Besides driving to work/school, are there any places you are going by foot or bicycle? I've seen people even driving their car to hills just for a run. Do kids go and come home by car or bus then stay home for the rest of the day?
I live in Europe and most people live in cities with stores, school and work nearby. I heard taking uber is very common even in dense cities like LA or Miami. Even our suburbs are not miles away from basic services.
42 comments
Short answer: No
Depends on the suburb and the person. Nothing is one size fits all
Confidence store and liquor store for me but that’s it
Not really
Yes, I can walk to the pizza place, the corner store, for sushi, to the drug store, to the local elementary school, a bar/restaraunt, a steak house, etc etc etc.
But my suburb is more dense/city like than many US cities..
The disconnect here is you see not having everything right on top of you as a bug, most that live in suburbs see it as a feature.
It’ll depend based on the suburb. Here in the Detroit area, many of the inner ring suburbs are very walkable. I can walk to the grocery store, post office, library, dozens of bars and restaurants, etc. In most of the deep burbs, however, that’s much less common.
Not really past a pizza hut and subway.
I grew up in a suburb. I guess I could get to a playground, a church, and Tim hortons, but usually not worth it. But my mom also grew up in a suburb and could walk to school, so it depends where.
Yes, I could get to school, library, and shopping on foot. If you worked locally, you could bike to work though I’m not sure how it would work if you get sweaty or wet.
I live in an older, near-in suburb and I often go for a run or walk out my front door. We have a lot of road cyclists around here too.
I do need a car to get to really good trails though. The best trailheads for hiking and mountain biking are 7-8 miles away. I guess I could theoretically run there, although I use different shoes for roads than the trails.
I could but it would be an hour of walking (15 min. Bike ride) to get to my small town’s downtown or the grocery store in the opposite direction. We have the sidewalks/crosswalk infrastructure, just a lot of space separating stuff.
There are close things to me that I can walk to. Like the park, library, ice cream store, floral shop, handful of restaurants, liquor store, etc. I live pretty close to my work so in theory I could walk, but I wouldn’t.
There’s a walkable area not far from where I live with a couple businesses, but it’s never really been possible to get to any normal services without a car from my neighborhood. It’s just too far and the sidewalks don’t connect very well due to the piecemeal development process.
I don’t live in a suburb and I also can’t walk anywhere. There are relatively few houses in smaller towns where the stuff is close to the dwellings. And of course there are cities but a lot of us don’t live in city centers.
It depends on how far you’re willing to walk. The library and dentist are pretty close by, but the grocery store is about two miles away, and that’s way too far to carry groceries if you get more than a few things.
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Yeah I can get anywhere in town by walking. I just choose to not be walking all day to get to the grocery store.
Even if the grocery store was one block away, I only want to go once a week, if that.
The one I grew up in it’s a 41 minute walk to the nearest shopping center with a grocery store, a massage place, and bike shop, and a couple bad restaurants. The sidewalks only went part of the way there.
Yeah. Not near as much as by driving of course but if I want I can walk to a selection of stores and restaurants, the neighborhood park, that kind of thing. Plus schools are localized, so students of a specific school live in a given area and kids can walk or bike to friends houses most of the time.
The nightmare stuff you see online is generally about a specific type of “suburb” which is usually more accurately called an exurb. They’re big, single developer things usually built on green field at the edge of a metro where land is cheap and there’s little to no surrounding infrastructure.
There are a few places in reasonable walking distance from my house, but there are no sidewalks in my neighborhood, so walking to those places isn’t really safe, especially for children.
The elementary and middle schools are less than a mile from my house, but they bus the kids there because of the lack of sidewalks.
Literally anywhere I want.
I don’t live in a suburb, but my cousins do, and it’s very walkable. I also see a lot of buses in the suburbs.
Depends where you live. Some places could have a store in walking distance. Or school or church might be right in someone’s neighborhood. But for the most part, no. Unless it’s within a few blocks you drive or get a bus.
I live in a suburb in Florida, sort of a middle ground between a large city and a suburb.
It’s so warm and the weather is so nice, I bicycle everywhere. And I really have no fcking idea why nobody else does. It’s basically free and there are actually bicycle trails around where I live in order to get around. It’s so easy, dude.
There ARE huge, sprawling suburbs that are far from food and employment but I don’t live in one. I hate those places (I lived in one for a few years, kids had to be driven everywhere except by the school bus, everything was too far for a bicycle). I can get on my bike and be at the store in 20 minutes or be at work in 10 minutes. No gasoline, no danger of a car accident, no hassle. Just a little sweatiness. I don’t even have to work that hard because i ride an ebike.
I truly don’t understand why anyone here drives a car. Big sprawling suburb or rural area, I get it. But in the Tampa Bay? Traffic is fcking horrible. I’d rather ride a bike for 30 minutes than be trapped for 10 minutes.
I lived in New York City for 16 years, nobody takes the car there. Only people with money take ubers or taxis. The train is easy to take and it used to be really dangerous to cycle there but it’s getting better in some areas as long as you’re careful and don’t ride while drunk.
I grew up in the Suburbs. I used to walk to and from school, a local ice cream place, the soccer field I refereed at as my first job, Panera, and the vast majority of my friends’ houses. I’d bike to the Y, where I had swim practice, and later worked. The longest walk was to school which was about 30 minutes? Roughly two miles.
Completely depends on the suburb but generally no. Best case is there’s sidewalks and you. Just have to watch out for soccer moms who can’t drive.
Worst case is there’s literally no way to walk even across the street. See la suburbs
For me personally, no, not really. The closest grocery store is a little over a mile, but there’s no sidewalk or bike lane and I’m not going to walk in a ditch next to a 50 mph road.
Some other suburbs aren’t as bad, a lot of the older Philadelphia suburbs are reasonably walkable.
Yes, I live in suburbs north of NYC and I walk all the time. I can walk to 2 different commuter train stations, 2 different centers of town, and out to eat all the time. We have a really good trail system in my area where you can walk through the woods to a bunch of towns along a north-south route.
I work from home and usually walk to get lunch most days. I can pretty much walk to any type of cuisine you can think of.
I can walk to the convenience store or CVS pharmacy. I can bike to many more places.
In Europe, the walkable city centers are the desireable places to be for middle income and up. Poor folks live in the suburbs.
In the US, that’s (generally) not the case.
People living in the central city (tend to be) lower income; middle class and upper middle class tend to live in bigger homes on bigger lots where schools are better in the suburbs.
You do often see a donut effect I guess you could call it – where as you get to higher levels of wealth you’re again willing to live in the city – since you can afford a big lot even in town, and mediocre schools aren’t a problem because you pay for private school.
I say all that to say that if suburbanites are middle and upper middle income, it can be taken as a given they have a car and can drive to their destinations; in parts of the US where suburbs are working class/lower income, you do tend to have more walkability even in the burbs out of necessity.
Not really, no. There are 450 homes in my neighborhood….it takes about 20 minutes of walking just to get outside of the neighborhood. Getting to places by bike are a little more reasonable. We do go on a good deal of family bike rides to the various parks in town. My kids most often walk to their friends houses that are near by. If they aren’t near by, they will bike or take their electric scooters to parks to meet up with their friends. If needed and the friends are too far away, I’ll drive them there.
Generally, no. It takes me 15 minutes of walking to get out of my neighborhood since houses be like houses.
No. If I walk maybe 7 miles I’ll get to the closest post office and there literally nothing else there. If you drive 15 minutes you’ll be in a very small town. A subway, grocery store, stuff like that. Probably 30 minutes to get to a large town with Walmart, target, Lowe’s kind of area.
I live in the suburbs of Austin, and for me the answer is absolutely not. Not at all.
It’s not the same for every suburb. Some I’ve lived in are more walkable than others.
“Everywhere is within walking distance… if you have the time.”
— Steven Wright
It’s impossible to generalize every single suburb in this country
I can get to the park. we walk to the park a lot.
Closest place to buy milk would be a 15 minute walk, and google says the grocery store would be a 30 minute walk.
Why would I want to walk to buy groceries though when I have a car though? I can get to the grocery store in 5 minutes and buy heavy hard to carry items. A gallon of milk (8 pounds) 1/2 gallon of avocado oil, a 10 pound bag of potatoes, 5 pound bag of carrots.
there are houses very close to the grocery store, Mine just isn’t one of them.
Suburbanite here. Yes, I do tons of walking, but not to places to buy things. My kids get to their friends house, to the park, and to school (at least the middle and elementary, HS is too far) by walking. There are greenway paths through the suburb that give 5 or 10km runs largely without crossing many roads.
Cities are walkable in the sense of walking to places to consume, but burbs are quite walkable for family focused things that don’t require spending money.
I lived in a rural area (housing developments and farms), and had to drive 20 minutes to a grocery store. Could walk to houses in your own development. Had to drive everywhere else.
Your parents drove you, and everyone got their license and usually a beater car when they turned 16.
Entirely location dependent, both per suburb, and where you live in the suburb. I’m 30m walk or mass transit from groceries / food, but my friend is only 10m away from a whole host of things. But in general, if you’re in walking range of the business zones, you’re good, and otherwise you have to drive. Very few suburbs have anything resembling decent busses.
I could walk but there are no sidewalks or shoulder and the cars are driving on that road at 50 miles an hour. It makes it very uncomfortable to walk so close to vehicles.