Annime Wong on Nostr: "I want all cities to be walk-able, you know, like they use to be a century or so ...

"I want all cities to be walk-able, you know, like they use to be a century or so ago, with everything I need just 15 minutes away. I hate how everything is a parking lot."

The average human walking speed is about 3 miles per hour. That means everything you need at to be at most .75 miles away. That means in a 1.5 mile radius, you need to have your house, a grocery store, restaurants, clothing stores, movie theater, church, entertainment, parks, a museum, a hardware store, salons, coffee shops, your job, public transportation, school, etc.

This isn't very realistic. Obviously someone might set up a unique restaurant or store in another 15 minute district that you'll want to travel to at some point. Things like museums and schools are also obviously only going to be available or concentrated to a single location.

Okay, okay, so we'll have unique restaurants peppered all over the place, museums, schools, parks, bouquet stores. But now we need public transportation, and a lot of it.

So do we have a train station set up about every square mile? How the hell does that work? We just replaced parking lots with train stations, horrible unwalkable pavement roads with even less walkable train tracks. Or we can use busses, and cover every part of a city with bus stations, and have them run often enough to reliably service every 1.5 square mile of an entire city.

I guess bicycles can push that range out a bit, as well, but it does not help the elderly who can't easily ride, or the disabled, or young children. I guess we can bring back rickshaws for them? Maybe even horses and donkeys?

I suppose a reasonable response would be to try and mix it all. Bicycles, busses, train stations, service trucks for special cases, but to most people, this is a complete mess. You are still going to need to have roads, and lots of them, as well as a lot more train tracks. Having to plan out taxis, busses, and trains to get to certain location is a choir. Scheduling and paying for a truck to deliver something is also a pain. People are going to ask "why can't I just own a truck?" Even the most famous "pro public transportation" nation only really uses it in Tokyo. Everywhere else, cars are best, with just a few spots where bikes and walking wins out.

At a certain point, it's clear that these walkable city people probably never leave their house ever for anything. It's a bunch of NEETs telling everyone to be NEETs.