Comments

1
Hah, scrolling quickly & thought this said "How Seattle's Wankability Ranks"!
2

I don't call it walking if you have to stop at a curb every 100 yards and wait for a light to change or a car to pass.

I walk on nature trails, where I can go for miles uninterrupted.
3
The study authors are not punishing Chicago; they're rightfully pointing out that you can't squeeze 9 million people into the center city. And that therefore you need to urbanize other areas outside the core. As the author said, this has been done successfully in some of the D.C. suburbs.

In our area Bellevue would be a good example. Piss on it if you want, but its downtown has become far more urban and quite livable. It has a lot of apartments and condominiums, many businesses and obviously a lot of restaurants and shopping. It is now very easy to live and work there without a car. That wasn't true 20 years ago.

I realize this doesn't fit Charles's absolutist view of how the world should be, with millions of people crammed into coffin-sized apodments. I prefer to look at the real world.
4
@3

ask chuckie mudede how big his apodment is.

Well thing Seattle does edge Bellevue on: it has more junkies laying in park, homeless laying on the street, and certainly has far more of the gimmefreestuff types....you know: all the worthless losers....
5
the suburbs will explode again with growth once all the young single wannabe-hip people in seattle realize that nobody in their right fucking mind would want to raise a family in a 500sf dowtown/close to downtown condo or apartment....
6
@3, but if you want to do any thing culturally interesting, i.e., checking out alternative music and performance art, you've got to leave Bellevue and go into Seattle---via car since the activities are happening in the evening for the most part. While I admire Bellevue's efforts in becoming more walkable and paving the way for light rail, they've got a long way to go to improve upon their white bread dockers culture.
7
We're #2 on Wankability.
8
"they've got a long way to go to improve upon their white bread dockers culture."

Really? Seattle and Capital Hill are far whiter than Seattle.
9
@2 is not correct, even about his own personal opinion.
10
If you look closely at the table you will notice the entire ranking is based on a single variable, "number of walkups" whatever that means. Everything else is just a multiplier of that figure.
11
@2, please do go for miles, uninterrupted.
12
@6

Please do tell us about these greater metro areas in America where one can find plentiful performance art well outside the urban core?

Walkability does not equal high availability of the kinds of cultural output preferred by white liberal college-educated aesthetes with comfortable levels of disposable income.
13
@10 Click through to the article. "WalkUPs" is their confusing shorthand for "Walkable Urban Places," defined as areas where offices and retail are within walking distance of residential areas. Without further definition, it still doesn't mean that much, IMHO.

Living where I live, the whole concept of using MSA statistics for something like this is anathema. There is almost nothing in common between the city and the suburban counties (ask any suburbanite), and with a New York MSA population of 22 million, they're clearly including everything from Montauk Point to Trenton to White Plains and half of fucking Connecticut. That's a lot of suburban and rural real estate. The five boroughs of NYC are but a couple percent of that land area, more than two thirds of those boroughs I would say is more suburban than urban in character.

Bottom line: bullshit article with cockeyed statistics.
14
Not sure how Denver managed to rank 14th. Oh, it's plenty walkable, without much in the way of hills or obstacles, but 1) there aren't really that many places that are really worth walking to; and 2) the weather is either way too hot or way too cold to walk all that much outdoors for about nine months out of the year. I don't think this chart has much validity.
15
@6: Different people have different tastes. Not everyone is into performance art, but Bellevue does have theater, a performance center, music, movies, an art museum, etc.

And you can ride an express bus leaving downtown Seattle for downtown Bellevue until midnight any night.


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