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?
Difference is probably mostly related to the width of the street. Crossing two lanes is fine, four is uncomfortable and six feels impossible. European strees tend to be much narrower than american ones, so people are more inclined to walk.
Not just the width of the street, but the pedestrian infrastructure surrounding it too!
Walking to the nearest corner store from my home requires me to cross the same 2 lane road a total of 4 times, unless I feel inclined to ignore the sidewalks and step on strangers’ properties.
Yeah Ive lived in places that if you look on a map and type stores, restaurants, and etc it’s technically walkable. In practice it’s narrow sidewalks straddling 45 mph roads with cars that are darting in and out of entrances. Whenever you have to cross the street you gotta pray the 45 mph car doesnt come into a right on red too hot and slam ya.
Then after crossing 4 lanes, feeling the wind of dangerously close traffic, and walking past car centric not that great scenery you arrive at your destination. A parkinglot but from the outside. So now you gotta dart past the parkinglot road where drivers are at their worst and finally passed the parking lot before getting into the store.
It’s doable but its not easy or enjoyable, and honestly kinda dangerous when you consider your surroundings, the speed at which cars are traveling, and how due to lack of pedestrian traffic they also dont expect you to be there crossing the street.
This is a good article. Has a lot of examples showing why streets have a good or bad pedestrian experience.
It’s not as simple as number of lanes or even the quality of the sidewalk. A lot of it really comes down to development patterns. You can really feel the difference when you’re in a place not built for walking. Being on a well constructed sidewalk far away from any buildings because there’s a giant parking lot in between just feels wrong.
There are a few places very close to my house I refuse to walk to because the pedestrian experience is terrible. You feel out of place, unwelcome, and unsafe.
