks of my house is foreign.

Part of this is from living in a cities and in mixed zoning areas rather than neighborhoods but it just seems to odd that to get ANYWHERE one needs to drive. Even living in a city, but just a bit further away from a major area, you can run into this issue.

Wife and I have looked at the Netherlands as well for similar reasons. Jobs/visas are the main concern. Family is the other big one.

Any success filtering for walkability in the US when buying a home? As far as I can tell, "walkability" scores are borderline useless -- the small town I currently live in has extremely low "walkability," despite being able to walk or bike to everything I need, whereas the large city I just left has extremely high "walkability" -- despite the fact that walking around town was not pleasant due to high volumes of car traffic. Manually checking or restricting the search is not really a scalable option.

What metric of walkability are you finding that is not reflective of reality? I've had at least some luck (in Canada) with https://www.walkscore.com/

I mean, you just can't have a walkability score for an entire large city. There's a lot of variation. You have to look at specific neighborhoods.

This is especially true in north America where cities all went through a huge conglomeration effort in the second half of the 20th century and absorbed their suburbs.

Of course I'm referring to the address I lived at in those places. I'm mostly complaining that Zillow's built-in "walkability" scoring based on addresses is abysmally inaccurate for the places I've lived in.

https://www.walkscore.com/ has aligned with my experiences pretty well.

Manhattan has a lot of car traffic. Short of the urban core of Philly, DC, Chicago, SF, or my favorite parts of Brooklyn (which also have a lot of car traffic), nothing seems nearly as walkable in the US. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see congestion pricing and fewer cars on the streets in Manhattan.

The best walkable suburbs I've visited, Montclair and Red Bank in NJ and Ardmore, PA seem pretty sad, small, and boring in comparison. Fine for a visit, but I wouldn't wan to spend three days in a row there.

Sometimes, people are looking for small and boring, like some parents who are raising kids and are no longer partying every weekend. (There are also pros and cons to raising children in cities; growing up in NYC I got a free transit pass in middle school and was able to take myself to places like the Met and the Guggenheim pretty effortlessly, and you certainly can't get amenities like those everywhere.)

There's nothing wrong with small and boring, the major issue is that generally the overwhelming majority of US housing stock and zoning laws are geared towards picket-fence suburbia, to the detriment of people who don't necessarily want that. Plenty of people certainly want that, but it's probably not anywhere near like 90% of people in the US.

Nothing wrong with small and boring, but even boring suburbs should have a grocery store within walking distance of most houses, which they mostly don't in the US.

Really? What do you call walking distance? Most suburbs I've spent time in will have a grocery store in driving distance (~5 miles away) but that isnt really walking distance if you are trying to carry any significant amount of groceries or trying to make the trip in less than 2 hours.

The majority of the world raises their children in densely populated and compact cities. It’s not about partying, it’s about social exposure.

I grew up in a dense city outside the US, and even as a not-particularly-social child, I still had plenty of friends I played with and hung out with, and also had tons of interaction with adults. Meanwhile I’ve seen my cousins grow up in suburbs over the past 10 years, and they interact with maybe 3 non-family members outside of school, because everything is like a 15 minute walk away through winding suburb streets. That kind of isolation is not healthy at all.

walkscore.com has heatmaps, theyre very accurate for MN

Filtering by neighborhood and knowing the neighborhoods. Not that helpful if you are moving from somewhere else but pretty easy if you live in the area already.

Town around 50000 is a good bet then. If you can work remotely, find a college town and live outside the center, about a mile. You can bike to anything, take the bus, or just walk.

I did this. I have 100 restaurants, too many bars to count, music and theatre (three!) and festivals and arts within trivial distances. No car needed.

Even smaller towns are viable, too. My New England town has around 5,000 people in it. Aside from the early closing times for restaurants and breweries, (8 or 9!?!?!?!), I have access to exactly the same amenities I had in cities before. And lots more outdoor-oriented things as well. Plus... no traffic.

My wife and I are seriously considering our options in smaller towns in New England. Many of them predate the automobile and have the sorts of qualities that are being talked about in this thread.

I highly recommend. Hanover/Lebanon, Burlington, and Montpelier are decent places to start if you want access to arts, music, theatre, etc. If you're willing to compromise on some of those things in favor of outdoor activities, there are a LOT of great small towns in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine that let you walk and bike to the basics.

If you enjoy biking to establishments, it's worth it to actively think about dirt roads and rail trails in your search -- dirt roads cut car speeds to safe levels, and rail trails let you avoid cars almost entirely. Both make biking miles better.

I've spent quite a bit of time looking at Vermont, specifically Burlington and Montpelier. I have a very good friend from who was born in Burlington and who moved back there to raise his kids. Those two cities are at the top of our list, but I'd also like to explore/research more of New Hampshire, Maine, and western Massachusetts. We spent some time in Maine, on the coast during the early fall, and really enjoyed it.

Having grown up in western MA I'd highly recommend it. There are lots of small towns with back roads for biking. There's also loads of state forest land and great hiking, as the Appalachian Trail passes through the region. The ski mountains are smaller than those to the north, but they're fine for kids and the bigger ones are a short drive away. It's a bit less rugged and outdoorsy than ME, NH or VT but the schools are the best out of the lot if that's a concern for you.

It's also almost evenly centered between NYC and Boston if you want to do weekend city adventures. You'll probably still need a car but if you live in the center of town you won't use it except for longer trips.

> but the schools are the best out of the lot if that's a concern for you.

That is how I became aware of western Mass, actually. FWIW education is a major driver for us since we have 3 young kids. My thinking waffles a bit because there's a list of criteria in my head, like being walkable, bikeable, having a downtown area, in addition to the more major concerns we have as a family around education, local economy, and affordability. I appreciate the reply!

Restaurants close at 8/9 in high-price metro areas like the SF Bay also (suburbs).

Some. Not all. The difference is when ALL restaurants are closed vs some/many/most.

Where? A town of 50,000 with 100 restaurants, many bars, and multiple theaters and festivals would be a highly desirable place to live for many, many people.

What area were you referring to?

Not the original commenter, but as they mentioned "college town" I would offer up Evanston, IL (home of Northwestern University) as a good example. ~75k population according to Wikipedia, so a little bigger than the target, but lots to do within walking/biking range and you can take the L into Chicago if that's not enough.

Iowa City, Iowa

Any college town, because students don’t have cars and necessarily have to takes buses or bike or walk everywhere. Eg Berkeley, Ithaca, Cambridge and more

> Town around 50000 is a good bet then.

Maybe. Two examples I've lived in or around are Chambersburg, Pennsylvania and Hattiesburg, Mississippi, with populations around 50k. Chambersburg is probably little bit more walkable because it's a little more dense, but neither are (in my opinion) comfortable for walking or biking outside of specific areas, and those specific areas don't have everything you need.

Not sure if this is the place you're talking about, but this sounds a lot like Portland, Maine. Portland has one of the highest restaurant densities due to being a tourist destination. It has a semi-dense downtown with a lot of very nice walkable areas. Look up "Portland Maine Old Port" to get a sense of what it's like downtown.

Unfortunately, there are relatively few places to live inside the dense part of town. The city is overly-zealous about maintaining historic districts and you'd better believe people get all up in arms about "changing the character of the neighborhood" every time a new development is proposed, even in non-historic and totally dilapidated areas. I've seen literally hundreds of millions of dollars worth of new housing and commercial projects be cancelled or indefinitely postponed due to this attitude just in the last 10 years.

While the city has a lot of potential, it's population has stagnated since the 1970s and the surrounding area has become a massive suburban sprawl. Many of the buildings downtown have been replaced with parking lots. Traffic is generally terrible, and the bus system has low coverage and poor frequencies.

Around 100 years ago, Portland was a thriving metropolis with electric trolleys going to every imaginable destination. All of those trolleys are gone now and their tracks have either been removed or awkwardly paved over.

Portland was once a vibrant inter-city train hub with hourly connections to the rest of Maine. The two primary stations, Union Station, and Grand Trunk Terminal, have been torn down. The current train hub, "Portland Transportation Center" is much further from the city center to make room for a large parking lot. It is about a 40 minute walk from what is considered the downtown area. 20 minutes by bus if your schedule happens to line up.

It's pretty disappointing how much better it once was. I'm doubtful that it will ever be as good as it was back then, but still hopeful. There are plans to move the train station back to where Union Station was. New routes to Lewiston and Rockland have been studied (although would apparently cost hundreds of millions to repair the tracks). The state has recently subsidized certain interstate train and bus routes to make them very affordable. And generally I think a lot of problems could be immediately solved by straightening out bus routes and increasing frequency, as well as obviously removing a lot of building-size restrictions and parking minimums.

> One of the hardest parts about buying a home, apart from all the stuff that isnt fun about buying a home, is finding somewhere that is walkable to... anything.

That's because if you want an individual home, you're giving up the customer density required to make those amenities viable. In a world with the internet, at-home delivery, and yes, cars, it's simply not economically viable to create a grocery store that only caters to 100ish families.

That’s just wrong. The village I come from in germany has 8000 inhabitants, pretty much only single/double houses, practically no flats and perfectly walkable. Multiple bakeries and grocery stores, never further than 15 minutes walk.

It’s just that these small groceries cannot outcompete supermarkets once people are in the habit of going everywhere by car.

Parent wrote:

> it's simply not economically viable

You replied:

> t’s just that these small groceries cannot outcompete supermarkets

So you are confirming what he said.

No, I’m not. The stores are economically viable unless you have a car centric culture. Car centric culture makes walkable mid-density neighborhoods unviable.

Cars are no longer the only way to bring in goods from outside walking distance. Online orders can also supplant the need for cars in suburbs, while producing a significantly more options than a mom&pop grocery store.

And with Covid restrictions and work-from-home, deliveries and online ordering were cemented as normal behavior.

The bakery in my parents town is famous enough for their bread that some people drive 50kms to buy that bread. No delivery service will come close to that, no way. Though I generally agree with that: the need for individual cars will become less and less as more options become available.

So the bakery relies at least partially on car culture to survive?

And there's always services who will pick up bread from such locations and deliver it. With or without the bakery's backing.

Online orders can also supplant the need for cars

Uh, somebody has to deliver those orders. And in the US, that's by car (van). You might make single-car households more viable with pervasive online ordering/delivery, but you don't necessarily change the core character of the neighborhood that way.

Oh, but he isn't wrong. It's quite likely that your 8000 inhabitants (which are a lot more than 100 families) live close enough together, just because of lack of giant lawns, so that your typical store owner is getting more than 100 customers.

So yes, it's not that you can't have single families, and it's not really about people having cars or not, it's the density, and therefore, it's the lawns and the streets that are too wide, making the number of places that you can go to in a 15 minute walk far smaller

> It’s just that these small groceries cannot outcompete supermarkets once people are in the habit of going everywhere by car.

This is true to a limited extent. If small grocers and bakeries were allowed to setup in mixed use areas they would do a whole lot better. However sticking them an average of 3 miles from their customers in a horrible strip mall kills them.

I would happily pay a premium for having a grocer just down the street instead of having to go 4+ miles to a supermarket. Being able to get a gallon of milk and some onions in 10-15 minutes from a place just down the street will always beat driving to, parking at, and walking around a 10 acre supermarket on a 50 acre parking lot. Just the stress of dodging all the parking lot speedsters is more than enough to keep me far from that place.

If small grocers and bakeries were allowed to setup in mixed use areas

That's the crux of the problem in the US. Vast swaths of land are dedicated to single-family homes (and ONLY single-family homes). You literally couldn't build a small grocery next to these homes if you wanted. And the hurdles to getting a zoning change as so high that developers just build strip malls on the outskirts of town/subdivision.

We're beginning to see some progress in the DC suburbs, with more mixed-use "village centers" being built in the 'burbs. My main complaint with these is the development is done in one pass by a giant corporate developer, leaving the area feeling very sterile (compared to an old urban downtown in a small city, which might not be as clean, but has a more organic mix of businesses). IMO, of course.

Yeah I hate this. I get that zoning exists for a reason but some regulation would lead to better mixed use areas so its not houses for 15 blocks then businesses for 5 blocks and repeat.

OP said _home_, not single family house.

Not OP, but...

Apartments suck, a lot, in the US.

  * Noise; aren't built to sufficient privacy levels.
  * Smell; laundry, cooking, or whatever...
  * not designed to scrub, filter, and direct exhaust.
  * Patios == smoke or grill; even though those are banned by policy.
  * Somehow cost more than renting elsewhere
  * Rent seeking causes negative patterns
  * Car parking hell

As much as the anti-car crowd wants to be anti-car, they still exist, and many of us still have at least one per adult. Even if my job and day to day stuff fit in that city, family and friends currently don't: the car isn't going away.

Yes these problems also exist when you rent in single family home (intended, often not fulfilled) suburbia, but they're less due to the lower density.

Well said, and matches my experience nicely.

Doesn't have to be an apartment. Just has to be a house without a 40ft setback on a giant lot. I live on the right side of a duplex and there's plenty of density to support a grocery store in walking distance.

It seems bad appartments are leading entire generations into thinking all appartments have to be terrible, last-resort options. I'm renting a recently renovated appartment , and while it's not perfect, the sound isolation is so good, that my roommate can play games with voice chat and I can sleep in the next room. Only a ~5cm wall separates our rooms.

I think a future with comfortable, large, isolated apartments is possible, and even such "fancy" apartments are going to be cheaper than full houses, if there are enough of them.

Apartment need not suck.

    * Noise is an easily solvable problem, with insulation.
    * Proper ducts and exhausts can handle smells/smoke.
    * high rents means there is a demand but not enough supply. 
    * car parking can be in basement, easily accessible.

Benefits of a high quality apartment.

   * easy to secure/gate. 
   * grocery, pharmacy,...  are < 5 min walk. 
   * a large pool, 2 hectare park inside the society. 
   * multiple badminton, tennis, basketball courts inside the society. 
   * above all allow my 7 year old to go for lot of activities on his own or with friends.

Your supposed easily solved problems run up against cost or local building codes. Apartments tend to suck because builders put the bare minimum amount of work/cost necessary to get a building up to code. They have shit insulation because it's cheap but up to code. They have bad ducting and poor ventilation because it's cheap but up to code. The building codes are generated more from danger avoidance and other liability more than occupant comfort or efficiency.

Suburban parts of cities often aren't zoned for high density housing because the NIMBYs don't want them near their detached homes. When everyone sees a house as an investment there's no incentive for them to increase housing in their city.

They spec cheap insulation and whatnot because after every party that they're legally required to do business (a dozen item long list of licensed trades and government entities) with gets their pound of flesh that's all there's money left for.

So the poor builder is being gutted by regulations and paying licensed labor? If not for those obscene costs they would use better more expensive materials?

How can you possibly believe such a thing? That is just an outright foolish assertion. The labor cost to build something to code is the same regardless of the quality of materials. Builders skimp on materials to pad their margins. Even if they used cheaper unlicensed labor there's no impetus to use more expensive materials.

If Brad the electrician wants to benefit from artificial barriers to entry that keep his job out of reach of Jose that raises the cost floor of a building. Now apply the same effect for every trade. Now add in the cost of dealing with obstinate government. Suddenly there's no money left to spruce up the building beyond the bare minimum and still come out the other side with an end result within the scope of "what the market will bear".

I was thinking house/condo but I've lived in apartments for most of my adult life and would have purchased several of them if I had the cash at the time.

They were not noise, in fact in one I only ever heard my neighbors one time in three years of living there, they were typically pretty spacious, rent didnt fluctuate that greatly, I didnt need/have a car most of the time but there was lots of street parking, and I don't have a great sense of smell but oders were never an issue.

Nice apartments exist. You just pay about the same as you would for them as you would on a mortgage.

In addition to the sibling comment, if the OP is looking for an apartment or condo, they will find exactly what they are looking for - housing with plenty of amenities within walking/biking distance. I live next to a 40k population city who has exactly that.

If they're not finding it, it's probably because they're looking for a low density housing option.

This just isn't at all true unless you define "house" as exclusively large lot single family homes with big back and front yards. Most dense and walkable places in the world are not full of high rises, they're a mix of high density houses and low to medium density apartments.

This mix is really rare in North America, at least and especially north of Mexico, but it does exist.

> a mix of high density houses and low to medium density apartments

Neither of which sounds very nice to me. I don't have a huge yard, but I do have enough yard to raise a few trees and firepit. If I lost that, I might as well be in an apartment.

And that still wouldn't provide enough density to support a variety of restaurants and grocery stores (not to mention things like employment for non-techies).

I grew up at 7k people per square mile. Almost all detached houses. My family’s was one of the smallest. We had a few trees and a fire pit. I walked to elementary, middle, and high school.

I think the key isn't so much making the single-family homes more dense, but allowing more mixed development mixed into the larger neighborhoods.

Take my neighborhood (south Reston, VA). The main road is about 2.5 miles long. There is a strip mall at both ends, leaving homes in the midde just outside easy walking distance (from my house, by footpath, it's nearly 2 miles to one end and a bit over 1.25 to the other). There is a major intersection about halfway down that main road. Instead of allowing a small shopping area, it's more houses. Hard to change now, but if it had been zoned mixed-use/light commercial at build time, there could be a coffee shop and small grocer there. And bring between 1/3 and 1/2 of the available customers in the area within walking distance of at least some of their regular errands.

Additional benefit of this would be reducing the size of the malls at each end, mostly by removing parking spaces, freeing that space for townhouse, apartments, or more shops.

Take my office... it's 1.25 miles away, and I walk. But, the complex is all offices. If there were a grocer there or on the way, I could eliminate my 1x weekly carload, instead grabbing things as-needed on my walk home.

Same office. I have coworkers who live closer than me, but refuse to try walking because the sidewalks and street crossings from their direction are less user-friendly. Crossing on/off ramps without signals. Crossing a 4 lane highway with 50mph traffic. Etc. Some simple crosswalk modifications could make the office complex walkable to some of these coworkers. But, traffic planners don't even appear to think of these things when building roads - it's almost 100% car-focused.

Curious what you rate as "easy walking distance"? 15 min (one way), 30 min? Though I'd think it rather depends on how much you have to carry...

My office is close to 1.25 miles, takes about 30 minutes if I don't want to break a sweat. If I'm late, I ride a bike. That's probably the limit for me for regular/frequent trips. I can carry a mid-sized backpack that distance without problem, even with a laptop and a jug of milk or other moderately heavy items inside.

With the number of signaled intersections, I can't drive it any faster than the bike. But definitely faster than walking most of the time (though walking is a guaranteed time - driving that distance has taken 20+ minutes before because of traffic jams).

Basically, if it takes the same or less time than driving, I try to walk or cycle. Sometimes I walk the ~2 miles to CVS or Starbucks, but that's as much recreation as transport - I can drive it in 5 min. Nice to have the option, but if they were closer to 1 mile, I'd always walk.

That would be about what I'd expect (except I don't use miles!). But I'm wondering if that's typical for most Americans of your or older generations. I always figured the LA story gag of driving 5 metres to your neighbour's house was only a mild exaggeration of reality...

I always figured the LA story gag of driving 5 metres to your neighbour's house was only a mild exaggeration of reality...

It's not far from reality. But mostly because so much of the US lacks sidewalks, so driving is the safest way to get A-to-B.

When getting anywhere useful requires navigating places like this [1], using the car for everything quickly becomes the default.

1 - https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/ijhV2hgcKaq...

Edit - yes, that photo has sidewalks, but there are so many intersections and road crossing, it's not a pleasant place to walk. Many places don't have sidewalks at all, or have some, but they're disconnected from each other block-to-block. Or you have to walk across a massive parking lot to get to the shops. Much of suburban US really is quite dystopian in this regard.

If this link works [2], it's the intersection to enter th nearest shopping center to my house. Note the lack of sidewalk on at least 2 corners. Crosswalk only on one side (if you live on the close left corner, there's no way to safely walk across the street in either direction). Lack of bike lans on the crossing street (the street has some, but they inexplicably end JUST before the shopping center). And even if you do manage to walk/ride into the shops, you have to dodge cars trying to park before you get to the actual shops. I wish this was unique, but it's extremely common in the suburbs.

2 - https://www.google.com/maps/@38.93839,-77.3287099,3a,75y,293...

Wow that really is taking pedestrian-unfriendliness to the next level. I admit I struggle to understand the mindset of people who'd consider that a desirable place to live. I admit I chose the suburb I live in now precisely because it was so walker and cyclist friendly (many of the houses actually face on to a dedicated walking/cycling path. I tried to find a good photo but this was the best I could do: http://cdn-assets.alltrails.com/static-map/production/at-map.... We're ~4km (2.5mi?) from the city centre "downtown", but most shops/ facilities we need regularly are within 1km, mostly via that pathway)

There's a lot of grades of density between "standard American yard big enough to keep a sheep dog entertained" and "can't have even a fire pit" and if it's a house, even most higher density houses still manage to have enough room for a yard with a fire pit and maybe some trees.

But here's the thing: all those big spaced out houses with big yards leave less room for trees and parks that make everyone happy. Suburban spaces also tend to be bereft of trees overall because no one can stand to have their lawn 2m shorter so the street can have a boulevard.

The grocery store doesn't need to be near everyone's home. It just needs to be near your home. Buy a home in a location that suits your needs.

The problem is that the overwhelming majority of land in the US is zoned in such a way where this is not legal, and as a result the relatively few locations that do accommodate this lifestyle have high premiums (both on a per unit and per sq ft basis)

This is mostly a problem with postwar urbanism. Older regions of the country will have neighborhoods that retain some local business activity.

The fact that it is hard if not impossible to develop this style of neighborhood is still a problem.

Every passing year is another one in which old buildings are redeveloped and the US population grows, increasing market pressure.

Sometimes that old building is a tire shop and the new building is a 5 story apartment with ground floor commercial space, though.

I’m never all redevlopment is bad, but if part of the old parcels are the nice walkable shops and nearby residences, and we don’t really allow new ones, then it’s going to be a predictable net loss. A lot of these locations are grandfathered in and would not be allowed under their current zoning regulations.

—-

There’s a separate issue with new modern mixed use in the US where retail tends to have low occupancy. Partially this is because there continues to be a massive glut of retail space in the US, and partly because the new spaces tend to be too large to be profitable for anything other than chain stores, and there are only so many chain stores to go around.

Take a street like melrose ave. It's filled with pretty well leased, single story commercial real estate abutting low rise apartments and homes. Walkable? Sure, if you manage to snag one of the limited available leases in a 15 mins walk. Replace those commercial parcels on melrose with 5 over 1s, and there is no net loss here. The same commercial square footage is available, sometimes more if the the building extends further into the lot versus if the old building had a small surface parking lot in the rear, sometimes a lot more if more than 1 story is set to be commercial space. Not to mention the apartment stock swells up, supporting a larger customer base for these businesses when these apartments are inevitably leased out before long.

NIMBYs in this city bemoaned old Amoeba records loosing its "historic" low rise commercial building. But Amoeba just moved into one of these mixed used developments a few blocks away closer to the metro station, got more square footage out of the deal, and sold the old property for a lot of money. The city changes and it isn't a bad thing, in fact its typically a good thing that it changes as this keeps rents closer to the actual wages seen.

There are plenty of homes near grocery stores in the suburbs. Not every home, but plenty if that's important to you. Location, location, location.

Given the premium, there’s not enough. Let’s create more locations.

There is no premium in any city I've ever lived in for that. $/sq ft doesn't change if you're a block from the grocery store, it might actually be cheaper. That said, you don't need more, you just need one.

We moved to a smaller city(Tacoma) inside of a big city metro(Seattle) for about half of the cost of a SFH in Seattle proper and it’s great. Can walk and bike to multiple grocery stores, beach, parks, etc. If I get the big city itch it’s easy enough to scratch it.

Tacoma's nice. I lived there for a few years, and wouldn't mind moving back to that area. That said, where I lived (an apartment on the top of the knob west of the docks), I couldn't realistically bike or walk to anything of value other than the bus stop.

Yeah I can’t really speak outside of the north end in the past couple years or so, but proctor, stadium, old town, Ruston and even around 6th all have a nice mix of local and chain stuff now.

Hot take - walkability is super overrated. I don't want to go to the same 5 resturaunts I can walk to. I like variety. I work from home and don't commute, but when I do go out I want to explore.

Another hot take - Being in the middle of a city doesn't make one more social. Actually it can be more lonely ironically. You are surrounded by strangers.

In my current suburb I am good friend with all of my neighbors. We share vegetables from our gardens, have block parties, let children play together, it's extremely social.

E-bike then. I can get anywhere in a 2 mile radius in Seattle faster with my e-bike than with my car, and I always get a prime parking spot right outside where I’m going.

I live in Cambridge, MA and there are over 80 restaurants and bars within my 15 minute walkshed.

We also have block parties, lol.

im sorry to tell you but this take is simply ignoring the fact the amount of restuaurants you can walk to increases with the square of the density.

I understand there are a few places in America you can live where there are a lot more restaurants densely packed.

These also are the highest cost of living places in the world to live. It's not practical to think everyone could live like that. They also are miserable with homeless people, drug addicts, and crime. It also relies on a huge network of people commuting to those jobs to support that area.

You can't have 30 restaurants within a few square miles with all the people to support that living there in homes. You'd need a combination of super dense housing and people commuting. It's really inefficient.

> 30 restaurants within a few square miles

that would be a low number for a middling town in the pre-car era.

also car-oriented planning is a primary driver of high cost of living in the first place, due to its abysmal space-efficiency.

> They also are miserable with homeless people, drug addicts, and crime.

What aspect of urban development caused these people to be homeless, drug-addicted, or criminal? Did the frequency of bus service get them addicted to drugs? Did the taller building height take their job?

We make this unconscious logical leap that there's some justification for human misery to be concentrated in urban cores. I live in a dense urban core right now, and I see human misery when I go outside. I think "boy, it'd be nice to move to an area where this miserable person isn't". But... it'd be ridiculous to be happy by pretending misery doesn't exist because it's not in eyeshot. If that were the case, we should just ship miserable people to the suburbs where I don't have to see them (that would be cheaper and more convenient for me!). The wealth density of an urban neighborhood is huge, there's easily enough money to relocate miserable people into even rich suburbs.

The better thing to do is to make choices that cause there to be fewer miserable people. I'm optimistic that the current debate around the urban-suburban-rural divide and the role of cars will make us recognize that there's huge mutual interest in the idea that _public spaces should be nice_, and that seeing the misery that results from our policy choices is a feature and not a bug.

I would say bikeability is the best. If you live in any quiter regions of most mid- to large sized cities in western europe and scandinavia you will have access to a huge variety of possibilites, restaurants, bars etc. and can access everything relaviely quick, while living in a quiet area. Biking is also fun imo.

I bike thousands of miles a year. I love it. I also don't want to bike to grocery stores and restaurants. Sweaty in the summer, and we get -30F in the winter and our city tends to be very windy with wind chills down to -60F.

A walkable city means groceries stores at a walkable distance, which means while walking home from wherever you were, you just buy a couple of things missing for tonight's diner. You're at home, no more sugar for a cake? just a 5 min round trip.

Ironically even in my suburb we have 3 grocery stores about a mile away each. But I only like going to the store once a week. Daily would be a waste of time.

At those distances I would never go buy groceries by foot either.

I'd love to be able to bike to restaurants, but it would mean convincing the rest of the family to do the same! Any trip I can take on my own I do by bike though, providing there's somewhere safe to lock it up.

It's great until its cold or rainy. I don't really want to bike in the rain to a restaurant for dinner. Or even if it rained recently due to the water kicking up from the tires. I can walk with an umbrella just fine.

> walkability is super overrated. I don't want to go to the same 5 resturaunts I can walk to. I like variety. I work from home and don't commute, but when I do go out I want to explore.

5? Depends where you live of course, I have 100+ within 20 min walk, easily!

> Being in the middle of a city doesn't make one more social. Actually it can be more lonely ironically. You are surrounded by strangers.

Depends. If you go to the same coffee shop every day, you certainly start meeting people.. or sit on a coffee shop for a while on the street, on a park..

I mean it seems obvious to me that if you have 100+ restaurants within a 20 min walk, all with near minimum wage workers that is a lot of less wealthy people having to commute in to give you that experience. That's great for you I guess.

> the same 5 resturaunts

In my case you'd be off by at least an order of magnitude. You like variety, eh? I mean.. I can get any kind of cuisine at all that can be found in a big city... Not sure what suburbia has to offer on top of that. I mean, you do you. Just saying your argument could maybe use an accuracy adjustment.

I do more than just restaurants you know. We like to visit state parks, bike trails and get out into nature.

That's fine. It's fine to own a car and use it for those things. What is absurd is using a 4000lb hunk of steel to go 2 miles down the road to get a gallon of milk, which is how the bulk of car centric america operates. The vast majority of the energy spent is just to move the vehicle.

The op was suggesting removing this infrastructure altogether so we could walk everywhere. I'm saying that is unrealistic because I like to go places I can't just walk to.

Whether I walk to the grocery store or not isn't super relevant.

I agree with everything you've said wholeheartedly. Personally I could never live in the city again - been there done that. It seems to be very popular here on HN though.

Probably going off on a tangent here, but I grew up surrounded by hundreds of acres of farmland and woods to get lost in the minute I walked out the door, which I still escape to as much as I can, whether it's family owned rural property or state parks/mountains. Working in tech early in my career made that escape harder to get to, but I wouldn't trade rural life for any amount of restaurants, social gatherings, or whatever else within walking distance.

Different strokes.

My wife and I stayed in a suburb for 3 months while we were caretaking and working remotely.

I couldn’t step out my door and go out on a run, the nearest coffee shop was a 15 minute drive away, and no restaurants were open past 9 and often closed on weird days.

It felt like the only way to be comfortable in the suburb was to own more things and build your own castle.

We returned back to Chicago and immediately bought to secure our preferred urban lifestyle for the long term.

Yup. We've considered moving to the small IL town my wife is from. It's even fairly lively for a small town (they have like 7 restaurants instead of 3). But we visit for a month or so once or twice a year and by the end of the month we are dying to get out.

Even thought in Chicago MOST of the time we go to the same handful of restaurants, its the option to have a near countless amount that we COULD go to that keeps us from feeling like were going to the same few places.

So what you want is your regular 4 or 5 cafes/ restaurants/pubs you can walk to, and use PT or a car on the rarer occasion you wanna try something different. It doesn't mean walkability is overrated. For things like minor grocery shops or the post office or even hairdressers/barbers variety is surely not that important anyway.

I think with the popular conception/definition of walkability and the assigned importance of that conception is a little over-rated.

I personally feel like it overvalues commercial activity (restaurants, retail, grocery, entertainment). Obviously, it depends on how often you want to partake in said commercial activities as far as how you would value it.

I would love if the conception of walkability could also take into account:

'How far can I walk without having to worry about cars/crossing streets/waiting for lights?'

'How safe/comfortable is the walk? Will I be walking by people who will harass me/be high on drugs/try to sell me something?'

'How easy is it to string together a run without having to stop?'

'How busy are the sidewalks? Will I have to be dodging people on their phones all the time?'

'Is it easy to take a dog for a walk? Or are there limited green spaces?'

'Are there social/interest groups nearby that meet up?'

I find some of these types of factors much more important than closeness to X number of commercial venues. So a busy downtown street may get a high walkability score (i.e. Walk Score) because of the restuarants/retail/theaters, but it might be atrocious to my conception of walkability.

As an extreme example: Times Square in NYC is considered a "Walker's Paradise" with a walkability score of 100 on Walk Score. But it seems like the worst possible place to walk, and most NYC locals I know avoid that area like the plague.

Link: https://www.walkscore.com/score/Times-Square-New-York

I agree with this. Having been in times square, it was nothing but being constantly bumped, having to say "No" to people hawking their CD to support their burgeoning music career, and keeping your wallet close by to avoid being pickpocketed.

The strip in Las Vegas is not far behind. While people didn't tend to bump me, there was a never endings series of people trying to get me to buy their prostitutes for the night.

I guess it just depends on how much you like/dislike driving. I hate driving. I hate parking. I hate traffic.

I'd happily take a less nice walk than being forced to drive.

> I don't want to go to the same 5 resturaunts I can walk to.

I have 56 eateries (restaurants, cafés and bistros) in a 500m radius, and also 36 bakeries, butchers and supermarkets all of which offer warm, ready-to-eat meals. Am I a weird outlier?

> Hot take - walkability is super overrated. I don't want to go to the same 5 resturaunts I can walk to.

Not only a walkable city will provide you with some 50 restaurants at 10-15 minutes by feet, but what is more important is having groceries and other household shops at 5 minutes.

> In my current suburb I am good friend with all of my neighbors. We share vegetables from our gardens, have block parties, let children play together, it's extremely social.

All of this often happens in walkable cities as well.

A decent bodega within ~5 of walking distance if such a game changer.

Walking and driving are not mutually exclusive. You can drive and go to restaurants far away even though if you have 5 restaurants in walking distance.

Source: Last 20 years I lived in cities with population from 5M to 15M and I always had at least 10 restaurants at walking distance and I used public transport and cars to go to places way beyond the walking distance.

I don't think being in a city makes one more social. That being said, I have a close friend group who I don't live near. I meet plenty of people but having moved around a lot I don't have any close friends in my current city right now. I'm friendly with my neighbors but not friends with them. That's been true of just about everywhere I've lived, rural or urban.

I don't think I'd be more likely to make friends with my neighbors if I moved to the burbs. This seems to be driven more by personality and need than location, right?

Check out Portugal's golden visa program especially if you can WFH. Either way, the real estate program provides instant residency and only mandates 7 days of residency per year before citizenship (14 in the last year). After five years, you'll have a passport issued by a Schengen country that will allow you to work anywhere in the Schengen area.

I've been checking Ponta Delgada out on Zillow for a while now.

So as a two car millennial American family that makes regular trips into our city center, we never use our cars going into the city. It's just stressful, streets are narrow, parking's expensive and car-jacking and vandalism are more likely. Just makes more sense to take the bus, cheaper too when you count the cost of parking. I also like having places to walk to from my house.

That said, I like having my own house with my own land. That house and land is freedom to live how I want (within reason) without worrying if the neighbors will complain about my watching The Mandalorian at 1am. A car is freedom to go wherever I want whenever I want, and I use said freedoms on a regular basis. It's also carrying capacity, instead of making multiple inefficient trips to a local market multiple times a week I can get all my family's groceries in one trip once a week. Ditto for outdoor supplies, small furniture, Christmas Trees, etc. Never mind that WFH doesn't work for a lot of jobs, and not just low-paying ones. Many good jobs require a car to get to them.

So I think there's a good middle ground here. Make city centers less car friendly and denser to discourage car use, improve walking infrastructure in the suburbs (more sidewalks/bike trails that actually go places).

I'm all for a wide range of options, but cars are not a universal evil. The frog is not being boiled, this is what a lot of us see as a better life. Granted there are plenty of people doing it wrong, but that's always been true.

Well said. I do something similar -- I live someplace with a bit more breathing room that's bike friendly and walk friendly for some basic things, and I never take my car into any city center.

> Make city centers less car friendly and denser to discourage car use, improve walking infrastructure in the suburbs (more sidewalks/bike trails).

To put it a bit more concretely: Remove street parking in cities. Expand sidewalks. Build more public transit and bike infrastructure. Create light rail with parking lots outside of cities so you can get in without a car. Let people use cars as before in rural middle-of-nowhere america, and mostly the same in the suburbs (lower speed limits and build more sidewalks and connecting paths, so you can walk between neighborhoods).

I love this concept made by dance a rental e-bike startup from berlin. They offer their bikes in all major cities in europe now.

https://twitter.com/ericw/status/1554445703891533824

Most who discuss better urban planning and focusing on less car-only design wouldn't consider having a SFH with land (now this depends) an issue even in a city or neighborhood adjacent to a city. A quarter acre of grass? Probably not except at great cost. A deep lot with a garage? Yea that's pretty practical. Ideally you'd have a mix of SFH, condos, apartments for rent, granny flats, and other housing options so you can accommodate people in different stages of their lives and at different price points.

Then of course as most would live in this mode, those who want large lots or lots of land would move further away.

> It's also carrying capacity, instead of making multiple inefficient trips to a local market multiple times a week I can get all my family's groceries in one trip once a week. Ditto for outdoor supplies, small furniture, Christmas Trees, etc

Is it really inefficient if it's a 10 minute walk away, or on your way home from your job? I think you'd really have to sit down on that and look at the whole context.

For oddball trips like a Christmas tree you have options including delivery, but what most people would suggest is that sure you still have a car for those trips (maybe one per family instead of two) but for most activities you don't have to drive. We get stuck on edge case scenarios so much that we over-optimize for them. It's like EVs. Many are like "but what if I go on a road trip", well how often do you go on a road trip? Once/year? Weekly? If it's once/year, well, figure it out.

-edit-

For example, most I'd argue are envisioning something more akin to German Village in Columbus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Village

Here you can see cars of course, but you can also see that many homes do in fact have deep lots which can be customized with grass, pavers, whatever you'd like. Of course not all homes have those (depends on socioeconomic capabilities) but you are also 5 minutes from a gigantic park with lots of green space.

In German Village you have cars, many homes have off-street parking, lots of pedestrian traffic, lots of bike traffic, tons of locally owned businesses and restaurants, and community events. I think people want more of this and wonder why we can't build like this anymore. Personally I think it's because developers, the government, and automakers are all heavily incentivized against it (not necessarily out of malice). Unsurprisingly, locations that are walkable like this have the highest property values despite often having crappy schools. If they had really good k-12 schools the property values would be immense.

I’m having a hard time imagining traveling into a area where car-jacking is a credible threat - and yet feeling safe on public transit.

Not in the US, but I grew up in large city in a developing nation. Someone fooling with your car wasn't common, but it wouldn't be a huge surprise either. I regularly took public transit: it was cheap, plentiful, and well used. Obviously you wouldn't do anything silly like stuff a giant money-almost-falling-out wallet in your back pocket, but otherwise I felt perfectly safe.

"Carjacking" is a violent crime involving threatening/assaulting car's owner, I suspect you are thinking of car theft judging by your phrasing.

We shouldn’t spend a dime updating suburbs unless it is to transform them into small towns with an actual main street. The design of the average suburb is impossibly inefficient, and the tax base rarely supports the cost of maintaining infrastructure.

I'd take it further and argue city centers should not be for residential use to begin. Cities can be built like a huge huge shopping mall, you park outside and do your work, enjoy your shopping etc, you don't have to live there.

No, this would be disastrous for cities. Downtown businesses depend heavily on foot traffic, and you’re going to get a lot more of that if there are people living nearby.

That’s what SF did, and now it’s a shell of what it used to be.

I think you're describing street-car suburbs. There are, I think, 3 of them in North America! Bad news... you're not even close to the first person to think like this, and the houses in those places are absurdly priced:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0

> It's also carrying capacity, instead of making multiple inefficient trips to a local market multiple times a week I can get all my family's groceries in one trip once a week.

This is pretty weird to me.

Whenever I've had exposure to a household like that, what actually happens is they buy way too much food to keep track of it, and either you eat too much or it mostly goes bad in the fridge. I find this oddly stressful, too, the feeling of wasting food or needing to use it before it goes bad.

Whereas I like to plan a day at a time and be close enough to markets that I could potentially visit every day and it's part of the daily routine.

Its much cheaper to load up the car at costco every couple of weeks, than go down to the corner store every day.

I feed two kids. If I did my shopping at Costco, I can tell you the food would go bad before I had a chance to use it. I find the idea of Costco pretty stressful.

I'm not necessarily talking about just corner stores either. I have several full on supermarkets in walking distance.

I find your comment weird. Make 1 trip to get all of the stuff you need for an entire family in one trip per week, or make 1 trip a day to get stuff for just that day, waiting in line to checkout 5-7 times, taking up valuable time you could spend doing other things.

I think suburban and car-oriented grocery stores give people a skewed impression of how time-consuming it is to check out at a grocery store. If everyone is loading up their cart, the lines are going to be long because everyone has to unload it at checkout. By contrast, if most people are there for just a few things, you speed through the line if there even is one.

Bonus if it has a self-scanner like this one to further speed things up, though unfortunately we don’t have any like that near me: https://youtu.be/kYHTzqHIngk

Pretty much the only time my wife and I use our car is for groceries. We plan out the week, buy only the perishables that we need for the planned meals and get in and out with ~5 bag of groceries in an hour, hour and a half with a commute.

Life is very short. If living in a walkable city is a major goal of yours, just move to one now rather than waiting and hoping your not-walkable city will transform itself.

First of all, it probably won’t. But more importantly, even if it does, 20% or more of your remaining healthy lifespan will elapse while it’s happening.

Don’t wait. Carpe deambulatio.

>>Life is very short. If living in a walkable city is a major goal of yours, just move to one now rather than waiting and hoping your not-walkable city will transform itself.

I agree, and not really sure why there are so many posts on this topic on HN - there are plenty of places to move and live if you want to be someplace where you can walk to or bike to.

There are also plenty of places where you can move to, buy a bit of land with a SFH and enjoy that lifestyle if that is what you prefer.

Why do some people have such a strong need to tell other people how they should live? or expect them to change to suit someone else's idea of what is 'better'.

Immigration is difficult, expensive, and isolates you from your family and friends. I don't think it's surprising that people born in the USA are frustrated that they must immigrate to life the lifestyle they want.

You might say that the people who want to drive cars everywhere are telling the walkability folks how to live. I just want to live in a walkable and bikeable place where I'm safe from aggressive car drivers within a few hours of friends and family. That place sadly does not exist. Would it be so wild to make a few neighborhoods in the US a bit more human-centric and a bit less car-centric? It doesn't have to change everything. Just a small number of cities and towns.

There really aren’t “plenty” - slots to live in places like this come up rarely and are fiercely competitive. If you’re not making FAANG money you have no real chance of owning one. And the reason it’s this way is suburban preferences have so dominated government for so long that it is either a historical oddity or an extreme swimming-upstream exception when a walkable neighborhood exists.

My old boss packed up his family and moved from the Midwest US to London after he joined a new company that had offices there. Seems like a lot of folks from the states are moving to Europe.

This works for some people, but others like myself have too many close ties locally to pack up and move. (As much as I'd like to if things were different.)

And broadly speaking, while that may be good for the individual I don't think it's good for society. We need some people fighting for walkable cities where they are, else we'll never get any more of them. And the highway widenings continue unabated...

Move or ask local candidates what they're willing to do to address the issue.

Usually it takes something bad happening.

I also don't think a lot of the changes people want will be coming to US cities as quickly as they hope. I've worked in the architecture/urban planning world and despite the people doing that work knowing what's best for a city, it's the engineers, politicians, and people with money that end up making the decisions unless there is some very vocal asks. There's also a ton of red tape that stands in the way, especially in CA, of anything being built in a timely, cost-efficient manner.

One can hope though. Small stabs at progress are being made.

Absolutely. It seems strange to lock yourself into a metal box for 2 hours every day as you move back and forth between the same two destinations 220 times per year, not getting anywhere in the process. I also hope this has been a wake up call for most people.

Furthermore, driving is a lot more expensive than people realize, somewhere on the order of nearly 15% of people's expenses! or more! it's not just gas, but maintenance, parking, insurance, registration, smog, and that doesn't even count all the externalized costs.

I've lived in highly walkable, pro-transit areas. It does have benefits, don't get me wrong. The flip side of the coin is that those areas usually have high population density. That comes with a lot of its own cons - noise pollution, air pollution, annoying neighbors you can hear and smell through your walls, etc. To avoid these cons, a lot of Americans want their own house on their own property and doing that means moving to a lower population density area which means less walkability, less transit, more cars.

Noise and air pollution are in part caused by cars. Meanwhile in the suburb, you have lawn mowers and leaf blowers, which I absolutely hate with a passion.

I don't know about annoying neighbors and smells. That seems to be a design and engineering issue.

> I don't know about annoying neighbors and smells.

If you live in a lower income area, get used to your condo/townhouse occasionally smelling like marijuana and/or tobacco whenever the neighbors decide to hotbox. Also get used to arguments and loud music late at night on weekends.

> That seems to be a design and engineering issue.

I'm sure you could build hermetically and acoustically sealed condos that keep out all unwanted noises and smells, but those sound like "rich people" condos that are not very economical.

Sounds like issues that an HOA (if you're into that) or the police/311 ought to address in a city. I assume that's why these services exist -- to resolve conflicts between people who live in dense environments where there is no option but to resolve the conflict.

If those issues go unresolved, that's a dereliction of city government and apartment administration duty.

If I have a kid who is learning music, your plan screws over any opportunity they have to practice at home. I've lived in newly built apartments and even those are not sound proof.

Not to mention public transit is dirty and unsafe in any major city in the US because there is way too much tolerance for disorderly and disruptive people.

Sounds like Minimum Code (building) isn't good enough.

The cost of decent insulation is a low percentage of overall cost. Also don't know if low income family can afford a nice/safe house in suburb, multiple cars etc.

> Noise and air pollution are in part caused by cars

Having lived in a Berlin Altbau flat, in a dense central neighbourhood, I can say that's not the biggest problem. At least not when at home.

Crappy neighbours are. For both noise and smells.

Techno blasting behind the wall. Arguing families and shrieking children, through the wide open windows. Passionate cigarette and weed smokers (plenty of them in Berlin). Smoke from cooking wafting through the Hof.

This is even a bigger problem if you are unlucky to have to live in a commie block (pretty much anywhere in Central Europe). Even more neighbours, even denser.

Air pollution: Caused by what? Probably cars.

Noise pollution: Caused by what? Probably cars. (Sure, some sirens here and there, but rural and suburban living doesn't make you immune to the sounds of train crossings, highways, jake brakes, motorcycles, etc).

Annoying neighbors, smell/hearing through walls:

1. Easily mitigated through smart building design and practices, enforced by building code.

2. You can have completely detached single family homes and still build walkable transit-oriented suburbs just by sticking to some simple development practices:

- Banning subdevelopments that disconnect form the city street grid, requiring residential neighborhoods to fit into a holistic city plan rather than farm parcels being sold where the city greenlights residential development projects without an ounce of thought to how it integrates with the town/city.

- Prohibiting neighborhood designs that increase walking distance, like winding roads and cul-de-sacs.

- Building traffic-separated, safe, pleasant cycling and walking infrastructure that offer a workable alternative to driving

- Building roads with traffic calming measures in mind. For example, unnecessarily wide suburban neighborhood streets encourage speeding.

- Properly funding transit service and removing social stigma against transit usage ("I won't take the bus that's for poor people" - we literally need government ad campaigns to help change minds on the issue just like those used to promote seatbelts.

- Prohibiting parking lots against streets, like in big box store developments. Parking should be required to exist in the back of the lot wherever possible.

- Removing mandatory parking minimums. Believe it or not, real estate developers don't naturally want to build parking lots that can't make a return on investment. They're often required to by the city to make them in order to...you guessed it...help ease traffic!

- Prohibiting excessive dead space/green space/setbacks in developments.

Overall, I don't agree that there are downsides to walkable areas that have to exist.

I've seen that stores against the road thing in a Food Truck cooking competition TV show. Did a good job of tricking some contestants for a bit until they realized the scale of the area was still large parking lot sized and the street was just the no consumer doors (or very infrequently used 'side' doors) face of strip malls with parking lots.

Density can't be faked by flipping the lot into the middle of the block. It can be made real at a city level by design and engineered accommodation interfaces. Public owned mega parking venues at the edges that interface between the city core and external regions. A utility layer and isolated areas for vehicles to deliver or traverse the city.

Well, I'm not saying "go ahead and build parking the exact same size as a Walmart parking lot right behind everything and all our problems are solved."

And I'm advocating for a holistic solution here: doing things like restricting the location/size of parking in addition to other measures. They all work together. Nobody's going to walk/cycle if all the pieces aren't in place.

Remember this also: You don't have to eliminate cars to reduce trips and lessen dependency. The choice on whether to use a vehicle can be left up to the individual, but if there is no realistic choice then the end result will be that the spaces we see in our lives will be maximized for vehicular use rather than a more balanced paradigm.

Great example is this business park in the Netherlands, where it's really obviously built quite well for cars with ample parking, it's nowhere near the city center, but it doesn't exclude people from getting there other ways. So, there's still a lot of space used for car-based infrastructure, but it's not anywhere near 100% car usage like you'd see in an American suburban business park: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDXB0CY2tSQ

Let's say that Walmart builds 500 parking spaces when there is no realistic hope of walking, but what if there was a frequent bus line stopping right in front of it, housing in close proximity, and separated bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure that felt safe and inviting. Would they build those same 500 parking spaces on their own free will (with more of them sitting empty) or would they build fewer parking spaces for a lower overall cost? Essentially, we should be prodding the "free market" to get closer to our desired outcomes rather than giving them only one choice.

If you have a situation where people driving to the grocery store use a car 100% of the time (for all the heavy bags), but maybe they only use the car 25% of the time to get coffee or get to the park to take a walk, that's still a win over using the car for 100% of activities.

Noise pollution: Caused by what? Probably cars . . . rural and suburban living doesn't make you immune to the sound of . . .

Noise pollution in the city is just a fact of the population density. Speaking from experience, if you've lived there for some time your hearing won't even be sensitive enough to truly appreciate the difference in a rural area.

It's just never going to be <35db in the city like it is in the rural community that I live in where I get to wake up to bird song. It took me 3 weeks when I moved back from living in the bay area to "hear" how quite it was, years of living in the city had desensitized my hearing. Sure, cars and especially fast moving cars contribute to the din of the city, but considering how loud it was even when the streets were empty in the middle of the night, I think that HVAC, elevators, and subways along with people being people create plenty of noise.

In the rural area I live in I can hear a car coming down the road from over a mile away at night, even with terrain in the way, and because of the low density most of the time throughout the night there are no cars. There is just no way you are going to be able to attain that level of quite with urban population densities - the 24/7 public transit would be louder.

Most of the noise in cities does come from cars. You're right that cities will never be <35 dBA, but most rural areas are not usually that quiet either. For example, even slight wind will cause ambient noise in wilderness to 40-60 dBA. Cities without cars can easily average <55 dBA. See this video [1] or this research [2] for sources.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTV-wwszGw8 [2] https://www.easa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/dfu/Backgroun...

Rural areas are obviously overall quieter, but that's not very relevant because we can't have 100% of the human population living in rural areas. That's impossible.

My overall point is that cities/suburbs that have fewer cars have less noise, and that reduction of the usage of individual vehicles is a major contributor to city noise. Just compare decibel levels standing in a residential block of the Upper East Side or inside Central Park versus the exit of the Lincoln Tunnel.

The loudest noise ain't coming from the HVAC and elevators, nor the underground subway.

This is exactly why I live outside the US in a country with walkable urban communities suitable for families, even though there are far fewer career opportunities and much lower compensation. I keep thinking about going to the US for the career boost and doubled pay, but just can't stomach the thought of driving everywhere to do anything, especially with kids.

I work from home. I'd still rather drive most of the time than rely on transit and live anywhere more dense. E-biking is nice and I do it for exercise often, but I wouldn't want to do it in the snow or rain, even with perfect separate bike lanes, no matter how much Netherlanders insist it's no big deal.

My car has a comfortable seat, good sound system, a lot of my stuff in it, climate control, and no drug addicts accosting me for money inside it.

I'll be glad to see bike infrastructure and more rail lines built out but I would never want to live somewhere without a car.

> I work from home. I'd still rather drive most of the time than rely on transit and live anywhere more dense. E-biking is nice and I do it for exercise often, but I wouldn't want to do it in the snow or rain, even with perfect separate bike lanes, no matter how much Netherlanders insist it's no big deal.

Yep. Not to mention, biking excludes a lot of people and is pretty ableist to be honest. I for one get sick very easily and having to bike during snow/rain seasons would mean I'm having a permanent low-mid grade cold.

Recumbent bikes, e-bikes, and other alternatives (https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2012/12/06/who-else-benef...) make "bike infrastructure" accessible to pretty much anyone. Considering the fact that it's impossible to live in the USA outside of a nursing home if you lose your ability to drive due to old age... I'm not sure accessibility is a great argument for car-centric infrastructure.

What percentage of people who are too old and disabled to drive a car are fit to ride a bike instead?

You’re replying to a post where the source’s headline image is several people using mobility scooters on a cycle path.

This. Good bike infra is also good mobility-scooter infra.

They should also be able to walk. If they can't walk, I suspect assisted living is the only option.

Imagine you were diagnosed with epilepsy today, and it was so severe you lost your license to protect others. You can still walk around, take public transit -- probably even ride a bicycle. Where would you live in the USA today?

> If they can't walk, I suspect assisted living is the only option.

This is just a terrible take. I have wrecked knees and there are times when I can't walk any significant distance, and I'm not even 50 years old.

The f-cars people reek of ableism and it gets really tired, and I'm not even speaking from a position as a disabled person (more like occasionally inconvenienced).

It's only ableist if your community is built solely around the car with no alternatives for these people who rely on cars for mobility due to these issues.

> If they can't walk, I suspect assisted living is the only option.

No, as mentioned in my sibling comment (and in the post you linked to earlier!) bike infrastructure also helps people who can't walk. Mobility scooters work fine on a bike path and people who can't walk (or have trouble walking) are among those who would use one.

You just need your city design to accommodate it. Bike paths help, as do ramps into buildings or ground-level entrances.

(I really wish we could popularize a term other than "bike lanes" for these in the US to acknowledge that they're useful for far more than just bikes.)

You can live in any decently big city without a car. I know people who live in LA as such. It's just inconvenient and more expensive.

All of them with an ebike and bike infrastructure. Hell, a golf cart would be an improvement due to the efficiencies of moving a smaller mass to get to your point A and Bs. Many nursing communities in Florida are in fact golf cart centric. I'd rather have the elderly in command of something that only goes 20mph and weighs 40 lbs than something that is capable of factors more that speed at orders of magnitudes more weight.

There's also the Canta, which you can drive in the bike lanes in the Netherlands: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canta_(vehicle)

Seats one person and can be adapted for various disabilities (you can wheel a wheelchair into one for example).

EDIT: Wait apparently some can seat two! Though I don’t think the wheelchair-adapted one can for space reasons.

That's amazing, and it just goes to show if you allow these things in the regulatory environment (they are not allowed currently), then they will be built and purchased by people who benefit from them. It's just a better tool for a job in 99% of the cases. Using a car for each and every trip you take in your life is like using an excavator, when all you need is a hand trowel.

Is your city really that bad that you are afraid of a bus because it might have a drug addict on it?

"My city" would be NYC I guess, so sure. I live in a ruralish town though.

Maybe I'm just not exposed to these ideas because I live in the Midwest, but this entire post sounds like some weird borderline clinical phobia of cars and driving that just doesn't jive at all with my experience, except perhaps a hatred of long car commutes. I can't imagine ever hating cars so much that I'd want to move to a new country...

Where do you live in the Midwest? If you don't live in a dense city environment, and you don't walk or bike much, it makes sense that you would struggle to understand the problems with cars linked to that lifestyle.

If I lived in a dense city, I wouldn't drive cars except on longer trips and would have no reason to rant about other people using them in normal, legitimate ways.

Have you been exposed much to the alternative to car commuting? I used to live in New Orleans, and commuted 45 minutes each direction by car, usually without traffic. I moved to San Francisco and commuted 40 minutes by bus, each direction. The difference in experience of these two commutes is something you truly need to experience for yourself.

On public transportation, you don't have to be engaged with the road. You can read. You can text with people on your phone. You can watch a TV show. You can get caught up on emails, or slack messages you need to handle. Commuting in general sucks, but not having to have your mind fully engaged on a specific (and frankly boring) task the entire time is an amazingly freeing experience.

Now I live in Tokyo and mostly work from home. The commuting experience here (for most routes) is even better. It's fast, comfortable, highly accessible and extremely quiet. I'm eventually moving back to the experience, but to be honest I'm a bit worried about my reverse culture shock when I have to downgrade my transportation experience.

I absolutely hate driving everywhere when I go back to visit my family. It's dangerous. It's expensive. I have to figure out where to park, worry about damage to the car, stay sober, and not be sleepy. Driving is in most ways a worse experience than using public transportation.

The Netherlands is pretty rough without a car. Public transport is pretty bad compared to other European places. I'm dutch but live in Barcelona now which is a lot better. In the Netherlands everything is privatized so each line has to run a profit whereas here they view it as an investment into making the city liveable. So even people in the cities own a car to get around and the results are massive traffic jams.

Same with health care, there's an excellent public system here which is free (paid by tax) but in the Netherlands you pay a private company a lot and there's penalties if you use it.

If you live in a big city in the Netherlands and don't need to leave it much you'll be ok work public transport but there's a huge housing crisis there too so city apartments come at a huge premium.

FWIW I love not needing a car and I hope I'll never need to own one again or even drive one. I've always found it so stressful.

In Barcelona you can go to many places without a car, but has awful traffic everywhere (and they drive really fast on the big streets). Plus, the police kicks you out of the street at night. I don't think it's a nice place to live.

>The Netherlands is pretty rough without a car.

Hard disagree. It depends on too many factors to make a universal statement like this.

While I generally like the idea of city centers, I think that this kind of anti-car stuff comes off like wild-eyed propaganda. For instance, the title suggests that the places were built for cars alone, kind of like the garage where Jay Leno keeps his collection. No. The suburbs were built for people driving cars. Not just cars. People getting rides in cars, avoiding weather, sitting comfortably, transporting the handicapped and the infirm and the older folks. Car haters need to remember that most people love cars because they work in all kinds of weather and transport them to work or health care or entertainment etc.

As for the bit about human connection, that's kind of silly. Life is what you make of it. For every lonely suburbanite trapped in a house with a two-car garage, I can show you a lonely city dweller who doesn't even know the name of the people in the apartment down the hall. I've lived in NYC and that is VERY common.

I don't really like driving myself. I prefer to walk, or when the weather is good, to ride a bicycle. But I can easily understand why others want to buy a car. They're very useful and the car haters who deny this come across as fools or shills.

I don't think car haters deny that cars can be useful, particularly in the environment we've constructed here in the USA. Hell, I own (half of) a car, because I want to visit family and friends who live a couple of hours away, and there's no train or even bus that could bring me to them.

> The suburbs were built for people driving cars. Not just cars. People getting rides in cars, avoiding weather, sitting comfortably, transporting the handicapped and the infirm and the older folks.

No, they were built for cars. Giant 4-lane 45 MPH stroads with no sidewalks that "connect" neighborhoods for cars, but isolate anyone without a car... those are built for cars. Driveways are built for people to get to cars, and some cul-de-sacs are built for children to play (but not teenagers to do anything interesting outside the yard -- they might get in trouble).

A lot of us just want SOMEPLACE in the USA where we can live without a car. NYC is the only place I can think of that accomplishes that, but with median rent hitting 3-4k/mo, that's out of reach for all but the highest earners. There are some cities and towns where you can occasionally do things outside of a car if you're willing to pay a premium and deal with poor infrastructure, but it all feels very fringe -- as if you're doing something you shouldn't.

Remember that wanting places without cars does not mean we want to ban cars, or stop people from using them in rural areas, or blow up the suburbs, or anything that wild. We just want to de-emphasize cars in dense environments so we can walk around!

No. You're missing my point. Those giant four lane roads were built for cars AND people moving together. The people are a big part of the equation. All of them are going some place. Some might be going to yoga. Some to church. Some to work. Some to the hospital. Etc. Yes, some might be doing something completely worthless and bad for society too, but, in general, people are the ones using the roads. The cars are only vehicles.

There's a slow movement back to urban environments, in part, because people understand the tradeoffs. But it comes off as foolish to pretend that these suburbs and four lane roads were imposed by some distant, evil presence. No. They were created by city planners trained by the best universities. They were created by progressive folks who wanted to build a nice place for people to live. This is what people wanted-- and many still want it in some form or another.

We might be missing each other's points!

In suburbs, those stroads are essential to get people from place to place. IMO that "essential" ends at the edge of a city -- at high density, cars selfishly dominate public spaces, and actually detract from that environment's utility. It's a scalability problem; single occupancy cars can only move so much meat. Walking + biking + transit can move a lot more meat in a dense space.

I think a lot of people do want those suburban environments even today. I'm not sure many people want today's US city center environment that has been compromised by the car.

You may want to look carefully at the motives of some of those 1950s and 1960s planners. The phrases "White Flight," "Redlining," "Blockbusting," "Steering" would be a good place to begin.

I think it's just the case where there is a handful of extremely vocal anti-car people. Mostly everyone else likes them and doesn't feel the need to defend them because it's the status-quo.

"Transport of the handicap and infirm... ", Cars are not ideal for disabled people. As an epileptic, the driving restrictions are one of the worst parts of the disease. I feel like I'm in a prison. I can't drive to the store, I can't drive my kids to school, I can't drive to do anything recreational. I'm literally stuck at home and 100% dependent upon someone else to do absolutely anything. Even if someone is nice enough to drive me somewhere I feel so guilty for taking their time away. Biking here sucks too, the local roads are like freeways (60+mph). The bike "lanes" are a joke. Cars are a requirement. It's so goddamn stupid and it really, really, really sucks for people like me. Its hard for me to convey how infuriating it is. Cars are not ideal for the disabled and infirm. There are a non-negligible amount of people in a similar situation as me.

I hope it's a trend, but I think it's more likely that the government will do everything it can to do what's most profitable for the biggest lobbyists. Cars create a huge amount of pointless fake economic activity and bullshit jobs that will never go away.

I think a lot of anti-car people underestimate how much people like their cars. People spend way more on their car than they need to. It's another thing they can customize and personalize.

I'm in central Texas and cars are somewhat necessary because of weather. Not enough businesses have employee showers, so biking or walking is often not a realistic option.

I also think if real self-driving cars are developed, it's going to fuel sprawl like nothing before. We will look back on cities of today and think they were decently dense.

These days, I'm pretty much in the pro-car camp. In my 20's I didn't like them and chose to live in pretty small places as close to the heart of the city as I could and I got by with a bicycle and small motorcycle. Then I had kids and we moved to the 'burbs for all the usual reasons. Now that my kids are at college I think my wife and I would like to move further out of the city where we can have a smallish house with enough land for things like a big workshop, greenhouse, gym, sauna, etc... When we get old enough that we aren't as engaged with our hobbies, maybe we would head back into the city for the closing chapter of our lives. I don't think that type of arc is all that unusual. People want different things in different parts of their life.

I’m anti-car and I love my car!

I drive no more than once or twice a month, to get to the coast or the mountains (or all of Europe via ferry/tunnel) or to move heavy stuff around. It didn’t cost me much but it’s reasonably fast and a joy to drive on country roads.

I can’t think of anything worse than having to drive every or even most days, to work or the shops or to see friends.

I walk almost everywhere, cycle most of the rest, take public transport if it’s really raining or really far (or I am late) and take the occasional Uber when none of those is an option and I still don’t want to drive.

So I don’t think there should be no cars, just [almost] no cars in the middle of most cities and towns, and no need for anyone, anywhere to own one to have a reasonable life.

I feel like I'm in a similar boat. You could characterize me as a car enthusiast; I love driving them, looking at them, talking about them, and a weekend drive across the state to sightsee and go camping is just about as good as it gets.

However, I also don't really want to use my car every single day to commute, or do basic chores. I see my car as an exploration/recreation/hobby, and I love it! But do wish that it wasn't necessary for the more boring parts of life, too.

I lived 22 years without a car in Boston. I finally got one a couple of years ago and also love having it, despite the fact that I only use it about 3 times each month. I don't know if I'm anti-car, but I'm definitely a strong advocate for the vision that cars shouldn't be required to live a full life in more places, especially in the US. In the US, there's so few places where living without a car is feasible, and all of them are incredibly expensive, so clearly there are Americans who want this. But for some reason we still seem to design new communities around the car.

Keep in mind that the US is only about 10% smaller than all of Europe combined.

While I would love more walking/biking friendly cities, what about all the rural areas? It would take millions and millions of buses or train connections to get to all the places I drive and would still be more of a hassle than just driving there myself plus I couldn't pick the scenic routes.

People in major cities have different needs than those in rural areas.

No one has said we should eliminate cars entirely. Cars make sense in rural areas, we should use them there. Cars don't make sense in cities, so we need alternatives.

I don't think anyone is advocating that rural America, or even most of exurban America, should be accessible by public transit. It's just that we literally only have one city in the entire United States that has a massive subway and bus system that operates 24 hours, which allows you to live without a car.

It'd be great to have more cities as dense as NYC in this country.

>It'd be great to have more cities as dense as NYC in this country.

Yes, but remember that density is not without its problems as well. Socially of course, but also practically--density requires more competent urban management for things like sewer and water, which the US is famous for being awful at.

In the not so distant past, even rural places had (limited) access to public transportation. My mother lived way out in the sticks, but there was a road nearby. The bus would stop for anybody standing on the side of the highway to take them into town or back. This was in the 1940s-50s.

This seems like scare-mongering, or FUD, in my humble opinion.

The reason that sewage and water is so hard to get right in the United States is in part due to sprawl, as well as the lack of political will to actually maintain infrastructure once it is built.

A bit of a deflection I'll admit but - look at the NY subway. It barely receives the funding to keep basic maintenance afloat. Compared to equivalently sized systems in Europe it fails because there's a massive political diaspora to overcome since culturally taking transit is "for the poors" (you know what that translates to) and we can't be giving them anything.

Similar holds true for sewage and water (for water, look at Flint Michigan). Housing, transportation, zoning, etc. are all the same problem. The reasons we fail at them are all connected and without taking a holistic approach we likely will remain bad at it. Pointing to any one thing and claiming "well even if we do that we'll still suck at 99% of everything else" isn't really a helpful description of reality, it just means there's more work to do.

I guess what I would really push back on in your argument is the point that higher density requires higher competence. At some meaningless level, sure, we have engineers that have to solve harder problems. But the reasons that the US is bad at a lot of urbanist policies isn't because we lack competency (you could just hire people from overseas) - it's because we've allowed ourselves to build a system that incentivizes that incompetency at multiple levels through restrictive zoning, endless veto privileges a la "community feedback" / NIMBYism, car culture and the social disdain for what is perceived as normal in other countries (trains, bikes), etc.

This isn't a problem with the US geographically or its people, and the problems have solutions. I think if you talk to most people in cities they probably agree wholly or in part on a lot of fronts, even if there's still a prevailing "got mine" attitude depending on where you ask.

> In the not so distant past, even rural places had (limited) access to public transportation

Actually, rural America has fantastic public transportation - if you're attending public school. Everyone else is SOL.

I don't think we need that level of density to warrant public transit. Singapore has one of the best public transit systems in the world (highest customer satisfaction rate), at 1/5th the density of NYC.

Oh absolutely, I just love living in NYC and whenever I think of where else I'd live my answer is always a city that isn't in the US. In a country this big you'd think there'd be more than one of us.

NYC only maintains their system because it's subsidized by non-residents.

This is a false dichotomy. You can have single family homes with walkable shops/schools.

I visited Nashville recently. Developers can pay a small fee to not put in sidewalks. Kids, adults and pets walk on the road in million dollar home neighborhoods. People don’t even have the option to walk because of ingrained car culture.

Take a look at European rural areas some time.

1. Commercial production of food and timber begins literally at the city line around most European cities. There's not the ring of suburban hellsscape. One one block, there's a city. And the next, farms begin.

2. Rural European villages are also compactly built. If you work for farmers or just want to live among farmers, you still might not need a car for your daily necessities.

3. Even if you are a farmer, you have the option of living in the village and commuting to your fields. Your machine barn is also right near the village, which means you are not the only person watching it day to day. And since you commute to your fields, leasing them to your neighbor for a season is easily done as a matter of course. Want to take a sabbatical? Walk next door, sign some papers. Done.

Europe does farm country better too.

Europe also has substantial rural areas, and they drive cars there. No one is saying we should abolish all cars and all car infrastructure. But things like residential only zoning and stroads that take a useful tool such as a car and make it a vital necessity are dumb.

I guess I am the opposite. It wasn't hard for me to find walkable places in the cities I have lived it because I planned my living around not having to drive much. There are still things I have to drive to like seeing my parents and family but everyday things like groceries, bars, food, haircut, etc were easy for me to do walking it all the cities I have lived. Also I lived in the suburbs of those cities so it isn't an urban core thing. For me as long as I prioritized walking my locations have been walking friendly.

r/fuckcars has seen a lot of growth in the past year or so:

https://subredditstats.com/r/fuckcars

https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/

That subreddit occasionally hit the front page, and lemme tell you, it's full of really fun and nice people who are able to take a nuanced and complex subject and handle it with care.

Me too. Either my city calms traffic, or we're moving to a walkable city in Europe. Having young children makes the decision feel more urgent.

Yeah kids getting mowed down left and right in my city this summer. City has announced only more lanes and faster traffic. Grim shit.

Yeah that's why I love living in Vancouver. You never need a car if you live remotely close to downtown... if you live downtown-ish you basically just walk everywhere or bike. It's so great. Back in my country I was all the time in car traffic...

I honestly think that most Americans have not traveled enough to realize there is a better way. Only 30% of Americans even have a passport.

I've traveled to plenty of cities where many/most people don't own cars, in the US and Europe. I still have zero desire to live in such a city.

Where in the US have you visited where many or most people don't own cars? In the USA, there is one such city -- NYC -- where MOST residents don't own a car. Every other city has over 90% car ownership.

Cool. No one is forcing you to live in those places.

The entire premise of this thread is to essentially make as much of the US like those places, from a transportation perspective, as possible.

Same, everyone has this loaded idea that as soon as you visit a city out of the US it's a utopia. "Walkable-city" often means taking 2-4 different forms of transportation to get from A to B, and if you're going to 5 different places in a day before coming home(say class, the gym, the grocery store, a specific store for that one thing you need today, then dinner with a friend) it means carrying 1-2 bags with you all day and making 15 different metro line transfers, buses, etc and dealing with inclement weather and rush hour crowds where you can't get a seat. Have you ever been in a city with one of the largest metro systems in the world and had to physically push and get pushed into a rush hour metro car that's so packed you can't even get your phone out of your pocket on a ~38C day?

I have a feeling a lot of this sentiment is driven by digital nomads who booked a hostel next to a wework and do nothing but go to a coworking space for half the day then sightseeing and get the impression that everyone lives like this. I've stayed in more than one world class city and if you can afford it you eventually just start taking a lot more ubers than you'll care to admit.

Despite living in major US cities for much of my adult life, I do not enjoy ride shares. I far prefer walking, biking, or public transport. Even if it's hot out, or raining, or even snowing. As long as I'm not in danger of being run over by cars, I'm happy.

I don't think all cities outside of the US are utopias. I just think you can walk around more comfortably. I've taken public transport plenty, thank you, and I know it's not always as convenient as taking a car. I don't mind carrying around a backpack with items in it, or putting a pannier on my bike.

> I have a feeling a lot of this sentiment is driven by digital nomads who booked a hostel next to a wework and do nothing but go to a coworking space for half the day then sightseeing and get the impression that everyone lives like this. I've stayed in more than one world class city and if you can afford it you eventually just start taking a lot more ubers than you'll care to admit

Please don't paint everyone who wants car alternatives with the same brush.

Anyone who would stoop to the level of constant ride sharing doesn't like public transportation, biking, or walking. I loathe ride shares as much as I hate cars. They exacerbate almost all car problems in US cities.

Most of my friends -- a spread of PhDs, teachers, well-off tech workers, and blue collar workers -- have barely left the USA. I really enjoyed the time I spent in the UK for a college semester. It permanently ruined the US city experience for me -- even NYC is not as walkable as the small-ish city I lived in.

When my friends do leave the USA, it seems to largely land them at resorts, or guided tours, or other "on rails" tourist experiences that disconnect them from the day-to-day life of people who live in those places. Meanwhile I visit cities to explore on foot. I plan on doing some European bike tours soon to experience some of the small towns and countryside that I've previously missed out on.

Considering how much my friends and family love the walking and public transit experience at Disney World, I wonder how much they would enjoy just walking and taking public transit around other cities around the world. It's really not that different.

> When my friends do leave the USA, it seems to largely land them at resorts, or guided tours, or other "on rails" tourist experiences that disconnect them from the day-to-day life of people who live in those places.

I share your distaste for resorts and guided tours, but if a person can only get one week off, these are safe options.

For my first real trip, I had to quit my job to get sufficient time off. They would not allow time off even without pay.

Visiting Chicago and NYC were what woke me up to it. Those places are the closest you can get to a car-free lifestyle here. Yet they're still very pedestrian and bike-hostile areas.

30% of people can be a lot of people, expecially in a political environment where there are only 2 parties, and the district lines are optimized/gerimandered.

Also, you really don't have to travel to realize that life can be different elsewhere. In fact, if you're going for an out-of-touch idealized belief, not traveling is almost a benefit: see "Paris syndrome".

> Also, you really don't have to travel to realize that life can be different elsewhere.

I think you sort of do, or at least I did.

I like to think I realized quite well that life could be wildly different throughout the world - it's what motivated my initial travels.

Hearing about how the Netherlands does transit vs. actually feeling and experiencing it immersed over a month of living there is just an entirely different level of understanding.

In this example I went from thinking the NL style transit is pretty neato, to now thinking that transportation is one of the most fundamental pieces that forms a society and it's future. It's not just energy and moving mass around. Get transportation wrong and you will fundamentally break society in unexpected ways.

30% is 100 million Americans. Also, a passport was not required to travel in North America (not sure if that is still the case). I traveled throughout Mexico and Canada before ever having a passport, for example.

I take it you have not travelled in some time? This hasn't been the case since "9/11" when the rules were changed. you need a passport to travel between USA/CA (not sure about Mexico but i would assume it needs a passport too?).

I routinely travel internationally. I simply wasn't conflating what I do at the border with a requirement. I regularly crossed the northern and southern border without a passport in the 1990s.

Some US states have an 'enhanced drivers license' which allows travel to Mexico/Canada via car or boat. However, you need a passport to fly into those countries.

Consider that America has around 45 million immigrants, most of whom probably haven't seen much of the world either. Assuming all those immigrants have no native-born children (an obviously terrible assumption), then we have 50 million passports for 250 million native-born Americans, a 20% rate. Compare that to germany's 90% rate.

Sure... but compare the size and location of Germany with that of the United States. It's probably not all that sensible to compare rates here between countries, except perhaps European countries against one another.

Where, with a landmass the size of the US, in the world is it done better than in the US?

If the crusaders on this mission want to carve up SF/Seattle/Portland/DC/NYC to build whatever it is you think is better, please do. Good luck. You can't even build housing in SF, but go ahead. Redesign the cities to be whatever you want.

I'm completely done with cities and I'm not alone, never again to return. Even 78 people per square mile, where I am now, is slightly too many. Once the kids are done with school I'll reassess, and probably move even further out.

Do you realize how massively big the US is and how incredibly diverse of an experience you can have just traveling to the next state over? Having a passport/leaving the country isn't a requirement to see that there is a better or different way to live.

The entire US is built around cars so I don't think you'd be exposed to a different way of living in that aspect, unless you're a brave American tourist visiting Chicago/NYC willing to learn and use the subway.

The US is incredibly big and diverse. The world is bigger and diverser.

I hate this argument because its always used to jutsify staying in the US.

do you realize how homogeneous the US is when compared to the diversity you get between different countries? and yes, I've been to all 4 corners and the midwest. There's more in common between LA and the midwest than between LA and southeast asia for example.

The equivalent drive in europe or asia will net you a rapidly shifting palette of languages, customs, holidays and foods. Not to mention the added perspective of seeing another countries politics and how it puts into perspective out own obsession with a two party system.

Lack of any mandated paid vacation/holiday days is probably a large factor. This graph makes the difference with other countries stark:

https://cepr.net/report/no-vacation-nation-revised/

I think this is a pretty big assumption that doesn't really consider that not all people prefer densely packed urban environments.

I've visited Europe multiple times and lived in Austria for 7 months. I loved seeing new things that were so different from my midwestern home. Using the train was awesome, the ease of access to get good quality food, walkability etc.

However, returning to Europe in my 30s I don't have that same feeling anymore. Those cities give me anxiety now. There are far too many people in one area. Everyone lives in tiny apartments where they have to be careful about who they disturbed. Almost no one owns houses, much less any land to go with those houses. They're completely reliant on public transportation. There's a massive lack of access to any real nature. Everyone just seems really sheltered and most of them don't appear to have any knowledge outside of urban environments. There's also a very elitist attitude that their way of life is somehow better, even though most of them couldn't survive a day without having easy consumer access to everything.

Further into adulthood now I much prefer to live outside a city with some land and the freedom to do what I want on it. I can take my car into the city and visit whenever I want. However, I get to live outside of it with much better access to nature and imo a mentally healthier environment than a packed city. Large cities just seem packed with consumerism to me. People do nothing but go around and pay for products all day. Pay to eat, pay to have coffee, pay to go to a show. I'll visit and live elsewhere.

I can relate to this! I lived parts of my life in car-only and walkable places. I so prefer walkability!

But, it has downsides.

Walkability, in a rich country, means insane real estate prices (in a poor country people don't have enough disposable income after food, clothing etc to create an auction effect).

In a poor country on the other hand, it means crime. In rich country even poor people have cars so crime is more equally distributed, but in poor countries, living in a place where jobs and shipping is unreachable on foot, you are also shielded from almost all crime, but in a poor country all walkable places are dangerous.

In other words, walkable places are only good if you are rich and live in a rich country.

Walkability in rich countries is expensive precisely because lots of people want walkability, and that want is underserved. It's signal that we should allow more of it to happen!

Walkability is expensive because density. Walkability = density. And density means that real estate is small and there is a competition to get it. A walkable place just can't be big to stay walkable, and it has to include a lot of things to still be liveable.

A suburbia can cover entire continent easily and stay cheap because land, on the scale needed for private houses, is almost free. It just doesn't work this way with liveable cities that have to be small, and quickly lose attractiveness as you move away from the very core which is normally only a few hundred meters in radius.

European cities look nice for a tourist but people living in "nice" parts of them are living there either because their ancestors bought their apartments pre-WWI, or because of one-off luck, or because they are rich. Vast majority still lives in the outskirts that look a lot more like Soviet Union than "Europe" the way Americans see it.

I'm pretty lucky for an average American, all things considered, and live in an area with a grocery store 15 minutes away by foot, and most everything else under 30 minutes by bike. Public transit isn't amazing, but there's 60 miles of light rail and a decent bus network. My family of 4 still needs (wants?) one car, but we only put about 8000 miles a year on it.

All that said, I feel a bit trapped here. I've yet to find somewhere else in the United States I'd like to move to if I had to move. Manhattan would be fun, but whoa boy...

Not a single good place in the entire United States to move to?

Miami, Savanna, Boston, NYC, Austin, Vermont, Minneapolis, Duluth, Salt Lake City, Chicago, Nashville, Colorado, Scottsdale, Vegas, Tahoe, San Diego, Seattle ...

It seems like there are a lot of different climates and feels to choose from ...

I've always wanted to bike, and the city finally said yes, let's make the city bike-friendly.

And then they go ahead and just paint a white bike lane right next to the car lane. Yea, even when politicians listen to their constituents, they just half ass the effort.

I'm not risking my life to ride in that bike lane, so I still use a car.

Yeah, I live about 15 miles outside Philly and don't know anywhere nearby safe enough to ride. Local drivers think nothing of missing you by only a foot or two, often at a speed difference of over 20 MPH.

Even offroad spaces set aside for bike routes often cross busy highways without proper signage, putting riders and pedestrians in the crosshairs of fast turning vehicles that are surprised to find anyone on the road who's not motorized. With the rise of big big SUVs and even bigger trucks, those who are not likewise encased in a large metal cage are just too easy to miss. Or hit.

From what I recall growing up, Vancouver's bike lanes were not well-recieved (by what I imagine was a slight minority) when they started taking lanes from traffic. "They're always empty", "They're unsafe", "What about the cars and increased wait" were some of the complaints I remember. Over time, they've gotten dramatically better, and public opinion is shifting as they improve.

Bike lanes become more common, so they grant access to more areas instead of getting you 90% of the way there, so they can be used, and people can take advantage of them, and see (or know someone), that uses them. It all ends up being a positive feedback cycle for bicycles.

They may not be popular in your city, but if they can keep the political motivation up for a few election cycles, it can work :)

This was my experience to a tee. I had been commuting about 80 minutes a day for work. Then we had the pandemic. I have been at a fully distributed company, and I love it. You would have to pay me an extraordinary amount to give up the quality of life I have working from home.

> Selfishly, I really want the USA to bring city centers back to livable levels by banning most cars and redesigning them for humans. Otherwise I'm absolutely going to end up moving to Europe eventually -- likely the Netherlands

There isn't a single US city which meets your criteria?

Nope. And I've tried. US cities are so dominated by cars that other modes of transportation are an afterthought.

If you've ever tried to bike on an icy bike lane (when the car surface was cleared days ago), been honked at by aggressive drivers on residential streets for daring to walk or bike, been yelled at by a driver parked in a bike lane, or been stressed out by a street corner that becomes completely blind to traffic due to a huge parked car... that's what I'm talking about.

I'm not the grandparent, but I've looked a lot and I don't think there is a single city. New York is the only place you can reasonably live car free without feeling like you're handicapping yourself to make a statement, but it's also very specific type of city that comes with a lot of other baggage (e.g. expensive, overly dense and urban, arguably not where you want to raise kids, etc).

There are plenty of cities where you can live parts of this life, for example when you're young. But when it's time for a family there's basically nowhere in the US you can avoid the house-and-two-cars typical American lifestyle (except New York City with lots of money).

Cities in the US with strong public transit have only ended up building moving toilets for the homeless. There are a number of bigger issues that come first before billions more in public funding goes into larger wheeled toilets.

I really want to like public transit!

I never even had to sit in traffic. I can bike to work through a very nice meadow and forest in about 15 minutes. But after working from home for 2 years, doing even that nice of a commute seems like hell. Never again.

> I'd rather not learn a whole new language and leave my family and friends so far behind

You could live in New York, Boston, DC, Chicago, or other dense cities with decent transit options without leaving the US entirely. It is certainly not impossible to live in the US without a car.

EDIT: not really sure why this is downvoted. Just taking OP's statement that they would prefer not to uproot their whole life at face value. I have lived without a car in both the US and Europe, so I promise it can be done.

I have lived in multiple major US cities without a car. In NYC it's feasible, but impossible to visit family or friends who live in car-centric places. In most other cities you feel like a distant second-or-third class citizen. Swimming upstream gets tiring after a while.

> impossible to visit family or friends who live in car-centric places

Traditional car rentals like Avis, Hertz, etc., as well as carshare services like Gig or Zipcar enable this if you don't already own a car. Many people I know in SF do this.

I live in Germany. I'm 26. I don't have a driver's license, and neither do many of my friends. It's never been necessary. Between transit and cycling, it's possible to reach everywhere, easily.

That's one of the issues with the US today.

The problem is that it's too hard to visit family and friends. The solution is to move to a different country where you don't know anyone or even speak the language?

If I'm going to take transportation to rent a car anyway, might as well live someplace I like more, no? It's about optimizing multiple variables, not making every variable of my life perfect.

Unless you move your extended family to the Netherlands too, I don't see that issue going away.

You should move to the netherlands then. Not everyone needs to live in a dense concrete jungle. You should -choose- that, though. I understand why you hate cars, so move to the urban center and figure out a way but you don't have a right to force that on me.

> I've seen so much anti-car, pro-walkability, pro-transit, pro-bikeability sentiment online recently.

Bikes bring me joy. I guess label that however you'd like!

Agree 100%

>Selfishly, I really want the USA to bring city centers back to livable levels by banning most cars and redesigning them for humans.

I bet if this happened you'd be living in a downtown that's physically walkable, but there's no business left to walk to.

This has been tried several times in cities and by and large it seems to be profitable for the businesses.

Source? Just curious

Many European cities have walkable downtown streets closed to cars with lots of successful businesses.

Burlington, VT. Boulder, CO. Old Town Arvada, CO. All have very successful pedestrian-only streets in the USA with lots of healthy businesses.

Yeah, tourist-centric destinations can do things like this. We do it where I live too, in the summer. Closing down a few streets is a world away from banning cars from downtown. How many people can actually live in an area like that?

I'm confused about your question.

If I can do everything I want in my city -- exercise, drink, eat, buy groceries, meet up with friends, etc. -- without a car, why wouldn't I be able to live there?

I expect in this situation you'd be able to store your car in a secure garage on the edge of town if you want to own one. Or you could take public transit or bike to rent a car on the edge of town. Or you could take a train to wherever you want to go and use another method of transport once you get there.

Is there some kind of deep intrinsic human need to sit in a car within 1000 feet of your home that I'm not understanding?

I think I’ve seen this in a few places, there’s one source in particular I’m thinking of that I can’t seem to find but here are some:

The positive impact of car-free streets on businesses during COVID: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-11/the-busin...

Good overview about autoluw streets and the effects they have: https://youtu.be/GlXNVnftaNs

…though as the video states, autoluw doesn’t mean completely car-free. I tend to agree that it’s probably the best balance rather than eliminating all cars from the area.

Boston has recently closed down major roads for pedestrians to great success. Most businesses ended up selling out entire inventories on those days during the weekend because their walk in traffic literally increased exponentially.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/07/10/metro/jamaica-plains-...

There's been a growing movement to permanently close down certain roads around Back Bay to encourage this behavior as well because restaurants and local shops love the increase in customers.

https://www.wcvb.com/article/open-newbury-street-returns-aug...

Ann Arbor MI closed Main Street for the summer months to allow restaurant patrons to sit outside. I think this began during year 2(?) of covid. This especially makes sense in a college town when the students are away (half the population) and the reduced traffic is relatively easy to shunt around the closed off areas.

Conversely, Kalamazoo MI closed off a major downtown street year-round around 1975 to encourage foot traffic, but found few takers especially in winter. After a decade or so of declining attendance in general (as interest in the downtown also faded) they finally reopened the street to motor traffic.

Oh hey, I grew up in Kalamazoo and went to school in Ann Arbor. It's been so long since I lived there I might be remembering wrong, but I just don't remember that much to do on the street in question (compared to somewhere like Ann Arbor). When I lived there, I think it was open to traffic, but a single one-way lane? Parking never seemed to be a problem if you were willing to park a block away.

>I've seen so much anti-car, pro-walkability, pro-transit, pro-bikeability sentiment online recently.

The usual political activist group has switched to this. The laptop class wants to ban cars. We could discuss if that's a good idea or not.

Societal cost of transportation is insane. Imagine where you have a society number of amortized cars sitting in drive ways doing nothing. What a huge waste of society's wealth.

What would be the cost difference if we simply had driverless vehicles that could pick you up, do whatever you need to do, and then move onto the next person. Sure there would be peak times and all this but for the most part you far better utilize transportation.

The cost is immense. Car ownership is stupid. If only we had a legitimate driverless option. Free market would shift because of this alone.

>I really hope this is proof of the younger generations -- Millenials, Zoomers, and younger folks even -- waking up to the idea that the USA in particular has become a toxic environment thanks to cars.

No certainly not. The only proof is the political activists have shifted their intentions. perhaps we find out later?

>I hate cars. I don't want to use them on a daily basis. I'm cheap, and I don't want to own one, or maintain one. I try to do everything I can by biking or walking, or transit if those aren't feasible. It is nearly impossible in 95% of the USA.

Ive been considering this.

https://organictransit.com/product/elf-2fr/

Solar powered pedal assisted ebike that's enclosed so even in the winter you could zip around and get where you need to go. It's an ebike so hills arent a problem. In the summer you could take windows and doors off.

If there's situations where there's too much snow? Ok I'll just not go, staying home. It's enclosed for rain. I dont need AC or heat.

But $10,000 for something that'll get stolen?

Looking at building my own from scratch as a winter project this year. I am estimating I could build something equivalent for probably $2000.

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