I moved from Spain to the US, and I often find myself trying to explain to people back home just how miserable and even humiliating the pedestrian experience is here.
Here are some other examples of things that I think contribute to the hostile walking experience in the US:
* Cars parked in short driveways often extend all the way across the sidewalk. Even if you can easily step off onto the road to walk around them (not all pedestrians can), it just feels like a slap in the face to have to do that.
* Cars have much higher and stronger headlights, with the high beams often left on, and drivers are generally much less mindful of them. As a pedestrian walking at night on under-lit streets, you are constantly getting blinded.
* Tinted windows (even the mild level of tint that most cars in the US have). The whole experience of being a lone vulnerable pedestrian among a sea of cars is made even worse when you can't see the people in the cars (but you know they can see you).
* Often the only option to get food late at night are fast food places, which become drive-thru only after a certain time. Having to go through the drive-thru on foot is obviously a terrible experience, and they will often refuse to even serve you.
> I often find myself trying to explain to people back home just how miserable and even humiliating the pedestrian experience is here.
Same. I’ve lived in Los Ángeles and Amsterdam, and it is impossible to explain to my friends and family just how awful the quality of life is in LA precisely because of the difference in attitudes and priorities over cars. Perhaps some have “nicer” (aka bigger) houses in LA than they would have in Ámsterdam, but once they leave their front door everything is objectively worse
Every time a politician anywhere in the world suggests adding more freeways or more lanes to freeways, I think they should be forced to live in LA for a year and do a ~1 hour commute each way in traffic.
They need to see first hand what happens when you just add more freeways and more lanes. It's not good.
Subjectively worse, not objectively worse. I think driving is much more convenient and nice for most things I like to do. The only exceptions I can think of are if I were a kid in a car-centric area (strangely, the thinking in the US is usually reversed, kids supposedly need to be in the burbs), or if I was drunk. I don't often get drunk, so I'd prefer to drive for everything from minor groceries to outdoor activities ~100% of the time.
Tinted windows are such a pet peeve of mine. I get it in the tropics but in most of America the individual benefits of dark tint seem like they’d be outweighed by the collective good of better visibility through cars, enabling eye contact with drivers, etc.
The SUV craze is really to blame - in general many US states don’t allow dark tint on traditional cars but do on SUVs. And since rear windows on vans and light trucks (aka SUVs) are exempted from window tint restrictions, pull up to a typical intersection in the US and look around and you can’t see worth a damn.
Somehow it’s ok for a Subaru Crosstrek to have dark tint but not an Impreza that is the same car but lower? There are even more weird situations like the Mercedes Benz GLA compact CUV which typically has tinted windows, but not the top-of-the-line AMG trim because that one has a lowered suspension, making it a “car” instead of a “light truck”.
I was surprised by SUVs being able to have more window tint, and I looked it up, and you’re right [1]. For windshield and drive side windows it’s the same as a sedan, but for rear windows it can be darker for passenger comfort.
Apparently in Alabama at least, the manufacturer determines the designation [2]. So you might be able to call Subaru about the Impreza and have them call it “an SUV” to get that sweet rear window tint.
In most states (all?) it's illegal to have a tinted front window, yet people still have them, because it's not enforced. IMO cops should be citing people left and right for tinted windows and tinted license plate covers. You'd think they'd already be taking advantage of such an easy revenue source.
SUVs having different rules is bizarre, but I'm confused as to how this impairs your ability to make eye contact with drivers since it doesn't apply to the front windows.
People in this thread are really talking past each other. I've been to the nice Asian mega cities with great and clean subways and buses. And I've lived in the American suburbs. You can't make the American suburbs like the mega cities by just making them walkable.
Everything in a mega city works together to make transit work. Those tall buildings? They provide great shade no matter how sunny it is which is critical for walking to bus stops and subway stations. Also, the walk itself is so much more interesting, random stores to stop at and places to eat and go to. Density makes transit work.
You can't just put random stores in a suburb and make it "walkable" and expect the same thing. Just as everything in a mega city works together to make transit work, everything in a suburb works together to make cars work.
We need to give up on the mass transit solutions that work for dense cities (subways and buses) for suburbs. It's a waste of money and completely the wrong solution. It hasn't worked for decades and never will.
Shut down bus systems for suburbs and use the government funds to give out ride sharing (either Uber or government run) credits for everyone to use (low income can get more credits). That's what a suburb is designed for, point-to-point travel such as cars. And invest massively in real protected, useful bike lanes and stop trying to kill e-bikes with regulations (which a lot of cities are trying to do). e-bikes are finally a real alternative to cars in suburbs, it has just the right amount of travel speed and ease to challenge the car, but it's already under attack. Ride sharing credits and e-bikes, these are the solutions for suburbs. Stop trying to fit a square peg (buses and subways) into a round hole.
> The whole experience of being a lone vulnerable pedestrian among a sea of cars is made even worse when you can't see the people in the cars (but you know they can see you).
It's even worse than that. You don't know they can see you, you know they could see you but you cannot know if they do see you. That's terrible for pedestrian safety.
Adding even MORE to the insult is this part from the article: "many agencies will simply remove pedestrian facilities to reduce the cost of compliance". I see that so often: having to cross the damn intersection three times just to continue across, and all the light timings favor cars. It's a big middle finger.
I see this all the time. It makes me SO angry. They do the same thing for construction. "Oh, sorry, the bike lane is closed for the next 2 years. Sorry, sidewalk closed. Walk 10 more minutes for the next 2 years."
I live in the US in a "platinum rated" bike city (so there are a relatively high amount of bike commuters) and have gone through drive throughs on my bike a handful of times. Every time I have been served but told not to do it again.
I've had some luck asking a stranger in a car to trip the sensor and then back up so I can order and walk though. Once your order is in its more work to say "no" than it is to say "yes but don't do it again"
just how miserable and even humiliating the pedestrian experience is here
I ended up talking to some woman yesterday who mentioned she loved to come back to Oakland because of how walkable it is compared where she is now in the central valley. I was amused at the whole exchange because while Oakland and San Francisco do a decent job, they're by no means great.
Cars parked in short driveways often extend all the way across the sidewalk.
Even if you can easily step off onto the road to walk around them (not all
pedestrians can), it just feels like a slap in the face to have to do that.
One of the big things I noticed when comparing the pedestrian experience in Manhattan (and to a lesser extent the outer boroughs) to San Francisco is that New York lacks the curb cuts that encourage this kind of behavior. You spend a lot less time walking around parked cars or having to keep an eye out for someone who's in a hurry to exit "their" driveway.
In San Francisco, at least, there's a big tug of war about where your driveway ends and the curb begins. Suffice to say blocking the curb is one of those things that's almost never enforced.
Tokyo is very oriented towards pedestrian traffic, considering shinkansen and most rail service - yet satellite suburban sites, like Saitama, etc have tiny residential rows that literally don't fit both a car and a pedestrian. And that's where most people live. Yet Japan is highly pedestrian.
Now, South America. Most if not all urban centers of 1M are extremely well covered by bus networks. And they have to, since most of the population cannot afford a car. However, the moment you step off the old city centers, you are literally walking on the main road, sharing space with speeding cards and buses driving like maniacs. You will often find a major road has literally no sidewalk, only dirt, weeds and sewage.
Compared to those situations, the US is a walking paradise.
The problem of distance is very different from the problem of safety and confort in the US
You can find a ton of much worse examples than the US, but the US is just vastly far behind Europe (i.e. Spain, to which OP was comparing the US to).
Plus, it's worth mentioning that while Tokyo has a lot of mixed-traffic streets, the streets are small, have very low speed limits, and have strong restrictions on the size and type of car that can actually be within the city. It's less like you're walking in traffic and more like the car is intruding on a pedestrian space.
I just spent the last 2 months i Europe and on many side streets there is no place to safely stop a car which means pulling into the sidewalk is the only option. So I frequently had to step into the street to walk around a stopped delivery van or similar.
You're probably not supposed to stop a car in those places, and when you do, you're supposed to stop on the road, never on the sidewalk. Steep fines for that in Belgium at least, though the odds of getting caught are slim.
I’ve never heard the experience described as “humiliating,” which is incredibly surprising because just seeing that written out (and your thoughtful elaboration) made a lot of things click into place for me.
Actually, the tinted windows worry me because I don't know whether the drivers do see me. Vanishingly few drivers would deliberately run over a pedestrian, but plenty are distracted or otherwise inattentive.
It is illegal in most places to park a car on the sidewalk.
I don't know of anyone, at least the big chains, that will serve a pedestrian in a drive thru. If you live in a more walkable part of town there is usually an all night diner.
>If you live in a more walkable part of town there is usually an all night diner.
Oh I wish. On the contrary, it feels most everything closes around 9pm here and it hurts as a night owl. Heck, so many cafes seem to close around 6-7pm.
This lens is underutilized in the discourse, but people feel it acutely. Even a lot of the anti-cycling stance comes down to, “What am I, poor?” When you are using transportation infrastructure that’s designed with contempt for you, you know, and you don’t want to be there. See also: rail slow zones, buses that shimmy and rattle violently on imperfect pavement, how Muni trains close their doors and pull one foot out of the station just to wait at a red light. If you’ve never seen good, dignified implementation of walking and transit then a lot of this seems inherent & car culture seems synonymous with dignity. Short of tickets to Amsterdam for everyone, I don’t know how to fix it.
> Even a lot of the anti-cycling stance comes down to, “What am I, poor?” When you are using transportation infrastructure that’s designed with contempt for you, you know, and you don’t want to be there.
I grew up in close contact with a large urban poor population and I think the view of bikes was the exact opposite of this. Biking in the city is considered the purview of affluent white people
I grew up in a low income, immigrant suburb and the poor rode bikes. They didn't wear bike kit and they had crappy mountain bikes with franken parts, not an 11 speed electronic shift bike. Often they either couldn't afford a car or the family only had enough money for 1 car, which in patriarchal immigrant households went to mom and the kids she drove around while dad biked to his back of house or construction job.
in my local facebook bike-to-work group i often comment about Schrödinger's cyclist: "too poor to have a car" according to some haters, and at the same time "too rich to be in a hurry" (because motorists have a real job they're driving to) according to others
I've had multiple professional-managerial friends tell me they personally won't bike because that's something they left behind in their childhood or broke-student days. It's beneath them now. But you're right, people also complain about bike infrastructure projects taking space from working-class drivers to benefit white yuppies.
We see this often with urbanist topics. New multifamily construction is gentrification and colonization if you lean left, full of crime and a threat to our schools if you lean right. The only widespread agreement is that it represents the Other. The stranglehold of postwar suburban car culture on the American psyche is self-reinforcing at this point.
The chart of income vs percent who commute by bike is u-shaped but with a higher left side. Rich people bike more than middle class people but poor people bike more than either the rich or middle class. People who are on the right half of the distribution think biking is affluent-coded because they only see the right tail where it curves up and they don't know anyone on the left side of the distribution where the gradient goes the other way.
I ride my carbon fiber road bike down the bike trail in the morning; when I drive home after a night of entertainment, I see laborers riding their bikes in the busy street to get home after a long day of work. I feel the irony deeply.
We should improve society somewhat.
Yet you participate in society.
In some way it makes sense. The poor are driven by high property prices to live far away. The more affluent can choose to buy property in the heart of the city and use bikes in the city.
I think it depends; biking because you need to and biking for fun look very different. IME of Phoenix you could have the cyclist doing training routes in their kit and the crackhead strapped with bags of their stuff pass by on the same street.
Walk behind restaurants in many US cities and you'll see the cheap mountain bikes that the lower-paid kitchen staff (mostly immigrants) rode to work. This is particularly common in the SF Bay Area.
(I am in favor of improving cycling infrastructure for everyone regardless of income level.)
I have a pretty strong anti-cycling stance, because I watched my New York neighborhood that was a pedestrian paradise significantly degraded by bike lanes. The balance of walking, subways, busses, taxis and delivery trucks had worked pretty well. Bicyclists introduced the concept of failing to yield, then acting indignant and entitled.
> I have a pretty strong anti-cycling stance, because I watched my New York neighborhood that was a pedestrian paradise significantly degraded by bike lanes.
A car driver, a cyclist and a pedestrian walk into a café and order ten cream cakes. When the waitress places them on their table the car driver grabs nine of them and scoffs them in his face, then he leans over to the pedestrian and whispers: “don’t let the cyclist take your one”.
e: Actually, not going to get into it but c'mon - cars kill pedestrians in a way that bikes rarely do and removing the cars from your NY neighborhood would have an obviously better impact on pedestrians compared to the bikes.
I will tell you who is entitled, driver of a 20 ton construction truck that drove over pedestrian area, where children play, to beat traffic. This was on pavement, few meters from the front door of my house.
It's amazing how you post this and a bunch of cyclists come out, elbowing each other aside to be the first to act out their most obnoxious stereotypes. "Yeah, we bomb down the sidewalks at 30 and categorically refuse to yield to pedestrians while shouting 'Share the road!' at anyone using an engine, and you should be grateful we didn't get in an SUV and plow through a daycare center!"
"Muni trains close their doors and pull one foot out of the station just to wait at a red light"
What is the reason for this? I see it all the time in metro areas, and it always blows my mind that traffic lights aren't synced with the tram schedules.
Sometimes I suspect that there is signaling going on that helps the traffic signals to favor the light rail train here. Then, sometimes, I suspect that there is not.
> how Muni trains close their doors and pull one foot out of the station just to wait at a red light
There are safety and scheduling reasons for this. They are not merely trying to snub riders. For example, the light rail trains here have a standard for how long they open their doors at each station. It's something like 14 seconds. A vehicle with open doors will also allow passengers to disembark; it's a two-way passage. So should they sit in the station with closed doors, or push off a few yards down to the intersection? Now, other motorists see a train stopped at a station and they think one thing. They see a train stopped and waiting for a red light and they know that it will proceed through on green. It seems weird to imagine a train that lingers at the station as if it's boarding but it's not, it's really waiting for the light to change, and then it will pounce on the opportunity. That's less than predictable behavior, as far as other motorists are concerned.
Our transit authority reminds riders to arrive at the stop 5 minutes early. We're also reminded that if we miss this one, another one is on the way. Passengers need not inherit that toxic road rage.
That's exactly what I'm talking about. The space is for drivers. The rules governing the space are tuned for the predictability and convenience of drivers. The light rail is just a slower, less maneuverable, very timidly driven car that we're all sharing.
It wasn't like that in The Netherlands. Urban spaces where the LRVs operate have few cars and fewer traffic lights. The train moves like it means business and anything in its way scatters. As a passenger, it feels like you & your journey matter. On Muni it's like you're in a DMV waiting room.
> Our transit authority reminds riders to arrive at the stop 5 minutes early.
For reference, In the Netherlands you only strictly need to be at the stop 30 seconds before departure, as that is when the doors close in preparation for departure.
> Now, other motorists see a train stopped at a station and they think one thing. They see a train stopped and waiting for a red light and they know that it will proceed through on green.
Why in the hell would drivers need to know that? Leave the train with the doors open at the station to allow any late comers to board. When the track clears start the traffic light cycle to stop car traffic, close the train doors and depart. The drivers see a red light and hopefully know to stop, whether or not they can see a train waiting.
This was my experience as well. I went in fall of last year for four days to attend Blender (the 3D modeling software) Conference, and it was simply delightful. I walked to and from the conference center every day, took the metro a few times, got to ride the high-speed rail from the station that's literally integrated right into Schipol airport, and witnessed more bikers than I've ever seen in one place. All of this while the city and its infrastructure was clean, quiet, safe, and beautiful.
Then I came back to Los Angeles. For reference, one time while taking the metro I had to evacuate because one of the cars caught on fire and had smoke billowing out the windows. I wound up trapped near the Walk of Fame in Hollywood at roughly 11PM, because when I tried to catch a bus out of there, a bunch of idiots were parked directly in front of the bus stop and the bus driver was forced to just drive right past me because they couldn't pull over and stop. So then I hailed an Uber and had to wait nearly half an hour for it to arrive and pick me up because of how utterly packed the streets were with bumper-to-bumper cars.
I used to semi-jokingly tell my friends and family I wanted to move to Europe. Then I went to Amsterdam. Now I am dead serious when I tell my friends and family I want to move to Europe. Although, I'll probably go somewhere with slightly warmer weather than the Netherlands — Portugal and Spain are both high on my list of candidates currently.
It's so strange because it isn't that people are flooding into cities and bringing their car fixation with them. As a rural/suburban person, nobody I know from here drives when they're traveling in a city because the driving experience is so miserably bad compared to driving in the country. It's the city people who think moving five feet every thirty seconds and bathing in an ocean of car horn noises is somehow compatible with human life.
> It's the city people who think moving five feet every thirty seconds and bathing in an ocean of car horn noises is somehow compatible with human life.
Some even manage to enjoy it. I did not believe anyone actually wanted, let alone enjoyed the misery of modernity until I experienced one such person firsthand. It blowed my mind, I was in shock for a straight day. The guy genuinely "liked" the new Transformers movie (which was beyond awful), "enjoyed" fast food, and "liked" the big car-honk-filled city center and CO2-infested loud mall. I'm yet to see a more oversocialized person. When I think of words 'deranged' and 'insane', no criminal but this guy appears in my mind's eye.
From an American perspective it could be. Amsterdam is the largest city in our country and it still pulls together walking, cycling and public transport in a way that doesn’t suck. Of course smaller towns have it easier in some ways because of the way Dutch towns are historically configured. What makes the large cities interesting is that they are somewhat metropolitan and still have the Dutch vibe.
> From 2001 to 2017 the number of people cycling increased the fastest among high income, highly educated, employed, white men between the ages 25 and 44.
That doesn't have data. It doesn't even have good summations.
How is "cycling" defined? For pleasure or for day-to-day travel? How was the data collected? How did they include/ account for the unemployed 20-somethings in poor suburbs who aren't biking to work, aren't "cycling" in events, aren't carrying the family groceries home in a basket, but are on bikes constantly going between houses (and maybe a gas station food mart)?
1) Most people prefer to drive... look at any country that is getting richer - people want to buy cars.
2) It is only when people cannot afford to drive or driving is too inconvenient (traffic, or narrow streets/lack of parking in Europe, or outright restrictions ), they will use alternative modes of transportation.
3) The more people are thus inconvenienced, the more public support there is for the alternative modes (simply by the numbers); moreover, an average person biking and taking transit becomes richer/nicer, so the political will to improve the experience increases even faster than the number of people; plus the experience becomes nicer even without extra investment.
It's a flywheel either way.
Now, you could argue that global warming is bad / enough freeways cannot be built / etc., sure. Maybe we cannot have nice things.
But don't argue that people want to live in urban paradise and some contrived system is simply not giving them what they want. Most people everywhere, when they can, want to drive and live in houses. Except in some places many can afford that and have the infrastructure, and in some only a few do. It's not like car ownership and traffic is that low in Europe, given how admittedly convenient it is to not have one and how relatively expensive car ownership is, esp. in relation to incomes.
You don’t know that. You would have to run the experiment - spend equal amount of money on infrastructure for bikes and for cars. Then see.
Most British cities are tiny, you can cross most of them on an e-bike in like 15 to 30 minutes. Except London of course. But there is usually no safe way to cross them.
When I ask people in London, why are your not cycling, 95% say they are afraid of getting hit by a car. They are wrong - they will be killed by a truck. Most cyclists in London due to 4 axle construction trucks. I have seen one of the bastards illegally drive into a cycle lane, then onto a pavement where women walk with kids, and drive on that pavement to get around traffic. I have seen a BMW stuck on a bend in a segregated cycle way at Tower of London. I’ve seen a wolksvagen in a cycle lane upside down.
Go to a rich and cycling safe are of London like hackney, there are plenty of bikes. Go to an area with dangerous roads, like Surrey, no bikes
We spend insane amount of money on car infra. We just built a new tonnes in east London, the only way to cross the river for miles, and you can only cross in a car.
> It is only when people cannot afford to drive or driving is too inconvenient (traffic, or narrow streets/lack of parking in Europe, or outright restrictions ), they will use alternative modes of transportation.
This is literally a tautology. "People find driving more convenient, except when driving is less convenient".
> But don't argue that people want to live in urban paradise and some contrived system is simply not giving them what they want. Most people everywhere, when they can, want to drive and live in houses.
Price signals are real. The fact that millions of people choose to pay large amounts of money to live in big cities and not drive instead of moving out to the sticks is proof that it is an extremely desirable lifestyle for a large fraction of the population.
> It's not like car ownership and traffic is that low in Europe, given how admittedly convenient it is to not have one
Indeed. Germany, France, Italy, Spain, etc. are all among the countries with the highest vehicles per capita in the world (it's not as much as in the US, but then in the US people can drive starting at 16 years old, so it messes the stats quite a bit).
>Even a lot of the anti-cycling stance comes down to, “What am I, poor?”
I agree with the overall point that people don't want to cycle because the experience sucks, but your description feels like an unnecessarily inflammatory way to say "people are willing to pay for a more pleasant experience". Nobody says "a lot of the anti-cheap laptop stance comes down to, "what am I, poor?".
There's an ad in rotation right now on a popular local radio station where the whole bit is that character A's car isn't working, and character B talks about the great deals at a specific car dealership. "Don't walk," he exclaims and he shares the gospel of car ownership.
Literally, the whole framing is that walking sucks and is embarrassing :(
> inflammatory way to say "people are willing to pay for a more pleasant experience"
You got it all wrong! It does noy matter how the expience feels physically.
The problem is social stigma attached to cycling.
Like tell you mates you spent 3 weeks fixing your car, or built your own house, and it was super u pleasant and you broke your hand in the process - you are cool.
But tell them you cycled to work to improvr fitness, and you are a weirdo.
If we want a shift to walking, we need cities to plant around 100x the number of trees they have.
Ever walk through an old, mature neighbourhood? Usually there are tons of people on the sidewalks, and a primary reason is that there are mature trees providing plenty of shade.
Then try walking in a new neighbourhood with barely any shade. It is awful.
> Then try walking in a new neighbourhood with barely any shade. It is awful.
Neighborhoods you’d typically want to walk in do have shade because they were all built a long time ago and there is somewhere for you to walk to. Suburban neighborhoods aren’t designed that way which is why even if there was shade there’s still nowhere to walk to.
I do agree we need more trees planted and more shade. Unfortunately a lot of space near and around places people would want to walk or bike to us instead covered in pavement for cars and parking.
We can do more than one thing at once though. We can make areas more walkable while we also plant trees. And we can flip state highway departments [1] so that they focus on serving the people and their needs instead of themselves or a small, vocal minority.
[1] Note that departments of transportation in nearly all states are highway and road transit departments first and do next to nothing w.r.t better means of transportation. Their entire context is cars and drivers and you can confirm this by looking at the budget.
> Neighborhoods you’d typically want to walk in do have shade because they were all built a long time ago and there is somewhere for you to walk to. Suburban neighborhoods aren’t designed that way which is why even if there was shade there’s still nowhere to walk to.
I agree with what you are saying generally but my point stands even for urban cores, which tend to have little to no trees (or many trees but not mature enough for any real shade) and tons of concrete. Awful walking experience despite lots of things to do and see.
100%l the lack of tree cover everywhere is criminal.
Three sticking points in my experience trying to help manage street trees in a neighborhood of 400 homes:
1. Planter strips are too small. This leads to infrastructure conflicts that are costly like lifting sidewalks and exploding irrigation lines. The problem is many municipalities simply have standard streets too wide and planters too narrow.
2. Maintaining trees is an ongoing expense and if not managed by an HOA or municipality the costs explode as individuals have to pay a crew to drag out equipment for just a few trees.
3. Lack of mandatory diversity- my neighborhood is 60% ash because the builder got a good deal 15 years ago after the emerald ash borer was found out east and wasn’t top of mind in the west yet. If the EAB makes a strong foothold entire blocks will be starting from zero again.
Can't upvote this enough. In Austin, with us on track to break the record of 100+ degree consecutive days, there is a huge difference between walking along nice, shaded areas and barren sidewalks. The trees don't even need to be that "mature" - I've seen new developments plant grown trees that only take a couple years to really expand.
Like the blog post and other commenters mentioned, it's not just trees alone but especially in hotter climates it can make all the difference.
It's crazy to me that people need to be reminded that trees, and plants in general, lower the temperature. Sufficient amounts of dense bushes do absolute wonders. I can feel the cool, moist air from 20 meters.
Animals understand this stuff just fine, yet certain modern humans somehow have trouble with the concept.
I don't think the tree has much to do with it. While shade is important and should be even more so going forward, the general scale of new neighbourhoods compared to old ones is dramatically different.
It's like homes used to be so much closer to the sidewalk, it was just a couple of steps to reach the sidewalk and get going, but now it's these giant football field widths separating homes from the sidewalk, and then massive 4 lane sized roads separating sidewalks on either side. I'm exaggerating of course but the point is still there, the scale is just so different planting trees won't solve it.
This difference in scale creates such a different atmosphere, where sidewalks are just for dog walkers and bored baby sitters, not for regular commute. It's like if you want to talk to your neighbour from the sidewalk you have to bring a megaphone.
I do. I lived 25+ years in Atlanta and I walked all over downtown, midtown, Buckhead, Little 5, Westside, etc. and a lack of trees means you BAKE walking more than a block.
There are lots of really nice, shaded neighborhoods in Atlanta. But anywhere there's a business that you'd walk to, you BAKE.
It wasn’t one reason. Some of it came down to liability (buckling sidewalks, falling limbs in storms, pruning), public safety (baddies can hide under trees and away from choppers before FLiR), impact on utilities (100+ years ago maybe there was a sewer line and maybe a water line, but not much else in most places).
Drunk driver dies hitting a tree. Whose fault is that really?
Could have easily hit a person, a traffic pole, another car on sideways.
I don’t understand the argument why trees are at fault here.
Trees are the ultimate carbon capture, they produce oxygen and humidity, they provide shade, something beautiful to look at. They bring in birds and tree dwelling animals like squirrels.
Trees are a magical invention by nature.
That’s why we feel amazing walking in a neighborhood with trees.
Then try walking in a new neighbourhood with barely any shade. It is awful.
Love how south-centric this statement is. In Northern countries, that's true for a month typically, otherwise "oh god please I hope the sun will shine on me".
In December, I see 4 hours of sun, where the light gets above tree tops. And that's in Southern Canada!
Not a hatred of trees, but a dislike of shade trees.
edit: until I visited Texas, I never understood why people wore hats. The sun is never hot enough here for it. It never gets as high in the sky. Yet it's a brutal beast in Texas. I can only imagine further south..
On the contrary, not south centric at all (note my spelling of neighbourhood!) - I lived in southwestern Ontario for most of my life and now live in southeastern BC. I have yet to see a new neighbourhood where I’ve thought the tree coverage was too much at any time of year! In fact, the same is true for old neighbourhoods. I just cannot imagine feeling oppressed by the shade from trees.
Unless all your shade trees are evergreens (unlikely) there's this thing called "autumn" when the leaves fall off the trees and they don't provide shade any more.
Given the conditions around the Mediterranean in recent weeks I'm not sure citing Barcelona as an example of why cities don't need trees to be walkable will be a convincing argument. Barcelona is a great place but it's also horrible to walk around at lunchtime on a hot summer day.
I spend lots of time walking through old, mature neighbourhoods with mature trees. Usually the sidewalks are empty, because stuff is too spread out to be walkable, and there just aren't enough people for sidewalks to be full. Yes, mostly in the US, but I've also observed this outside the US. Leafy+dense enough to be vibrant areas are really nice, but the exception. The thing that really makes new neighborhoods awful for walking isn't lack of shade, it's everything else about the new neighborhood, typically built in an extremely car-centric manner.
I observe that in a 1950s neighborhood with mature trees. The sidewalks are only for people to exercise themselves (jogging) or their dogs, not as a means to get to a destination.
One of the fundamental axioms of traffic engineering is you can't have trees too close to the edge of the road, because drunk/speeding drivers might get hurt. It is not just that the neighborhoods are mature enough for trees to have grown in, it's that they predate this science.
Then those traffic engineers are idiots, because they should be designing the roads so that people don't feel like they can safely drive at speeds that will endanger themself and others.
I like mature trees and love walking among them (e.g., downtown Sacramento). In 99% of the US more trees would be better (and I try to contribute by planting an acorn or other tree seed when I spy a place a sapling might not get mowed, wherever I go). But I still consider more trees a distant second to buildings closer together, without room for trees (or, as typical, empty space or junk). If there's room for many mature trees, the place is fundamentally not dense enough to be totally amazing for a life of walking, as opposed to walking tourism.
I'm curious what the rates of walking are in Sacramento now, given that it's got that whole "City of Trees" moniker and is also hot as Hell during the summer. I've honestly never been there in the summer, so I couldn't even share anecdotes. I'm not finding anything useful on Google.
What you say makes sense, when I walk in my own (new-ish development) neighborhood in Orange county, I specifically go to the areas where trees are more developed and provide more shade.
People walked under sun since forever. That's what hats are for. What you're really saying is walking under the sun crosses a discomfort threshold for you which driving and walking under shade doesn't.
I spent a few weeks recently cycling from LA to the Mexican border across non-coastal Southern California. Zero complaints about cycling in that part of the USA: I was pleased by how many hard shoulders had been turned into bike lanes, and drivers seemed courteous.
But man, was walking in towns a drag. If I left the bike safely at a hotel and wanted to stroll over to a restaurant or supermarket, every intersection was button-operated traffic lights where pedestrians wait ages for their turn to cross. Then, the pedestrian light flashes for almost too little time to cross the six or seven lanes of traffic. The sheer width of ordinary US roads must have a deterrent effect.
> I was pleased by how many hard shoulders had been turned into bike lanes, and drivers seemed courteous.
But how many are protected bike lanes, instead of just paint? Painted bike lanes are only helpful for relatively confident cyclists, and obviously do virtually nothing to actually protect people on bikes. Imagine if we started replacing sidewalks with painted walk lanes!
> The sheer width of US roads must have a deterrent effect.
Yup. In Munich, not only are roads generally not as wide, but if they're even sorta of wide, they get a pedestrian island or two.
Painted bike lanes of this sort are quite common in the EU (and even a step up from painted shared lanes), I can't regard the US ones I experienced as inferior. Moreover, because the roads are often as multi-lane and wide as I described, cyclists over in that painted lane might even feel well removed from the main flow of vehicles.
> If you were driving past and saw a friend walking or rolling there, what would your first thought be:
>>“Oh, no, Henry’s car must have broken down! I better offer him a ride.”
>>“Oh, looks like Henry’s out for a walk! I should text him later.”
To me, this is a great way of framing it. I sometimes see people walking along a stretch of road and I feel for them because I know that no human would be waking along that stretch unless their life was in a bad place.
When I lived in Berlin from 2009-2012 I was impressed by the pedestrian friendly infrastructure and found myself comparing it to America's. Berlin's system is certainly made with dignity: Trains, trams, and busses were always clean, and the people at that time were overwhelming quiet and polite. Bicycles never given a second glance. I never felt safer without a car.
Contrast to America where trains and busses where the level of danger is considerably higher, to a degree that it is dissuading to walk. Vehicles provide safety in an otherwise uncertain society.
I like this idea of dignity, but no matter how amazing a walking/biking infrastructure is, it is only as good as the behavior of the people who use it. Until busses, subways, trains, trams, streetcars, and just walking down the street is made safer and cleaner people will continue to stick to the safety of the cars
I think what's being noticed here, as in many urbanist conversations, is that our urban conditions are primarily reflective of the vastly unequal socio-economic structure we have at large.
In places where the working poor are the most disadvantaged, there also tends to be the highest auto dependency. (Think American South, Panama City, Panama etc)
To Soap box for a moment, almost all of our problems are reflective of our vast inequality. Our ability to live more sustainably, enjoy greater opportunity, ability to form new businesses, household formations, civic function etc. ultimately are limited by the degree of inequality a nation faces.
On one hand, it's kind of a tautology - sure, if you're in a city that is very car-dependent, it's a disadvantage to the working poor because owning a car costs money.
But in the US there are also (usually older) cities with relatively great public transportation that are more walkable that also have enormous amounts of wealth inequality.
Doesn't really have anything to do with inequality, in the US at least it's mostly just reflective of when cities were built and developed. Pre-WWII cities like NYC and Boston have (again, relatively) great public transit options and huge walkable parts, while newer cities (often in the South) developed around the car.
The problem is that the shining example of low-inequality urbanism (Western Europe) achieved this by having effectively the most exclusionary immigration policy in the West for two centuries.
Europe may have great biking culture and equality, but they have effectively sacrificed pluralism.
I’m an Aussie, and after living 3 months in LA I think it was the most poorly designed city I’ve ever been to for this exact reason - I felt unable to walk practically anywhere!
It felt like my options were drive or taxi. And we know what LA traffic is like.
I can’t speak to other US cities, and it is possible that certain areas of LA are less terrible than where I stayed. (But I will say, I was in quite an affluent area which had no business being unwalkable and without public transport).
But it really opened my eyes to how good we have it in Australian cities (which themselves are still far behind many European cities).
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Here are some other examples of things that I think contribute to the hostile walking experience in the US:
* Cars parked in short driveways often extend all the way across the sidewalk. Even if you can easily step off onto the road to walk around them (not all pedestrians can), it just feels like a slap in the face to have to do that.
* Cars have much higher and stronger headlights, with the high beams often left on, and drivers are generally much less mindful of them. As a pedestrian walking at night on under-lit streets, you are constantly getting blinded.
* Tinted windows (even the mild level of tint that most cars in the US have). The whole experience of being a lone vulnerable pedestrian among a sea of cars is made even worse when you can't see the people in the cars (but you know they can see you).
* Often the only option to get food late at night are fast food places, which become drive-thru only after a certain time. Having to go through the drive-thru on foot is obviously a terrible experience, and they will often refuse to even serve you.
Same. I’ve lived in Los Ángeles and Amsterdam, and it is impossible to explain to my friends and family just how awful the quality of life is in LA precisely because of the difference in attitudes and priorities over cars. Perhaps some have “nicer” (aka bigger) houses in LA than they would have in Ámsterdam, but once they leave their front door everything is objectively worse
They need to see first hand what happens when you just add more freeways and more lanes. It's not good.
The (insane) cost of housing in LA doesn't exactly lead to people having bigger houses (or often affording any house).
Why the accent? Is it not the one in California?
The SUV craze is really to blame - in general many US states don’t allow dark tint on traditional cars but do on SUVs. And since rear windows on vans and light trucks (aka SUVs) are exempted from window tint restrictions, pull up to a typical intersection in the US and look around and you can’t see worth a damn.
Somehow it’s ok for a Subaru Crosstrek to have dark tint but not an Impreza that is the same car but lower? There are even more weird situations like the Mercedes Benz GLA compact CUV which typically has tinted windows, but not the top-of-the-line AMG trim because that one has a lowered suspension, making it a “car” instead of a “light truck”.
Apparently in Alabama at least, the manufacturer determines the designation [2]. So you might be able to call Subaru about the Impreza and have them call it “an SUV” to get that sweet rear window tint.
[1] https://www.suvradar.com/can-suvs-have-tinted-windows/
[2] https://www.alea.gov/dps/highway-patrol/alabama-tinting-regu...
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Everything in a mega city works together to make transit work. Those tall buildings? They provide great shade no matter how sunny it is which is critical for walking to bus stops and subway stations. Also, the walk itself is so much more interesting, random stores to stop at and places to eat and go to. Density makes transit work.
You can't just put random stores in a suburb and make it "walkable" and expect the same thing. Just as everything in a mega city works together to make transit work, everything in a suburb works together to make cars work.
We need to give up on the mass transit solutions that work for dense cities (subways and buses) for suburbs. It's a waste of money and completely the wrong solution. It hasn't worked for decades and never will.
Shut down bus systems for suburbs and use the government funds to give out ride sharing (either Uber or government run) credits for everyone to use (low income can get more credits). That's what a suburb is designed for, point-to-point travel such as cars. And invest massively in real protected, useful bike lanes and stop trying to kill e-bikes with regulations (which a lot of cities are trying to do). e-bikes are finally a real alternative to cars in suburbs, it has just the right amount of travel speed and ease to challenge the car, but it's already under attack. Ride sharing credits and e-bikes, these are the solutions for suburbs. Stop trying to fit a square peg (buses and subways) into a round hole.
Did you just make this whole post up? This is obviously wrong.
It's even worse than that. You don't know they can see you, you know they could see you but you cannot know if they do see you. That's terrible for pedestrian safety.
(Here in Berlin I have to plan around Sunday trading rules in a way I didn't back in the UK, but we have Spätis, so there are options).
In San Francisco, at least, there's a big tug of war about where your driveway ends and the curb begins. Suffice to say blocking the curb is one of those things that's almost never enforced.
Also this:
https://old.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/155z0eo/frien...
Tokyo is very oriented towards pedestrian traffic, considering shinkansen and most rail service - yet satellite suburban sites, like Saitama, etc have tiny residential rows that literally don't fit both a car and a pedestrian. And that's where most people live. Yet Japan is highly pedestrian.
Now, South America. Most if not all urban centers of 1M are extremely well covered by bus networks. And they have to, since most of the population cannot afford a car. However, the moment you step off the old city centers, you are literally walking on the main road, sharing space with speeding cards and buses driving like maniacs. You will often find a major road has literally no sidewalk, only dirt, weeds and sewage.
Compared to those situations, the US is a walking paradise.
The problem of distance is very different from the problem of safety and confort in the US
Plus, it's worth mentioning that while Tokyo has a lot of mixed-traffic streets, the streets are small, have very low speed limits, and have strong restrictions on the size and type of car that can actually be within the city. It's less like you're walking in traffic and more like the car is intruding on a pedestrian space.
I also think Japan is generally a lot more pleasant to walk in than the US
Japan’s cars are mostly small, civilized and without tinted windows.
Sidewalks next to large roads generally have a barrier that clearly separates the bike/pedestrian traffic from the cars.
If there’s roads where there is no separation between cars and pedestrians the speed for the cars is generally limited to 30km/h.
Streets also have natural speedbumps in the form of lantern and electricity poles essentially standing on the street, instead of the sidewalk.
I certainly feel safer walking here than anywhere in the US.
I just spent the last 2 months i Europe and on many side streets there is no place to safely stop a car which means pulling into the sidewalk is the only option. So I frequently had to step into the street to walk around a stopped delivery van or similar.
Oh I wish. On the contrary, it feels most everything closes around 9pm here and it hurts as a night owl. Heck, so many cafes seem to close around 6-7pm.
I grew up in close contact with a large urban poor population and I think the view of bikes was the exact opposite of this. Biking in the city is considered the purview of affluent white people
We see this often with urbanist topics. New multifamily construction is gentrification and colonization if you lean left, full of crime and a threat to our schools if you lean right. The only widespread agreement is that it represents the Other. The stranglehold of postwar suburban car culture on the American psyche is self-reinforcing at this point.
https://lede-admin.usa.streetsblog.org/wp-content/uploads/si...
The chart of income vs percent who commute by bike is u-shaped but with a higher left side. Rich people bike more than middle class people but poor people bike more than either the rich or middle class. People who are on the right half of the distribution think biking is affluent-coded because they only see the right tail where it curves up and they don't know anyone on the left side of the distribution where the gradient goes the other way.
(I am in favor of improving cycling infrastructure for everyone regardless of income level.)
https://grist.org/cities/black-chicago-biking-disparities-in...
In reality, only rich (and white) folks can afford to live in areas that are not car-dependent.
https://granfondodailynews.com/2020/01/17/is-north-american-... > From 2001 to 2017 the number of people cycling increased the fastest among high income, highly educated, employed, white men between the ages 25 and 44.
Or this tired bit of "wit": "Oh, you're biking? Let me guess, DUI?"
A car driver, a cyclist and a pedestrian walk into a café and order ten cream cakes. When the waitress places them on their table the car driver grabs nine of them and scoffs them in his face, then he leans over to the pedestrian and whispers: “don’t let the cyclist take your one”.
e: Actually, not going to get into it but c'mon - cars kill pedestrians in a way that bikes rarely do and removing the cars from your NY neighborhood would have an obviously better impact on pedestrians compared to the bikes.
I will tell you who is entitled, driver of a 20 ton construction truck that drove over pedestrian area, where children play, to beat traffic. This was on pavement, few meters from the front door of my house.
[0] NYC's toxic ebike culture almost killed 4 people; let's talk about it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrtLWilSoNI
What is the reason for this? I see it all the time in metro areas, and it always blows my mind that traffic lights aren't synced with the tram schedules.
Sometimes I suspect that there is signaling going on that helps the traffic signals to favor the light rail train here. Then, sometimes, I suspect that there is not.
There are safety and scheduling reasons for this. They are not merely trying to snub riders. For example, the light rail trains here have a standard for how long they open their doors at each station. It's something like 14 seconds. A vehicle with open doors will also allow passengers to disembark; it's a two-way passage. So should they sit in the station with closed doors, or push off a few yards down to the intersection? Now, other motorists see a train stopped at a station and they think one thing. They see a train stopped and waiting for a red light and they know that it will proceed through on green. It seems weird to imagine a train that lingers at the station as if it's boarding but it's not, it's really waiting for the light to change, and then it will pounce on the opportunity. That's less than predictable behavior, as far as other motorists are concerned.
Our transit authority reminds riders to arrive at the stop 5 minutes early. We're also reminded that if we miss this one, another one is on the way. Passengers need not inherit that toxic road rage.
It wasn't like that in The Netherlands. Urban spaces where the LRVs operate have few cars and fewer traffic lights. The train moves like it means business and anything in its way scatters. As a passenger, it feels like you & your journey matter. On Muni it's like you're in a DMV waiting room.
For reference, In the Netherlands you only strictly need to be at the stop 30 seconds before departure, as that is when the doors close in preparation for departure.
> Now, other motorists see a train stopped at a station and they think one thing. They see a train stopped and waiting for a red light and they know that it will proceed through on green.
Why in the hell would drivers need to know that? Leave the train with the doors open at the station to allow any late comers to board. When the track clears start the traffic light cycle to stop car traffic, close the train doors and depart. The drivers see a red light and hopefully know to stop, whether or not they can see a train waiting.
I just got back to the US from Amsterdam. I'll never look at these awful streets the same again.
Then I came back to Los Angeles. For reference, one time while taking the metro I had to evacuate because one of the cars caught on fire and had smoke billowing out the windows. I wound up trapped near the Walk of Fame in Hollywood at roughly 11PM, because when I tried to catch a bus out of there, a bunch of idiots were parked directly in front of the bus stop and the bus driver was forced to just drive right past me because they couldn't pull over and stop. So then I hailed an Uber and had to wait nearly half an hour for it to arrive and pick me up because of how utterly packed the streets were with bumper-to-bumper cars.
I used to semi-jokingly tell my friends and family I wanted to move to Europe. Then I went to Amsterdam. Now I am dead serious when I tell my friends and family I want to move to Europe. Although, I'll probably go somewhere with slightly warmer weather than the Netherlands — Portugal and Spain are both high on my list of candidates currently.
Some even manage to enjoy it. I did not believe anyone actually wanted, let alone enjoyed the misery of modernity until I experienced one such person firsthand. It blowed my mind, I was in shock for a straight day. The guy genuinely "liked" the new Transformers movie (which was beyond awful), "enjoyed" fast food, and "liked" the big car-honk-filled city center and CO2-infested loud mall. I'm yet to see a more oversocialized person. When I think of words 'deranged' and 'insane', no criminal but this guy appears in my mind's eye.
Maybe this will change now that bikes cost more than most used cars. Spending 15K on a bike is a thing now.
https://granfondodailynews.com/2020/01/17/is-north-american-...
> From 2001 to 2017 the number of people cycling increased the fastest among high income, highly educated, employed, white men between the ages 25 and 44.
How is "cycling" defined? For pleasure or for day-to-day travel? How was the data collected? How did they include/ account for the unemployed 20-somethings in poor suburbs who aren't biking to work, aren't "cycling" in events, aren't carrying the family groceries home in a basket, but are on bikes constantly going between houses (and maybe a gas station food mart)?
It’s just artificial scarcity, like fine art.
1) Most people prefer to drive... look at any country that is getting richer - people want to buy cars.
2) It is only when people cannot afford to drive or driving is too inconvenient (traffic, or narrow streets/lack of parking in Europe, or outright restrictions ), they will use alternative modes of transportation.
3) The more people are thus inconvenienced, the more public support there is for the alternative modes (simply by the numbers); moreover, an average person biking and taking transit becomes richer/nicer, so the political will to improve the experience increases even faster than the number of people; plus the experience becomes nicer even without extra investment.
It's a flywheel either way.
Now, you could argue that global warming is bad / enough freeways cannot be built / etc., sure. Maybe we cannot have nice things.
But don't argue that people want to live in urban paradise and some contrived system is simply not giving them what they want. Most people everywhere, when they can, want to drive and live in houses. Except in some places many can afford that and have the infrastructure, and in some only a few do. It's not like car ownership and traffic is that low in Europe, given how admittedly convenient it is to not have one and how relatively expensive car ownership is, esp. in relation to incomes.
You don’t know that. You would have to run the experiment - spend equal amount of money on infrastructure for bikes and for cars. Then see.
Most British cities are tiny, you can cross most of them on an e-bike in like 15 to 30 minutes. Except London of course. But there is usually no safe way to cross them.
When I ask people in London, why are your not cycling, 95% say they are afraid of getting hit by a car. They are wrong - they will be killed by a truck. Most cyclists in London due to 4 axle construction trucks. I have seen one of the bastards illegally drive into a cycle lane, then onto a pavement where women walk with kids, and drive on that pavement to get around traffic. I have seen a BMW stuck on a bend in a segregated cycle way at Tower of London. I’ve seen a wolksvagen in a cycle lane upside down.
Go to a rich and cycling safe are of London like hackney, there are plenty of bikes. Go to an area with dangerous roads, like Surrey, no bikes
We spend insane amount of money on car infra. We just built a new tonnes in east London, the only way to cross the river for miles, and you can only cross in a car.
> It is only when people cannot afford to drive or driving is too inconvenient (traffic, or narrow streets/lack of parking in Europe, or outright restrictions ), they will use alternative modes of transportation.
This is literally a tautology. "People find driving more convenient, except when driving is less convenient".
> But don't argue that people want to live in urban paradise and some contrived system is simply not giving them what they want. Most people everywhere, when they can, want to drive and live in houses.
Price signals are real. The fact that millions of people choose to pay large amounts of money to live in big cities and not drive instead of moving out to the sticks is proof that it is an extremely desirable lifestyle for a large fraction of the population.
Indeed. Germany, France, Italy, Spain, etc. are all among the countries with the highest vehicles per capita in the world (it's not as much as in the US, but then in the US people can drive starting at 16 years old, so it messes the stats quite a bit).
I agree with the overall point that people don't want to cycle because the experience sucks, but your description feels like an unnecessarily inflammatory way to say "people are willing to pay for a more pleasant experience". Nobody says "a lot of the anti-cheap laptop stance comes down to, "what am I, poor?".
Literally, the whole framing is that walking sucks and is embarrassing :(
You got it all wrong! It does noy matter how the expience feels physically.
The problem is social stigma attached to cycling.
Like tell you mates you spent 3 weeks fixing your car, or built your own house, and it was super u pleasant and you broke your hand in the process - you are cool.
But tell them you cycled to work to improvr fitness, and you are a weirdo.
The closest is "people aren't willing to pay to improve an unpleasant experience" which isn't related to purchasing a laptop in anyway.
Ever walk through an old, mature neighbourhood? Usually there are tons of people on the sidewalks, and a primary reason is that there are mature trees providing plenty of shade.
Then try walking in a new neighbourhood with barely any shade. It is awful.
Neighborhoods you’d typically want to walk in do have shade because they were all built a long time ago and there is somewhere for you to walk to. Suburban neighborhoods aren’t designed that way which is why even if there was shade there’s still nowhere to walk to.
I do agree we need more trees planted and more shade. Unfortunately a lot of space near and around places people would want to walk or bike to us instead covered in pavement for cars and parking.
We can do more than one thing at once though. We can make areas more walkable while we also plant trees. And we can flip state highway departments [1] so that they focus on serving the people and their needs instead of themselves or a small, vocal minority.
[1] Note that departments of transportation in nearly all states are highway and road transit departments first and do next to nothing w.r.t better means of transportation. Their entire context is cars and drivers and you can confirm this by looking at the budget.
I agree with what you are saying generally but my point stands even for urban cores, which tend to have little to no trees (or many trees but not mature enough for any real shade) and tons of concrete. Awful walking experience despite lots of things to do and see.
Three sticking points in my experience trying to help manage street trees in a neighborhood of 400 homes:
1. Planter strips are too small. This leads to infrastructure conflicts that are costly like lifting sidewalks and exploding irrigation lines. The problem is many municipalities simply have standard streets too wide and planters too narrow.
2. Maintaining trees is an ongoing expense and if not managed by an HOA or municipality the costs explode as individuals have to pay a crew to drag out equipment for just a few trees.
3. Lack of mandatory diversity- my neighborhood is 60% ash because the builder got a good deal 15 years ago after the emerald ash borer was found out east and wasn’t top of mind in the west yet. If the EAB makes a strong foothold entire blocks will be starting from zero again.
Like the blog post and other commenters mentioned, it's not just trees alone but especially in hotter climates it can make all the difference.
Animals understand this stuff just fine, yet certain modern humans somehow have trouble with the concept.
It's like homes used to be so much closer to the sidewalk, it was just a couple of steps to reach the sidewalk and get going, but now it's these giant football field widths separating homes from the sidewalk, and then massive 4 lane sized roads separating sidewalks on either side. I'm exaggerating of course but the point is still there, the scale is just so different planting trees won't solve it.
This difference in scale creates such a different atmosphere, where sidewalks are just for dog walkers and bored baby sitters, not for regular commute. It's like if you want to talk to your neighbour from the sidewalk you have to bring a megaphone.
I do. I lived 25+ years in Atlanta and I walked all over downtown, midtown, Buckhead, Little 5, Westside, etc. and a lack of trees means you BAKE walking more than a block.
There are lots of really nice, shaded neighborhoods in Atlanta. But anywhere there's a business that you'd walk to, you BAKE.
"A drink driver might swerve off the road" killed so many old growth trees in the US.
I would rather the drunk driver hit the tree and deal with his/her consequences, than hit my house or my neighbors during our sleep.
Could have easily hit a person, a traffic pole, another car on sideways.
I don’t understand the argument why trees are at fault here.
Trees are the ultimate carbon capture, they produce oxygen and humidity, they provide shade, something beautiful to look at. They bring in birds and tree dwelling animals like squirrels.
Trees are a magical invention by nature.
That’s why we feel amazing walking in a neighborhood with trees.
Love how south-centric this statement is. In Northern countries, that's true for a month typically, otherwise "oh god please I hope the sun will shine on me".
In December, I see 4 hours of sun, where the light gets above tree tops. And that's in Southern Canada!
Not a hatred of trees, but a dislike of shade trees.
edit: until I visited Texas, I never understood why people wore hats. The sun is never hot enough here for it. It never gets as high in the sky. Yet it's a brutal beast in Texas. I can only imagine further south..
I don't think Barcelona or Tokyo are gonna win any awards for having lots of trees.
https://highways.dot.gov/safety/rwd/provide-safe-recovery/cl...
What you say makes sense, when I walk in my own (new-ish development) neighborhood in Orange county, I specifically go to the areas where trees are more developed and provide more shade.
Dead Comment
But man, was walking in towns a drag. If I left the bike safely at a hotel and wanted to stroll over to a restaurant or supermarket, every intersection was button-operated traffic lights where pedestrians wait ages for their turn to cross. Then, the pedestrian light flashes for almost too little time to cross the six or seven lanes of traffic. The sheer width of ordinary US roads must have a deterrent effect.
But how many are protected bike lanes, instead of just paint? Painted bike lanes are only helpful for relatively confident cyclists, and obviously do virtually nothing to actually protect people on bikes. Imagine if we started replacing sidewalks with painted walk lanes!
> The sheer width of US roads must have a deterrent effect.
Yup. In Munich, not only are roads generally not as wide, but if they're even sorta of wide, they get a pedestrian island or two.
>>“Oh, no, Henry’s car must have broken down! I better offer him a ride.”
>>“Oh, looks like Henry’s out for a walk! I should text him later.”
To me, this is a great way of framing it. I sometimes see people walking along a stretch of road and I feel for them because I know that no human would be waking along that stretch unless their life was in a bad place.
Contrast to America where trains and busses where the level of danger is considerably higher, to a degree that it is dissuading to walk. Vehicles provide safety in an otherwise uncertain society.
I like this idea of dignity, but no matter how amazing a walking/biking infrastructure is, it is only as good as the behavior of the people who use it. Until busses, subways, trains, trams, streetcars, and just walking down the street is made safer and cleaner people will continue to stick to the safety of the cars
In places where the working poor are the most disadvantaged, there also tends to be the highest auto dependency. (Think American South, Panama City, Panama etc)
To Soap box for a moment, almost all of our problems are reflective of our vast inequality. Our ability to live more sustainably, enjoy greater opportunity, ability to form new businesses, household formations, civic function etc. ultimately are limited by the degree of inequality a nation faces.
On one hand, it's kind of a tautology - sure, if you're in a city that is very car-dependent, it's a disadvantage to the working poor because owning a car costs money.
But in the US there are also (usually older) cities with relatively great public transportation that are more walkable that also have enormous amounts of wealth inequality.
Doesn't really have anything to do with inequality, in the US at least it's mostly just reflective of when cities were built and developed. Pre-WWII cities like NYC and Boston have (again, relatively) great public transit options and huge walkable parts, while newer cities (often in the South) developed around the car.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/07/upshot/transportation-eme...
Europe may have great biking culture and equality, but they have effectively sacrificed pluralism.
It felt like my options were drive or taxi. And we know what LA traffic is like.
I can’t speak to other US cities, and it is possible that certain areas of LA are less terrible than where I stayed. (But I will say, I was in quite an affluent area which had no business being unwalkable and without public transport).
But it really opened my eyes to how good we have it in Australian cities (which themselves are still far behind many European cities).