this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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The problem isn't that bikes and buses aren't manufactured. The problem is that infrastructure is based around cars. Cities aren't "walking cities" or accessible. Roads and the building plan for everything screams "fuck people without cars". So people have no choice but to get cars.
This also means that cities are built for cars, not humans. It's not human sized.
Yup,when I went to this suburb in Tennessee, I was baffled by how car dependant it was.
We spotted a Wal-Mart as we drove into a hotel to spend the night, it wasn't far at all. We asked the desk clerk how to get to it. My mom wanted to go for a walk and since it wasn't far, we decided to walk there. He pointed in a direction and said it was a mile away but the clerk wasn't specific with the details.
So we walked that direction, and we walked a mile, but didn't spot the Wal-Mart at all. Confused, we see some women drive to this building next to us and get out of their car and we ask them for directions to it. They said we had to go back the way we came, go down the road further, and take a turn. It's straight from there. They said the Wal-Mart wasn't accessible because of a bypass.
We thank them, turn, and start the walk. However, because the road was so windy, 1 mile was not one mile. We could see the Wal-Mart now but it felt like we weren't getting any closer to it because we are going in basically a zigzag motion. Right, left, right, left... it's a mile as the crow flies, but because of the way the road was set up, it took over 2 hours to walk. To make it worse, there is just acres of empty fields between us. But we can't cut through the empty lots of absolutely nothing because of 10ft+ fencing with barb wire on top. If we could cut through we could have been there and back so quickly. There was nothing on this property, it wasn't farm land. There was no buildings being constructed, nothing, just fields of empty, but mowed grass. The road we walked was so busy and there wasn't even a sidewalk. I never seen anything so unfriendly to pedestrians before.
This place was 100% reliant on cars. Even the main town itself didn't really have any sidewalks to speak of While walking in the main part of the town I only saw 2 businesses and they were blocks apart. Even just going to the store and getting a few small groceries looks to be a hassle without a car.
I had a similar issue with an airport. I had a flight delay and got stuck in Miami for a day, so I had to find an Uber at 2 AM. Ubers were about $60 from the airport, but I noticed if I walked about ten minutes over to a nearby hotel and got an Uber from there it would be about $20. I plugged the hotel into Google Maps, Google goes "Yeah sure, here's the walking directions!", and I start walking only to realize that it's telling me to walk down the shoulder of an eight lane highway.
There was no safe, pedestrian way to leave the airport. Not even to a hotel less than a mile away.
Airports tend to be like that in the west, it was similar when I visited Mexico too. A taxi right outside the airport was a lot more expensive than the taxis across the street. The airport used to have a overhead walk way (which did suck to travel with luggage since it was quite a few steps), but I'm pretty sure they removed it since and the airport is on a major highway.
The airports in Montreal has a bunch of shuttles. Pretty much every nearby hotel runs a shuttle. But it's not walkable there either.
Montréal has the 747 bus for now, soon(TM) to he replaced with the REM
I'm absolutely terrified of crossing any road bigger than two lanes because of that. Whenever I would take a walk I would refuse to go to the neighborhood across the main street and would just stick to my own neighborhood. Even with a bike I don't trust other drivers to give me the time to cross, I have no idea how people do it
This right here. Though my city has buses it's inconvenient to all other traffic how they are structured. Literally having to go across 3 lanes to turn left within 100 feet of a 6 lane intersection from a stop on the side of the road in the right hand lane. I love my city. /S
Where are the sidewalks? Every other but maybe third but also forth occasionally house maybe? Fuck you walk in the street.
Btw why is every man hole in the way of a tire. City planning.... Not here.