The suburbs DO NOT require more walking than cities.
I lived in nyc for 20 yrs. No car. Walked everywhere.
I now live in Dallas. Car culture. Nobody walks. You can’t walk, architecturally impossible in most areas. People drive everywhere and are more overweight and angry because of it.
That's crazy to me Dallas doesn't have infrastructure for walking. I can walk anywhere in the Minneapolis/St Paul metro area on a sidewalk or designated path and it's a frozen hell scape here 3 to 5 months a year.
Yeah, I grew up in the LA-OC metro area in suburbs and urban areas and always had sidewalks no matter how crappy or ghetto the area was. I just assumed it was the same everywhere.
I live in Phoenix Arizona and even in the suburbs we have sidewalks but no one would walk in 110 degrees in the summer but winter yes. I though Every city had sidewalks
It is, dude is being hyperbolic. The big thing with Dallas (and DFW as a whole) is that you'll occasionally get an intersection or area thats completely completely unpassable without a car, but for the most part there will almost always be a sidewalk on at least one side of the street. For the most part the infrastructure exists even if its in terrible condition (clay soil is the bane of infrastructure), but in the suburbs everything is spread out to the point where its really inconvenient.
Uptown is super nice though and probably the most walkable area in the South (not a high bar I know but still).
Born and raised Dallas, it’s not most areas, but to get between one walkable area and another you probably have to drive. I think they’re just being hyperbolic saying “most”.
Ever been to Texas in early August? You can combat a frozen hellscape with proper clothing. You can only shed so navy layers in public before getting arrested however
To be fair, the US has car culture for transportation in most places outside of the northeast.
Sure there’s a few outliers, but, for the most part, any city outside of the northeast, is car first, pedestrian second.
We have a very rare experience round these parts in this country and we don’t truly realize it til we leave. People complain about transit in NYC or Philly or Boston etc, but there’s large cities and places who wish they had even a fraction of that infrastructure.
I would say Texas and California are probably the most “urbanized” car regions you can find. Just the polar opposite of design choices when comparing to the northeast. Dallas/FW is a good example because it’s basically the same population of NYC but spread across a 100sq mile area.
"Cities" like Phoenix have a lower population density than my suburban town in New Jersey. And we're mostly single family houses. I'm not in some inner core, satellite city of NYC. I'm almost 20 miles out.
Couldn’t be more right. The suburbs out west are super car centric compared to the historic streetcar suburbs of the northeast.
I’m from NYC and used NJ transit to visit friends and family throughout New Jersey. Not to mention the fact that there’s also the Long Island Railroad, Metro North, etc.
Point being, there’s nothing like that out here in California(where I now live). Sure there’s transit, but it’s not on the same level as the northeast.
To me, that is so unnatural. With all the excepted caveats of disabled people or people with kids or mobility issues- humans are meant to walk. Fish swim, birds fly, and humans walk. Living someplace where walking is essentially a non option seems like taking us further from what we were meant to be doing.
As a disabled person, I can tell you that most walking/transit infrastructure is still preferable to car centrism. Things get a bit trickier with ancient historic places (Venice, Paris, etc.), but other than that, give me a pocket neighborhood over a postwar US suburb any day.
I lived in Dallas less than a mile from my job with a nice sidewalk between the two. But if I walked I'd arrive at work soaked in sweat, or soaked in rain on other days, so I drove everyday. The weather in Dallas is not outdoors friendly.
There are enough sidewalks in the area I live in my small town to go to Walmart and other stores, along with restaurants, but when I walk for the exercise, I'm often the only one walking and feel like a freak. It's said walking is one of the best exercises, but few people do it. At least I'm thankful there is a lake in town with 3 miles of sidewalk around it where I can go walk or even jog and not feel like a freak.
My kid lives in a suburb in SC. She can almost see the closest grocery store from her driveway. If it was possible to walk it would take 5 minutes, but it's a 30-40 minute drive to get there.
I have to travel further vertically than I do horizontally to get to grocery store, doctors, bottle shop (liquor store), train station, bus stop, gym.
Haven’t used my car in three weeks.
I kinda have to force myself to take walks; everything is too close and too convenient.
Bottle shop (liquor store… who buys “liquor”?) is perhaps just far too convenient. It’s like taking the lift (elevator) down to the basement for booze 🥃 , a bottle of this or a bottle of that from the bottle shop, whenever I feel like it.
“In NYC you walk to the train, and walk a block or two to your destination.”
That does not represent my 20 years in nyc at all. People in nyc walk everywhere for every purpose. You walk up and down platforms to trains. You walk off the train to your destination. Multiple times a day.
In car cultures, you and I both know that everyone tries to park as close as possible to their destination and drive an hour to get there. I agree things are spread out more, but that’s for cars, not people. People will drive three blocks to get food. Daily.
I saw a video a little while back that showed a lot of what you’re talking about is perception.
A lot of it is about line of sight. Another part is the doorway/entries. Everything is designed to psychologically mess with your perception.
You will actually walk a lot farther parking in a Walmart parking lot and through the Walmart store than you ever would parking two blocks away from a store downtown and walking.
This is just straight stupid. The longest walking distance across my local mega mall parking lot is 500 ft. I can find thousands of square miles of any city that are farther than 500 ft from the nearest trampoline park.
There is no way people are walking a half mile to get into a mall there would be heart attacks in the parking lot. Walking from the farthest edge of one parking lot all the way through the mall and to the farthest edge of the other parking lot is maybe 3/4 of a mile. The other giant malls in Denver are all under 3,000' from farthest edge to farthest edge.
I just checked Mall of America too since it's the largest I've heard of and it'd 2,000 feet from outside parking lot edge to outside edge.
This is wrong. I walk the most I’ve ever walked in my entire life living here in NYC. I climb a lot more stairs too. It’s easy to walk 10,000 steps here without really trying.
This may be the dumbest thing I’ve seen posted here in a while.
I live in NYC and down town St Petersburg and in no way is the suburban parking lot at Publix nearly (even at the back of the lot) farther to walk then the 3 blocks to Publix in St Petersburg or to the grocery stores in NYC which are multiple blocks away and many times requires multiple stores to get stuff since there’s not many “super markets”
Not to mention none of the suburbanites are walking to work, walking to get drinks, walking to do anything, their only walking is from parking lot to a thing. All you do in a city if you live down town is walk to places.
Also for his point to be valid you’d have to have lots where you always park city blocks away which is extremely rare and every grocery store would be basically in building in a city which they are not
Depends on your city i guess. I lives in a city centre. One-stop supermarket at 200m away, clothes shops in my street. Basically anything i needed at max 5 minutes walking.
My father, a septuagenarian contrarian, likes to park at the edge of the crowd "to save the close spots for old people". But he would also rather walk a few extra steps than fight other drivers to squeeze into a slightly nearer spot anyway.
I’ve been to southern cali, the only real city is LA and San Diego most are to tiny to have a city center most places in OC are a town, in La and Sd both function as I said. Walkable down town burbs are car, no of it’s different
Yeah, because this comparison usually goes the opposite direction, I've used it to make the opposite argument. Local boomers were angry about potential plans to keep a suburban downtown commercial area car-free after COVID restrictions ended, because what if elderly people have to park and walk several blocks from the nearest garage to their destination? After noting there were still handicapped parking spaces on the street nearby, I overlaid some maps. The entire downtown commercial district was smaller than the parking lot at a nearby indoor mall, and nobody ever demanded to drive their car into the mall.
Or a city! The OPs entire premise is absurd. Even if they lived in an ultra dense city in an apartment above a supermarket(ultra rare in dense city centers) and were on the same block as a train stop, there is no reality where living car-less in a city doesn't result in a shit ton of walking.
It’s also funny that they believe that walking down a nice street with shops is the same as walking across a depressing parking lot. It might be the same for your body, but def not your spirit.
Ya, I'm visiting NYC from a small town in Illinois outside Chicago. This is simply not true. If you're willing to pay out the nose sure maybe there's a small corner store. CVS is the closest place to get "groceries" and it's a 10 minute walk.
I will say that the distance I have to walk from my car to the Costco door is farther than I walk to get to four stores I regularly frequent, including a TCG store.
I could not imagine living in the suburbs again. I grew up in the suburbs, and moving to an urban area as soon as I could is something I don't regret
The average American walks under 5000 steps per day. This includes people who exercise a lot, run for recreation, and urbanites who walk more than suburbanites. I wouldn't be surprised if the typical middle-aged suburbanite was half that. For example, the research literature suggests that people who commute by public transport average 2000-2500 more daily steps than those who drive.
Based on the premise, I'm not sure the OP has ever even been to a suburb. I've never once seen a parking lot that was a far across as any city block. If they were that big people would die of heat stroke walking across these hypothetical huge paved areas in summer in the South!
As someone who has previously lived in suburbs and now lives in an urban area, this is generally not true. Unless it's an absolutely massive parking lot, you're generally going to walk more in a city, which isn't a bad thing. It's not usually possible for literally everything you need to be within a like, 5 minute walk.
Something that person doesn't realize is that we almost never have to walk across a giant parking lot. The distance from where you parked to the store entrance is usually about 20 feet.
This is factually false. In my suburban town growing up, from the furthest parking spot to the front entrance of Winco is 0.4 miles. I now live in a major urban city and walk everywhere, don’t even own a car. The absolute closest market to my house now is a 0.5 mile walk, but the closest store with fresh vegetables is a 0.7 walk, and the closest big box store is a 1.0 mile walk
A bit of an exaggeration but I understand what they are trying to get at here. I hope people understand that it’ll take a minute (everyone in this sub will be dead) before most cities in America will be walkable like a Japanese or European city for example
Yes, you have to drive, but the parking lot isn't THAT big. Unless you are deliberately parking all the way in the back of it, and no major shopping area is that packed unless it's Black Friday or a weekend in December.
If this were true it would negate one of the main benefits of building walkable cities, which is that it causes people to exercise in order to get around ("active transportation"). It's not actually true overall, though there are specific times, like parking at a very busy shopping mall or Walmart or something, where perhaps it's the case.
That said, I do think a walkable city can be built to where the average person spends less time, and certainly less mental energy, on most trips overall. While also getting the benefits of increased exercise.
I just moved from Northwest Arkansas to the Netherlands. The distance between the far end of the Walmart parking lot, where I usually had to park, is definitely less than the 300 meters to the block with my local supermarket, drugstore, bakery, butcher, fishmonger, etc. And there's no 15 minutes of driving before doing that walk. 100% upgrade
Um just no. Urban area doesn’t have a fraction of the choices my suburbs has, and the choices it does have are way more expensive. Compare the grocery bill from “Moe’s Corner Grocery” to WalMart. Yeah…
As a suburbanite, I like walking. The appeal of the suburbs isn’t walking vs driving. It’s the fact that my mortgage payment is less than I would paying for rent in a city, and it gets me a privately owned plot of land with a freestanding house, the ability to go about my day without walking by homeless encampments, and just not being in a city.
Yeah I see what you mean. Subreddit rules say no talking about the greatness of suburbs but you at least have legit reasoning that makes sense so I won’t do anything about it.
Can confirm--looking out the window at the grocery store down the block!
Suburbanites get defensive at the notion of car-free life because they imagine their exact lifestyle, with their exact habits, in their exact built environment, but without a car. The whole "but what about groceries!" thing arises because they picture themselves walking down their driveway, through the subdivision, walking miles along the shoulder of some god awful stroad, across a massive parking lot, buying a week's worth of groceries, and then making the trip in reverse.
The idea of a neighborhood built to human scale with grocery stores seamlessly integrated simply does not occur to them.
Lived in several large cities. You still need a car, public transportation, or long distance walking with shopping bags to do anything more than basic groceries.
Actually one of the things that pisses me off about busses in NYC is that they stop every other block. Shit makes the busses run so much slower than they need to with all the stops. So yeah, most bus stops aren't further than a block away.
The argument between urban and suburban life is hilarious, because 90% of people in the argument have never lived rurally. It’s like arguing between silver and bronze, when gold exists. Change my mind.
It’s generally a life for people who don’t think it’s worthwhile going many places. I would rather live rurally for sure if I wasn’t interested in dating.
Really all three of these choices can be good depending on the type of person.
As someone who thinks that even my suburban area doesn't have enough amenities I know that I would hate living rural but some people like the land and quiet.
Honestly I do think that living suburban is best if you have young kids. In a city you might have to go down dozens of floors and walk several blocks to reach a park. In a suburb you can just walk out your back door and the kids can play in the yard. Also you can customize your yard such as putting in a trampoline, pool or other play equipment (granted a garbage HOA could prevent this.) It's also far safer for kids to bike in a suburb over a US city (mainly over the traffic.) Some people also like having their own yard. This could also be achieved with townhouses though and our suburbs could also be laid out in blocks. I have criticisms about suburbs but I don't think that they are completely bad.
In a city you have tons of access to amenities but apartments will almost always be smaller than houses and they don't build equity. Also in my experience cities tend to stink a lot. Granted if you go rural, you are then often dealing with farm smells and even suburban areas can stink, mine is next to a garbage dump and occasionally septic tanks overflow throughout the subdivision.
lol. That’s pretty much it. Basically you think there’s a zombie apocalypse coming and you think beer is too expensive at a bar. Plus you’re kind of weird person too..
Worthwhile is my backyard in the woods without cars honking, construction noises, and business all around me. Just a deer feeder and naming the deer as they come by.
I’m not going to be ignorant, I can see the positives and why certain people like city or the burbs, but people who like rural living do not care about places that are “worthwhile” like yall care about.
I actually wanna know how it's like, what are your favorite things to do, what's the beauty in it. Like 99% of people I know in America have never lived rural. I don't see the appeal as someone from NYC. It's like there's nothing there and education and jobs always become an issue. My family comes from Bangladesh and we have rural houses. Especially since I can't get many 1st world amenities there it's not my favorite type of place to be. I lived in my village in Bangladesh for about a month in 2022 and I was so happy to leave afterwards. I do admit that there are upsides and many transformative moments I had in that month but it's not something I'm so fond of. I used to visit a lot as a child during my summer vacations so like riding cannoes on the lake, swimming in ponds, eating fresh sugarcane, there are many near and dear memories I have from rural life but I dont enjoy it beyond a few weeks. As a kid I hated it actually 😂 even though I love the memories today.
They want peace, quiet, open space and freedom. Not everyone wants to live in a noisy, busy area. Rural areas have a lot more natural beauty and a slower pace of life. They typically don't mind having to drive 15 minutes to a grocery store. They might have chickens, a garden, etc.
I can get your perspective. For me I live in Brooklyn, NY. I was born here and my family owns our house. Its an extremely rare situation unless your very rich to live in my location while owning. My father has been here since the 80's and that was how we got our house and it's fairly large by New York standards with 6 bedrooms.
I live 30 mins by subway to the downtown finaincial district of Manhattan, 45 mins by subway to midtown. It's a 40 minute commute to my college by subway. I have about 7 different subway lines walking distance from my house. I can walk, take the train or bus to most amenities. My whole family lives in the city. The neighborhood I live in is extremely hostile to cars with no parking lots or driveways and extremely congested street parking. However I love using the subway system.
The fact that as a young person I get to live carless with so much autonomy and freedom to zip around with the subway and regional rail system feels so unamerican to the point it's like Japan or Europe but in actuality this is the original style of American life that got erased through the advent of suburbia.
To each their own preference, but the fact that everything is so expensive here just points towards the insane and unsatiable demand for great urban living. It's just sad that none of this can be replicated on a large scale in the US. It's financially bared from many people and the only way to receive this level of convenience is by moving to car dependency.
Car dependency is great until you look at the downsides. In my opinion, make it so that there are options and not only cars as the only viable transportation method. If we can design life around kids walking to school, biking to the hardware store, and many other things like that than the US would be a better place.
People on Reddit tend to think all Suburbs are equal and all cities are walkable which is comical at best. I went to college in an urban setting - and you still really needed a car since the nearest grocery store was not walkable or accessible (easily) with public transport. I've lived in two big cities and there were walkable areas but you still needed a car. They always ask -well where did you live? It seems like if the answer is anything other than NYC, Boston, or SF then they want to pretend you didn't live in a city which brings me back to my earlier point, the majority of large US Cities areas have varying pockets of walkability, but are hardly places that I'd want to live without a car
There are suburbs where nice neighborhoods have been built around the old town squares that have markets / restaurants etc. My in-laws live in the epitome of Suburbia but could walk to a Publix, a Kroger, and about a dozen restaurants far closer than what I ever could living in the city, but they are almost 80 and it gets rather hot here so that's not happening.
Me personally? I'd rather (and do) have this in my back yard. A dock on a 40k acre lake. It takes me 8 mins to go to the two closest grocery stores, there are dozens of restaurants within 10 mins, and I can enjoy the lake on my dock, boat, kayak, paddle board, or just float and watch the sunset with warm water for 7+ months of the year. Nature trails are everywhere and I can run a 5 mile loop that leads me back to my doorstep during my lunch hour. I am a remote worker and she works at two hospitals that are less than 20 mins away, but in different directions.
We have 4 local Walmarts
1 is 20 minutes away, but requires 30 minutes of parking walking in 5 minutes and minimum 20 minutes at the register. 2 others are 40 minutes away with similar issues. I go to the hour away Walmart because during Saturday daylight it's essentially in and out
Hard disagree... at least for the store context. Unless the only store I am allowed to shop at is a costco and only on the weekends. I think the only way it would be closer is if I lived on the same block and on top of said store.
There is also the aspect that being close to a store means it's the store I want. As space is even more a premium in cities, selections may be less. For example, I don't buy my meat at the grocery store, I go to a butcher because their stuff is better. I can also do that in the city, but it doesn't always mean that preferable location is near where I am. Granted, not everyone cooks or takes as high a level of obsession, for some, whatever the nearest market has is what they will get.
It was so strange coming to the US and realising it wasn’t that people just didn’t walk, but that it was actually impossible to walk. Crazy having to drive to something that’s less than a twenty minute walk away
Did you read my comment? It’s literally impossible to walk to some places even though in a European country they’d be easily within walking distance. That’s the problem, and what I was saying
Not true… When I lived in Paris I easily had to walk hours every day; the walk to the grocery store was 5 to 10 minutes. Now that I live in Phoenix’s suburbs I barely have to walk compared to that.
This is just patently absurd. There are better ways to argue your point than to make arguments so piss poor that they'll only serve the opposite of your intended effect.
They roll up the sidewalks after dark. You really are taking a chance walking in very dimly lighted streets which I suspect is done on purpose so you have to drive. Big oil runs everything.
This might be true if the particular store you’re interested in going to happens to be located right next to your apartment. Otherwise this is completely wrong, you’re doing way more walking, even in a dense city
Even if true I still would never want to live in a city. Not wanting to live in a city has nothing to do with not wanting to walk. What a weird argument.
Wrong. People will walk much further when the walk is pleasant and interesting. Walking between a highway and parking lots in the suburbs, or a long row of garages and driveways facing a street, is neither.
I guarantee you most people in 'a real urban area' do not live within a Walmart parking lot radius of enough cute little urban storefronts that cumulatively sell everything available at a Walmart.
Every time I stay in the burbs visiting friends or family I get alerts from my phone saying that my activity levels are plunging and I instantly gain weight. I typically keep up my routine. It’s all walking and stairs in the city. (Yes, I also eat like a pig, but at home and traveling).
This is a hard thing to argue because there are some places where it’s true and some where it isn’t.
I’ve never walked a mile from my car to the door. But I have lived more than a mile from a grocery store most of my life. I have lived in LA, Seattle, small towns, suburbs. Super walkable areas and not
This is bs. How big does this person think most parking lots are? And why are they acting like most people park as far away as possible? And why are they acting like 100% of urban housing is free from zoning laws and situated right on top of the exact businesses you want to support? So curious where this logic is coming from lmao…
This just popped up in my feed, idk why, but I'd be willing to bet 99% of the people in this sub grew up in a regular, middle to upper middle class suburb, and this whole thread is about how all of you are just terrified that your upbringing has made you extremely uninteresting, so you rail against suburbs to overcompensate for your own insecurities.
People can live where they want. Different strokes for different folks. Also you all have clearly only been to one kind of suburb, the type in the midwest/south/southwest that was just built in the last 40 years. Clearly most of you have never been to any walkable bedroom communities outside of NYC, Boston places like that with great downtowns, nice parks etc.
Maybe if it’s Christmas Eve at the mall and you’re parked far away and you compare that to someone in Manhattan whose favorite restaurant is on the ground floor of their apartment complex.
But most of the time, dense, transit oriented cities require much more walking. Which IMO is a good thing.
Walking 2 to 3 miles a day, everyday gets you like 75% of the benefits as you’d get from regularly working out or playing sports.
Yeah, na. Maybe im california where they're putting apartments on top of a Costco, but this is just devoid of reality. Im not going to be living 40 feet from a Walmart door just because I live in fucking Chicago.
Also, imagine having to live in a place with that much random foot traffic. Hard pass.
That’s silly. Depending on where you are in your apartment you’ll have to walk out of your apartment and just that might be more than the walk from a parking lot to a store.
I’ve lived in urban areas for decades and prefer the burbs. I want to drive me car. I enjoy not sharing a subway car or having the negotiate around homeless or just people hanging out in my way.
Its certainly inconsistent with the typical urbanist claim that people that live in urban areas are less obese because they walk more, also sometimes stated as people in the suburbs being less healthy due to walking less.
To be fair, there is more WALKING in the suburbs. In the cities, you mostly have to run and jump a lot to avoid getting stabbed or stepping in human feces.
Congested cities full of piss and trash and unwashed human filth is a hard pass for me, but hey you enjoy that $5600/month studio and crackhead yelling at 8am on the subway 😂
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u/[deleted] Aug 23 '25
The suburbs DO NOT require more walking than cities.
I lived in nyc for 20 yrs. No car. Walked everywhere.
I now live in Dallas. Car culture. Nobody walks. You can’t walk, architecturally impossible in most areas. People drive everywhere and are more overweight and angry because of it.