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Comment by angarg12 | Hacker News Reader

My hometown was founded by romans, and during the last 10 years the local government has made big efforts to make the city more walkable and pedestrian friendly.

If a 2000+ years old city can do it, surely American towns can.

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A 2000 year old city has a much better chance of being walkable than an American city. Take a look at something like the Dallas/Fort Worth area. It’s an enormous sprawling web of low density suburbs. To make it walkable would require a very large amount of effort and that effort would likely be wasted due to the climate. Even a five minute walk down the street is going to leave you exhausted and dripping with sweat on most summer days there.

Making "Dallas/Fort Worth" walkable would be a multi-decade, multi trillion dollar project. But if it were legal for small scale, local changes to be made, then the market would 1) experiment, 2) pay for it, and 3) more closely match what people desire and what's feasible.

Parts of Dallas and Fort Worth are walkable already, and there are sizable pops living in both cities that absolutely do not want that

It’s possible that some trees might help that.

There's plenty of trees most places. Dallas has the largest urban forest in the US.

And yet I can show you image after image of treeless streets and sidewalks. Therefore, there is room for improvement.

Is it possible that Dallas has the largest urban forest in the US, because it has the most urban sprawl? (I know nothing of this urban forest claim).

Trees don't do much to stop you from sweating buckets when its 110F at 50% humidity.

1) While, I can't personally speak (much) to walking around Dallas, I can speak quite a bit to walking around Austin, Texas. Walking around on a day that is 110º is doable, because the humidity is rarely ever that high, when the temp is.

2) Shade trees lower the temperature for the air under them, by as much as ten degrees.

I'm not arguing there shouldn't be trees,at at least where I'm at in DFW there's tons of them, I'm just arguing that dropping the temp from 110F to 100F still doesn't change the fact walking around in even 100F at decently high humidity will render most people a sweaty mess in a block. We had weeks where the heat index was around 120F this summer.

Even just sitting around outside in a shady backyard with lots of vegetation, a pool, and umbrellas we were still sweating profusely this last summer.

Trees prevent that 110F in the shade from become 120F on asphalt and concrete.

Ok, but you're still going to be a sweaty mess just walking a few blocks when its 110F and 50% humidity, and probably not going to walk even a few blocks in that kind of heat when you can otherwise traverse that with air conditioning.

Didn’t the Romans build walkable cities? What happened to make them less walkable?

I'm not sure what the GP's city is, but many old cities in Europe were torn up in the 1960s-70s for freeways and parking lots, because the future would be the age of the automobile.

People look to Amsterdam now as a pedestrian and bicycle paradise, but that's a recent development; until a couple decades ago it was as car dependent as anywhere.

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