I would love to have a picture of me dressed up like that on my old white Peugeot. Sadly none exists.

Here is a pic of the garage at the townhouse I lived for my last 8 years in Shoreview. Streetview distorts it some. I sold it in 1999 at the height of the housing market. A guy drove by an hour after the for sale sign went up. I was standing in the driveway and he offered me the asking price without ever seeing the inside.

The double garage had almost the same sized footprint as the townhouse.





My first few years in Shoreview I lived in an efficiency apartment that cost about $400 a month. A single stall garage with room for nothing other than a car was an extra $125 a month.

Don't misunderstand, I do appreciate the value of garages. But moving outward from the center of a city and into the suburbs is like rings on a tree. The oldest homes near the center of the city don't have garages or if they do they were added later. When they were built people didn't have cars.

I live in Minneapolis proper but in a neighborhood that was developed in the 30s. The houses all have garages, but usually only single car garages (at least originally). They are typically in the back of the house, not the front and are accessed through the alleys. There was a trolly line that ran down the major street at one end of the block. People had cars then but usually only one and pubiic transport was still heavily utilized. We have sidewalks. There are stores, restaurants and parks within easy walking distance.

Through the seventies and eighties you saw the garage become a more prominently featured part of the home when viewed from the front. The 90's is where it seemed to really go off the rails, IMHO. The garage often dwarfs everything else that's visible from the street side.

If you wanted to explain to someone how important the car is to American culture, all you have to do is show them one of these houses. And the surprising thing is that people don't really notice it.

Hello! The garage makes up 2/3 of what people see when they look at your house ! Maybe that's a sign that we care about cars a little too much.

Yes, and I think this has become even more vital, now that most households require two or more jobs to make ends meet, and change jobs every few years due to layoffs or wage stagnation. Life becomes more complex if you have kids too, especially if you feel that they need to attend private schools, or want to provide them with extracurriculars such as music lessons. My state is pushing to replace public schools with charters, meaning that virtually everybody will have to drive their kids to some far-flung school.

Amusingly, my family uses bike / bus / walking for the basics: Work, school, and shopping. Most of our car use is for extracurriculars and recreation.

I think that exaggerates the role played by the automobile. I would (for example) give unionization a lot of credit for businesses paying living wages for what otherwise would have been low paying jobs. People rarely traveled more than 20 miles from their home because stores, schools, bars, restaurants, banks, churches, etc were located near where people lived. If the town you lived in didn't have opportunities, you found a job in a community that did and you moved there. People kept jobs for decades. Laying workers off was a last resort and a sign of trouble, - not a sign of healthy corporate restructuring.

Besides, it's not like people went from walking to driving cars. There were horses, mules, carriages, trains, street cars, trolleys, etc. Oh, and bikes.

Just ran across this website: https://www.walkscore.com

You plug in an address and it gives the address a score on a scale from 1 to 100 in terms of walkability. My old Shoreview neighborhood scored 17 which sounds pretty bad but the house I grew up in scored a 3.

My Minneapolis neighborhood scored 58 in terms of walkability and got a 69 for bikeability

There was also a slider that let's you pick a time interval and then select a mode of travel. It would show you the area on the map that you could travel to within that time frame. So if you pick 20 minutes, it'll show you the area that you can cover by bike from that address within 20 minutes.

The Shoreview address wasn't given a score for bikeability or transit. It also didn't have the slider feature.

I'm not sure what the scores are based on but it seems fairly accurate. We are in walking distance to a number of places but there are other Minneapolis neighborhoods that are much, much better.

The problem with walkscore is that it's distance based. There have been a number or articles about how it rates a 1/4 mile walk along a 55 mph 4-lane road with no sidewalk to a place with 1 greasy spoon and a 7-eleven better than a 1/3 mile walk along a 30 mph residential street with a sidewalk to a place with 4 nice cafe's, a grocery, and other things.

Great idea, useless execution.

I'm sure it's far from perfect but I doubt it's consistently that bad. FWIW the 3 scores I got pretty accurately reflected the realities of places I have lived.

Edit: Turns out that walkscore improved their algorithms starting last year so that it's not longer just distance based. They called it the "Street Smart Walk Score Algorithm"

Ha. I live in 10014.

Nice ! Is it that good in reality ?

The neighborhood where I work (North Loop) gets a walkability score of 93, a transit score of 97, and a bike score of 94. Those numbers seem a little inflated.

If they gave some weighting to the types of places you'd have to walk to get somewhere (sidewalk vs no sidewalk, busy high-speed thoroughfare vs slower) then it'd be quite useful. As is it can be misleading.

Apparently it has been doing exactly that since last year: "Street Smart Walk Score Algorithm"

E-assist bikes have already been mentioned but aside from that no one has really talked about technology and potential improvements to human powered transport.

Even existing things like trikes or recumbents can make long distance commutes faster and more comfortable. I know some people don't like how low to the ground they are, but if the infrastructure were safe enough that could alleviate some concerns.

Then there are velo-mobiles that could help people manage in poor weather.

There are lots of ways that bike performance could be enhanced but our performance bikes tend to come from the racing world where design is very much limited by UCI rules, - which are based on tradition as much as anything else. For example, racing bikes still have seat stays and seat tubes only because rules require them, - modern construction techniques don't.

I guess what I'm saying is that when thinking about what is realistic in terms of bike commuting, we shouldn't limit ourselves to only consider bikes as we normally think of them. We may be able to cover more ground in less time and perhaps even in more comfort if we look beyond traditional bikes.

I am actually considering this for my next step up/or down from my PriusC, depending on how one looks at it Welcome to Organic Transit!

Yes! Everything is within a half mile: restaurants, tourist sites, shoe repair, watch repair, grocery stores, delis, pizzerias, clothing stores, drug stores, bike shops, hardware stores. I happen to like some supermarkets that are farther, so I walk about 2.5 miles round trip. It's immensely impractical to do short trips by car, so no sane person does it. Parking can take longer than the trip.

Walking is so convenient that I don't ride my bike unless my trip is at least a mile, often longer.

It's also quite invigorating to have so many people out on the streets. In the course of my day, I think I might witness hundreds or maybe even a thousand faces. Can you imagine that? It's radically different from living and working in the suburbs.

I've been thinking something like that may make a far more practical winter commuter than a traditional bike. The only problem I see is where to keep it at work.

If I were an engineer I'd have an easier time at this but if there was such a beast as a lightweight folding trike with an optional fabric body...

Hope those things have doors and some kind of heat, because that is going to be extremely cold sitting there not generating any body heat.

Yes they do have a door option, but you can also pedal as much as you want to extend range, or keep up speed, or exercise...

The ELF is interesting. Any idea what the dimensions and turn radius is? They seem like they'd be too wide for most bikeways so you'd need to be in the traffic lane.

Except you are stuck in traffic, while the bikes whiz by, keeping warm by pedaling. I guess you could pedal in place to keep warm and generate electricity, while going nowhere, but it doesn't sound that great.

What are the dimensions of the ELF? Exact dimensions vary depending on exactly how a particular ELF is outfitted, but the dimensions are roughly 9′ long x 4’0.25″ wide x 5’1″ tall. You can get a good idea of how it compares to other vehicles by watching the videos. The ELF can comfortably fit in most bike lanes.

So I did the walk score for my last two places. One of which I've never lived in yet, damn hospitalization.

I got high walk able scores 86 and 92. Transit was 68 and 69. Bike able ratings were 72 and 61.

What is funny with the 72 I live on the bike lane and the 61 I was on block over from the bike lane. They were both major lanes heading into town, it could not be much easier to get downtown on bike lanes than these two.

I like [MENTION=127275]gregf83[/MENTION] only commute for fitness and health benefits but will drive one km to the store.

I'm with you on that part (see Commuter bike pics thread). That's not a stunt, it's my usual bad-weather commuter. I've been frequently tempted to put an electric wheel motor in it - but I'm stopped by the fact that it's overkill for my easy 8-mile commute, and that I'd want it to be fast to be worth the expense and trouble. Meaning beyond the statutory limit to still be considered a "bicycle" in Georgia.

That walk score thing won't cooperate. When I put in Potomac, MT it gives me scores for Potomac Street Northwest in Georgetown, Washington D.C. It has a really good walk score of 98 so I guess they want me to travel 2,215 miles to get there so I can walk around the place. (Well, that's if I were to go through North Dakota. It's a little farther if I went through South Dakota.)

What a bunch of eastern snobs.

I think I'll stay put. It's only 5.1 miles to Cullys, the local restaurant/bar/convenience store/gas pumps. What more does a guy need?

I can't get info for my whole commute, but intermediate parts rate as "somewhat walkable" and "car-dependent."

The downtown area is making baby-steps toward being more pedestrian-friendly, but the nearby city I grew up in isn't quite there yet.

My daily commute takes me past Potomac Street in Georgetown. It's a great area to walk around, so I can understand the high score. If you ever do decide to check it out, it's basically where the C&O Canal starts, and hundreds of bike commuters funnel through there every day.