#Suburbs are unwalkable how to
#Suburbs are unwalkable free

Not a car can be seen, because the town’s main drag has been turned into one huge outdoor restaurant, with the 60-odd eateries along it all setting out tables. It’s a summer Saturday night on State Street in Media. If you value our reporting and you can right now, please help us dig out of the $100,000 hole we're starting our new budgeting cycle in with an always-needed and always-appreciated donation today.Photograph courtesy of Media Business Authority It's time to fight like hell, as our namesake would tell us to do, for a democracy where minority rule cannot impose an extreme agenda, where facts matter, and where accountability has a chance at the polls and in the press. Donate We've never been very good at being conservative. If you value our reporting and you can right now, please help us dig out of the $100,000 hole we're starting our new budgeting cycle in with an always-needed and always-appreciated donation today. But it also means we can't afford to come up short when it comes to scratching together the funds it takes to keep our team firing on all cylinders, and the truth is, we finished our budgeting cycle on June 30 about $100,000 short of our online goal. We've never been very good at being conservative.Īnd usually, that serves us well in doing the ambitious, hard-hitting journalism that you turn to Mother Jones for. Short of that, your white papers will never make more than the tiniest inroads.īy signing up, you agree to our privacy policy and terms of use, and to receive messages from Mother Jones and our partners. Offer them all jetpacks and maybe they’ll change their minds. They don’t want to live in condos they don’t want to walk three miles to the grocery store they don’t want lots of traffic and they don’t want to take a bus everywhere. You can hit them with all the logical arguments for denser development in your arsenal and it won’t affect them even slightly. I’m a longtime suburbanite who could happily live anywhere since I don’t really care about detached houses and yards, but I know my neighbors pretty well.

#Suburbs are unwalkable how to

It sure seems like there’s a lot of talk about how to make suburbs denser that doesn’t account for human nature even slightly. They want the classic suburban detached house with a yard, and that’s fundamentally non-dense. Some people are happy with it, but a huge number of people aren’t.

For one thing, they require denser housing, and there’s a limited appetite for that. There are places that have successfully combined city-like shopping streets with suburban-like housing, but even after decades of pressure from the urbanist movement there aren’t a lot of them. No politician in her right mind would even suggest a small reduction in parking, let alone anything that might have a real effect. In theory, you could force them to walk more by taking away all the parking spaces, but good luck with that. In a suburban environment, people just don’t walk. There’s a shopping center about half a mile from my house (and half a mile from perhaps a thousand other houses), and unless I miss my guess by a lot, at least 90 percent of the people who shop there arrive by car even though safety is a non-issue. For that matter, no one makes a walk of two miles or one mile, either. Here’s the question: Am I nuts or are they? I’ve lived in suburbs all my life, and no one makes a walk of three miles. Which would be perfectly fine for a bike ride, a scooter ride, or a walk in many of those trips, if there was adequate infrastructure to make that a safe choice. Dunham-Jones: Right now, 46 percent of trips from predominantly single-family-home suburban neighborhoods are three miles or less. Which retrofitting interventions provide the greatest benefits at the least cost?

In the New York Times recently, we got the following advice from an expert in “retrofitting” suburbs to make them, among other things, more walkable:

#Suburbs are unwalkable free

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