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Less than 25 percent of Americans walk for more than ten minutes continuously in a typical week
(www.sciencedaily.com)
this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2025
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traingang
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i grew up in a shithole american suburb, one of those housing developments with no sidewalks, no streetlights, just an enclave of cheap houses 4 miles up a 55mph canyon road with no shoulders. it was literally impossible to walk to any type of shop for the first 22 years of my life. i hated it so much i put all of my life's energies into getting the fuck out and living somewhere urban. after getting priced out of one metro area, we were able to relocate somewhere cheaper and buy a home. now, i measure how good my weekend was by how little i needed to drive. i've got bars, shops, and
restaurants within 1 mile in every direction. it really is a blessed existence. i work with suburboids who are too scared to go on walks. if it isn't a walk from the parking lot to the store, or up the driveway, to their house, they won't do it. i desperately want to visit one of those european cities that was developed before the existence of the automobile so i can experience life how it was meant to be lived - locally, on two feet.
america is a deeply sick place.
This picks up two points I that are dear to me and they're both just "it's also very much a cultural issue". Both on the suburban anxiety disorder and also on the part of how 10 minutes of continous walking is very well within territory of walking to two stores from the parking lot without moving your car. Fuck, some of them driveways in the US, probably.
It is an issue of infrastructure, absolutely, but you have to negatively incentivize people out of cars or they'll never stop, because that's like asking them to take a hot air balloon to whereever they're going. It's just not an option for them.
My relative was an exhange student in the US in the 70s and has told me that one of the problems she ran into with the host family was the way she would just go for walks and jogs around the area by herself. This was somehow super dangerous and unheard of, she said the area was just a basic suburb.
It's an entirely different outlook on life.
My favorite thing about going to new cities is learning the various transit/bike-share options and getting to explore. Having a car always feels so fucking limiting and I hate it. Unless there’s a scenic spot I wanna go to specifically that requires driving, I’ll avoid it, it’s just so liberating to not have one’s existence tied to operating a machine.