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Re:The Irrelevance of Thingies by CalRobert on Monday September 03, 2018 @04:43PM (#17904774)
I want to live in a walkable place where I can ride my bike without dying. I also want the same for my kid.

Right now, in the US, that means cities. That's _it_. And even then, most cities are horrible places to cycle.

But it doesn't have to be that way. I'd love to walk or cycle around Houten (NL, pop ~45,000 and built for walking and cycling from the beginning), or perhaps Rothenburg Ob Der Tauber in the old town centre (Germany, pop 10,000 for the town as a whole, smaller within the medieval walls of course).

I just can't think of any place built since the rise of the car which is not a city, and pleasant to walk in, aside from some very small communities like ecovillages (which are nice but not going to be self contained) - https://ecovillage.org/ . Even towns in the US that like to think of themselves as fitting this tend to be fantastically expensive and still very car dependent (San Luis Obispo comes to mind)

Re:The Irrelevance of Thingies by freehunter on Monday September 03, 2018 @05:02PM (#17904851)
You might be surprised. My Midwestern 7,000 population town doesn't have very many dedicated bike lanes, but biking in town is incredibly common (to the point that the local library allows you to check out bikes like books) and we have a long-distance bike trail connecting us to the nearest "big" city.

Not every town is like that, of course, which is why I picked this town to live in. The best walkable/bikable towns, I've found, don't advertise themselves as walkable or bikable. They just are.

Re:The Irrelevance of Thingies by CalRobert on Tuesday September 04, 2018 @03:42AM (#17907296)
If you don't mind sharing, can I ask what town it might be? Or if you don't want to reveal your home do you know of any others with similar traits?
Re:The Irrelevance of Thingies by freehunter on Tuesday September 04, 2018 @03:15PM (#17911946)
I'd rather not say where I live (even though I love my city and really do want you to move here), but I can tell you how to find similar cities. Pick a mid-size Midwestern metro area (say, Madison Wisconsin), then do a Google search for "best suburbs around Madison Wisconsin". I see a site like niche.com and click on it. I know the first few results are likely to be the most expensive places to live, so if my budget is high those are where I'm going. I might go down into to 5-10 range if I'm looking for a more budget-friendly place. Now I'm looking at Oregon, WI, which is about 15 miles from downtown Madison. Bringing it up in Google Maps, looks like there's a bike trail that will take me all the way into Madison without having to ride on the road? Score. Zillow shows housing prices around $150-$300k, great. Yelp shows a coffee house and a couple of tasty looking restaurants. Doesn't seem to be any local breweries, but oh well.

I'll also check out Verona, another well rated suburb. Looks to be a bit more expensive in housing, but also more local food options. Again a solid bike trail into the big city. Monona might be a little too close to the big city. Sun Prairie might be a little too far away. Disclaimer, I've never lived in any of those cities, so this is all based on just 5 minutes worth of Internet research. YMMV.

We got lucky when we settled down in that we knew what state we wanted to live in and what metro area we wanted to be around. From there it was just trying to find a bedroom community with a good solid downtown. Most suburbs close to the city won't have a downtown (they're more like residential areas), so it really narrows your choices a lot. I like using Google Maps to find area bike trails and bike lanes, which helps show how seriously a town/area takes bike safety and their overall attitude towards bikers/pedestrians.

Hopefully that helps.

Re:The Irrelevance of Thingies by liveoneggs on Monday September 03, 2018 @06:11PM (#17905214)
so as a weird counterpoint I live in a somewhat unique part of Atlanta (east-side in-town) where you could exist without a car, housing is relatively affordable (400K - 900K for single-family-house, much less for condo/townhouse) and can walk to: a small grocery, coffee shop, a few restaurants; biking opens up to pretty much anything and thanks to The Beltline and The Freedom Path is very safe
Re:The Irrelevance of Thingies by freehunter on Monday September 03, 2018 @09:19PM (#17905936)
>400K - 900K for single-family-house

Hot piss, my house cost $150,000.

Re:The Irrelevance of Thingies by liveoneggs on Tuesday September 04, 2018 @11:33AM (#17909725)
don't look at NYC or SFBA :)
Re:The Irrelevance of Thingies by CalRobert on Tuesday September 04, 2018 @03:50PM (#17912225)
That reveals part of the bigger problem, though - it would be nice to live somewhere homes were affordable for people who don't work in tech (or the few other high paying professions out there).