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Comment by iinnPP | Hacker News Reader

What is stopping them exactly?

I live in a well off area on the outskirts of a city of 500,000. Driving across the city takes an hour. I have lived in the south-east, south, north, central, west, southwest, and northeast areas of the city and have been able to walk everywhere my entire life.

I guess people don't like luxury because a large chunk of my neighborhood will drive their 8-seater SUV(alone) to the convenience store on the corner for a drink. I have met precisely zero people from my area who walk to the grocery store nearby where I pickup my fresh produce every few days.

People are just lazy.

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> People are just lazy.

Do you commute to work by walking? How long does that take you each day? How about the grocery store? How many people do you have to do grocery shopping for? What about buying clothing or other necessities? If you're ordering most of your stuff in, you're not reducing the need for driving, you're paying someone else to drive for you.

No, people aren't just lazy. Most people don't have the time or money to live that lifestyle.

> What about buying clothing or other necessities? If you're ordering most of your stuff in, you're not reducing the need for driving, you're paying someone else to drive for you.

not really... batching a bunch of orders and delivering them out of a van is about as efficient as last mile logistics can get.

ubereats/GrubHub is a notable exception, since people expect much stronger latency guarantees for this use case.

> not really... batching a bunch of orders and delivering them out of a van is about as efficient as last mile logistics can get.

It's definitely more efficient than driving yourself, but it's also hiring out your driving to someone else, which counts against someone being able to "walk everywhere" because it requires you to assume that the person can make up any shortcomings in their location with mail order. Point is, you can't realistically walk everywhere in most places.

I work full time. I make all my food from scratch(when tomatoes are off season I do use canned tomatoes and tomato paste but not something such as tomato sauce) I have one child, an elderly dependent, and a wife. My wife also works full time.

We do not order delivery.

I do not commute currently, but I have walked for 75minutes one way(2.5hours total for 12.5hours a week) for about a year at a previous position with a poor bike route.

We do order stuff from Amazon. Which covers things that are hard to find close by.

There's no way that everyone is lazy in my area. They could definitely stop 3minute drives to the park though.

Let me get this straight. You're asking what's stopping people from walking everywhere?

And instead of thinking for like 5 seconds and realizing someone may work 15km away from home you write a senseless comment about people driving to the grocery store and concluding that what's stopping people from walking everywhere is that they're lazy.

OK.

Not everywhere. That is a very deliberate decision on my part. I have picked jobs which support it, moved where I rent based on it, and made it important. Not for the environment either, but for me.

If you want to work 15km from your home and can't bike/public transport to work and don't have the ~2 hours to walk (which I am not suggesting would be common) then you could do whatever makes sense to you. I have been finding work from home positions since 2015 without issue.

The comment about the grocery store is different than what you think. The problem is that people complain about carbon while doing nothing to solve it. In my scenario it is a 15min walk to the store. I carry two reusable bags and sometimes a backpack for bulkier items. The area is on the outskirts and the sidewalk is limited to one side of the road. Having walked to the grocery store some 500 times in the last ~2 years, I have met an astonishingly low amount of people doing the same. My neighborhood has two public schools and a highschool, to give you an idea of size.

These same people drive to the centralized park and convenience stores. It is a nice area with 80% NDP voters.

I collect groceries for 4 people and make all my meals from ~scratch (very limited canned food). We don't use the cities garbage services, everything is recyclable or compostable.

I'm not really suggesting anyone should walk everywhere, just that driving everywhere isnt helping the problem they claim to care about.

> What is stopping them exactly?

Not every city is laid out according to sound urban planning principles, or they have been remodeled and reshaped to accommodate and prioritize car traffic. Many American cities, for example, are organized around the assumption that people will be driving, to the detriment of other modes of transportation.

That, and the introduction of the car has allowed people to live far from places of work, food markets, stores, schools, churches, etc. There isn't as much pressure to build closely to minimize distance which is why postwar developments looks like sprawl instead of the compact cities that dominated historically. It becomes necessary to drive everywhere.

> People are just lazy.

Eliminating parking space would change the incentives. If you know parking will be a huge pain, it offsets a good chunk of the convenience. (It might be painful at first, but our current practices are financially unsustainable. Sometimes you have to break crooked bones so that they can be straightened out.)

> Not every city is laid out according to sound urban planning principles […]

Well… they were laid out according to the "sound" urban planning principles of the 1950s and 1960s. Their soundness is currently being re-evaluated since the previously-unknown/ignored externalities are now being taken into account.

You're right. 100%.

There are areas that promote walking and other forms of transit and there are those that don't.

I am in a city that contains a voter base that is 80%(NDP - A Canadian political party that is left of the Trudeau Liberals). We have bike paths all over and many areas of the city can be reached through a gorgeous city wide bike path paved throughout gorgeous scenery. Together with dedicated bike lanes with spacers from traffic. Those paths are used mostly for excerise and the paths on the road are used by an alarmingly small sum of people.

Its definitely laziness for some people but not all.

I also read every privacy policy for services I use. I'm weird. I'm also lazy.

>Not every city is laid out according to sound urban planning principles, or they have been remodeled and reshaped to accommodate and prioritize car traffic. Many American cities, for example, are organized around the assumption that people will be driving, to the detriment of other modes of transportation.

In addition, plenty of climates in the US don't allow for walking, no matter how the city is laid out. You aren't walking anywhere remotely distant in Las Vegas or Phoenix or other parts of the Southwest in the summer, when temperatures routinely soar over 110 degrees (with blazing sun), unless you want someone to find your shriveled husk of a corpse on the side of the road. Similarly, you aren't walking anywhere in huge portions of the North/central/northeastern parts of the US in the winter, when temperatures plummet below zero and blizzards and ice storms occur frequently. Even in areas where the weather and the city layout is amenable to walking, there are tens of millions of elderly, disabled and/or morbidly obese Americans that lack the capacity to walk any significant distance at all.

> What is stopping them exactly?

Living in places not suited for it. I don't have a drivers license. I'm 48 and have never gotten one because I like to walk and have always lived places with good public transit.

So, when in a past job I often travelled to the Bay Area, I tried to walk as much as I could there too, and it often worked.

But I also frequently found direct routes to places I needed to get to unsafe to walk, and ended up on massive detours. E.g. once while we had offices near Menlo Park, I stayed in a nice B&B in Atherton. The direct route along El Camino Real would've been short enough to walk (for me anyway), but there are parts of it that have no pedestrian affordances whatsoever and woefully insufficient lighting to walking along the roadside. I did that. Once. The detour I found (there might well be better ones; I tried once and wasn't very familiar with the area) took 2-3 times as long at the time.

Had the direct route "worked", I'd have loved to stay at that B&B again on future trips, instead it was written off as too inconvenient for me.

As a visitor, I took some perverse pleasure in trying to figure out how to manage there without a car. But had I lived in the area, I'd probably quickly have given up and resorted to learning to drive.

And frankly, that's one of the more pedestrian friendly areas I've visited in the US outside the highest density urban cores.

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