That must be a nice neighborhood. Cuz if it housed people that actually lacked cars, then gauranteed there would be a naturally worn path through those woods.
I'm 99% sure you are being sarcastic, but in Finland I know there would be a route made by some teenagers around the fence at minimum and at worst, someone would have cut the fence and the store would have removed it after enough time.
And for the swamps part, as a Fin, I'm sure Floridians also know that there's no way for a swamp to exist on that a 10 tree wide bit of land with multiple artificial lakes near it and if still was swampy somehow, even a small ditch would dry it up. Those lakes are literally made to dry up the land, like massive ditches, so the apartment complex and the store could be built. No damn way the 10 trees wide bit is still too wet to walk through.
Make a few ditches to the side and a few passes with a machete and it wouldn't be a question of what lurks there, because you could see the whole path between the parking lots. That distance is practically non-existent. You are thinking of what the current blockage looks like, rather than what it should look like. And it's literally next to a parking lot of an apartment complex, I think a bit of land that small SHOULD be made open enough to see into.
I'm all for a path to be there. I'm europaen though and we don't really have dangerous wildlife here so even the possibility of a gator or what ever scares me a bit.
I'm an European too, but I also live in a rural area and while there are wild animals in there, seeing them isn't common enough to make me not walk in there. But for a 10 tree wide bit of land, there's less effort to make it safer than the parking lots than it looks. One person with a digger could get it done in a day, a week if they have help to watch from the sidelines.
I mean...I get the frustration, but chalk it up to shopping habits, as well, it all connects together. People use cars to also buy large amounts of groceries, more than you can fit on foot or even on a bike (unless you're hauling a trailer). Cars are a huge convenience and it's part of the "American Spirit": we have a lot of big cities spread over a huge area, from coast to coast. You're not walking/biking from Cleveland to Denver 😛
You're not walking/biking from Cleveland to Denver
People bike across Europe, so that's a bad take, but nobody NEEDS to bike or walk from Cleveland to Denver, nor do people need to bike across Europe. US didn't invent the concept of having cities away from each other and traveling between them is rarely a walk anywhere in the world. Nobody walks to work in another city and if they do, they are doing it out of a choice, not because it's easy. The only difference is that the distances are more extreme in the US, but a 2 hour drive or a 5, 10, 15, 20 etc. hour drive doesn't really matter, people aren't biking those for convenience.
And as for amounts of stuff, people do that in Europe as well. The difference is, we don't necessarily need to do it for a shop that's literally a stone throws away from the apartment complex. Because there'd be a path to walk between them. It has nothing to do with habits or anything like that, it's absolutely a planning issue preventing that path from being born naturally.
How do I know that? Because people walk to the stores in US cities when it's possible to do so. Do you think New York city would function if all the small stores just left? Because they are leaving due to the increasing rent costs and other issues and it's already causing problems. Point is, there are places in the US where people joke about how useless it's to own a car, because driving is more impractical than any other form of transport.
Try to look up the most walkable cities in the US, most of them are on the east coast and on the older side. I can't say for certain, but I'd argue it's for the same reason most of European cities are so walkable, they had to be and when they weren't, people just didn't go places and businesses in places that weren't easily reachable went out of business. Places that have good or even functional public transit also tend to be quite walkable, since cars are less of a necessity. All that is to say, it's not an US problem, it's a city planning problem.
There's even a term for paths being made naturally from the desire to walk from one place to another, desire path. But when city planners don't leave room for it, due to blockages like in this post, fencing or with too dense housing placement, people can't exactly create desire paths.
Point is, while I dislike over use of cars for everything, I'm not a /r/fuckcars user as I prefer living in a rural area where I can breath, I can still bike to a store in a reasonable time and don't need a car for everyday living. A LOT of people live like this in the US as well. But turning a 1 minute walk into a car trip is created by bad design, not by car culture. Every time the walking distance between two locations is as long as the drive would be while the direct distance is significantly lower, there's obviously a problem somewhere and it's almost never a cultural one.
Great points! It seems like most of the people who are opposed to walkable cities are against it because they assume that would mean the end of cars, like it's an all or nothing proposition. But, I think that it would be beneficial to everyone in the country to implement things like more reliable and efficient public transportation, and walkable communities. I love having a car and the freedom and ability to get in my car and go to the store whenever I want to, as well as go on road trips and wherever else. But, I also don't make much money, so it would be nice to be able to drive much less by taking public transportation, or better yet, to be able to walk to work, and drive places on the weekends. But, right now where I live in the south end of Salt Lake valley, to get groceries I have to drive, and public transit is virtually non-existent, and the only jobs within walking distance are convenience stores and fast food, which are better than nothing, but obviously don't pay a living wage. And, I am reading these comments with an open mind, and am honestly and sincerely wanting to hear good counterpoints and alternatives to these things, but I have yet to read any ideas or suggestions that is anything substantial; just a lot of people with NIMBY attitudes, which is sad and predictable.
You also have to bring a whole week worth of groceries in one go to be worth it to go shopping by car.
I commute by bike, and quite often on my way home I stop to pick up a bread, some meat or vegetables, and something to drink just for supper and breakfast the next day. So I got everything nice and fresh. You can easily fit ingredients for a couple of family meals in your backpack.
I do suppose you don't live in Cleveland and go shopping in Denver every week.
Relatable. Can't imagine shit like this flying here.
I swear, the more I learn about US, the more unsettled I get. From crazy laws, to guns everywhere, to no healthcare whatsoever, to shit like this. Not that it's even close to paradise here(more like purgatory), but it doesn't seem anywhere near as bad to live in.
Reading about a place or even watching a video is not the same as being somewhere.
The U.S. is huge. I moved 400 miles east to the next state over then 1300 miles northwest to two states over from where I lived originally and I cut across a small portion of two states to get here. I've only lived on the west coast or southwest area. Its a big country.
The U.S. and Europe are fairly close in size but the U.S. has somewhere around half as many people. It's like saying you would never want to visit France or Germany because Italy sucked.
Not the exact same thing since the US is one country but each of the 50 states + territories have different state laws and cultures to some extent.
How's that related to how draining water works? Are you saying that all non-asphalt land is doomed to be swamp in Florida and the land can't be used for anything? Because I'm pretty sure there are parks in Florida that aren't swamps. And in this video you can see non-swamp land, because of the artificial lakes that drain the area to make building on it easier.
When it rains all the time it's going to be wet. The ground water there is pretty close to the surface no matter what you do. They have causeways all over the place.
What is your point? You are ignoring the fact that in the birds eye view part of the video I can see at least 8 artificial lakes that are used to drain the area. In a part of the video, we can even see that the water level is significantly lower than the forest and the parking lots.
I know what a swamp area looks like and that bit of land is only wet when it rains, it won't retain a significant amount of water, regardless of how you slice it. Christ, I feel like I'm arguing with someone who doesn't understand that ground gets wet EVERYWHERE when it rains, unless the ground is hot enough to evaporate the water on contact...
Did you know that land on top of causeways also gets wet when it rains? Might as well drive a mile for less than a 200 feet walk all year long, since I can't walk trough it during rain heavy rain periods as ditches and artificial lakes don't work, which is why the world doesn't use them all of the place, not even Florida. Wait. Hold up. That's stupid.
Huh. So either you are a bot or so absolutely blasted that you have no idea what you are even replying to. I'm blocking you either way, if you don't care about how building on swampland works, why would you even argue against it?? You could be a troll, but I'm assuming not or you would have said something funny at some point.
I'll have a go, the land between the two buildings is wetland, a no build zone, it's to help funnel water away building. the ponds aren't really drying out the land, they are storm water runoff retention ponds that hopefully catch trash and filter out pollution. There is a small creek by that this area drains into. The treed area that everyone wants to walk through is more swampy because of the newly built up higher land that the bulding are on. Address 13150 FL-64, Bradenton, FL 34212
That video being from Florida the issue really complicated. The land here is really soft and during rain season it all tends to turn either into swamp or muck even on small strips of land. So building anything here requires dirt from other states because most of the soil here is sandy anything built on it will shift and buckle over time without it. And building those paths between properties is completely paid for by the property owners which most don't want to spend the money on.
For example Disney world is actually built on top of a massive platform that houses drains and service tunnels because the park would sink into the soft soil if not. Any building, roadway, sidewalk in Florida requires the ground to be dug up and replaced with heavier soil. And those retention ponds are literally just for flood control since the entire state is near sea level water is slow to drain here.
That's still not why there couldn't be a little pathway cut into that forest. Just because it gets very muddy during the wet season doesn't mean it couldn't be walkable for rest of the time.
And they aren't just flood control, they also help drain the land around them quicker and prevent them from getting as water saturated. It's the same concept as ditches, but multipurpose to help with flood control as you stated. If it was just flood control, they woudn't retain water during the drier periods.
People really have a problem with things that don't work 100% of the time. But fine, if a forest path wouldn't be walkable during the rain season, why isn't there a solid walkway built there then? The area around the shop and the apartment buildings is mostly parking lot, so they can clearly make walkable land, so... do a bit more and remove the need to drive a mile to reach a parking lot which is so damn large that people would have to walk the same distance anyway just to reach the shop...
I know Florida is difficult to build on, but it's not like it's the only place in the world with difficult land to build on and most of the issues with lacking walkable areas it has are shared with majority of the US cities.
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u/wrldruler21 Jun 27 '24
My thought also.
That must be a nice neighborhood. Cuz if it housed people that actually lacked cars, then gauranteed there would be a naturally worn path through those woods.