I mostly use a car since it's so much cheaper and faster than public transport, but I bought this ticket in order to do some longer distance journeys as well. I don't really like driving.
In most of my jobs in Europe(Austria specifically) I couldn't walk to my workplace because most tech companies in my current city put their offices in ugly concrete industrial techno parks outside the city where I don't want to live, meaning driving to work mostly as public transportation there is slow busses only every 30 minutes or one hour of biking. Similarly my GF needs to drive 40 minutes to work outside the city, to one of the few employers in her field. Not everyone lives and works in the city center to be able to walk to work.
So walking to work is such a weird and subjective metric since not all companies in everyone's' area of work will be clustered in your vicinity of your house unless you're lucky or you make active efforts to keep moving close to work which might be in undesirable areas for living.
>your doctor
My current one yeah, but she's terrible and to change her, the only one I found that accepts new patients is on the other side of town so no walking there either, unless I like walking for an hour each direction every time.
MY point is Europe can be highly spread out as well, with people and businesses fleeing inner cities due to space constraints and rent costs, leading to commute distances too long to walk economically. That's why you see traffic jams at highway ramps at rush hour. It's not like those people were too stupid to realize they could walk to work instead of driving if that was an option.
I mean even just perusing around a lot of metro areas on Google Maps its by far the norm. I know its by far the norm for just about every metro I've spent more than a week or two in.
Definitely not universal, no. And in some place the "norm" can be pretty different, even in somewhat surprising locales. But generally speaking? Yeah, pretty terrible experience for a lot of pedestrians and cyclists in US suburbia.
I mean, most places I've visited traveling around the US suburbia, bike lanes were practically non-existent, there was zero notable public transit at all, and sidewalks were usually an afterthought if they existed at all.
Nearest train station is a 35 minute walk, nearest supermarkets are almost an hour walk. One advantage, before Covid and I had groceries delivered, mandatory walking back and forth three times a week to the village did wonders for losing weight.
Lots of people have had their transportation-related costs reduced to $0 by killing! Just be sure to get caught or it won’t work.
