In case you're being serious, you rent a car or take an Uber. A metropolis might as well be defined by its lack of car ownership.
Even when you're renting or being driven, you go as far as you can via train. (The Metro-North goes to an Appalachian trailhead [1].) It's safer, simpler, cheaper and nobody has the deadweight loss of being unpaid chauffeur.
Hrmm, so you do need a car after all. It's really amusing listening to people from the Bay Area pass down edicts for how everyone else should use transportation, given that their decrees are a complete non-starter in well over 99% of the United States. Calling it "out of touch" would be a bit generous.
> so you do need a car after all. It's really amusing listening to people from the Bay Area
The Bay Area is car centric--most people have a driver's license. I live in Wyoming and lived in New York. You need a car in Wyoming. You don't in Manhattan. High rises make sense in the latter. They'd be stupid here.
If you're dense enough to make high rises necessary, you're too dense for cars to make sense. Parking for high rises is a dead giveaway the project is being pursued for appearances. (San Francisco's skyscrapers are dominated by commercial buildings that double as advertising.)
You didn't ask how to go hiking in the mountains, you asked how to "leave city limits". but you could still bike, go with friends, or rent a car for a day if no buses go where you want. Hiking locations tend to have lots of tourists so there would likely be bus routes, however.
Sure, that's true - though I can see a couple dozen of them out of the window behind my desk, and there'd be lots more if I were on the other side of the building - but I was really just replying to the previous commenter's mockery of the idea that one could go to the mountains via bus. It's not only possible, it's routine!
Bullshit, I'm from the Puget Sound and it hardly covers any of the good trails in the Cascades, nor could it do so practically if service were ever expanded.
Yeah, and when my grandpa was a kid, instead of a 20 minute drive to the neighboring town, it literally took them three days on foot because of all the hills, sloughs, and rivers. Cars and their associated infrastructure are a modern miracle, and the luddites opposed them are extremely foolish.
Car owners could (say) use outlying parking towers.
To travel there are buses, trains, aircraft, boats, etc.
Not owning a car is common in many parts of the world.