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  • Walkability has plummeted. It's too dangerous for me to even walk from my house to the gas station about a mile away because there are no sidewalks and cars come hurtling down the road I would have to walk down.

    I live in a small city/large town now. I used to live in L.A. and, unlike a lot of people, I walked all the time. And took the trains. I miss being able to walk to the supermarket or down to the donut shop for breakfast and coffee.

    • As someone not from the US, the idea of non-walkable cities is so alien to me.

      Before learning to speak English and reading about the US, I wouldn’t even imagine it’s a thing.

      • Yeah basically the country was blowing up in birth rates and suburban expansion post WW2 at the same time the car was becoming a big thing and people were able to afford them. So auto companies lobbied and campaigned heavily to make everything very car-centric in the US and now this is the result. It really fucking sucks.

        Also doesn't help that the country is so damn big, but that's a poor excuse for the lack of proper transit at the metro area level.

      • The town I grew up in was very walkable, and I'd like to move back there one day if housing ever gets cheaper, but until then I'm stuck in this town where they want us all to drive everywhere.

      • It's frustrating because so many of the older city and town centers actually have decent walkability, even if growth made things a little more complicated. It's mostly the later development surrounding the cities where the only thought during planning was how the cars get from point A to point B and then park, and now the barriers to fix that situation are enormous. Some of them will update their ordinances to require sidewalk construction during new development, but it's not all that helpful when you end up with sidewalk stubs connected to nothing. It also doesn't fix the existing arrangement of buildings and drives that makes everything so hostile to pedestrians.

    • I feel like I live in the least walkable city in the US. I live 2 miles away from work and I've walked it a few times and here's the annoyances I have to deal with:

      • Sidewalks are blocked by obstacles such as overgrown vegetation and cars.
      • Sidewalks are broken up so badly they aren't safe to walk on.
      • Segments with NO sidewalks around blind curves.

      Basically you have to walk in the road most of the trip.

      But fuckin' hell, we need to increase taxes to pay for that new jail! I really hate my town.

    • I live in a very walkable part of the world with great public transportation, and still people don't seem to walk anymore. It's electric scooters and these weird electric mopets.
      I was in the city the other day and walked in between some people. There was a tram arriving and most people around me started to pick up because they had to catch it. They looked like they were running, but were barely faster than me walking, and some of them were slower, because they had to catch their breath on that epick 100m sprint. I think wall-e wasn't too far off.

      • You could be right.

        39% of adults in the world are overweight or obese Globally, 39% of adults aged 18 years and older were overweight or obese in 2016. Being overweight is also defined based on body-mass index: the threshold value is lower than for obesity, with a BMI equal to or greater than 25.

        https://ourworldindata.org/obesity

        To be fair, BMI is kind of a bullshit measure, but I think there is definitely an obesity epidemic and, while it is especially bad in the United States, it is global.

  • 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.

  • 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

  • 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.

37 comments