Indeed. In NYC I do 98% of my shopping by walking. I can reach my doctor by walking. My daughter used to walk to school because it was a 10 minutes walk (and an excellent school).

That would be impossible in a suburban setting; at best, one of these destinations would be within the theoretical waking distance, but without the walkways.

Absolutely. There's a reason body fat percentage in New York City is so much lower than anywhere else in the US!

This is something I've visually observed all over Australia. The walkable areas are noticeably fitter. I don't think all of those people just happen to care about fitness more, they just spend more time moving to get between places rather than sitting all day.

Absolutely! Fitness scales super closely with localized population density.

This is a recent phenomenon.

The original reason for low population density was agricultural work, which - even in the early days of mechanisation - was plenty physical.

Living in exurbia to work and consume like a city dweller is a new kind of stupid.

Yep, and we caused it, through the massive subsidy to cars that was the federal highway program. Many tranches of spending, from ~1937 forward, caused this.

> That would be impossible in a suburban setting;

Not necessarily true. The "village center" idea Jim Rouse used in his design of Columbia, MD could be used to solve the problem.

All of these things are within walking distance if you live in Columbia's village of Wilde Lake (and, of course, your health insurance covers the primary care physicians in walking distance).

I'm guessing you're thinking of typical "stroad" suburbs, but alternatives are possible and do exist.

Unfortunately, the suburb has to be the product of planning like Columbia. Typical "emergent" suburbs turn into unwalkable ones.

The fact that alternative designs are possible is almost irrelevant, because the problem is that you don't get people to agree on the same things. You get one example of something like that and it never replicates.

If you want public health outcomes, actual scale, you get much better outcomes by not having that regulatory system at all.

Really depends on the suburb. Where I live in NYS (a suburb of Buffalo) all of those things are within walking distance if you live within the village limits.

It's interesting - whether examples of potential destination categories are within walking distance doesn't move the needle on health (physical or mental) outcomes, compared to absolute residential density moving the needle tens of percent.

Yeah pretty much the only way to scale exercise to entire populations and over entire lifetimes is to design it directly into the cities.

The crazy part is you don't even have to DESIGN it, the market is desperate to build walkable density because it's so much more profitable than anything else. You just have to LET landowners build upward.

But then you'll run into traffic/parking issues unless you have a good public transit and land use policy (e.g. bikes, trams, mixed use development, etc). That requires such good design skills few cities have mastered it (Tokyo, Copenhagen, Singapore).

It really doesn't take that much at all. You just have to allow apartments and mixed use zoning, and not actively chop up the land with stroads.

Human populations naturally gravitate towards walking, and it's pretty much active sabotage of the outside environment that has broken this.

You're right, of course!

The hard part is "just". If you have mechanisms that allow neighbors to have an opinion at all, they will organize around it, they will stop growth, and you will eventually get San Francisco and New York restrictions anywhere that has high demand.

I know it seems this way, but all you have to do is not subsidize driving with government provided parking, and not build highways, and there's no traffic problem, because people don't get cars in the first place - they don't have anywhere to put them and there's no highway to punch through dense neighborhoods. Transit and bike infrastructure can always be built after the fact through public demand. When you let go, the people who WANT to live in high density without cars FLOCK to what gets built.

In fact, if you really stop zoning, there's a decent chance companies will ASK to operate transit for you, because those population densities and no free car competition can make it profitable. This happens in many cities!

Mixed use development happens if you let it happen. Banks and developers like money, and mixed use makes way more money, so they want to build it. Sometimes they fuck up and don't, and those land owners pay the price and retrofit. And that's fine. Again, just let them.

In high engagement Western societies, where people get involved in politics and urban planning, "design" universally leads to car subsidies and shitty outcomes. The market does a way better job.

I see what you're getting at. That's not going to work. Public transit falls into multiple well-known market failure modes - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_failure

You need considerable govt intervention, just aimed properly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transit-oriented_development

Try this: go to your favorite frontier LLM (I like Gemini pro - free in aistudio), paste this entire exchange we're having, and ask it to carefully analyze it and assess who seems more correct. It's a long story.

Of course you still need government intervention to get transit. I'm not saying "no intervention". I'm being precise: "private companies will ask to operate it".

It also doesn't matter. Which sounds weird, but it's true. If you just let people build density without transit, the market will almost always build it in convenient places (a bank won't underwrite if they don't think it'll be successful), the people who move into it will either be happy with walking or they'll organize.

I've done a lot of such organization, if you're curious. I spearheaded Seattle's successful 2016 ballot measure for $50 billion in additional rail transit, much of which is now under construction. It'll take more ballot measures, but we're getting there: https://seattletransitblog.com/2011/11/23/lets-build-a-seatt... And along the way, we had to save bus service, so I forced the city to do that too: https://www.seattlemet.com/news-and-city-life/2014/04/friend...

Ok that probably explains it. We're just talking past each other. You're doing really good work, and Seattle is one of the top transit cities in the US, but those three cities I mentioned before are in a whole different league as global outliers. Best practices in an American historical/political context are completely different than best practices overall. You can find lots of examples historically and today (eg in developing countries) where density outpaces good transit and the result is gridlock/pollution/etc. Seattle is just not that dense (yet).

Ha, happens a lot in comments! No worries! And thank you.

I think the big reason gridlock and pollution happen in a lot of other countries is more about lack of traffic laws, and lack of pollution controls. In Seattle we're selling a lot of electric vehicles. Maybe we get some gridlock, but that reduces road deaths. It's not necessarily a bad thing. Because we are willing to shift road space to bicycle infrastructure, we will end up with bicycling getting a higher share of trips if cars slow down. And then we will have a healthier population as well!