What's hardest to find, and what I prefer, is somewhere it's easy to walk and drive. I've lived in walkable places where if you do have to drive, traffic is a nightmare. And then of course there are places where you can drive without traffic but there is nowhere to walk to. I think I prefer the latter with my lifestyle, though it becomes more frustrating for meeting friends, going our for dinner + drinks, etc.
For sports / leisure, "driveable" areas are better for getting out of town and into nature faster. In bigger cities (in Canada) I never would have considered going skiing after work, but it is possible in smaller places. I find it's also easier to go to league sports in a driveable place. For running, walkable is obviously better, and one reason I like living in the city is that I can step out my door and safely go for a run, where as further out that option doesnt exist.
Most Americans would say the Netherlands is tough for driving I think because the cars are smaller, the lanes are smaller, there is light rail everywhere, many pedestrians and bikers everywhere, etc.
I think all these decisions are why the Netherlands are so lovely and most of America is seemingly highways, strip malls, and suburbs.
One of the most popular Dutch vacations is biking around the country and camping instead of staying at hotels. It’s quite far from American car culture in that regard.
> One of the most popular Dutch vacations is biking around the country and camping instead of staying at hotels. It’s quite far from American car culture in that regard.
American car culture is to go on vacation to drive up camping spots. You can't actually camp in many places without a car. There isn't really public transit from Seattle to Mt. Ranier national park, for example, and the distances is too far and the terrain too hilly for just biking it (the Netherlands is lucky to be flat, in this regard).
Yes being flat does help for sure. In much of Europe I think they solve this problem with trains or sometimes buses to get to the parks or outlying areas. For example, much of Italy is hill towns and no one wants to walk up huge hills to get to each town but you can typically get there with transit.
The United States admittedly is quite large and spread out but if we started to connect more things with transit then I think it would stop feeling so much this way. Like why couldn’t there be a connection from San Francisco to Tahoe that doesn’t involve driving? It’s a very very popular weekend trip and a train would be great for moving skis and other equipment.
If you live near Seattle, you’re lucky to have some of the better planning in the United States and some of the more open-minded people with regards to transit, camping, etc. In a place like Florida, for example, it is fairly common to meet people who’ve never been camping unless maybe you count a music festival. The priority is often air conditioning, a nice hotel room towering over the beach, etc. which is not what the Dutch seek out for the most part
We have lots of choices, but driving is the norm. There is a train near Ranier, it’s still operable (steam train!) but is now for tourism. Let’s hope it reopens.
Switzerland has trains and postal buses to serve its mountain villages and make tourism easy. The distances involved are a bit greater out west, however.
Yes I was delighted to learn in Switzerland that before my flight out I could take my suitcases to any train station in the country and they would route them to the airport for me and make sure they made it on the plane. It’s some truly incredible infrastructure!
Japan manages it pretty well. The mass transit system of Tokyo is well known. But the city is also zoned such that walking or biking from an apartment/house/hotel to a restaurant, supermarket, or even a major park or museum is easy and fairly safe. The roads are clean and well-maintained, and traffic really isn't that bad. Street parking is rarely allowed, but small parking lots are numerous albeit expensive.
Biking and public transit moves most commuters off of the streets, leaving the roads to the owners of luxury cars and driving aficionados who don't mind paying the tax premium to subsidize their vehicular access. I pay $450/yr in road taxes, kei car drivers pay maybe $75, and someone with a big-displacement engine like a Lexus IS-F or a Mercedes AMG probably pays $800-$1000 every year. I'm totally ok with this system.
I spent 3 weeks in the New Jersey suburbs of Philadelphia and HATED how I couldn't walk to anything....but the roads are also of absolutely terrible quality (potholes everywhere) and are mostly straight and boring highway travel, so they aren't even fun to drive. Then I quarantined in Tokyo for 2 weeks and everything was a convenient 5-minute walk away. If I LIVED in Tokyo, I would still own my sports cars there, as I love the freedom of being able to travel longer distances, at any time, with privacy and storage capacity.
I'm in another region of Japan where the public transit is almost non-existent but the walking-friendly zoning helps to compensate. I don't NEED a car to get to the convenience store or the supermarket, but they definitely make life 100x easier, especially since the weather here is terrible more often than not.
So I'd say Japan is proof that walkability and driveability are not in "irresolvable conflict".
> Help me understand this. Where do cyclists and ground-level public transportation go if they're not on the streets?
Public transportation is much denser ( even a paltry bus can fit at least 30 people vs a car which occupies slightly less space, but usually has a single person in it), and bikes take much less space. You can fit 4 bikes in the space of a single standard sedan; and a small bus is what, 2-3 sedans but 30 times the capacity?
You'd think, but come to San Diego and take a look at downtown. I frequently see 2-3 buses driving in a row down Broadway with single digits of occupants between all three.
>>>Where do cyclists and ground-level public transportation go if they're not on the streets?
Cyclists are on the sidewalk, and use little ringer bells to signal to pedestrians to move outta the way. For public transit "off the streets" I was mostly referring to the subway system. Buses and taxis are still "on" the street but the users are out of privately-owned vehicles. I wasn't clear on that.
>>>Wait a minute, quarantined and walked around?
Technically "restriction of movement" not "quarantined", I get sloppy and often use the two terms interchangeably. Quarantine = you are COVID+, inside a specially-designated hotel, which you can't leave. ROM = you are COVID- pending additional testing, can stay in any hotel, but can leave your room for essentials such as groceries/take-out food.
> Cyclists are on the sidewalk, and use little ringer bells to signal to pedestrians to move outta the way.
No, cyclists are on the bike lanes or, if they aren't there, with the cars. The sidewalk is for people on foot only, who are the most vulnerable and should be separated from other faster modes of transport.
US and Japan both have a number of mid-tier cities in the 4000-6000 per km2 range (look at the "list of [US|Japan] cities" pages on Wiki and sort by descending pop density). Japan has a number of efficient cities far from the Tokyo/Osaka megalopoli that don't benefit from their network effects. Consider Fukuoka, Sapporo, or Kagoshima (all fairly remote/isolated cities) compared to Miami, FL and Santa Ana, CA (for high-density US cities outside of the Northeast Corridor). Hiroshima and Sapporo have surprisingly-low pop densities closer to Nashville and Kansas City. We Americans should be able to draw some applicable conclusions even when we look outside of Tokyo. The initial reaction is usually "the density disparity makes it cost-ineffective when applied to the US". If we zoned and developed along Japanese patterns, wouldn't our city densities increase, due to the higher quality of life delivered by the efficiency improvements? People would actually want to live in places where they had flexible transit options and safe walkable neighborhoods with integrated commercial and entertainment activities.
> I think it's hard to find because those two preferences are in direct, irresolvable conflict.
Plenty of places that were built pre-WW2 have people walking for groceries and such, cycling and taking transit to work, and yet still have cars (street parking and back yard garages) for other longer distance errands:
Toronto is one example of where neighbourhoods were built that are not Manhattan- and Hong Kong-level densities, but are still not entirely car dependent. They were built semi-recently, and not some long-ago time period that is unrealistic to try to recreate.
They also have recognizable architecture that is not from the Middle Ages or Napoleonic age. You can explore some of these neighbourhoods (in Toronto and elsewhere) and realistically visualize similar houses being built today.
Of course Toronto suffered from the same automobile malaise as many other North American cities, first in the 'inner suburbs' (North York, Scarborough), and later in the "905".
Well I think there are cultural differences and that Europe is not the only acceptable model.
Both america and Canada are bigger and wilder than Europe. Cars are nice and a necessity to live in both countries. The neighborhood here is a good example of a walkable neighborhood that is also uniquely north American. That's okay. We don't need to replicate Europe when we have perfectly good, culturally appropriate models here.
The neighborhood here is exactly like my neighborhoods. It's lovely. I don't need to have old town Prague levels of walkability to be happy. Quite the opposite, where I am is perfect
> Both america and Canada are bigger and wilder than Europe. Cars are nice and a necessity to live in both countries.
Only in the rural parts. In Canada the population is highly concentrated very close to the US border (i.e., the southern part). While the 49th parallel is the 'meme' of the Canada-US border, 72% of the population lives below it, and 50% lives south of 45°42′ (45.7 degrees), including Toronto/GTA, Montreal, and Ottawa.
I've never run into a walkable city center where there was one super-obvious and convenient place to park--maybe a gigantic underground garage--and then you walk everywhere from there. Feels like that might work.
The attractive city centers have nice stuff, but too few people who live within walking distance to keep them in business and in good shape. They need a way to bring in suburbanites and visitors to supplement the native population.
In a lot of areas, street parking is actually a really good way to provide a barrier between the sidewalk and traffic. This physical safety provides psychological safety, so people feel a lot more comfortable with sidewalk dining, etc. A lane of parking can also separate car traffic from a bi-directional pair of bike lanes.
Also, a lot of cities have too many and/or too wide lanes, which makes drivers feel too safe driving unsafe speeds. You can use parking to "eat up" the extra space and make the street feel more crowded, which will make drivers slow down and drive a lot more carefully.
So street parking should absolutely not be seen as just a negative thing, it can serve a very useful function in the layout of a street.
On a similar note, my city used to have a lot of 50 km/h four lane streets through residential areas, even though they were only minor trunk roads that didn't warrant that many car lanes. There was also a severe dearth of bike lanes, and since these are residential areas with lots of houses, there were always cars parked in the right lane and cars turning left into driveways.
The solution was to remove two lanes of traffic, forbid street parking, add a bike lane along each side of the road, and add a centre turning lane. this was all done with just paint and "no parking" signage. There was a bit of complaining about the loss of street parking, but other than that it's worked out great, and I actually see people using the bike lanes now, and traffic actually flow smoother.
Montreal is similar. Parking downtown: horrible. Parking out in the 'burbs and then riding the metro into town? easy, and lovely. For a lot of things, anyway.
Might be a Canadian thing. Toronto is similar. If I recall correctly, Toronto operates the second most used public transit system in the United States or Canada, while the public transit authority there is the largest parking garage operator in North America.
It’s a pretty good solution for medium-sized cities, but it breaks down as population increases. Toronto has largely stopped building these garages because they’ve run out of room for them after immense population and ridership growth.
Toronto is a pretty big though, so it’s still a solution worth exploring for medium-sized cities that can still reasonably build these facilities.
In Europe this is solved by having a train station in the center. Even the little towns have them which is why it can be lovely to spend a day exploring the area whereas in the United States it’s often easier to assume a small town will have little walkability and maybe you’ll just stop there for gas.
Where have you been that has both? From my reading, it seems like cities need to prioritize walkable / bikable OR cars, but I've never seen example of a city doing both well.
IMO Portland is actually kind of like this (for now). I've heard Berkeley, CA sort of, too.
In Portland (where I live), I have a driveway and convenient street parking right outside my house, but I can also walk to many shops and restaurants, and have a pretty good busline nearby. I usually take the bus if I'm going downtown, so I don't have to worry about parking. But in my part of town, which is less dense, I can conveniently drive or bike. Parking can be a little annoying on this side of town, but it's usually okay.
That being said, Portland is clearly moving in a denser direction. Housing has gotten too expensive here, and the only way out of that is density. Our cycling infrastructure and public transit are decent, but need to get better IMO. All of this will probably negatively impact the car-friendliness, but I think that's the right move for Portland right now.
It's desirable only because they don't build the outer burbs this way. As you drive out of the city, the time of building gets later and later. When you hit some point where the homes were built in the 60s, suddenly the walkable neighborhoods, which were the standard before then, make way for huge, sidewalkless developments.
If they just built more of the commenters neighborhood, and my neighborhood, there would be more desirable land.
Towns tend to be this way, not so much cities. I live in a single family neighborhood in a large city and it’s both walkable and drivable. It’s not great driving beyond a 1-2 mile radius, but I don’t need to go that far more than once a week. My kids’ schools are all walkable distances, 30 minutes tops, or a 5 minute drive. Same for the gym, restaurants, bars, the grocery stores, etc.
Ottawa, Canada is pretty good for this. It's a pretty small city but has a few neighborhoods that would be considered walkable, while in 20 minutes you can be out into the country. Compared with Toronto or Montreal where in 20 min if you're lucky you've entered a highway so you can sit in traffic for an hour to clear the city. Not sure about in the US.
In the US, most suburban areas have plenty of low traffic streets, and many have additional recreational paths for pedestrians.
When I lived in a quite rural area, it was no problem jogging on the low traffic roads, and if I wanted long runs, I could have gone ~3 miles on those roads to a converted railroad that ran for miles in either direction.
Hong Kong has that in some places. It makes it hard to navigate on foot, as pedestrian routes are no longer obvious lines but require entering building perpendicular to your direction, for example.
However, the idea is nearly perfect. All it really needs is to put the cars in tunnels. Underground there's plenty of room for driving, parking, etc.
For sports / leisure, "driveable" areas are better for getting out of town and into nature faster. In bigger cities (in Canada) I never would have considered going skiing after work, but it is possible in smaller places. I find it's also easier to go to league sports in a driveable place. For running, walkable is obviously better, and one reason I like living in the city is that I can step out my door and safely go for a run, where as further out that option doesnt exist.
Anyway, just my experience.