Walkable "towns" would bed an interesting study in contradictions. By the time you get to walkability, you have a city.
And that replaces your 19 problems and adds about 50 more.
Nah, small towns can be walkable too.
Towns of all sizes can be walkable, there just might not be as many things to walk to.
Some examples include
My town is very walkable, although it does have 60,000 so is not that small. We also have two colleges where the campuses are walkable but no real college town and two train stations, with a third planned. Does it “become a city” because we zone to allow five story apartment building near the train station at the town common?
I grew up in a ~250k pop town which had like 90% of the town in 1h walk from the center. Not something you'll do every day but it definitely simplifies getting home after night parties.
This is the most ignorant take I’ve heard in a long time, so congrats on that I guess. Walkable towns are in some ways easier than walkable cities. A city you need to be walkable across the entire city, over and over again, a town just needs to do it once. Anyway, I live in a walkable small town. One of several I’ve lived in. It’s great.
Take a look into archologies. Specifically Arcosanti. We can definitely do it, but we would essentially have to design the cities from the ground up with that approach in mind.
Sorry, but the thoughts I have with regard to arcologies go in very different ways from yours.
It's a panopticon. a complete police state where there's no privacy, no individual freedoms. Everyone is watched all the time because no one is ever outside the zone of control or between overlapping zones of control to create jurisdictional gray areas. Everything is rationed, because the arcology has to operate on the concept that everything you need is in the arcology. That means resources must be tightly controlled - and so only the rich & powerful get what they want, and everyone else might be allowed to exist. And of course they can't be allowed to leave, because then the labor force to support the rich people will be gone. So any possible arcology becomes a massive prison - at best.
Second, I'll admit that I'm a Shadowrun fan. Possibly one of the greatest tragedies in that setting was the horrific incident in the Renraku Arcology. And really it's just an image of what could happen. People are closed in and murdered by something they can't control.
I live in the densest part of the USA, in a metropolitan area that can give my friends and loved ones from rural areas a panic attack just by existing. More consolidation and more control terrifies me.
Me thinking about what an arcology would be like when I was playing the hot new game Sim City 2000: "Imagine the technology in these things, and maybe they're an important option for human expansion if propulsion technology doesn't make huge leaps, and oh maybe with some really good deep geothermal for power they can be so land area efficient..."
Me thinking what an arcology would be like when I exist in 2025: "Yeah they were pretty coo- wait... What about the governments? What about the corporations that build and administrate these things and employ people? Are all those entities even distinct from one another? This isn't a post scarcity Star Trek techno heaven, it is a real world Final Fantasy 7 shit pie with the haves living literally on top of the have-nots. No, no, forget that, these things are going to destroy the mental health of the people in them even before we add the evils of modern society!!"
I don’t want to live in a Darco.
What the hell does that even mean?! In my country every fucking city, town and village are walkable, there's nothing difficult about that. Usually only in places where it's not dense enough to really call it even a village, you have to walk in the same roads with cars. Which are still walkable though (those are no highways), unless you live so far away there's nothing to walk to
Fr having moved somewhere I can comfortably walk/bike/ride a lot of where I want/need to go has been a massive improvement to my life.
Where?
Pick any city with a good rail line.
Examples pls.
DC, Chicago, Seattle, NYC, I hear mixed things about Boston
I'm moving soon from a small town with nothing but a Circle K on the main road where last year 6 people died trying to cross the street, to a pretty big town with a bustling downtown and sidewalks the whole way to my new house ~2.5 miles away.
I'll be a 5-10 minute walk from a shopping center with a grocery store, a sports complex, a public library and a lot more.
I'm absolutely stoked. I grew up in the city and the sort of strandedness the last few years has really affected my mental health.
Oooh a post that will attract the fuckcars brigade! Let’s guess: will genuinely curious questions or even the mildest of criticism be absolutely buried in downvotes? Stay tuned to find out!
Love how triggered you are, speaks volumes.
I don’t drive, but I wanted to point out just how unhinged and disconnected from reality the echo chamber you’ve formed around yourself has become.
I'm sorry that internet points are so triggering for you that you had to come here just to point out that most members of the anti-car community are going to vocally disagree with the contrarian pro-car sentiment that finds its way here. Truly groundbreaking, thanks for your contribution.
You’re the second person to tell me that I am triggering. Can you explain to me what I am doing?
So far it seems only a false statement and some prediction about something barely related are the ones being heavily downvoted.
It's so fucking nice!
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