this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2023
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City Life

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If We Want a Shift to Walking, We Need To Prioritize Dignity (www.strongtowns.org)
submitted 1 year ago by haxe11@beehaw.org to c/citylife@beehaw.org
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Have you ever had a friend return from a vacation and gush about how great it was to walk in the place they’d visited? “You can walk everywhere! To a café, to the store. It was amazing!” Immediately after saying that, your friend hops in their car and drives across the parking lot to the Starbucks to which they could easily have walked.

Why does walking feel so intuitive when we’re in a city built before cars, yet as soon as we return home, walking feels like an unpleasant chore that immediately drives us into a car?

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[–] chaorace@lemmy.sdf.org 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Because it's a parking lot. Name the top five things that people enjoy doing in the parking lot that aren't parking or driving. You can't, because it's an empty lot where humans don't belong.

[–] rancor@beehaw.org 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)
  1. Smoke weed
  2. Play catch
  3. Drink a beer
  4. Skateboard
  5. Bmx
[–] idealium@beehaw.org 9 points 1 year ago

Sure you can do these things in parking lots, but I expect most people would prefer a more pleasant and dignified space to perform recreational activities in if they were just as common and convenient to find as a parking lot.

[–] chaorace@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 1 year ago

I'll grant you skateboarding & BMX on a technicality, despite those things both definitely not involving walking. Also... do people really enjoy getting drunk or high in parking lots? I'd just assume anyone doing that was homeless or truant.