A reader writes:
Perhaps the unwalkable cities are where they are not because of conservatives or agriculture, but because those cities are in areas with very hot climates. One can bundle up to stay warm to walk in cold climates, but there is little one can do to stay cool in hot ones while walking. Thus, one may walk in reasonable comfort in Cincinnati during the winter, but walking in Houston or New Orleans in the summer is nothing but misery, if not deadly (heatstroke). Driving, even without air conditioning, is mostly shaded and has a breeze.
Another writes:
The author of the article on walkable cities seems to have missed a few critical points. More walkable cities tend to have at least one of two characteristics: They are usually older cities that experienced large amounts of growth before WWII and they tend to have physical boundaries that demand more dense growth (lakes, oceans, bays, mountains).
Why are Houston, Phoenix and Dallas so unwalkable? Because the majority of their growth has taken place after WWII, at the height of our car-oriented culture, and because they have no physical boundaries to force residents to go dense. The South's agricultural history has no direct effect – it's just correlative with the fact that the South is largely flat and open, providing for unobstructed sprawl, which is exactly the kind of growth we've seen in the considerably more liberal mid-west since WWII.
That the author thinks nothing of comparing Cambridge, MA, Berkeley, CA and Patterson, NJ to Clarksville, TN and Palm Bay, FL exposes the lack of thought here. The first three are all part of large metropolitan areas (all connected to their urban cores by rail and other transit), while the latter two are essentially in the middle of nowhere. It's apples and oranges. I'm sure he could find a correlative effect between more conservative-minded thinking and suburban-style living, but this data doesn't do that.
Another:
I am completely and totally in favor of making the places we live more walkable; hell, I'm currently fighting with local government in my town for better sidewalk coverage. But this is one of those issues where progress will be just incredibly slow, in large part because the United States is just so damn big. Wikipedia says that we're 179th out of 242 in total population density, but this actually understates the case, because a number of countries below us on the list have large expanses of uninhabitable land. In terms of ratio of population to arable land, we're rated 205 of 233.
Land is like any other desirable product: if there's a lot of it available, it'll be cheap and people will use it like crazy. Sure, better government policies can help the problem, and things will improve long-term as fuel prices increase. But right now people have roots down, most of which are still based on how the world used to be. This is going to change only slowly.
The Dish 