zlacker

Were jobs hard to come by in that city because it was walkable, beautiful, and full of life? I'm guessing not, and there are other factors causing that.

NYC is beautiful, walkable, full of life, and you sure can find a job there. Same with the Boston area.

I've lived in both walkable and car-dependent areas for years. I am one of the people who grew up in a car-dependent small city who couldn't imagine not owning a car 10 years ago.

Now that I've lived in both, sure, there might be tradeoffs living in a walkable neighborhood, but if you build a neighborhood with the amenities you need, walking for most things is simply amazing. Having a car is useful for getting out, but it now becomes a "once in awhile" thing, almost a luxury, if you have a nice market and some restaurants nearby. And then you can do things like ZipCar or other options for the rare times you need to drive.

>>karmel+(OP)
And pretty much all the people I know in Boston also own cars because they visit friends outside of the city, go out of town for weekend activities that often involve transporting a lot of gear, etc. So, yeah, you can get by day to day but people I know also want a car.

>>ghaff+uq
There's nothing wrong with that either. The Dutch, known for their bike and ped friendly streets and great transit, are also known to love their summer trips where they drive around and tow camping trailers. Japanese families in less urban areas frequently have a car for family trips or for shopping for home goods. There's no way transit will ever completely displace the car, the economics will never pencil out.

Having the option to drive when there's copious amounts of transit is empowering. It lets you go hiking into the mountains where it wouldn't be economical to run even a bus at greater than 1 hr headways or haul your ski and snowboarding equipment to the slopes. It lets you ferry around your aging parents who are starting to have cognitive issues. It means when your children are still very young you can keep them from being a nuisance on the bus. Being forced to drive because there's no transit and you know your brake pads are shot and scraping against your rotors but you don't have the money or time to fix your car is dreadful.

>>ghaff+uq
Yeah I mean that’s totally fine. When I lived in Boston it was much more common to see people rent cars for that purpose, but either way it’s completely okay.

The infrastructure should support that sort of trip out of the city. It’s intra-city car use that’s a disaster, and our infrastructure should not support that.

>>ghaff+uq
No idea about Boston, but in Copenhagen the result is a family probably owns one car for these trips, rather than two.

>>Symbio+5F
If that's the only use, probably. Although a lot of jobs in the Boston area are in the surrounding suburbs and commuter rail is mostly unsuitable for those for people who want to live in the city.

>>karmel+(OP)
That's great, but my point is that if you go to such a place and see all that spontaneous social interaction, you're just seeing people who can afford to eat out and live close to the city centre. That's not how actually life in such places looks like for most.

My (European) city is walkable by any American definition. Tourists enjoy its XIX century architecture, restaurants, boulevards and such. What they don't see is that the 1,6% unemployment rate is there thanks to huge swaths of barely walkable and frankly ugly industrial complexes providing jobs to which people generally drive or commute a significant amount of time in public transport, because with their credit score it made more sense to get something on the outskirts or suburbs. You won't see them in places visited by tourists because that's far from where they live and they generally can't afford going out that often.