Not Just Bikes - Even Small Towns Are Great Here
Isn’t NJB’s general rule something like the more car-friendly a place is, the worse it becomes to live there. Guess pedestrian & bike friendly is always a good thing if there’s people living around there.
The opposite is also true: the bigger a city is, the more transit friendly/pedestrian/bike friendly it should be, hor it will be congested by cars (see Palermo, Italy as an example)
No I get that, but there’s this prevailing sentiment that cars are somehow more necessary in rural areas because…they’re not worth serving with transit or something? I don’t know. I think it’s ridiculous. Big cities should obviously have excellent transit and non-car infrastructure but so should small towns and villages
From a certain point of view a small town should be more walkable than a big city but that all comes down to planning. I’ve lived in several small towns over the years. Let’s compare 2 for example.
Isolated oil industry town of 990 founded in the 1950s. You cannot function without a car. Only a dozen or so businesses or places to go. Everything is far apart, literally ZERO sidewalks. Two high speed highways bisect the town, obviously no sidewalks means no crosswalks either.
Historic 1800s ranching town turned into a resort destination, population 8,000. I never had a car living here and never wanted one (I’d bum a ride to go hiking). Several hundred businesses or places to go, but sidewalks everywhere. Traffic had recently been calmed as the mistakes of the previous decades of car centered design became obvious to the town. The highway through town had a lower speed limit and several safe crossings. The streets were originally planned out before cars and euclidian zoning were a thing. Was very pleasant to be a pedestrian.
In theory the town of 990 could have been even more walkable because combined together all the towns businesses and destinations would have been maybe 10 acres. But instead they were spread out in different unconnected parcels which had dangerous highways between.
In my experience, small towns in the US are much more spread out than in Europe. In Europe I lived next to some farmers, and we lived in the village proper, they’d hop on the tractor and head out to their fields.
Here, farmers mostly live on their farms, and most people have comparatively big properties.
Still not impossible to have transit, but definitely tougher when the density is lower.
