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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
>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?".
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
Bipetalism is a homo sapiens superpower. We are healthly and happy when we walk serious distances. A lot of people discovered that during the pandemic.
The plot twist is that another homo sapiens superpower is inventiveness and adaptability. So we have invented powered mobility and changed our world to take advantage of it.
We have more or less adapted to that new mobility-on-steroids reality but our legs are still made for walking. And fossil fuel based mobility is in any case unsustainable.
The final act is when we realise that we must adjust the intensity of usage of our various inventions to achieve optimal quality of life for the long term.
Walkable cities is a major piece in solving that puzzle. Less pollution, more space, more natural, more fun. Life need not be overengineered in all its aspects.
The thing is we (as an American society) really don’t want a shift to walking. We like the idea of walking more but won’t actually do it. Instead we’ll make up a million excuses about why we just can’t walk.
I say this as someone who at 40 years old has never learned to drive and who has walked/bicycled/taken the bus virtually everywhere I’ve needed to go. And I’ve lived in very rural and very suburban areas, as well as mid-size and bigger cities.
I know it’s possible. It’s just that the vast majority of people don’t want to do it. And if you show them it can be done they’ll just make up a new excuse and keep on driving.
Just throwing it out there but it would be nice if there were a lot more pesestrian and bike only roads built separate from car roads. Big cities already have recreational walking trails that typically follow some sort of a drainage or sewage "river".
Another thing I wondered is how under most city streets there is already wiring and tunnels and some infra. Is the cost that unreasonable to convert roads one by one so that cars go underground and intersections overlap to avoid stops, then all you need is exits to parking spaces and low-speed residential streets. Cars get to go a lot faster with little stopping in cities (which will reduce freeway jams), less pedestrians die, self-driving cars would do well there too. Flooding is the main issue I can think of but given climate change, they need to make cities much more flood tolerant and making more floos tunnels/digging might be needed anyways.
In my ideal city, these roads will also have systems for small package delivery/transport and garbage disposal where people will select the type of garbage and put it in a box, upon validation they get credits for it if it gets recycle but also less package waste because the package delivery system won't need to have boxes with your address on it, it would just be the stuff, as-is. And this will work with grocery delivery and even high volume destinations like warehouses to walmarts which also require a lot of packaging and waste. Now imagine this delivery system as a subway for packages and imagine adding humans to the mix, delivering them to destinations as if they were packages and then you need a lot less cars and parking space waste. That type of transportation removes the downsides of public transportation like sharing space with a lot of people and being picked up/dropped off ar specicific points and then having to walk to the destination.
Just random ideas to put out there for anyone who reads and knows the subject better.
> Have you ever had a friend return from a vacation and gush about how great it was to walk in the place they’d visited? “You can walk everywhere! To a café, to the store. It was amazing!” Immediately after saying that, your friend hops in their car and drives across the parking lot to the Starbucks to which they could easily have walked.
> Why does walking feel so intuitive when we’re in a city built before cars, yet as soon as we return home, walking feels like an unpleasant chore that immediately drives us into a car?
Because when they are on vacation they are a tourist. They are interested in exploring the area and discovering things that are new or different to them. They are taking a break from their normal busy routine and are free to relax.
Walking is a wonderful way to explore a new area and see what shops and attractions and sights are there.
When they get back home they are no longer a tourist. They already know where everything is in their area and what it has to offer. They are back to their normal life with too many responsibilities and not enough time. When they go somewhere in their area traveling there is not a delightful opportunity for exploration and discovery. It is a bothersome chore that is getting in the way of what they want to do.
I was looking at an old map of my city- and 100 years ago, there was a well run trolley system that could take you to any place in the city within a few minutes. Now, we’re told that such a thing is impossible.
The more you think about it, the more you realize that most people's vacations are to places where they don't have to drive everywhere. People get on cruises because "they have everything". Disneyland is just walking around to stuff. Vegas is basically one strip with huge sidewalks and a whole bunch of stuff. Resorts are... resorts. Yet no one seems to want to have any of that when they are not on vacation.
I don't care that much about the "safety" as described in TFA: there's a big mall across the street of where I live now, so I walk there. The sidewalk is a bit hectic: I don't care. What I do care though is that it is safe: as in, it's not an hellhole of a shit city where the risk of being mugged is high (well I did martial arts in the past so at least they'd get some for their money).
You aren't getting people to walk or bicycle if your city is a shithole where thieves are roaming free.
Fix insecurity in public transports. Fix pee/urine odors in the subways. Then I'll consider using your public transport (which I do now use, here, in Luxembourg, because it's both pristine and feels mostly safe: except around the train station but, well, nothing can be perfect I guess).
But if you city is insecure and your subway stations stink and buses feels like a place where little gangs makes the law, then, fuck it, I'm using my car.
I walk everywhere and never think about this. There are going to be times you need tog et from A to B without being in an environment perfectly designed for aesthetics or convenience the whole way. Where I live, is something is very poorly designed (eg the path with two unnecessary 90-degree turns joining a crossing to the main path), people just wear a trail across the grass which shows the optimal route.
I have to agree with a lot in this article: I just walked down a street in staten island... very narrow, just enough for me and nobody next to me. Many spots just push you onto the road by trees and signs. Winding. And many spots with no shade so it is unpleasant in the summer.
But walking is just one aspect of the equation. You need public transportation to be convenient, fast, and reliable. Without that, when I need to go more than a few steps away, I will drive.
That's the point. There are very complex challenges, but the only real fix is a massively efficient transportation system combined with pedestrian areas, to encourage everyone capable to prefer that over driving.
I thought (and hoped) this post was going to mention the bizarre american phenomenon where people driving by a person walking have the urge to scream something at them.
Maybe dignity is part of it, but the main issue (in the U.S.) is that everything is very spread out and very few places have the requisite density to support walking. I don't care if it's the most dignified experience ever. I'm not walking 30 blocks to go to a coffee shop.
A lot of improvement could be make by just enforcing the laws. Many cities across the US allow sidewalk parking for example. My neighbor has a Tesla Y and his charging station is literally on the sidewalk, he can afford the car but not a house with a garage.
Weird complaint because it says a lot about political dysfunction in American society when a (mostly) self-driving car costs about $40,000 but a reasonably decent house in those cities where those cars are built cost about 15-20x at around $800,000. Let’s get rid of arbitrary suburban zoning codes that keep the status quo that makes density and walkability a low priority for “neighborhood character”
[+] [-] degrews|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] closeparen|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] __MatrixMan__|2 years ago|reply
I just got back to the US from Amsterdam. I'll never look at these awful streets the same again.
[+] [-] causality0|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pharmakom|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jjav|2 years ago|reply
Maybe this will change now that bikes cost more than most used cars. Spending 15K on a bike is a thing now.
[+] [-] cscurmudgeon|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] sershe|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] gruez|2 years ago|reply
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?".
[+] [-] voisin|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mlinksva|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scruple|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] spixy|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tmnvix|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] OfSanguineFire|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] hairofadog|2 years ago|reply
>>“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.
[+] [-] Simulacra|2 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] wnc3141|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] angusturner|2 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] nologic01|2 years ago|reply
The plot twist is that another homo sapiens superpower is inventiveness and adaptability. So we have invented powered mobility and changed our world to take advantage of it.
We have more or less adapted to that new mobility-on-steroids reality but our legs are still made for walking. And fossil fuel based mobility is in any case unsustainable.
The final act is when we realise that we must adjust the intensity of usage of our various inventions to achieve optimal quality of life for the long term.
Walkable cities is a major piece in solving that puzzle. Less pollution, more space, more natural, more fun. Life need not be overengineered in all its aspects.
[+] [-] paulcole|2 years ago|reply
I say this as someone who at 40 years old has never learned to drive and who has walked/bicycled/taken the bus virtually everywhere I’ve needed to go. And I’ve lived in very rural and very suburban areas, as well as mid-size and bigger cities.
I know it’s possible. It’s just that the vast majority of people don’t want to do it. And if you show them it can be done they’ll just make up a new excuse and keep on driving.
[+] [-] badrabbit|2 years ago|reply
Another thing I wondered is how under most city streets there is already wiring and tunnels and some infra. Is the cost that unreasonable to convert roads one by one so that cars go underground and intersections overlap to avoid stops, then all you need is exits to parking spaces and low-speed residential streets. Cars get to go a lot faster with little stopping in cities (which will reduce freeway jams), less pedestrians die, self-driving cars would do well there too. Flooding is the main issue I can think of but given climate change, they need to make cities much more flood tolerant and making more floos tunnels/digging might be needed anyways.
In my ideal city, these roads will also have systems for small package delivery/transport and garbage disposal where people will select the type of garbage and put it in a box, upon validation they get credits for it if it gets recycle but also less package waste because the package delivery system won't need to have boxes with your address on it, it would just be the stuff, as-is. And this will work with grocery delivery and even high volume destinations like warehouses to walmarts which also require a lot of packaging and waste. Now imagine this delivery system as a subway for packages and imagine adding humans to the mix, delivering them to destinations as if they were packages and then you need a lot less cars and parking space waste. That type of transportation removes the downsides of public transportation like sharing space with a lot of people and being picked up/dropped off ar specicific points and then having to walk to the destination.
Just random ideas to put out there for anyone who reads and knows the subject better.
[+] [-] tzs|2 years ago|reply
> Why does walking feel so intuitive when we’re in a city built before cars, yet as soon as we return home, walking feels like an unpleasant chore that immediately drives us into a car?
Because when they are on vacation they are a tourist. They are interested in exploring the area and discovering things that are new or different to them. They are taking a break from their normal busy routine and are free to relax.
Walking is a wonderful way to explore a new area and see what shops and attractions and sights are there.
When they get back home they are no longer a tourist. They already know where everything is in their area and what it has to offer. They are back to their normal life with too many responsibilities and not enough time. When they go somewhere in their area traveling there is not a delightful opportunity for exploration and discovery. It is a bothersome chore that is getting in the way of what they want to do.
[+] [-] fallingfrog|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pkulak|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TacticalCoder|2 years ago|reply
You aren't getting people to walk or bicycle if your city is a shithole where thieves are roaming free.
Fix insecurity in public transports. Fix pee/urine odors in the subways. Then I'll consider using your public transport (which I do now use, here, in Luxembourg, because it's both pristine and feels mostly safe: except around the train station but, well, nothing can be perfect I guess).
But if you city is insecure and your subway stations stink and buses feels like a place where little gangs makes the law, then, fuck it, I'm using my car.
[+] [-] anigbrowl|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Justsignedup|2 years ago|reply
But walking is just one aspect of the equation. You need public transportation to be convenient, fast, and reliable. Without that, when I need to go more than a few steps away, I will drive.
That's the point. There are very complex challenges, but the only real fix is a massively efficient transportation system combined with pedestrian areas, to encourage everyone capable to prefer that over driving.
[+] [-] chunk_waffle|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rcme|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mizoguchi|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] standyro|2 years ago|reply