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Comment by crubier | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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

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.

New york comes to mind.

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