However, it has been... eye opening. We live in a fairly urban area of Nashville, but my street doesn't have sidewalks. We've been yelled at multiple times (me, my wife, and our kindergartner) by drivers to "Get out of the road!" (This is on a 25 mph street.) There are ditches and uneven ground on both sides of the road.
Even the sidewalks we _do_ have on our route are paltry... about 3 feet wide and immediately adjacent to a busy 30 mph road. We sometimes walk in the grass next to the sidewalk, and I actually had one neighbor yell at us to "Get out of the yard, get on the sidewalk." That one took the cake for me.
So, yeah. There's a lot of reasons people don't walk to work, but one of them might be that everyone and everything assumes you're supposed to drive in a car and idle in the parking lot for 20 minutes rather than walking. Walking can be _stressful_, especially if you're doing it with multiple kids (which I often do).
Just curious, do you have a family and do you shlep them by bus everywhere?
I go basically everywhere walking, but if I visit my friend the next city over we take the car.
Have you been to, say, the Netherlands? There are plenty of cars in Amsterdam, but it is the opposite of a car centric culture. Bikes and pedestrians abound (including bikes with places to "shlep" your kids or cargo around), and they all have right of way, anywhere, and the drivers generally seem to respect it.
Contrast that with a big American city like NYC, and though probably the vast majority of New Yorkers don't own a car, it is still very car-firstin the priority of who gets to use the streets.
Not being America there will have actually been sidewalks everywhere though.
Or are you telling me that day to day life is better if I'm not a woodworker?
More food for thought: how cold does it have to get, with how much snow on the ground, before walking can be reasonably said to be unattractive to the average individual?
I’m not claiming there are no things where a car is useful. But having to drive regularly is depressing. My life improved so much when I moved out of the suburbs and in to a walkable area. Sitting in traffic twice a day was sending me insane. While walking makes me feel better.
This is not the case in Australia, especially with younger people mid 20s where not owning a car is usually associated with living in one of the expensive inner city trendy areas.
That... adds up quickly. And delivery services have other problems, such as actually getting the items you want. This may not be a problem for you; it's been a problem for me. Also, I can't help but point out that instead of driving out in your car for your groceries, you're having someone else drive the groceries to you. In a car. (I'm not sure if this has developed into something else, but it started with the topic of cars and their associated infrastructure).
> I’m not claiming there are no things where a car is useful. But having to drive regularly is depressing. My life improved so much when I moved out of the suburbs and in to a walkable area. Sitting in traffic twice a day was sending me insane. While walking makes me feel better.
Well, for me, I love to drive. I spent five years without a vehicle and it was depressing as all hell. This is in the context of country roads though, not city traffic. I hate cities...
I also tend to walk an hour or two most days, so there's that. Maybe we can agree that the issue is more about being forced (or feeling forced) into one path or another?
I’ve regularly evaluated the cost effectiveness of getting deliveries/Ubers vs owning a car. And owning always comes out massively more expensive. Most of the stuff I want is within walking distance anyway.
> They also don’t deliver them in a car, they deliver them in a refrigerated small truck which makes multiple deliveries to the same street/area in one trip. Often a few to the same building as me.
Ah, interesting. Very different from my area. Where do you live, roughly speaking? If you don't mind.
In walkable places, you can just walk down and get that day's groceries as needed, or maybe you do it on your way home from your walkable job, etc. It's more flexible, fresher, requires less mass consumption, less packaging, as well--lots of ancillary benefits.
More food for thought: I've heard a saying (attributed to Norwegian/Scandinavian folk wisdom) that goes like, "There is no such thing as bad weather, only inadequate clothing."
It's also more expensive, and I don't buy "less packaging". Bulk purchasing generally involves less packaging than purchasing in smaller quantities. It's also far more time consuming to go to the store every day vs. once a month for bulk items and once a week to supplement perishables / small stock. I realize some cultures do this, and that's fine and all, but it has tradeoffs.
> More food for thought: I've heard a saying (attributed to Norwegian/Scandinavian folk wisdom) that goes like, "There is no such thing as bad weather, only inadequate clothing."
I have plenty of clothing. Nothing stops me from going out in most weather if I feel like it. When I don't feel like it, my truck is sure nice to have...
I sense that the no car advocates are single people living in cities. I lived car-free back on those days. But once you have a house and a family, a car is a basic necessity. Its financially impossible to raise a family in a city on the US west coast, with the same standard of living as suburbia.
It seems like you have a notion of what a high standard of living is that isn’t actually shared by everyone. I’m looking forward to raising my kid in the city with the absolute minimum amount of car dependency that I can manage.
It's a tourist town in a red state. Their priorities and funding do not align with making a pleasant built environment for residents.
I live in Nashville right now too and it's just a mystery to me why people actually want to be here. I guess the people here just do not share my values, and they just want to drive their big cars on big roads.
There's a bit of our road without sidewalk, and someday I'd like to fix that. But mostly, it's just really nice to live somewhere walkable.
I've done a lot of walking in non-walkable areas before. It is awful. And I think that's most of the country. Been hit a couple of times by the side mirrors of drivers who were driving right on the edge. Had to make my way on roads with steep dropoffs or ditches on one side and cliffs on the other. Crossing big highways. It's dangerous.
I can totally see why some people just won't do that and won't let their kids do it. But what amazes me is that most people don't even see that as a problem. It's something that can be fixed.
I just gave cars berth, and wandered into the ditch when necessary. So the ground is uneven; never bothered me any. I didn't feel particularly restricted; I just went where I wanted to go, however I needed to do it. Probably not the best place to walk with your kid, I'll grant.
What did get to me was freeways; the idea that you have this huge swathe of road that's just straight out illegal to cross on foot.
What's really limiting, though? Not having access to a vehicle when you need one...
Put another way, some Americans just love complaining about America.
We're a country of 330 million people, spread out the length of an entire continent. Name a problem, and somewhere, someone has it. No place you go to has every problem, and I imagine most places you go the average person will have more good than bad to say about where they live.
My daughter's school is under two miles away, but I can't let her ride her bike alone because it is terrifying. I will sometimes ride with her though.
To get there one has to cross a huge stroad and motorists frequently ignore all traffic regulations. They look at cyclists and pedestrians as obstacles and their hatred is visible in how (and what) they drive. My daughter's bus driver told us that people don't stop at the red stop lights on buses here and I have seen first hand motorists pass and honk at buses that are actively picking up children.
Cities don't need to be built this way, Nashville is just an especially bad place to raise a family. A sibling called it a nightmare society and that is close to correct.
There's a closed and sold elementary building about 4 blocks from here.The consolidated buildings are still reasonably close, but still some multiple of that.
That said, a lot of parents still drive their kids - the vast majority I would say. Even people who live within walking distance. It definitely is faster if you look at it in a vacuum: you save 10 minutes round trip!
And when casually discussing things with them, that's usually the excuse - they just don't have the time! They're always running late! etc. But I get a 20 minute walk out of it, and spend time with the kids talking about stuff. So to that I say: I'm multi-tasking.
Part of me thinks this problem isn't much different from the fear of child abduction: overblown. But there is something especially frustrating about the times this happens because people think they are doing something good when they really aren't.