The Great Mystery

Thoreau locates a walker in Southern California:

My wife has found a job, and we have found a nice and reasonably priced apartment (by local standards–$1095 for a large 1 bedroom with lots of closets and shelves) 1.5 miles away, which in good weather is walking distance. In bad weather (be it heat or rain) there’s the bus. Which means that we will be able to pull off the 1 car thing, a feat without precedent for a couple with 2 jobs in southern California.

This reminds me of the Great Shame of American urban planning. What does and doesn't constitute "walking distance" is highly weather-dependent. The best weather in the nation, meanwhile, is in Southern California, a region that would be one of the best places in the world to walk except for the fact that it's . . . horribly unfriendly to walking. Meanwhile, your Northeastern cities are all quite walkable in urban planning terms, but climactic conditions make long walks unpleasant on a large number of days. It should be all the other way 'round. Cold, damp Boston would be an excellent location for a car-dependent city and LA would be a great place to put Manhattan.

Comments

"LA would be a great place to put Manhattan."

Manhattan exists in LA. It's called Venice and Santa Monica.

They've even got rent control.

Posted by Petey | July 13, 2007 8:12 AM

When are you going to stop making stupid comments about Boston weather? Yeah, no one in Boston liked you, get over it. New York city gets 46.7 in of rain a year, Boston gets 42.9 in - New York is damper than Boston, just as cold, yet you go on as if Boston were Moscow or Fargo, ND. Jaysus, you must be one of the biggest whiners who ever studied in Cambridge. "Cold and damp" describes Amsterdam or Edinburgh - both cities where you can do quite well without a car by the way.

Posted by vanya | July 13, 2007 8:20 AM

Having lived in both, I can attest that Boston is indeed colder than NYC. However, since I originated from colder climes than Boston, it was positively balmy to me (always 10-20 degrees colder when I went home to visit my folks). I did have to buy waterproof boots, though, to deal with the lack of appropriate plowing that would result in deep puddles of standing water. If you couldn't hack walking to the Quad on a regular basis, then you needed a heavier coat. Both both cities are *extremely* walkable probably 90% of the time, with terrific public transit for those times when it's unbearable (though the NYC subway is a hellhole in the summer--the bus is slower, but at least you don't have to melt on the platform).

Posted by Mrs. Coulter | July 13, 2007 8:29 AM

Manhattan exists in LA. It's called Venice and Santa Monica.

Heh. I lived in Venice for a year and occasionally walked to work. My wife and I survived the two-job one-car situation quite nicely. Not quite as inexpensively as in Thoreau's example, though, with a studio apartment costing us around $1800 a month. Not having to drive, for most of our needs, was a pleasure.

Posted by RSA | July 13, 2007 8:39 AM

Cold, damp Boston would be an excellent location for a car-dependent city and LA would be a great place to put Manhattan.

This is a very good suggestion! I will forward it to those in charge and see what they can do.

FYI, once one leaves the West Side of Los Angleles (not something many readers of this blog may often do), climate conditions become more extreme. During the years I lived in Pasadena I found the summer heat there much more oppressive than that in New York. (New York suffers from sticky multi-day 90-plus degree heat waves; in the inland valleys of the LA basin, the temperature rises to the mid-90s in late May and remains at that level through September.)

Posted by James Gary | July 13, 2007 8:54 AM

We live in Denver and do quite nicely with one car. I usually run to work (about 7 miles), which isn't a hassle since I run marathons. We live about 0.5 miles from the light rail stop, so I just take the train home. We also live about a mile from my wife's job, so she walks to work whenever our daughter's daycare schedule allows (which is why we need a car, rather than a couple of bikes). The $500/month we save on car payments, gas, insurance, etc. really expanded our homebuying power--we could essentially buy something that was $50k more and still pay less than with two cars.

Of course, we moved out here from a big, northeastern city, so we were used to this lifestyle.

Posted by Joe | July 13, 2007 9:43 AM

This is all wrong. Manhattan is the perfect place to put Manhattan because its geography makes it difficult to dribble in more cars. And even then it was sheer chance that Robert Moses was unable to strangle the city center with elevated expressways. Also, as someone who is typing right now on 34th Street, I can attest that the weather is, on balance, good for walking, especially in the 3/4 of the year that's not the dead of winter or the heat of summer.

And the West Coast already has a city that seems not only perfectly set up for pedestrians--great climate, geographically constrained--but was also, well, walkable when I was there: San Francisco.

Geez, there more to the U.S. than N.Y., D.C. and L.A.

Posted by jlw | July 13, 2007 9:54 AM

The best weather in the nation, meanwhile, is in Southern California

Um. No. Although I guess this is a matter of personal opinion.

Except along the coast, So.Cal. gets very hot in the summer. "But it's a dry heat" you say? But while your body can cool you off quicker in that dry heat by sweating, it dries out your innerds pretty quickly. And then, even with reduced auto usage due to more people walking, LA would still have a huge smog problem; even when the area was pre-industrial, smoke from people's cooking fires made the area all smoggy. And smog's not conducive to walking.

NYC may be cold in the winter and hot and humid in the summer -- but compared to the sun-belt, its summers are rather mild. And NYC is not so cold that you can't keep warm walking quickly and wearing a good coat.

NYC is about the best place to have a walking city. They don't call it a temperate climate for nothin'

As jlw mentions, SF is also a good walking city (although during the winter SF is arguably colder feeling than NYC as the humidity really gets under your layers and brings the chill straight to your bones) ...

And as to Manhattan in or around LA: what's Manhattan Beach? Chopped liver? OK ... stupid joke ...

Posted by DAS | July 13, 2007 10:04 AM

If we're voting on best weather, I nominate Santa Fe.

Posted by Bloix | July 13, 2007 10:38 AM

In the interests of grammatical clarity, you might want to check the difference between the two words -- climactic and climatic. Your article gives a laughable picture of people per-
forming under "climactic" conditions.

Posted by John Botens | July 13, 2007 10:42 AM

In the interests of grammatical clarity, you might want to check the difference between the two words -- climactic and climatic. Your article gives a laughable picture of people per-
forming under "climactic" conditions.

Posted by John Botens | July 13, 2007 10:43 AM

Having even more crazy Boston drivers on wet streets would be problematic.

Posted by JP | July 13, 2007 10:47 AM

Um, no, nowhere is a good place for a car-dependent city.

Posted by tps12 | July 13, 2007 10:56 AM

The best weather in the nation, meanwhile, is in Southern California, a region that would be one of the best places in the world to walk except for the fact that it's . . . horribly unfriendly to walking.

I lived at the beach in L.A. for 12 years. The weather is great -- I never needed A/C and rarely ever had the heat on -- but it is also a great place to walk. Many times I'd drive home from work on Friday night and not need my car again till Monday morning.

I now live in the Valley. The heat can be oppressive. We hit 119 degrees last summer. There are months when you don't want to leave the A/C during the daytime. (So far this year, though, not so bad.) But you can't walk anywhere. The only thing within walking distance is a mailbox.

So I wouldn't over-generalize about the pluses or minuses of Southern California. The climate changes every twenty miles. So does the ease of walking, which is like the Northeast: parts of the city are good for walking, and outside of them, not so good.

Posted by JJF | July 13, 2007 11:07 AM

Boston: Cold, damp, and proud of it.

(Except today, which is 75, dry, sunny, with a light and pleasant sea-breeze).

Posted by Ben Cronin | July 13, 2007 11:34 AM

Also, the notion of moving LA here to the Bay State -- or turning us more car-dependent -- makes the stomach turn.

Posted by Ben Cronin | July 13, 2007 11:36 AM

All this bickering aside, the real point is that LA could really benefit from an effective public transportation system.

It's moving slowly, but there are steady improvements happening from downtown to the westside -- there's a subway system that's being expanded with stops in century city, which should clear up a lot of road traffic east of santa monica.

Is it good now? No. The ability to get wasted 24 hours a day and not have to drive home is my favorite part of New York.

I went to school in Boston, and when my friends were deciding between LA and NY for postgrad, my compelling argument was simply, "there's no winter where I'm going," and all of them came with me.

Posted by Max Goldberg | July 13, 2007 1:07 PM

Actually, large portions of LA are surprisingly walkable. Venice, Hollywood, downtown, and a ton of other neighborhoods are densely populated and have all the amenities within walking distance. The problem is that the sheer geographic size of the place means that if you don't have a car, large chunks of the city are effectively off limits, which restricts which jobs are available to you, etc. I know many people who live in LA without a car. They all agree that it is inconvenient and limiting, but not the impossible task some describe it as.

Posted by Henry | July 13, 2007 1:16 PM

Henry writes: "The problem is that the sheer geographic size of the place means that if you don't have a car, large chunks of the city are effectively off limits, which restricts which jobs are available to you, etc. I know many people who live in LA without a car. They all agree that it is inconvenient and limiting, but not the impossible task some describe it as."

But the same is true in New York. I live in Brooklyn and work in Manhattan--and that's virtually all of the city I see, let alone the wider metropolitan area (which, when people talk about Los Angeles, is what is really implied). My friends with cars go out to Costco or Fairway or IKEA or whatever, or take a weekend daytrip to the Jesey Shore or the Hamptons. My carless family and I walk to the grocery store in the neighborhood and take a bus to Coney Island. Stuff in Westchester or Passaic County could as well be in another time zone.

And yet, I don't long to see that stuff. My life is so full-up with things to do in walking/short public transport distance that adding things beyond that horizon would subtract stuff from closer in that I'd miss. Indeed, I don't know what I'd do with a car (and I've turned down two free ones in my life) that would be worth the hassle of owning one.

Posted by jlw | July 13, 2007 2:08 PM

What, no one's mentioned Portland yet? =)

Despite the weather reputation, Portland's a great walking city. The rain's never really that bad, usually just minor drops and you quickly get used to putting up with it. And once you do, it's smallish city with teeny blocks and craploads of busses to get you where you're going. My partner and I have been doing the one-car thing for three years now, and before he followed me to town, I made it for a few months on transit alone.

Posted by ryan | July 13, 2007 4:15 PM

Because of earthquake building codes in California it would be prohibitively expensive to construct the tall buildings that allow for the high population densities that permit public transportation to be a viable option in Los Angeles. That is why Los Angeles is so spread out and consequently so dependent on cars.

Posted by andrés | July 13, 2007 8:35 PM

There is nothing about earthquake building codes that prohibits tall buildings or makes them too expensive to be viable. Look at downtown L.A., Century City, San Diego, San Francisco, Pasadena, Glendale, Long Beach, or any number of other local downtowns in Southern California. More tall buildings are being built now, when there are more building regulations in place, then there were in decades past.

L.A. is spread out because in the decades in which the general pattern here was established -- 1880s to 1920s -- the single-family detached home was sold as a lifestyle and was enabled by easy rail access. Later, extensive highway systems were used to fill in the areas between rail stops. Any other American city that grew up over the same time period shows the same pattern of development; it was just more successful here, which is why the relatively dense (3,000+ pop/sq. mi.) area is so large.

There are big differences in weather from one part of L.A. to another. Along the beaches the weather is as mild as can be, and highs in the summer are consistently about 20 degrees cooler than in the Valleys. Still, I really can't stand the summer humidity in the eastern half of the U.S.; pretty much the whole summer in the South is "never leave the A/C" temperatures for me. Personally I prefer the cool, rainy weather of the Northwest.

My sister and her husband live in Long Beach and have jobs about 10 miles from home, in different directions, yet are able to live with just one car. They coordinate their schedules and use public transportation; they live next to a Blue Line station.

Posted by Adam Villani | July 14, 2007 4:02 AM

I live in La Canada/Flintridge, to the north of Pasadena. It gets rather hot up here in the summer, and it's cold in the winter (we have some altitude, compared with the West Side) but I actually can walk to work (lucky enough to work close to where I live). The real difficulty with the West Side, compared with NYC or Boston (or Frisco, for that matter) is that it's so congested and the public transport is LA's, which means it's awful. This means that if you're to go anywhere, you need to take a long and inefficient bus route, or drive and fight traffic endlessly. There aren't any options. As for the weather here as opposed to any of the cities back east: one of the Bostonians defending his city's weather cited rain stats that would be record-breaking here, and he was citing the average in Boston. After a while, Angelenos complain if it's 65 in the fall or spring, because it's too cold. The heat perhaps gets to people in the summer, and the inland valleys have worse weather, but I'll take heat over snowdrifts that need plowing most days of the week.

Posted by David Nicholas | July 14, 2007 4:03 PM

Bah. You people need to toughen up. I live in Madison, Wisconsin. It drops below freezing in November and doesn't come back above until March. Last February, the weather girl on the news was breathlessly giddy when she reported that a "heat wave" would take us into the 20s, and I was sincerely gleeful to hear it. And still I walk 45 minutes to work all year round.

Posted by Greg | July 14, 2007 7:02 PM

I do not really understand carping about cold weather. True, I grew up in Warsaw, Poland, wee bit cooler and as windy as Boston, so my winters there seemed, well, normal, as was the pedestrian life style. But another point is that apparel industry made great strides in the last 20 years, and you can adjust to practically any amoung of cold or rain, even of combined with wind. You work in Yellowknife? You can find boots, gloves, parka and balaklava, and goggles to protect your eyes. From what I have heard, in Antarctics, people either walk or bike to work --- special single speed snow-worthy bikes were constructed.

Importantly, you can put on modern apparel quite quickly, it is lighweight, and you do not have to look like a matryoshka.

Posted by piotr | July 14, 2007 9:26 PM