This is not a sustainable solution to population level health needs, even if maybe in your particular situation you do actually get enough vacation days and free time on weekends to be able to do this (I also doubt this).
For me the competing requirements are space for gym equipment and space for a workshop. I could have space for both if I lived further out, but then all other aspects of life would get worse. I'd have to drive constantly, to work, to social outings, to fun weekend stuff, it'd be a drag.
As you are pointing out though, we all have our tradeoffs we make. My only counterpoint would be that most cities are doing a terrible job of offering options to people who do want the more dense, "less car" communities.
A honest, objective comparison would be between going to a store in, say, LA or Amsterdam, and going to a lake or nice big park in LA or Amsterdam.
In Amsterdam, you can go to stores on foot without any issue. Not in LA.
In LA you need to drive for hours to go to any of the nice spots you listed. In Amsterdam you can walk to a nice park or a nice lake, and for the same amount of time you need to drive in LA to reach any decent spot, in Amsterdam you can actually reach at least two different countries, and by train you can reach spots like Paris.
For the mid-range activities we have to compare like with like. For some low-mid range activity (like a local park) indeed, walking in Amsterdam would be more convenient. Something more remote/infrequent (e.g. a specialized gym like a climbing gym or a large pool), I'd prefer to drive rather than take transit.
As for the surrounding area it doesn't really depend on the city itself, LA is surrounded by desert and mountains, Amsterdam is in one of the most historically agriculturally productive (and so, densely populated for centuries) and flat areas in Europe. If LA was built like Amsterdam, it'd still take forever to get anywhere interesting outside of the city.
If choosing between areas that either are less crowded, or have all the stuff I enjoy, I'd prefer an LA-like one to an Amsterdam-like one.
A reverse (also not very relevant) thought experiment - would you prefer to live in one room that is office/bedroom/bathroom/kitchen, just because you don't have to walk at all, everything is so close, why sprawl? :)
You walk down 2 blocks to get some milk and bread for the breakfast, post office is 3 blocks in the other direction, 1 block another way and you have fruits and vegetable. Basically you can treat the immediate surroundings as an extension of your house where you just "go" without a modal distinction of getting into a car, parking, back into the car, parking again.
Even taking a bus or train feels less of a discontinuation as you just walk in walk out and at no point have to switch to a "driver" mode.
Whereas if you drive you can choose when to go and so make it convenient - like I go to a climbing gym at 6am in winter, no traffic and less people. Also, many things you don't even need to leave the house for - even with a relatively small house (1100sqft) I have room for a weight rack and home office, no need to go to a real office or to a gym.
I am pretty fit, like I deadlift 280lbs :) and still walking with this stupid bag ruined the whole walk back. And it wasn't even much - if I replaced beer with food it would be like, 2-3 days worth.
I would have rather just finished the walk, then drove 3mins to the same store. In the most perfect conditions imaginable, with minimal amount of groceries. And what if it was 100F, or 32F, or raining, or I didn't want to go for a walk, or I needed to get some large items like sugar or rice or a gallon of milk or a lot of beer for a party?
Walking to a store is simply not an advantage at all. And if you go to even a poor country you can see most people agree - as soon as they can they start driving to big box stores, and small local stores die.
And regardless, even if (which I wouldn't grant) the majority would prefer to walk rather than drive, it's still SUBJECTIVE, not OBJECTIVE. A ton of people prefer to drive.
Walking to stores is an advantage because it allows for a density of services unavailable if parking lots are a serious consideration for businesses. I can go to my local convenience store, and my barber, and a no-waste shop, and my local bar, all in one pleasant morning… plus I don’t have to worry about a dui!
I think I mentioned the drinking aspect in the original comment. I could do all of these things by car, probably faster too... except drinking. So I guess it depends on how often one drinks :)
I suspect they're simply supposed to be a bundling device so you can stack them for loading in one of those foldable vertical bring-your-own-grocery-cart like old ladies in urban areas use. They certainly can't carry all that crap in-hand either, but this is the only way I've seen paper-bagged groceries make it more than a block without drama.
Same to the OP. You should own a decent feckin' shopping bag. It's basic adulting where I live. You have observed the problem yet not doing anything about which is just really weird.
They observed the problem and simply have a different solution than you. I'm sure there's a number of other factors they didn't mention that make it preferable to simply use their perfectly working car.
I'm sorry but when one is willing to put that much effort to try to justify using a car to avoid a 10 mn walk, that's only because one is way too lazy and privileged...
To me car is the default solution, it's simply better in every way for most people. Making one's life better doesn't need to be "justified".
Is it unreasonable to treat “moving around with your body” as the default vs “moving around in a $x,000-x00,000 device”?
>one is way too lazy and privileged...
you are free to think that. It is still a subjective choice in the matter.
in my case it doesn't matter because the nearest store is a mile and a half uphill. Nothing can fix that.
It's also a desert so there's plenty of space. Suburbs are simply incompatible with these ideas.
Indeed. But you seem convinced it's the idea of walking to fulfill basic daily needs that's the problem...
There are other solutions to this if we don't only consider walking. e.g. public transportation. But my nearest bus stop is a quarter mile in the opposite direction. And only a quarter mile if you decide to hop the train tracks (which comes hourly, I am conveniently enough a mile from my local Amtrak); it's a half mile to do "safely".
I actually do agree that some of the tips here could improve even this short minor route I described to get to a bus, but suburbs don't exactly care much to begin with. When everything is far, everything is unwalkable, so why bother (in the minds of these small city planners).
I'd argue the main reason it is isn't possible is because of poor town planning decisions made by governments over the last 50-60 years. It is still possible in many (most?) European town/cities, and is possible in the inner-city (but still pleasant and largely residential) suburb I live in, but I'd acknowledge there's far too few such suburbs in most Australian cities, and from what I've seen the US is similar.
And maybe it's just a TV trope, but do your paper bags lack handles? In Europe essentially all grocery bags have handles and are easy to carry. The amount of food you bought sounds easy to me to carry home, and I don't even lift.
They have handles, it's still just inconvenient to carry and makes a nice walk into a chore, vs driving with much more groceries per trip.
It is also ok to express an opinion that car-free living is better for some people, or argue that most people prefer it, although I think that is self-evidently incorrect, cause as per IMF data I linked somewhere here, one of the first things people all over the world do when they get any richer (like, $2.5k-10k per capita income) is buy a lot of cars.
But the above is saying it's OBJECTIVELY better. Other than just being wrong, that betrays the kind of "I know exactly how everyone should live their lives, and I would make them if I could" attitude that I hate.
My mom used a wheelie cart to do our shopping growing up. As a kid I thought it was embarrassing but now I get it. Cargo bikes are another good option. Having to carry home groceries without some sort of cargo apparatus like that does suck, even in nice weather.
They will drive in their little bubbles until the planet boils unless you physically stop them. "Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."
It's true that the inevitable conclusion is that we can't rely on individual voluntary actions to solve climate change, but the obvious plan B is government regulation, not vigilantism.
But don't argue that people want to live in urban paradise and some contrived system is simply not giving them what they want. "
I just don't like the hypocrisy.
However, it's the comments like this that make me think that for any equivalent level of far-, far-left is much, much worse than far-right ;)
One I've had tossed at me during a discussion is, "if you aren't a socialist when you're 20, you have no heart, but if your still a socialist when you're 50, you have no head." This isn't "holier than thou" per say, but it serves the same rhetorical role, it's smug nonsense from someone thinking that they just know so much better than you that time's steady march will make their argument for them (and so they don't have to address what you've said or treat you ).
Frankly, I also see people using the same tropes as in your comment mischaracterize substantive points as being whining or moralizing.
I would say the problem is that as a society, we don't understand how to conduct a productive discourse. I'm pretty sure we never have and have just been muddling through for millenia.
Believe me, I'd love it if being left wing meant the people I disagreed with online weren't frequently rude or vindictive, but I'm afraid I share your experience.
Based purely on forum internet discourse: when talking about "micro discussions" (a kind term for "flame war between 2-3 people that go on for dozens of comments), the most negative Left-leaning language tends to be "personal", while the most negative Right-leaning language tends to be "internal". That is to say, in very wide swaths it seems like left leaning people tend to argue in a way that attacks the character "you're being X, you lack a soul if you don't Y", etc.), while a right leaning person tends to argue from a place of authority ("I'm right", "this is the truth", "Everyone knows X"). This can mean that a right leaning person at worst can feel like a prick. But a left leaning person can feel like a nag.
It's the difference between walking past the oddly loud fellow on the street vs. walking away from the person poking you. The latter will probably stick with you longer because while the poker may have done less damage overall, they were clearly targeting you. While the loud person wasn't targeting anyone in particular, it may not have even looked in your direction.
This brush is just too darn broad. If you're gunnuh judge by flame wars, everyone is gunnuh come out smelling like poo.
I did warn beforhand. I agree judging an entire political paradigm based on its worst actors is pretty much the worst way to approach said paradigms. But at the same time that is unfortunately becoming more and more commonplace.
I'd need much more than 2 paragraphs if we want to fully dive into the psychology of the internet, anonymity, negativity bias, and modern discourse. Everyone does indeed smell like poo here, but the kinds of comments that lead to flame wars are rarely the perfectly civil technical answers.
>I also see this in lots of conversations that aren't political, so I think it's more of an online discourse thing. People get nasty to each other online.
It can certainly happen in places like media, yes. But oftentimes it comes from applying some political topic to what seems tame on the outside. That's how we got here, since talking about Walkability lead to talking about environmentalism. And next thing we know we have a person talking about slashing tires because a single commenter mentioned how they would have preferred using a car to carry groceries after their walk.
Then don't do that. One person got frustrated and said something about slashing tires (and was immediately corrected by another urbanist). Don't turn that into a mountain.
I just wanted to touch into the why's and hows of the frustration. It feels like similar results, but had different causes. If you aren't interested, I apologize.
I think maybe I didn't communicate tone well enough in my previous comment, I don't mean it to come off as berating you to stop or something. I was saying that, if you understand that painting with a broad brush doesn't work, I'm confused why I see a brush in your hand.
Do you not think it's likely, if left wing people changed the language they used or otherwise addressed these reasons you highlighted (or likewise if right wing people did the equivalent), that because there was still profound polarization and disagreement, people would kinda find other things to complain about?
If you accept that premise, then does it really matter what things the people who you disagree with do that grind your gears and what it is you find grating about them?
Isn't it more important to try and have a productive dialog, despite finding the people you disagree with grating?
I think almost always when there is something about the way someone expressed themselves that bothers you, it's more a reflection on your preferences than anything else, and it's best to set it aside and try to hear them out anyway. There's no obligation to do so, I'm just suggesting it's the pragmatic and productive thing to do.
I live a block from a store, and its much, much easier and more plesant than going to the effort of getting the car out, driving somewhere, having to find a parking spot, etc... Driving's a pain in the arse.
A decently walkable suburb/city would have a store within a block or two, maybe a five minute walk.
It's like a bag with wheels you can drag, that was my immediate thought anyway
There's tons of micro mobility that could have also helped
I have a store in same building than my flat (but other side), and it is the best. Dont need to have car, dont need to worry about DUI...
100F (38C) is here twice maybe per year? Cannot you survive 38C for a few minutes?
If it is 32F (0C). I just put warm clothes on? 32F is not very cold temperature anyway.
Raining = umbrella (but I go without it, 2 minutes of rain wont kill me).
How many times a year do you host a party? For me its just once a year (birthday), I just go to store multiple times.
But I understand that your store is 10 min walk which sucks. I guess your city is not dense enough.
"sedentary lifestyles" is not a real externality and anyway is also easy to achieve with transit; "time wasted in traffic" is simply false (far more time is wasted on transit given how fast it is to drive for an average trip, and sometimes even in rush hour), "dominance of cityscape by infrastructure dedicated to automobile traffic" by itself is a totally fake - it's a subjective aesthetic preference.
Now as for the actual real externalities, I said elsewhere, it's one thing to say "most people reveal the preference to drive (and I disagree with them OR because driving is just better), however they cannot all have what they want because of pollution / global warming /...". That could be correct, although it would also imply this is a technological problem - they mostly solved pollution from cars, and if we e.g. had cheap fusion or solar energy and electric cars we could all go back to driving.
It's quite another to pretend that people need to switch to the inferior (by their own revealed preference around the world) lifestyle because it is "objectively better".
I certainly don't want people feeling like they're being forced into making inferior choices - just that we make an effort to design our towns and cities so that the choice to walk/bike/use transit is a realistic one that compares favourably with driving.
I think people just don't realize on gut level how fast driving is... someone mentioned Edinburgh as a place where it would never occur to them to drive. As it happens it was 5:30pm there when I plotted a random trip out of the city center to some residential area, it was 25min in "red" traffic vs 43min by transit, not counting overheads of waiting of course - so realistically x2 faster and that's from a city center. That was also my experience wherever I lived or visited, except rush hour Moscow where traffic is completely unreasonable and transit is good (although at rush hour very crowded, so reading is also questionable)... you'd look at "terrible traffic" and wince, then you look at transit directions and drive/call a cab cause it's way faster anyway :)
Which I'd wager includes a sizeable fraction of the population. I also remember seeing a study in Germany some years ago where they found that exclusive car commuters had the highest average BMI and bike commuters the lowest. Granted, it was not a massive (ahem) difference, but definitively a few kilos…
Here, walking to get groceries means depending on what I need, I walk down the road to get some daily fresh produce, or a few minutes more to get more variety of non perishables, cleaning products etc. It’s a lovely walk, it’s relaxing, and I come back with at most 3-4kg. I do this regularly, and I can do it on my way home when I take the metro for whatever.
In the US, it’s literally something you have to plan for. No kidding you don’t want to walk; one of the goals is to minimise time spent especially if it’s not relaxing time.
If you don't understand the core differences between how to even buy shopping and the influence this has on how you live your life… it's not possible to explain that, actually yeah, it's possible to never do shopping by car, even to feed a whole family.
At the same time I agree that it wasn’t fun and I didn’t enjoy it as a kid. If we could have an option to have a car, drive it and fill the trunk with groceries and drive back we would have.
As a New Yorker, you just described daily life here? It’s really not a big deal — things are so close you can take multiple trips if you need to. Get some canvas bags. Plus since everything is so close you end up just doing smaller trips every day or so. If the shop is longer than 10-15 minutes and I’ve got more than, say, 40 pounds of groceries I might get a car back home, but that’s a rare trip. And honestly I’ll probably just walk it back anyway.
Maybe we just have a higher tolerance for pain here — I’ve certainly had people visit who think of themselves as fit and they get gassed out by regular New York walking life.
It's interesting how things become normal once you do it every day. I used to live in a fifth floor apartment without lift. Quite a few stairs to climb. Three things come to my mind.
a) You very quickly learn not to forget anything when leaving the house.
b) There is some perverse sense of satisfaction in having guests over and walking up the stairs together; and purposefully keeping a calm breath whilst the guests are wheezing and complaining.
c) Some tradesman was working on one of the floors. I will never forget the sight of him carrying something heavy up those stairs whilst practically breathing through the cigarette in the corner of his mouth.
For very legitimate reasons life like this is not for everybody. But I would say for able-bodied healthy people it would be good to have a bit of regular forced exercise like that.
Oh man, absolutely. I still have a vivid memory of moving out of a 5 floor walk-up with a narrow stairwell and as I was walking back into the building out comes the guy bear hugging my Fender Rhodes electric piano. It's gotta be around 150 pounds and very bulky. He was walking like it was nothing.
I didn't drive until I was 29-30 and lived mostly in walkable areas so I can easily consider the alternatives. They are just, as I found out when I tried car-dependent lifestyle, inferior. One might even say, "objectively worse"...
This keeps coming up on HN but it's not as absolutist as it's made to be.
There are lots and lots of suburban places in the US where you can walk to things as you describe. NY/Chicago/London/Paris/Tokyo do not have a monopoly on walkability.
I live in very suburban (approaching on rural, but still suburban) area in the outskirts of silicon valley. Within 10 minutes I can walk to two supermarkets, several cafes and two pubs. Also to movie theaters, library, two drug stores, many restaurants, child care, a department store and many other businesses.
But unlike Manhattan, within 10 minutes (ok maybe 12) I can also walk to an open space forest where I can hike, mountain bike and go camping. Unlike in Manhattan, I can road bike many tens of miles of rural low-to-no-traffic roads out of my front door. We have many open soccer fields within easy walk (kid loves soccer so this is great).
Suburbs can be very walkable and have more variety of amenities within easy reach than a dense city.
But a lot of suburbia is completely inaccessible or hostile by foot and unbikeable. Since you're in Silicon Valley, you can probably think of tons of places like that. Mixed use zoning and infill developmental priorities are what create this urban form. This is the important bit, not squabbling over which city is better than the other.
I sort of can't, which is why I always express doubt about these suburbs where one must supposedly drive 30 minutes to the nearest store (not a quote from this thread, but one that I've seen many times on HN).
I've lived also in south San Jose, Cambpell and Cupertino. In all those I could also walk to supermarkets and many other businesses.
Sure…is that because driving is inherently more convenient than walking, or because your city was designed so driving was more convenient than walking?
I own a car in London and there are many cases in which it's objectively superior for me to use it purely based on time savings. Generally any journey that's more than about 3-4 miles from the absolute centre of town.
It's also more comfortable, private, has AC, I don't need to wear headphones to listen to music, can carry more, etc.
It's just fundamentally better. If the UK had an equivalent of LA I'd move there in a heartbeat.
The only people I hear who are rabidly anti-car are those who ideologically prefer not to use one. They're generally not people who tried it and found it lacking.