Walking is rarer in the U.S. compared to similar nations | Hacker News Reader

Walking is rarer in the U.S. compared to similar nations

bigthink.com

12 pointsBrajeshwar17 comments

It's too dangerous. The article has some good statistics. To add to it, I recently took up riding a motorcycle. According to wikipedia[1], walking is 7x more dangerous than a car. Bicycle is 20x. Motorcycle is 28x.

And the above is just accidents. Crime is a problem. For example, no way am I letting my elderly mom walk to visit her friend downtown, I drove her instead.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorcycle_safety

Yep. It's dangerous and it's just not appealing. Even in SF, despite parking being a pain, I've grown to prefer driving places to walking (beyond ~10-15 minutes radius) because:

A) Sidewalks are just too damn cramped. Pedestrians feel like 2nd class citizens to cars

B) Public transit, to get longer distances, is unreliable and often chaotic

C) It's faster

D) Besides some parks, there aren't very many places I want to hang out outside at en route to most destinations. There aren't enough nice, safe public spaces

E) I keep my head on a swivel and I still have to dodge clueless drivers who run stop signs or don't use turn signals _far_ too often for how little I walk now. Although I will say that this seems to have gotten worse since COVID for whatever reason.

I don't really see a solution to the problem.. there's opposition to pretty much every baby step towards progress. They tried "slow streets" (with minimal investment into said infrastructure) and... local residents seemed to hate them, drivers didn't care, and police didn't enforce anything.

If you can't beat 'em..

If there's one thing I've learned from urbanist YouTube videos, it's that drivers don't base their speed based upon posted speed limits, they base their speed on how comfortable they feel on a given roadway. You can't just tell people that what was an arterial yesterday is now an alley. You have to physically change it into an alley.

For sure. Whenever I drive in the sunset, I'm blown away with how unnecessarily wide all of the streets are, how it encourages drivers to go 30+ when they should be going 20, and how few protected bike lanes exist taking advantage of all the extra asphalt.

They could take even just a couple streets, convert them to be narrower, calm traffic, and create safer spaces for pedestrians and bikers all in one go.

> If you can't beat 'em..

Hard to fault people who try to getting a larger, safer vehicle - which not only means joining them, but going further, going all the way to buying a SUV. Sit higher for better visibility, more cage around you. Can't change the city planning, can't prevent people from looking at their phones, but you can decided what vehicle you drive.

I hope you realize that you just screamed for some form of government intervention. If the only solution to personal safety is to redirect the danger at your fellow citizens (actually, intensify and redirect that danger), there needs to some level of intervention to halt the arms race. Because we can't all have the largest vehicle. And at some point, even in a parking lot, we all have to interface with those brodozers on foot.

I'm usually anti-regulation and very pro-capitalism, but the feedback loop has to work correctly. Positive feedback for positive things, negative feedback for negative. If the system goes off the rails, such as monopolies in capitalism's case and vehicle size arms race in the US, then yes regulation is needed. Speed limits are fine. Another alternative to regulation is for the US to change it's city planning polices.

I think it's a combination of factors. One is, it's easy to get trapped in a cycle of not moving and becoming increasingly weaker and fatter, but the other is our toxic lifestyle of high stress. Lots of people are making subsistence incomes because they can barely survive the low pay out there in society. They are exhausted and don't have time to walk, which loops back to one.

It's true though, many places don't have sidewalks and there are many drivers that like to swerve or act threatening to anything that is not another truck, so this also plays a role in disincentivizing people from sharing the road.

False dichotomy. I live in the suburbs, The closest things to me to walk to (within 30 minutes) are a gas station, or another gas station, or an automotive replair place. The bus station is a 1.5 hour walk. No sidewalks by the way, just neighborhood frontage so I'll be walking at across downward slopes the whole time.

When I take conference trips to other cities, I do walk everywhere.

That hardly makes it false. That's actually almost exactly the point the article is discussing. In the U.S. policy decisions, in this case encouraging living in suburbs, is a major contributor to the lack of walking.

> That hardly makes it false. That's actually almost exactly the point the article is discussing. In the U.S. policy decisions, in this case encouraging living in suburbs, is a major contributor to the lack of walking.

Policy decisions and citizen preferences. I've been to dense, walkable residential areas, and I wouldn't trade a suburban home for that.

It would be nice to have a little more neighborhood commercial space in the suburbs (e.g. a little cafe), like some older inner-ring suburbs have/had. But the economics probably just don't work anymore. My parent's neighborhood had some of that at a corner, but 3/4 of the businesses closed or relocated to higher traffic areas.

>No sidewalks by the way

This is something that blows me away whenever I hear about America. Are people okay with that? I'm not trying to be sarcastic, I'm genuinely wondering if there's any backlash or outrage towards the lack of basic infrastructure.

As a Brooklynite without a driver's license, American suburbia, like my wife's family's lovely NJ town, feels hostile due to its car dependency, lack of sidewalks, etc.

I had the opportunity to spend 8 weeks last summer in Barcelona and I thought Brooklyn was one of the most walkable cities in the world. Its not about just being walkable, it's also about public places, being able to "loiter." having roads where cars and can not go, etc.

The range of opinions is huge. I got into an argument here on HN with a fellow American who argued that sidewalks are nothing but legalized trespassing. There are, in fact, many Americans who choose to live in neighborhoods without sidewalks, largely because they already drive everywhere. That said, for the past 30 years or so most new neighborhoods have included sidewalks.

City walks are typically paid for and maintained by the property owner. Suburban sprawl means a lot of sidewalks frontage to pay for.

It's ultimately a matter of American's being silly about taxes and paying for public goods.

We go without because taxes are evil, public goods are socialism. We literally allowing our dogma to lessen our life expectancies and cap our quality of life. It's a sort of a unique American mental illness we refer to as freedom.

> False dichotomy. I live in the suburbs, The closest things to me to walk to (within 30 minutes) are a gas station, or another gas station, or an automotive replair place.

> When I take conference trips to other cities, I do walk everywhere.

Pardon me, but you seem to have accepted car-dependence an inevitable fact of your normal life, even though you see how others live on a regular basis. Why?

I live in a rural area, and I love to walk and listen to music.

I can't do this, because too many people use free range dogs as security systems.

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