Being a Brit, who walks to the corner shop, or even supermarket if I just need a few bits, I tried walking a few times while in the US. The US makes it hilariously impractical. Pavements (sidewalks) will just randomly stop. Crossing the road is sometimes a crime, depending on state! Even convenience stores are inconveniently far away.

You've spread your infrastructure out so wide in some places that walking becomes more like a hike. It's little wonder that you end up driving for anything beyond going next door. :)

The biggest problems exist in areas that don't have any pre-car infrastructure. Our density is fine (if not ideal) in the older east-coast cities, but anything that was build up in (or after) the 20th century is a disaster.

The challenge is that the most walkable areas I've been to are the ones that are thoroughly inaccessible by cars. Building a city to be accessible by cars (and trucks) inherently sacrifices walkability due to the lost density created by larger roads.

I'm curious what a modern city would look like where we were willing to drop the hard requirement of being navigable by Land Rover -- if we were to build something akin to historic Rome or Barcelona using modern technology.

That fits. NYC was fairly walking friendly.

San Diego was not intended to have pedestrians at all as far as I could figure. Most striking was how much space it took up when flying in compared to population. Then you'd see minor residential streets with road an pavement wide enough to be a 4 lane highway.

I don't know how zoning works in the US, but I guess that's the explanation for all the shops and bars being miles away from where people live? Or is that another car-related choice?

Yep. San Diego is largely a post-car creation. Philadelphia is a city of rather similar population, but is basically the same size as it was in 1890[1]. San Diego, on the other hand, grew almost 10-fold from 1890 to 1930, then again from 1930.

I don't know too much about zoning processes, aside from that in the mid-to-late 20th century, mixed use zoning wasn't in fashion. My grandfather was a suburban mayor in the '60s, and when he talked about zoning process, he said it was: "Well, we drew a box and put the residential here, and the commercial district here" -- and San Diego was built up at a similar time, so I expect a similar process existed. A decent representation of this process is SimCity -- that the entire notion of mixed-use zoning was absent is certainly a reflection of 20th-century urban planning.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largest_cities_in_the_United_S...

[2] http://www.sandiegohistory.org/links/sandiegopopulation.htm

SimCity also got rid of the bane of the US city, massive surface parking, because it made the game boring and the cities unappealing.

from http://humantransit.org/2013/05/how-sim-city-greenwashes-par...

"Librande: Yes, definitely. I think the biggest one was the parking lots. When I started measuring out our local grocery store, which I don’t think of as being that big, I was blown away by how much more space was parking lot rather than actual store. That was kind of a problem, because we were originally just going to model real cities, but we quickly realized there were way too many parking lots in the real world and that our game was going to be really boring if it was proportional in terms of parking lots.

Manaugh: You would be making SimParkingLot, rather than SimCity."

I live in a San Diego neighborhood built in the 20's along a street car line. It's about 3 miles from downtown.

(Edit: the streetcar is long gone, though there's a bar called Station nearby and a few other hints of its former existence).

It's not bad for SD, but the streets are wide and drivers blow through stop signs constantly. I can, at least, walk to several great bars, a small Target Express, and a few other amenities.

It's low to moderate density because the homeowners fight all new construction tooth and nail (I go to the planning meetings). There isn't a single bike lane in my community. Any time someone suggests building something they are told they have to build massive amounts of parking, so nothing gets built.

Of course, their charming cottage homes (which would be illegal to build now) are $700k to ~$1.1million, so it's great for the landowners. Not so much everyone else.

The people who live and vote here are mostly owners, so they have a very strong interest to fight any new construction, increasing the scarcity of their asset, and its value. I can't see how this changes so long as any area which is composed primarily of landowners can vote to make sure nobody else is allowed to build there.

It's pathetic here. Where I live, in the suburbs, there are people who rely on public transportation, but I honesly don't know how they pull it off. I tried it, at different points in my life, and it takes all day to do simple tasks. Right now I'm without a car due to emission failure, on a perfectly running, stoichiometric 14:7 to 1, four banger small car, and I'm stuck. I need to get my vechicle going today.

For myself, I use a car, and a bike every day. I drive my vehicle into the city, and park where I legally can. It seems like it's shrinking monthly? I then take my bike out and peddle to a job I detest. A job site that changes monthly.

I don't have an answer, but bicyclists should be given some perks. One--don't require a motorized vehicle as a job requirement, unless the job requires driving. I've seen too many employers slip that one in casually. It's usually some guy exploiting the minimum wage.

Two--If your riding a bike to work, lay off the strict dress code. A little?

Three--Give the bicyclist a credit on their taxes, if they don't have any motorized vechicle. (Guys like me wouldn't qualify. I'm not giving up my driving privilege until they pry the wheel from my cold, dead hand.)

Some americans even get in the car to fetch their mail from the mailbox at the road...

Some Americans have driveways 1/2 mile long. And longer...

My parents house (that I used to live at) was a mile from it's mailbox at the end of a long private dirt road. I would walk to get the mail every afternoon (I was homeschooled) to help clear my head and to get some daily exercise.

That's like 800 m, still very walkable

But not very fun when it's 103 degrees outside.

You still have to walk back.

I have to admit that we drove our trash to the dumpster where we lived in Pittsburgh. It was an apartment complex. We lived at the extreme east end, while the one and only dumpster was 0.3 miles away at the extreme west end.

I really want to believe you're joking, but think you're not :)

He's not. It's very common in rural Texas, and even in some cities where the USPS has implemented mail cluster boxes for 12+ households. Yours might be inconveniently far away from your home.

https://about.usps.com/publications/pub265a/pub265a_006.htm

I worked on a cattle ranch one summer in high school in West Texas and it was easily a 15 - 20 minute drive to get to the mailbox on the highway (the ranch was 11 miles from end to end, all rough dirt roads and gates every quarter mile or so).

Walking to get your mail in 105+ heat and back would have taken(no exaggeration) almost all day.

Hah, my parents don't get USPS mail at all, and they're in a smallish suburb that's not all that sparse.

going next door will probably get you shot. Just drive.

As a Chicago native who has had a gun flashed at me while walking my dog a block from my house, I wish you were joking.

Unless all cities concurrently advance in this area, this simply becomes a factor that drives home purchase / rental prices up.

San Francisco has neighborhoods with a WalkScore of 100, but the baristas and cooks and other laborers in those neighborhoods, including construction workers who build the homes, largely drive and transit in.

IMO it basically carries that you worsen the Effective WalkScore of other people's lives, even if they live in neighborhoods that are walkable to desk-sitting professionals, because the wage-paying jobs in those areas (e.g. Oakland / East Bay) doesn't pay as well as the wage-paying jobs in neighboring cities with stronger economies (e.g. SF).

This is absolutely happening right now and the reverse impact is that SF's cost of living is creeping over Oakland's and driving the folks who live in Oakland and work in SF to further reaches of the bay as people, giving up on walkable life in SF, try it out in Oakland.

Bicycles help this, but I'm here to tell you that nobody has any fucking sympathy that you've chosen a car-free life and it's El Nino and why are you late because your coworker who drives an SUV 100 miles is already here and how is your life possibly harder?

Anyway .. it's complex AF. Believing another world is possible is for sure a great first step.

Not everyone wants to live downtown, though. In fact, most people don't. More often than not schools in suburbs and rural areas are head and shoulders above their urban counterparts.

I used to live in a downtown area and it was nice being able to walk 6 blocks to work. But I would never want to raise a family in an apartment or with those terrible schools.

City living means pretty much apartment living in the US. It's a problem, because neighbourhoods can be walkable and still feel spacious. There's some fantastic low rise downtowns in Savannah, Charleston, New Orleans,.... Problem is, there's so few of them that they've all become expensive and tourist destinations. If more cities were like this, I think people would like their city centers a lot better. Now, it's either the car wastelands of urban renewal in the middle of the country, or the insanity of massively crowded downtowns on the coasts. No wonder people prefer to move out.

>More often than not schools in suburbs and rural areas are head and shoulders above their urban counterparts.

a school in a rural area isn't automatically better than a school in an urban area because its rural.

There are plenty of shit rural schools. I'm saying if you take a random rural school and a random urban school the rural school often performs better in standardized testing. And the suburban school often outperforms both.

I'm not arguing rural/suburban schools aren't often better, I'm arguing that they're not often better just because they're rural/suburban.

You're arguing against a point I never made.

The GP is talking about the need for walkable cities, you said urban schools are bad as if they're bad just because they're urban.

If less people commuted into the city from the burbs urban schools would get better for the exact same reasons the schools are often better in the burbs now.

In terms of actual quality of education I'll agree with you on the last point. But in my experience -- having spent a lot of time in both urban and rural schools -- the quality of education in urban schools is typically better than or similar to that available in rural schools on average.

Most urban areas have a mix of terrible and excellent schools. The excellent ones rival or exceed the best of the surrounding suburban schools (except with more in-school variance in terms of quality of instruction and background of students), while the terrible ones are truly toxic. Conversely, rural schools are more uniformly "meh" -- generally not toxic, but also pretty underwhelming in terms of instructional quality and available learning opportunities/resources.

Also, IMO, test scores are not great indicators of school quality. Even if you could perfectly control for all confounding factors, test scores probably still wouldn't be great indicators. They're simply, de facto, measuring the wrong things.

What you are missing is that "good schools" doesn't actually mean good schools. It's a dog whistle.

When I say "good schools" I mean "good schools." If you want to call me a racist why not just come out and say it?

Or better yet, say something constructive.

"Good schools" mostly means "wealthy students".

If rich people move into the cities, and form little neighborhood clusters to exclude poor families, the schools will become more attractive by all standard measures.

Now, the trick is that it's much easier to build out segregated wealthy communities in the suburbs, than it is in cities, since tight geography works against the informal segregation of suburban development projects.

My sister just moved to Wyoming and has a daughter in school there. They live a few blocks from a school, but she's not able to attend that school because it's in high demand. Apparently parents are able to apply to go to any (public) school in the district, and are accepted based on a lottery with no preference given to proximity to the school. (I could be wrong about these details, this is just what she told me.)

I guess that system is designed in part to account for the effect you're describing - if one school starts to become known as a better school, the kids in the poor parts of town are just as likely to be able to get in as anyone else. I have no idea if it actually works that way, but I do know it's a pain for my sister who now has to drive her kids to school several miles away when they could easily walk to the closer one. Can't please everyone, I guess.

This is how Boston works. Implementing it accelerated white flight in the 60s and 70s.

> "Good schools" mostly means "wealthy students".

Be careful there at teasing out the real motivation. If you want "wealthy students" because poor people are icky, then you're a jerk. If you want "wealthy students" because you want schools to be well-funded, that means you do in fact want good schools.

How to tell the difference? Maybe by putting the person somewhere where all schools in a very large area are funded at the exact same level. I don't know. But assuming it's a dog whistle isn't a good idea.

Yes, we do have a measurement problem. I was going to propose a solution, but it's a hard problem and any solution will necessarily have side effects on the surrounding communities as well.

Okay. One constructive remark coming up...

What's your definition of "good schools"?

Actually teaching the kids some things. What other definition is there?

The suburban/urban school divide is less potent than it was 10 or 20 years ago. For example, this program on a school district that's 99% african american and has huge rates of poverty with terrible failing schools is about a decidedly suburban school: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/562/t...

In many cities, poverty is highly concentrated not only in urban areas but also in some of the surrounding suburbs. So the suburban schools -- or at least some of them -- end up as bad or worse than the worst of the urban schools.

So the old surburb/urban school quality divide is slowly breaking down. As a result, affluent urban areas often have high quality schools while impoverished suburbs often have terrible schools.

That said, it's generally true that living in the "good" suburbs is cheaper than living in the "good" parts of urban areas.

There's a fairly low ceiling in terms of walkability within cities though. Once you exceed a certain distance, no amount of walkability is going to convince people to walk, and rent/housing prices within the walking distance tend to be much higher than those outside, thus exacerbating the issue of public transportation.

If you're able to walk for 95% of your needs, public transit, taxis, uber and zipcars solve the other 5%. If you're only able to walk for 5% of your needs, public transit isn't going to help you much.

Rent/Housing does indeed cost more in walk-able areas. That's a great signal telling us that there's a lot of demand for walk-able neighborhoods, and urban planning should allow a lot more of them.

Well going to work is probably 90% of your moving needs.

So if you live 45 minutes by train from where you're working and there is an actual train there, public transit helps you a lot.

That's a woefully inaccurate representation of my life and the life of my friends. Do more things.

Tangent but:

I live in SoCal, and I can't get my head around the car culture mentality. Of all the places that should be walkable, one that is 80 degrees and sunny 90% of the entire year should rank very high on the list. But nooo.... the walkable cities are in places that get run over by a glacier every six months. Go figure.

Because it's large?

I'm all for public transportation and LA used to have the best in the world 80 years ago. But, a large city as large as LA is never really going to be completely walkable unless everyone always moves close to their job. That would mean moving away from friends and family because of a job change rather than just commuting a little further. I suspect most people would chose to stay near their friends and family rather than move closer to their job.

You can compare Tokyo which is large like LA but which has excellent mass transit and yet the average commute is 80 minutes each way. Why? People can't or won't uproot their families for new jobs. Also housing close to a job is probably also often either too expensive (downtown) or undesirable (industrial area).

Also, the popularization of two-income households complicates this quite a bit. How often do you see partners that work near each other?

New York is larger than LA and has very good transit.

Coastal areas are becoming more and more walkable... Minus the lack of density - Santa Monica is the prime example, ask people about walkability and everyone is excited, then talk about making it happen for more people and you get crucified.

In the valleys, walkability runs into the heat problems in the summer. Walking in 100F+ is no fun and can be dangerous to some.

Even in inland CA you have perfect walking weather for around 9 months a year. It's more of a cultural thing in my opnion.

I think you are right.

There definitely is a very strong desire still for wider spaces, bigger yards, etc. As the result, walking in most of inland sprawl take a lot more time and effort.

I grew up in South Texas. Ain't nobody got time for walkin' more than a block in 100+F heat and people end up spending more than their mortgage payment on electricity and A/C repair because the heat will literally kill you.

LA was built by people who were escaping the stressful dense urban life of the east coast. Not hard to understand why, when they arrived at empty land by the ocean with perfect weather, they didn't resolve to build a bunch of apartment towers.

This is a great point. Why do so many people in the US live on large lots with huge houses in the suburbs? Because we can.

Live in downtown Minneapolis, can confirm walk-ability and presence of seasonal glacier.

Because it is new. Maybe not new in age, but new in being a big city. Founded in 1800s, became second biggest city in 1980, third biggest in 1960, fourth in 1950: http://www.discoverlosangeles.com/blog/historical-timeline-l...

Big cities on the east coast are older, so didn't develop in the age of the automobile and have to conform to its needs. Except cities in the SE, which again, grew due to modern appliances like the air conditioner.

A winter ice blanket makes driving less desirable. Pleasant weather makes walking more desirable.

This implies that walking has a hard limit on desirability, which is easily topped by driving, even with the worst traffic. You have to make driving worse to tip the preference toward walking, even if the conditions simultaneously make walking less desirable.

If driving 5 miles is likely to put your car in a ditch, you may opt for a 200m walk, which may only plant your ass on the concrete once or twice. If you have to shovel snow for 20 minutes to drive anywhere at all, you may prefer to just pull on some wellies and hoof it through the drifts. If every mile you drive is rusting away your vehicle's underbody due to road salt, you may prefer to wear away your boot soles instead.

If you could wave a magic wand to install a roof over ever road and highway, the residents would squeal with glee, toss out their tire chains, shovels, and boots, and get right back into their cars.

In places where there's actual winter people adjust to it. Snow in Atlanta is something people perceive as a PITA whereas in Augusta (Maine) it's perceived as no more inconvenient than rain.

In Maine, people bitch when it isn't cold and snowy enough. This winter was brutal for the ice fishers, snowmobilers, and skiers.

"In Maine, people bitch when it isn't cold and snowy enough."

That's Stockholm Syndrome, is what that is.

Never did I ever adjust enough to stop bitching about shoveling driveways or scraping windshields or hitting patches of black ice or having the plow throw snow back onto your driveway so you have to shovel it again. Snow always has been, and always will be, more inconvenient than rain.

Except freezing rain. That stuff is the worst.

SoCal was never walkable beyond a local neighborhood - if you look at population density and where the freeways are, they all parallel former lines of the Pacific Electric Interurban system. [1][2]

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Electric

[2] - https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2e/Los_Ange...