Fuck Cars
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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I don't know about great.
If it's not walkable, it's not good. I want to cover my basics without a car or long trip. Where I am now there's maybe 5 groceries of various sizes and a couple dozen restaurants and bars within a short walk. Plus other stuff like hardware stores, pharmacies, etc.
This isn't a fancy or expensive neighborhood. It's just regular Brooklyn. I wouldn't trade this for the suburbs.
Even if you had a "suburb" that was walkable, you're just not going to have as much stuff. Like if you lived right by "main Street" where my parents lived, there's just fewer options. Like, I don't think they had a single Thai restaurant when I was growing up.
If you accept the premise that a wider variety of options is better, suburbs really can't compete on that metric. Someone might prefer the "there's one diner in this town" model but that sounds dull to me.
But mostly it's the car-first nature of most suburbs I can't stand. It's antisocial, it's dangerous, it pollutes the environment. My parents take a 10 minute drive to get groceries and that's incredibly wasteful.
My suburb as described does allow for much walkabilty, and bikability with sidewalks and tree lined gravel trails that go all the way to the city center. I can walk to 2 groceries, and a host of other stores in about 15 minutes one way. Bars, coffee shops, restaurants too. All on sidewalk or trail, sidewalks along slow speed neighborhood roads
On the trail, or via the neighborhood bus line, I can be downtown with a large variety of shops or or restaurants of every type.
Moreover, my point isnt to get kudos for luckily living in a nice neighborhood. It's to highlight that generalizations are pointless.
You have a perspective of a suburban neighborhood is "not great", and that's fine, in a lot of places it's true.
I have an opinion that most apartments suck, but that's obviously not universal.
Your suburb sounds exceptional. As in, the exception to the norm. But as it is the exception, adopting policy decisions on it would be foolish.
You wouldn't point to one docile bear and be like "Living among bears is great. Look how friendly he is."
Absolutely agree. Adjacent to that is that discussion on this topic should be tighter grained...to allow/avoid for biases everyone involved has.
Edit to bring it.back from above, sunzu2 said American construction is shit, (paraphrase). It's simply not true, universally, and speaks to a lack of understanding. (Which isn't an attack, everyone has lacks of understanding). Many, many homes.in America are of quality construction, and or are on lots with sufficient free space between structures to allow privacy.
Like I said in another comment, I'm sure it's the case that European apartments aren't all Soviet era shoeboxes. I'm sure there's very nice apartments with reasonable space.