[rootusrootus]

I live in American suburbia and that's how I live. I can walk or bike whenever I feel like it, drive if it suits me. I sometimes wonder what the average European assumes American suburbia to be. Endless tract homes? Such places do exist, true. But that is far from universal.

[kaladin-jasnah]

I'd be curious what metropolitan area you live in for this to be true! If you're not comfortable sharing for privacy reasons, that's all right. But it seems like this is the case in inner-ring suburbs in the Northeast megalopolis.

[teaearlgraycold]

I grew up in the Philly suburbs. They’re mostly pre WW2 in layout, so relatively walkable and bikeable.

[kaladin-jasnah]

Yeah, I've been. They were pretty much what I was referring to in the comment.

[MagnumOpus]

Of course you can walk. But can you walk to your workplace, your kid’s nursery, your local bakery/supermarket, your doctor, your dentist, the pharmacy?

[joe_mamba]

>But can you walk to your workplace

In most of my jobs in Europe(Austria specifically) I couldn't walk to my workplace because most tech companies in my current city put their offices in ugly concrete industrial techno parks outside the city where I don't want to live, meaning driving to work mostly as public transportation there is slow busses only every 30 minutes or one hour of biking. Similarly my GF needs to drive 40 minutes to work outside the city, to one of the few employers in her field. Not everyone lives and works in the city center to be able to walk to work.

So walking to work is such a weird and subjective metric since not all companies in everyone's' area of work will be clustered in your vicinity of your house unless you're lucky or you make active efforts to keep moving close to work which might be in undesirable areas for living.

>your doctor

My current one yeah, but she's terrible and to change her, the only one I found that accepts new patients is on the other side of town so no walking there either, unless I like walking for an hour each direction every time.

MY point is Europe can be highly spread out as well, with people and businesses fleeing inner cities due to space constraints and rent costs, leading to commute distances too long to walk economically. That's why you see traffic jams at highway ramps at rush hour. It's not like those people were too stupid to realize they could walk to work instead of driving if that was an option.

[bluGill]

I bike to all of those. Only work is typically so far away that you need to drive, the rest exists in every suburb and is in bike distance.

[CalRobert]

Absolutely not in every suburb.

I used to live in a suburb in Sacramento and just walking to the closest grocery store was over an hour

[bluGill]

I said bike distance not walk distance. Typically bike speeds are about four times faster than walking speed so your hour walk is fifteen minutes.

I don't know Sacramento, but if it is as hilly as San Francisco you want an ebike which makes the hills level and is even faster.

[dredmorbius]

Sacramento is largely flat. Topo view w/ bike routes indicated: <https://www.google.com/maps/place/Sacramento,+CA/@38.5615711...>

It has reasonably good biking infrastructure, for the US, but suffers badly from sprawl. There's also the summer heat.

San Francisco is hilly (tough riding), but quite compact. It's generally possible to avoid the worst climbs with modest detours.

Sacramento's sprawl means that it has roughly 1/4 the population density of Sacramento. Travel distances are correspondingly longer, and much commercial development (office, retail) is in suburban hubs / malls / office parks, rather than either downtown or in neighbourhood shopping districts, as with SF.

[bluGill]

Again that sounds perfectly bikeable. You seem to be confusing not walkable with must have a car but bikes would just fine.

While the large malls are likely only reachable by cars, I expect small malls are closer and in bike distance.

[thatfrenchguy]

It is though, like, 90-95% of suburbia, and why the US has close to 100% of car commuters ( https://vis.csh.ac.at/citiesmoving/ ). Even small cities like Rennes (or even Clermont-Ferrand, which has objectively mediocre transit) have less car commuters than NYC, which is insane.

[vel0city]

> But that is far from universal

I mean even just perusing around a lot of metro areas on Google Maps its by far the norm. I know its by far the norm for just about every metro I've spent more than a week or two in.

Definitely not universal, no. And in some place the "norm" can be pretty different, even in somewhat surprising locales. But generally speaking? Yeah, pretty terrible experience for a lot of pedestrians and cyclists in US suburbia.

I mean, most places I've visited traveling around the US suburbia, bike lanes were practically non-existent, there was zero notable public transit at all, and sidewalks were usually an afterthought if they existed at all.