Is that amount of time common to walk in places in the world where cars don’t dictate the layout of the community?
Im going to be making this walk tomorrow, no worries, I’m just curious if its normal in other places. Maps says its 1hour15minues for 2.3miles or 3.7Km.
I don’t go to the office often, but when I do, I usually walk. The distance is 4km and it takes me 40mins. It’s not like I walk often, most days I get less than 2k steps, but I do walk fast.
It is up to you (unless the infrastructure is an ass) to make it there in 40mins or 2 hours
I usually run that kind of distance on a e scooter. Faster, less noise and pollution.
People talking walkable cities forget that cars move more than just people. And people don’t stay in one living spot all the time. No modern city works without the logistics moving goods in and out and peoples stuff from and to their homes and businesses.
So you can’t just remove all the streets and make a denser neighborhood. You need alternative solutions for logistics. I work in rail and I can tell you there is too many people starving in the world, but not for a lack of food but for a lack of logistics infrastructure to get the food to them in time.
Me personally I love underground rail networks and pneumatic tube delivery, but as an engineer i know about the weaknesses of these systems. For now that remains a dream.
I walk 1,5 km in 10-15 minutes (depends on if I am alone or not), so yes I would walk that. But I like walking, I can suggest walking as a way to hang out haha
Last time I lived in a city, 15m is where I’d take the bus instead.
I’d bike it. 2.3 miles should only be a 45 minute walk for a normal person unless there’s bad stop lights (assume ~20 minute miles). On a bike it’s less than 15
Depends on the weather but probably not. I would walk an hour to a concert, to keep from having to park the car, but library, no. 2 miles doesn’t seem like it should take that long though - 2 miles is the distance kids have to have between their house and the school before the school bus will get them, so I had to walk that twice a day for 7 years of my youth, it didn’t take an hour.
Not really.
I may do a walk like that if I incorporate the walk as a leisure. But if I have to just be in a place I won’t be walking more than 30-40 minutes to get to it if there’s a fastest more convenient way.
Walkable means all you need is in reasonable walking distance.
I wouldn’t consider my neighbourhood to be particularly walkable as it’s a suburb (in Europe) but my library is about 15 mins walk away.
Sometimes the amenity you need isn’t in that walkable range, but cycling is a great alternative.
Everyone has their own definition of “walkable”. For me that’s not, plus it’s getting to the point where the books i’d likely get would be annoying to carry. But also do you mean literally walkable or “don’t need a car”. The latter includes transit and micromobility
I walk to my library but it’s less than ten minutes. Especially since they put up parking meters, walking ten minutes is more convenient than finding change or feeding a profiteering app company.
Unfortunately the best part of my towns downtown is a mile away so less convenient. Most of the time I’ve lived here I’ve decided to drive the mile but since pandemic I’ve been far more likely to walk. I recently went to a diner where a newly opened trail made it a nice walk despite it being over a mile.
And the definition of walkable changes over time as well. As a young adult I lived in Boston and considered essentially everything walkable. While I was also a big user of transit, they tended to be too slow and crowded when you can walk instead. Most of my driving was to move my car for street cleaning or snow removal
A reasonable amount of time would be 15min-30min
Longer than that there needs to be transit
A walkable environment also means good public transport.
I live somewhere that absolutely should be walkable and it isn’t. No local public transport, not a single bike lane.
It’s really frustrating. Last time I tried to walk to the store, a 15 minute walk, not counting waiting for the crosswalk light at the 5 lane, four way intersection, my son and I almost got hit by a car when we had the walk signal. It is smelly, loud, dirty, and outright hostile to pedestrians. It’s even dangerous for the cars, that intersection is a race track, and there are accidents there all the time. That’s what I must cross to make my way, two miles, to downtown. I really want walkability.
Anyway, meeting I had to walk for, was able to make it virtual.
I don’t want to live like this. It’s not human.
I asked here, because I thought I was being lazy not wanting to make this journey. I’m glad to confirm, I’m not, and it is not common to walk this length.
That’s weird reasoning. Why would walkable mean there’s busses?
For me walkable means that you don’t need to own a vehicle from going from point A to B and pedestrians are not an afterthought.
For my daily commute or to meet my friends it’s faster/comfortable to walk to the metro station or bus stop than picking the car.
By the way, count the actual time it took you to walk that. From personal experience, Google Maps always says a considerably higher number
Agreed. 90 minutes to go 2.3 miles sounds like a snails pace. That works out to just under 40 minutes to walk a mile. Most healthy adults should be able to jog or fast walk a mile in under 15 minutes. A 5k is about 3.1 miles and most of the slow runners finish in 30-40 minutes. I would consider 25 minutes per mile a leisurely pace. 40 minutes per mile must mean a lot of signalized intersections. I’ve found a mile or two is the perfect distance to walk home from the bar after a night out (weather dependent obviously). Maybe Google thinks they’ll be walking drunk?
Thats fair. Honestly its less about the time, and more about how hostile the first half the journey is. I used to live in a place that was urban, I felt lazy not wanting to make this trip, just another “stupid lazy American” ya know. Confirmed here it’s not normal to walk an hour to a destination as an everyday task, even though I have done walks prior daily, I’m not so young anymore.
3.7Km
It is more like 40-50 minutes if you’re in the town with actual roads, not just a corn field.
would you walk an hour and 15 minutes to go to say, the library?
Walking more than an hour just to get to one place? No, unless walking is a sub-goal. You know, the weather is nice, no tasks for today…
Walk? No. I would cycle there. Get some bike bags so you can bring some books back.
Yes that makes sense. Good to know it’s not a common walking length for everyday. I thought I was being lazy not wanting to make the trip on foot. I’ll be two and a half hours walking for a 45 minute meeting …
I wish cars didn’t rule everything here
I can, and have in the past, it’s not that big of a deal, but it’s not something I do regularly. Here’s the thing, 4km takes about 1h walking, 30min by bus/tram, 20min by car (then another 10min finding a place to park), or 15min by bike. This is why bikes are so ubiquitous in European cities, you can get to places usually much faster than by public transport, and sometimes even faster than cars since they have to do weird paths and skip entire neighborhoods.
I normally would take public transport for such distances, mostly because I don’t own a bike and sweat more than I’m comfortable with when I ride one, and don’t mind the extra 15min of listening to music.
