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Comment by b2fel | Hacker News Reader

I can imagine but wait until you visit a walkable city!

Man this is America. If people had any interest in walking, our national health picture would look very different. Even huge swathes of people voting for public transit in the US are doing so because they want everyone ELSE off the highway.

It's not just about a lack of interest in walking. If your infrastructure is extremely hostile to walking, it's outright dangerous and unreliable and force people out of it.

>our national health picture would look very different.

It wouldn't, you'd need to change the food industry for that to happen.

No, consistent exercise is more than enough to make a significant difference. I didn’t say it would be fixed, I said it would be very different.

you know what they say: you can't outrun a bad diet.

I’ll take that still. It’s bananas to me that more people aren’t in favour of public transit only for that reason.

THe history doesn't help. LA is a huge area and California is traditionally very rocky and hilly. The great weather and modern industrialism is the reason people continued to flock here after the Gold Rush. But anyone playing Orgeon trails knows how rough getting to California was to begin with.

There's definitely amenities that can be done to make LA walkable regardless, but I understand that nature did not intent for this settlement to be human friendly.

There are walkable parts of LA, just LA itself isn't very walkable. But if you confine yourself to westwood around UCLA, you can even walk all the way to Sawtelle for Japanese food (although it isn't a very nice walk).

LA is walkable.

However I don't really like walking everywhere or taking public transportation so LA is the perfect city for me because it has many municipal places I can park my car and then walk around.

Let me explain LA to you since you clearly don't understand it.

LA is a combination of many smaller cities. Each one, on it's own is a small micro city with everything you would expect. You can live in Santa Monica, Pasadena, Burbank, Sherman oaks, West Hollywood, Ktown, Beverly Hills, Sawtelle, etc. each one of those places has a very vibrant and walkable area with cute shops and restaurants and easy public transportation. If you live in those places you don't necessarily need a car.

The problem with LA is that you might want to go from one of these places to another and the walk would take a very long time because LA county is bigger than Delaware and Rhode Island. But you can walk it if you want.

LA is currently the only city in North America building new subway lines. And is doing so rapidly.

> LA is walkable.

You and I have different definitions of walkable.

Mostly in the 70s, sunny, sidewalks everywhere, an actual street food culture, a bus network that spans the entire county and about half a dozen rail lines. Where does the goalpost have to move for people who have clearly never spent much time in LA to see it for what it is?

> LA is currently the only city in North America building new subway lines.

That is demonstrably false. As I type this comment I can hear the sounds of excavators digging out a station for a new subway line in Toronto.

Panama Metro Line 3, too, which is underground for 5km.

All the extensions under construction to the Seattle‘s link light rail are grade separated and subway standard (or 3/4 if you count the Tacoma extension).

which Toronto? The biggest known Toronto isn't in the US.

"[...] city in North America [...]"

It's also mostly low density, single story housing which of course means that the distance to get anywhere will be quite substantial.

Density is pretty dispersed in hot pockets. You have places like koreatown with 45 thousand people a square mile.

> LA is walkable.

> However I don't really like walking everywhere

Hint: If you don't like walking, then your city is not walkable. In actually walkable places, everyone likes to walk because it's so much better.

Hint: if you read the parent comment, you see that "LA" is actually a collection of many smaller cities, and that "LA" is geographically bigger than some states and so of course it is not completely walkable. LA is 44 miles long and 24 miles wide. And that's just the city of Los Angeles. The county of Los Angeles is 4000 square miles, and has over 80 cities, most of which are only separated from each other by a road. But LA Metro is the (geographically) largest public municipal public transportation system, so you can take a bus from one of of LA county to another.

Downtown is walkable. Hollywood is walkable. Echo Park is walkable. Pasadena is walkable. Santa Monica is walkable. Long Beach is walkable. Culver City is walkable. Bevery Hills is walkable. Glendale is walkable. Burbank is walkable.

> Downtown is walkable. Hollywood is walkable. Echo Park is walkable. Pasadena is walkable. Santa Monica is walkable. Long Beach is walkable. Culver City is walkable. Bevery Hills is walkable. Glendale is walkable. Burbank is walkable.

In the same way that Everest is walkable. None are walkable cities by any reasonable definition.

100% this. The person above has never been in any actually walkable city. Can't blame them, these are very rare in the US. (I haven't seen any yet).

I'm out walking around LA all the time. Santa Monica alone is a beach town with an amazing ocean front. You don't need a car at all. I'm seriously sitting here doing the Obama shrug meme.

It's stupid that I even have to point out a few things. Like that I was born in Europe, have been to Germany and Japan, and lived near NYC for a time so I probably know better than some European about my own city.

Santa Monica *beachfront* is decently walkable. Santa Monica as a whole is not walkable. All the other examples (Downtown?) are also completely not walkable.

At least my definition of walkable does not mean "you can technically walk there" it means "if you live here you will not want nor need to use your car"

There's three new stations in downtown which extended the blue and yellow line.

Santa Monica and downtown are now directly linked with the yellow line.

Having public transport is 5% of what makes a place walkable

New york comes to mind.

Of course the entire city of Los Angeles isn't walkable. It's 500 square miles, or over 10x the size of Paris (40 square miles).

But LA has a great many neighborhoods that are very walkable, and it has public transportation connecting all those walkable neighborhoods.

And in response to your spurious claims about Santa Monica: the entirety of the city of Santa Monica is just as walkable as the cities of London and Paris, and definitely more walkable than the outlying neighborhoods like Versailles.

Downtown Los Angeles is also very walkable, and there are tourists who make that walk every day.

No matter how accessible you make it, humans in the modern era can't just walk around 15+ miles a day and do any other kind of commerce. LA is just a huge, hilly city. Even with full bipartisan support and unlimited funding, it's a fundamentally harder problem to make LA walkable compared to something like Copenhagen.

Well, yeah, that is the point.

Making a walkable LA would mean making a much smaller urban area (or series of much smaller) with much higher population density and ideally rewilding most of the LA metro area. It is functionally impossible in the current political environment.

LA with a subway system would be insanely clutch. Throw in a regional rail to SB and SD, and I won't need a rental car again when I go out there!

Have you seen other american cities outside of NYC and Chicago? LA is walkable in a lot of places,plenty of side walks. Southern cities are particularly atrocious because even if they were walkable, the heat makes walking impractical in the summer (which can be > half of the year).

Southerner here, bless your little heart, we are fine!

No, we're not. been wanting to take a walk for ~2 months now and couldn't because of the heat. Maybe in more inland cities it is nicer, but within ~200 miles from the ocean it is unbearable.

Live in Houston, and no we're not. The only break we get from punishing heat is hurricanes and floods, but that often comes with significant power loss throughout the area, making the heat even worse.

Also live in Houston; the heat is uncomfortable but is nothing that some Gatorade Zero can't fix. It's a walkable enough city if you live in the loop. Not NYC walkable but not nothing. Outside of the loop; forget about it! A small price to pay for being able to wear shorts and sandals all winter!

This is such a tired argument. Yes, YOU like it, that doesn't make an objective goal for every person on earth to achieve.

> doesn't make an objective goal for every person on earth to achieve.

The walkability of cities is linked to increased happiness in people, so there actually is merit to saying that it is objectively good. Walkability encourages you to literally walk past large amounts of people, local businesses and plenty of outdoor activities that you have the opportunity to take part in.

maybe he doesn’t feel like stepping over needles and passed out homeless people in order to get somewhere

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