The most, and least, walkable cities | Hacker News Reader

The most, and least, walkable cities

economist.com

55 pointspavel_lishin31 comments

I noticed Utrecht in the third place. Having worked there, I can agree with that. However, with Utrecht being so expensive to live in I experienced that most people that work in Utrecht, don't live there. They live in 'affordable' smaller cities and villages nearby. And with industrial estates like Papendorp and Science Park having sub-par public transit, those people often take the car. If you live in a place like Cothen, it is 19 minutes by car to Science Park or 53 minutes by public transit. Papendorp is over an hour by public transit and 18 minutes by car.

So while 75% of the people living in Utrecht are likely to travel to work by bicycle or even walking, I'd say that the people working in Utrecht are far less likely to travel there by bicycle, walking or even public transit. Resulting in daily heavy traffic on the nearby four highways of Utrecht (A2, A12, A28, A27)

Utrecht is fantastic and even if you get to the city by car, the most convenient is to drop it in the park and ride outside for 7 euros a day including public transport to the center.

All cities should have a downtown where the only vehicles are taxis and buses and some neighbour.

The neighbourhoods around the center are also designed in a way that crossing them by car is possible but very inconvenient. Going from Lombok to Wittevrouwen is always around 10 minutes by bike but can be more than 30 by car during busy hours.

Parking outside the city at P+R Westraven and then taking a tram to the client took 20 minutes, going directly to the client by car was 10 minutes. So I would just drive there directly, as it was faster and much more convenient than having to switch from car to tram and then walking 10 minutes for the final leg.

If Utrecht would invest in better public transit that would lower the amount of cars significantly, I assume. If the P+R was a better option I would for sure have taken it.

This is not so much about which cities are walkable, but a survey of how people actually do get around there. Big difference. I've browsed the dataset and Auckland rates as less "walkable" than Kuala Lumpur. Yes, Kiwis do get around by car a lot, but Auckland is still a perfectly pleasant, walkable city. On the other hand, I've never been in a more pedestrian-hostile place than KL.

I disagree about Kuala Lumpur. Maybe it depends on the area, but IME the walkability is great. Public transport is superb, lots of zebra crossings and foot paths, drivers are considerate. I see lots of people walking everywhere. Even at night, as the city feels really safe.

It's been six years since I was there, so things may have changed in the meantime, but back then I've explored central KL on foot for a few days, and did not find that particularly enjoyable. Public transport is indeed great, but as for actually walking... taking kilometer-long detours to cross some urban motorway, being stuck for five minutes at a pedestrian traffic light, sidewalks being constantly interrupted by driveways or switching to the other side of the road... all perfectly normal. This depends on the area too, of course -- I found Putrajaya pretty nice, for example, but also not representative.

Auckland is a horrible car-ridden shithole.

You can't get from where people live, to where they work without a car and actually maintain a job.

Completely agree. I live in the CDB because I don't drive and need to get easy access to the ferries. From the CDB it's easy to get around on public transport and I have a 5minute walk as a commute. I don't know why everyone in Auckland wants to live in the burbs?! The downside is that Friday and Saturday nights turn into a seedy cesspit of drunks and homeless people, but I don't go out anymore so don't really see it much. They also physically cut the CBD off from the nearest neighborhood with freeways which choke the CDB. I guess some right wing government decided they wanted to get to their office and back and fuck the pedestrians. There is even a lovely park in which they just put a freeway straight though. As a result its hard to walk out of the CDB and the center is full of carparks which few can afford. (And the rail network is sporadically not working, and busses are incredibly sloooooow). Would not live here if i wasn't forced too.

Interesting. I lived in Auckland for a month pre-Covid and liked it quite well in general -- fairly clean, modern, lots of green, and not overflowing with traffic. Not much public transport, of course, and a moderately bad homeless problem, but otherwise pleasant all around. Not to mention all the stunning nature an hour's drive away. So I'm genuinely surprised by the negative comments. Has the situation deteriorated recently? Or is the perspective of visitors and locals just that different?

Interactive visualization with free access: https://citiesmoving.com/visualizations/

The difference between the US and even its northern neighbor, Canada, seems stark.

That being said, how does Manhattan have a greater percentage of car trips than NYC? Are hundreds of thousands of people taking Taxis and Ubers?

> Are hundreds of thousands of people taking Taxis and Ubers?

Probably. Not just the tourists, but business folks. I remember people would regularly take a taxi for a business meeting only a couple blocks away. I guess if the company is paying for it, why not.

I noticed this as well. I find it hard to believe that car is the most common form of transportation to work in New York. I would assume Public Transit and Walking would dominate.

I don't think that an overall statistic works very well for this.

I live in London and I probably do split my time very roughly 1/3 ish across the three modes as stated.

But that's because I'm doing different things.

The tube is used to go into town, meet up with urban living friends, go to museums, visit specialist high end shops.

The car is used to go to larger stores like the supermarket, big shopping centres, DIY stores, to go out of town, go to the golf range, visit friends and family.

Walking gets me to the corner shop, to local friends, to the park, the last mile on public transport.

It's very walkable/cyclable, I just don't spend my life in a 1-5 mile radius.

The article specifically refers to statistics about how people commute to work.

Sure, I have done all three for a work commute as well.

It just depends where you live and where the job is. The city is not homogeneous, nowhere over maybe a few km in radius is.

yeah, I used to live in Shoreditch (before it was cool) and commute by bicycle to Queenway 90% of the way on the canal. It was brilliant and not many people seemed to do it at the time. I did have some pretty hairy experience cycling around London however (was almost squeezed between 2 double-deckers once, not to mention black cabs!). Its not the most bike friendly, but this was all before the Olympics...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041202...

The triangular visualizations are kinda nifty.

Data and more visualisations here https://citiesmoving.com/visualizations/

https://archive.is/rgGaX

Unfortunately, the table with the actual data is not functional here and it's one of the more interesting parts of the article.

Yea none of the interactive stuff appears to be functional :\

The city/cities I have lived in would not be considered walkable by many people. The thing is if you want walkable you pick your location in the city to make it walkable for you. I have always been able to find a place that can cover a large % of my trips by foot. I love cars and still own them, I just prefer to run my errands on foot.

there's a massive difference between city planning in European cities vs Canadian for example. I walk my groceries too, like 18 blocks, it's walkable but not what I would define as "a walkable city", which would be someplace with pedestrian priority zones and not needing to walk more than 10 blocks for anything you might need.

Walking, scootering or taking transit to work became of considerable less interest to me once I became fully remote.

What is interesting to me now is whether my children will able to walk to school and back, since that one is not remote, and I hope it won't be.

Counter-point: walking and taking public transit became considerably _more_ interesting for me once I became fully remote. However, I do live in an area with walkable amenities (coffee shops, grocery stores, etc).

Sure, but unfortunately, the linked website doesn't ask about that.

I agree with this. Why would I need to own a car when I'm going to the office once a week?

Correction (May 13th, 2024): A previous version of this article stated that two Spanish cities made the top ten. In fact, it was four. Sorry.

lol, I see what you did there

Can someone summarize this for us? even with the archive link I can't see the data

My take-aways were:

- Americans drive

- Non-European countries walk / transit

- Very large cities aggregate a lot of kinds of living that skew the results towards the common modality for that country (e.g. New York and London).

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