Have you ever lived somewhere where you can walk to get lunch for example?

I really detest having to get into my car and drive 15 minutes each way (30 minutes round trip) to do any errand.

Not the parent, but I lived 17 years in the heart of SF before moving to the country. I loved it in my 30s, but was pretty over it by my 40s. Now I love cooking at home, letting my kid play outside, and throwing parties without worrying about neighbors.

People like different things. The things people like change. Give the parent (and people like him/her) the benefit of the doubt.

And different people like different things. I live in the suburbs and there's somewhere on the order of 20+ restaurants I can get to within 15 minutes (and probably about 10 within 7-8 minutes. And I can also, like the poster you were responding to, go to several different stores, pick up a carload of stuff, and get back home.

If I want to do city things, I jump on the train (or drive) into a city and do city things for the day/night. But I don't want to live there.

"Restaurants."

Yes. I used to live in an apartment in the middle of city. It was easy to walk to lunch/dinner/drinks. It was great for those activities but absolutely awful for many others. Grocery shopping? Still need a car. Going to another part of the city where my friends are? Still need a car. Etc.

I enjoyed city living for a short period of time but it got old, very fast. It is NEVER quiet. Your selection of restaurants and bars is actually quite limited, or you’d need to taxi/Uber. And overall I felt my quality of life much lower.

Now I have a yard and a garage, extra storage in my house, and don’t have to deal with renting.

Life is MUCH better, for me, in the suburbs.

> Grocery shopping? Still need a car. Going to another part of the city where my friends are? Still need a car. Etc.

I think that we also need to understand the whys of some of this.

Grocery shopping or going to another part of the city to see friends should not require a car. If it does, that means the city's transit infra isn't sufficient for residents' needs. And the reason that's the case is because car culture is prioritized above all else in the US.

For larger grocery 'trips' I usually do delivery these days. But we also have a small grocer a couple blocks away (very well stocked, huge variety of stuff, great produce, etc.) that easily meets daily/weekly needs.

I do have a car, but I drive it only a few times a month. I fill up the gas tank once every couple months. I probably shouldn't own a car, but I can't kick the habit. It's great for long trips outside the city when we're doing some light traveling, at least. But overall I really dislike driving at this point in my life (absolutely loved it back in my 20s); I'd much rather take a train or bus, or walk.

The lack of quiet is an absolutely valid point. I personally just got used to it. I grew up in the suburbs and didn't move to a city until I 29 years old. That was almost 15 years ago, and I still love living in a city. But everyone's tastes differ here, certainly.

> Your selection of restaurants and bars is actually quite limited

I guess you picked the wrong neighborhood, if that's what you were looking for? Within a 10-minute walk I can choose among 15 or so restaurants, and seven bars. If I widen that to 20 minutes, I can add another 10 restaurants and three or four bars. And I don't live in a particularly dense or "party scene" neighborhood. At this point my partner and I pretty rarely leave the neighborhood for food or drink. And when we do, it's usually to meet up with friends who live in a different neighborhood, or to treat ourselves with something fancy/different.

> Life is MUCH better, for me, in the suburbs.

I'm genuinely happy for you! I personally don't care so much about having a yard, and we have all the storage space we need. (Frankly I prefer to constrain my storage space a bit, so I don't accumulate more stuff than I need.) We also own, so no need to deal with renting.

But I'm not trying to say you shouldn't live in a suburb, if that's what you want to do! My point is that I do think that some of the things that make cities unlivable for some people are the way they are because of decades of pushes toward car culture. Maybe fixing those things wouldn't sway you, personally, but I think there are lot of suburb dwellers who think, "I wouldn't mind living in the city except for X", and that X is actually something that's not hard to fix, if there was political will to do so.

You're comparing living in a car dependant city vs living in car dependant suburbs. It's not going to be meaningfully different. You mention the constant noise, but what do you think causes it?

To see what everyone means by car dependency, you'd need to see the few places that aren't.

Here's what a 100% car-free island looks like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWDFgzAjr1k

Here are some progressive European cities that have started to undo the damage that's been done by cars:

• Freiburg, Germany: https://youtu.be/6Vil5KC7Bl0?t=36

• Haarlem, Netherlands: https://youtu.be/ztpcWUqVpIg?t=90

• Paris, France: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSQSBoHmG8s

Check out these background noise levels:

• A very busy mixed-use street in Amsterdam: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqQSwQLDIK8

• Exiting the train station in Delft, Netherlands: https://youtu.be/CTV-wwszGw8?t=289

• Cycling streets in the Netherlands: https://youtu.be/bMJaMy-0ChA?t=242. You can even hear birds chirping at 4:29.

Anecdotes are anecdotes. The fact is everyone loves their own preferences, because that's what preferences are.

When I lived in the suburbs it took me 28 minutes to drive to the grocery store. When I lived in a city it was a 4 minute bike ride to two different grocery stores.

> When I lived in the suburbs it took me 28 minutes to drive to the grocery store

Wow. That sounds more rural to me. I've lived in 5 or 6 different suburbs (of three different cities, 2 "major" ones) and never been more than 10 minutes from a grocery store; even when I had corn fields in my back yard and drove by cows and apple orchards on the way to the store.

Admittedly, it's possible I'm "dense suburbs" and you're "sparse suburbs"; there's a range. It's just.. 30 minutes is a REALLY long trip for a grocery store.

I think there's a pretty wide gulf between true "rural" areas and the most dense of the suburbs.

A 30-minute drive to a grocery store in a suburb doesn't surprise me all that much. In the 'burb I lived in during my teens, 15 minutes to the grocery store was essentially the best you could hope for. Add some traffic (pretty common most of the time) and that could easily creep up to 20 or 25 minutes.

(And yeah, I live in a city now, and I can walk to a very well appointed smaller grocery in about 3 minutes.)

Yes, this is the issue I often ran into in the burbs. Traffic management in suburban neighborhoods can be pretty non-existent in some areas.

And that's a very privileged position to take that makes you incredibly reliant on the benevolence of the trillion dollar oil gas, auto and insurance industry that have to pay constant microtransactions to play. It sucks for pretty much everyone else who isn't as privileged or wanting to be a pay pig for the multi-billionaires in comparison to being able to walk, bike and hop on a train.