> walkability is super overrated. I don't want to go to the same 5 resturaunts I can walk to. I like variety. I work from home and don't commute, but when I do go out I want to explore.

5? Depends where you live of course, I have 100+ within 20 min walk, easily!

> Being in the middle of a city doesn't make one more social. Actually it can be more lonely ironically. You are surrounded by strangers.

Depends. If you go to the same coffee shop every day, you certainly start meeting people.. or sit on a coffee shop for a while on the street, on a park..

I mean it seems obvious to me that if you have 100+ restaurants within a 20 min walk, all with near minimum wage workers that is a lot of less wealthy people having to commute in to give you that experience. That's great for you I guess.

Different strokes.

My wife and I stayed in a suburb for 3 months while we were caretaking and working remotely.

I couldn’t step out my door and go out on a run, the nearest coffee shop was a 15 minute drive away, and no restaurants were open past 9 and often closed on weird days.

It felt like the only way to be comfortable in the suburb was to own more things and build your own castle.

We returned back to Chicago and immediately bought to secure our preferred urban lifestyle for the long term.

Yup. We've considered moving to the small IL town my wife is from. It's even fairly lively for a small town (they have like 7 restaurants instead of 3). But we visit for a month or so once or twice a year and by the end of the month we are dying to get out.

Even thought in Chicago MOST of the time we go to the same handful of restaurants, its the option to have a near countless amount that we COULD go to that keeps us from feeling like were going to the same few places.

I think with the popular conception/definition of walkability and the assigned importance of that conception is a little over-rated.

I personally feel like it overvalues commercial activity (restaurants, retail, grocery, entertainment). Obviously, it depends on how often you want to partake in said commercial activities as far as how you would value it.

I would love if the conception of walkability could also take into account:

'How far can I walk without having to worry about cars/crossing streets/waiting for lights?'

'How safe/comfortable is the walk? Will I be walking by people who will harass me/be high on drugs/try to sell me something?'

'How easy is it to string together a run without having to stop?'

'How busy are the sidewalks? Will I have to be dodging people on their phones all the time?'

'Is it easy to take a dog for a walk? Or are there limited green spaces?'

'Are there social/interest groups nearby that meet up?'

I find some of these types of factors much more important than closeness to X number of commercial venues. So a busy downtown street may get a high walkability score (i.e. Walk Score) because of the restuarants/retail/theaters, but it might be atrocious to my conception of walkability.

As an extreme example: Times Square in NYC is considered a "Walker's Paradise" with a walkability score of 100 on Walk Score. But it seems like the worst possible place to walk, and most NYC locals I know avoid that area like the plague.

Link: https://www.walkscore.com/score/Times-Square-New-York

I agree with this. Having been in times square, it was nothing but being constantly bumped, having to say "No" to people hawking their CD to support their burgeoning music career, and keeping your wallet close by to avoid being pickpocketed.

The strip in Las Vegas is not far behind. While people didn't tend to bump me, there was a never endings series of people trying to get me to buy their prostitutes for the night.

I guess it just depends on how much you like/dislike driving. I hate driving. I hate parking. I hate traffic.

I'd happily take a less nice walk than being forced to drive.

I would say bikeability is the best. If you live in any quiter regions of most mid- to large sized cities in western europe and scandinavia you will have access to a huge variety of possibilites, restaurants, bars etc. and can access everything relaviely quick, while living in a quiet area. Biking is also fun imo.

I bike thousands of miles a year. I love it. I also don't want to bike to grocery stores and restaurants. Sweaty in the summer, and we get -30F in the winter and our city tends to be very windy with wind chills down to -60F.

A walkable city means groceries stores at a walkable distance, which means while walking home from wherever you were, you just buy a couple of things missing for tonight's diner. You're at home, no more sugar for a cake? just a 5 min round trip.

Ironically even in my suburb we have 3 grocery stores about a mile away each. But I only like going to the store once a week. Daily would be a waste of time.

At those distances I would never go buy groceries by foot either.

I'd love to be able to bike to restaurants, but it would mean convincing the rest of the family to do the same! Any trip I can take on my own I do by bike though, providing there's somewhere safe to lock it up.

It's great until its cold or rainy. I don't really want to bike in the rain to a restaurant for dinner. Or even if it rained recently due to the water kicking up from the tires. I can walk with an umbrella just fine.

> the same 5 resturaunts

In my case you'd be off by at least an order of magnitude. You like variety, eh? I mean.. I can get any kind of cuisine at all that can be found in a big city... Not sure what suburbia has to offer on top of that. I mean, you do you. Just saying your argument could maybe use an accuracy adjustment.

I do more than just restaurants you know. We like to visit state parks, bike trails and get out into nature.

That's fine. It's fine to own a car and use it for those things. What is absurd is using a 4000lb hunk of steel to go 2 miles down the road to get a gallon of milk, which is how the bulk of car centric america operates. The vast majority of the energy spent is just to move the vehicle.

The op was suggesting removing this infrastructure altogether so we could walk everywhere. I'm saying that is unrealistic because I like to go places I can't just walk to.

Whether I walk to the grocery store or not isn't super relevant.

I agree with everything you've said wholeheartedly. Personally I could never live in the city again - been there done that. It seems to be very popular here on HN though.

Probably going off on a tangent here, but I grew up surrounded by hundreds of acres of farmland and woods to get lost in the minute I walked out the door, which I still escape to as much as I can, whether it's family owned rural property or state parks/mountains. Working in tech early in my career made that escape harder to get to, but I wouldn't trade rural life for any amount of restaurants, social gatherings, or whatever else within walking distance.

I live in Cambridge, MA and there are over 80 restaurants and bars within my 15 minute walkshed.

We also have block parties, lol.

E-bike then. I can get anywhere in a 2 mile radius in Seattle faster with my e-bike than with my car, and I always get a prime parking spot right outside where I’m going.

im sorry to tell you but this take is simply ignoring the fact the amount of restuaurants you can walk to increases with the square of the density.

I understand there are a few places in America you can live where there are a lot more restaurants densely packed.

These also are the highest cost of living places in the world to live. It's not practical to think everyone could live like that. They also are miserable with homeless people, drug addicts, and crime. It also relies on a huge network of people commuting to those jobs to support that area.

You can't have 30 restaurants within a few square miles with all the people to support that living there in homes. You'd need a combination of super dense housing and people commuting. It's really inefficient.

> They also are miserable with homeless people, drug addicts, and crime.

What aspect of urban development caused these people to be homeless, drug-addicted, or criminal? Did the frequency of bus service get them addicted to drugs? Did the taller building height take their job?

We make this unconscious logical leap that there's some justification for human misery to be concentrated in urban cores. I live in a dense urban core right now, and I see human misery when I go outside. I think "boy, it'd be nice to move to an area where this miserable person isn't". But... it'd be ridiculous to be happy by pretending misery doesn't exist because it's not in eyeshot. If that were the case, we should just ship miserable people to the suburbs where I don't have to see them (that would be cheaper and more convenient for me!). The wealth density of an urban neighborhood is huge, there's easily enough money to relocate miserable people into even rich suburbs.

The better thing to do is to make choices that cause there to be fewer miserable people. I'm optimistic that the current debate around the urban-suburban-rural divide and the role of cars will make us recognize that there's huge mutual interest in the idea that _public spaces should be nice_, and that seeing the misery that results from our policy choices is a feature and not a bug.

> 30 restaurants within a few square miles

that would be a low number for a middling town in the pre-car era.

also car-oriented planning is a primary driver of high cost of living in the first place, due to its abysmal space-efficiency.

> I don't want to go to the same 5 resturaunts I can walk to.

I have 56 eateries (restaurants, cafés and bistros) in a 500m radius, and also 36 bakeries, butchers and supermarkets all of which offer warm, ready-to-eat meals. Am I a weird outlier?

So what you want is your regular 4 or 5 cafes/ restaurants/pubs you can walk to, and use PT or a car on the rarer occasion you wanna try something different. It doesn't mean walkability is overrated. For things like minor grocery shops or the post office or even hairdressers/barbers variety is surely not that important anyway.

I don't think being in a city makes one more social. That being said, I have a close friend group who I don't live near. I meet plenty of people but having moved around a lot I don't have any close friends in my current city right now. I'm friendly with my neighbors but not friends with them. That's been true of just about everywhere I've lived, rural or urban.

I don't think I'd be more likely to make friends with my neighbors if I moved to the burbs. This seems to be driven more by personality and need than location, right?

> Hot take - walkability is super overrated. I don't want to go to the same 5 resturaunts I can walk to.

Not only a walkable city will provide you with some 50 restaurants at 10-15 minutes by feet, but what is more important is having groceries and other household shops at 5 minutes.

> In my current suburb I am good friend with all of my neighbors. We share vegetables from our gardens, have block parties, let children play together, it's extremely social.

All of this often happens in walkable cities as well.

A decent bodega within ~5 of walking distance if such a game changer.

Walking and driving are not mutually exclusive. You can drive and go to restaurants far away even though if you have 5 restaurants in walking distance.

Source: Last 20 years I lived in cities with population from 5M to 15M and I always had at least 10 restaurants at walking distance and I used public transport and cars to go to places way beyond the walking distance.