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by earlz 2907 days ago
I do a lot of traveling for business and staying in a city like Dallas, St. Louis, or some suburbia part of the bay area is absolutely my least ideal place to stay almost always. I love that uber exists, but my favorite part about traveling is walking around and doing photography so that I'm not just sitting in a depressing hotel. If everything interesting is at least 2 miles apart, it's hard to enjoy a city. And especially in Texas cities, many times there are no sidewalks so that walking even short distances is a big pain
1 comments

Texan cities are all very car friendly and pedestrian unfriendly. It is just not possible to get anywhere without a car, and people will look at you strangely even if you walk down to the grocery store a mile away or so. One fine Houston morning, my friends and I decided to walk down to the strip mall for lunch after a night out; the sidewalks were unmaintained and cracking, but also... we were the only ones walking! It was quite a shock to me to see that, especially since the roads were chock full of traffic.
The suburb (south Houston suburban city) my mom lives in has a token sidewalk for people to run or walk their dogs. That's literally 90-95% of the type of uses I see there minus one guy I see every once and awhile who looks like he's going to or coming from work. It's pretty sad.

I do get one thing, it is really hot in Houston, so I think that plays a lot into the mentality of cars vs walking, at least there.

It doesn't help that it's 100F with 100% humidity.
You say a mile like it's nothing. That's 20 minutes at an average walking speed vs 2-3 minutes at most by car.