But beyond that, the group isn’t sure what’s keeping Americans off their feet.
certainly it cant be all the obvious things that keep them off their feet
My neighbors drive to the gas station for snacks and beer in my excessively walkable town. Said gas station is close enough to my apartment to throw a snowball to.
Sad diabetes noises
Ok, put simply, if you lived here at the ponds there would be many days where your car is parked farther than the gas station is to your apartment.
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The suburb I live in is only walkable if you’re willing to cut through lawns. Otherwise it takes three times as long to walk.
It would be awesome if they could connect the cul de sacs with bike paths. Suddenly it would be faster and legal to bike or drive.
However, this would require buying many expensive homes and tearing them down, so it won’t ever happen and I’ll continue trespassing to get to the store.
The US has been car-centric for so long and walkability has been neglected in construction and local policy forever. It’s much harder to build it after the fact.
If you have visited or ever will visit Europe, notice that there really isn’t an urban or suburban road built without sidewalks and bike lanes. It’s standard practice.
I’ve been to Europe and while the walkability is nice, there’s still too many people and I don’t like being that close to others. American suburbs are too crowded for me, but I can’t move further out at the moment.
Plus I’m lucky that I’m in an older suburb, because the new ones don’t even have sidewalks.
I live in NYC and a big reason I like it is how walkable it is. Haven’t needed a car in a decade.
I’m lucky enough that I can just refuse to live somewhere else.
Grew up in the suburbs and I never want to go back. I can’t stand how isolated and barren they feel.
The data for this tracks 2019 - 2022 and so I’d be real curious to know how this would have looked had the pandemic not happened. I think a lot of people’s walks often have an objective to them (get coffee, stop at a store, etc) and it just wasn’t a great idea there for a while.
I was in Seattle for the pandemic and the number of people outside doing anything at all dropped considerably during that time. I lived by a really popular neighborhood walking greenway thing and it was almost totally dead for a while.
I thought it was bad where I live, but when I was in OKC it was so much worse. I’ve never been anywhere so hostile to pedestrians. Sidewalks were jagged and broken and just ended randomly wherever they thought they could squeeze more parking in. Despite being a small city there were highways EVERYWHERE. You could never escape the roar of traffic. My buddy who lives there is in a gated community and even if there was anything around (there wasn’t) you couldn’t walk anywhere anyway because the gate is pressure sensitive to the weight of a car so you can’t actually leave unless you’re driving. I can only hope the next generation of planners can mitigate some of the last generation’s damage in our lifetime
And it’s not only gated communities. So many neighborhoods in the US, especially in the burbs, trap you at the entrance to the neighborhood. Unless you’re in a car, you simply can’t leave. There are no sidewalks and no bike lanes and nothing connecting you to the neighborhood down the road. It’s ridiculous. Hate it.
Pedestrian fatalities from vehicles has skyrocketed.
Makes me appreciate my very walkable neighborhood.
so people monitoring their steps with a fit bit isn’t helping?
Americans are fat and lazy. Its not all because of car centric infrastructure.
That’s a symptom, but not the disease.
