Originally Posted by InOmaha

There was a time when people weren't fat, and the majority were in way better shape then even the fit people now, because they worked hard physical labor jobs. There were no cars and they walked, used horses, took trains and trollies, and maybe rode a bike to get around. Then cars came on the scene. Those people gave up walking, gave up the horse and wagons, left trains to handle freight, tore out the trollies, and skipped right over bicycles to the car. They embraced cars quickly and developed their entire infrastructure around it.

So it's intellectually lazy to say people now just want cars because they're fat, lazy, etc. You need to go back to when cars were first developed and became popular over 100 years ago to determine why the bicycle lost the race at the start. The reasons the car became the transportation mode of choice are still the reasons it remains the most popular choice, and cars now have over 100 years of entrenched infrastructure design and cultural attachment on top of that. Not only does another method of transportation have to beat out something it couldn't beat out in the past (when people were fit and trim) but it has to overcome even more due to the inertia of sunk costs and culture.

Go back, figure out why the car won in the first place and you may have a chance at coming up with some alternatives. Tossing out a list of stuff the a small minority would love to have, while handing someone else the bill for it, probably isn't the way to go.

Originally Posted by Jim from Boston

…It seems to me that in order to be an attractive place to support a variety of restaurants and shops to which to walk (and not drive to visit that neighborhood…the basic premise of this thread (["Car-Free outings for otherwise car-heavies"]) a neighborhood must be a large area with a substantial, dense population living there, likely that evolved in the pre-automotive era.

I think a lot of urban revitalization projects tend to create enclaves as driving destinations to walk around in such large cities like in my native Detroit.

One of my greatest complaints about the automotive industry/culture is that by intent, or just popular acceptance, previously vitalized neighborhoods just whithered away, and deprived the citizens of the choice to Live Car Free

Quote:

Location. location, location