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Comment by chomp | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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