Ask Lemmy

I'd walk that for pleasure, but not for work. Time for you to get a bike.

A reasonable amount of time would be 15min-30min

Longer than that there needs to be transit

I'd bike it. 2.3 miles should only be a 45 minute walk for a normal person unless there's bad stop lights (assume ~20 minute miles). On a bike it's less than 15

Walkable means all you need is in reasonable walking distance.

I wouldn't consider my neighbourhood to be particularly walkable as it's a suburb (in Europe) but my library is about 15 mins walk away.

Sometimes the amenity you need isn't in that walkable range, but cycling is a great alternative.

A walkable environment also means good public transport.

What stops to put a tram there? Or bike there? Thats then 10-20 minutes from my experience

No, that's way too far just for the library. I'd do that for pleasure but right now I'm time poor and can't afford that for a general task.

no, but i would bike 10 minutes

In general no

However, a sunny Sunday, walking 1h to do something may be part of the fun.

For distance above roughly a km, I use bicycle or even bus/train

If I had no responsibilities for the day I would walk that but if I had anything else it would add up too much

I think the most I would walk is around 40-45 minutes. So no, 1h15m would be far too long to justify walking. Maybe on the weekend if the library was super nice?

Where I grew up it was about a 45 minute walk to the library. I went maybe twice a year.

Now I'm about 15 minutes from the library and I'm there weekly.

Its a perfectly fine walk to go that far, it just kinda blows to do it regularly

4km / >30 mins is ok for 2x per month - but get a bike, that's a 15 min ride - just l9ng enough for casual excessive.

For me everything more than 10' of walking from my home is a bike default. Except i need to transport bulky equipment or it rains very strongly. Then its walking with umbrella + bus/train. (I dont own a car, as I live in a City.)

No

If it’s more than a 20 minute walk I’m biking, if it’s more than a 30 minute bike ride I’m driving, if it’s more than a 40 minute drive I’m not going.

Maybe on a nice day, but then really because I want to take a walk, and not out of necessity.

I don’t do walks longer than 20 minutes unless it’s for pleasure, thankfully the bus can get me most places I want to go beyond that. The terrain also makes a difference, I’d be less inclined to do 20 minutes uphill or across multiple freeways or something.

I wouldn't hesitate to walk that far for a library, but realistically I'd take my cruiser bike for that distance. I've heard people tend to cite around 15-20 minutes as the maximum walk length that is considered "walkable," but I've often chosen walking longer distances than that even when other options were available. For dense urban areas, I'd rather walk that take a bus unless it's really far. Sometimes I get passed up by the same bus 5 or 6 times along the way. I agree with others who have said that time estimate sounds way long.

What kind of path takes 75min for 3.7km? In a normal environment, this should be doable in 40 minutes.

Nah. If I can use public transport for such distances, I will.

For once because it's quicker, and because my path would probably lead along some noisy roads, so it wouldn't be fun to walk there

I usually run that kind of distance on a e scooter. Faster, less noise and pollution.

People talking walkable cities forget that cars move more than just people. And people don't stay in one living spot all the time. No modern city works without the logistics moving goods in and out and peoples stuff from and to their homes and businesses.

So you can't just remove all the streets and make a denser neighborhood. You need alternative solutions for logistics. I work in rail and I can tell you there is too many people starving in the world, but not for a lack of food but for a lack of logistics infrastructure to get the food to them in time.

Me personally I love underground rail networks and pneumatic tube delivery, but as an engineer i know about the weaknesses of these systems. For now that remains a dream.

Last time I lived in a city, 15m is where I'd take the bus instead.

Bus or bike distance.

But i also walk closer to 3mph so maybe it would be on the edge of the weather is nice.

No, I wouldn't. For daily needs, the walk needs to be less than 10 minutes. Weekly less than 20, and anything over that needs to be a special thing. I know the pain of lugging back groceries and a heavy load of books on what was a 20 minute walk one way. Those get a bike with luggage, or the scooter.

I think my requirements would be the same if I had to use a car, actually. An hour trip to see relatives is a once a month/every two months thing.

I wouldn't walk any distance for a library.

But even it was a place I actually wanted to go, 10 minutes walking distance is about the maximum. For anything more there has to be a tram (or at least a bus).

Hell no. Maybe if it was a really nice weather, but I would still go home with a bus or a tram, no way I'll carry books that long.

I did close to that, when I was finding jobs after college, I was applying to listing in a library,/uni library. The trains back before pandemic decided they need to renovate for 6 years, so it left with limited options for transportation

If that’s the round trip, yes. I do that daily. But one way? No.

No, but walkable places would probably have public transport access as well? If so I'd take the bus. I think I generally consider 15-20 minutes to be "walkable" if I need to go often (train/metro stations, grocery stores). For the occasional trips I'd consider 1 hour walk one way. Anything longer I would probably skip or find alternative ways to get there (including taxis/ride shares)

I walk 1,5 km in 10-15 minutes (depends on if I am alone or not), so yes I would walk that. But I like walking, I can suggest walking as a way to hang out haha

Hey, my local public library is 3.2km away from me, which is about a 45 minute walk!

Anyways, no. I have multiple affordable public transit options that can take me there in 10 minutes. There are also bike lanes for the entire route if I ever decide to bike.

I can, and have in the past, it's not that big of a deal, but it's not something I do regularly. Here's the thing, 4km takes about 1h walking, 30min by bus/tram, 20min by car (then another 10min finding a place to park), or 15min by bike. This is why bikes are so ubiquitous in European cities, you can get to places usually much faster than by public transport, and sometimes even faster than cars since they have to do weird paths and skip entire neighborhoods.

I normally would take public transport for such distances, mostly because I don't own a bike and sweat more than I'm comfortable with when I ride one, and don't mind the extra 15min of listening to music.

Everyone has their own definition of “walkable”. For me that’s not, plus it’s getting to the point where the books i’d likely get would be annoying to carry. But also do you mean literally walkable or “don’t need a car”. The latter includes transit and micromobility

I walk to my library but it’s less than ten minutes. Especially since they put up parking meters, walking ten minutes is more convenient than finding change or feeding a profiteering app company.

Unfortunately the best part of my towns downtown is a mile away so less convenient. Most of the time I’ve lived here I’ve decided to drive the mile but since pandemic I’ve been far more likely to walk. I recently went to a diner where a newly opened trail made it a nice walk despite it being over a mile.

And the definition of walkable changes over time as well. As a young adult I lived in Boston and considered essentially everything walkable. While I was also a big user of transit, they tended to be too slow and crowded when you can walk instead. Most of my driving was to move my car for street cleaning or snow removal

I would ride a bike. But generally yes, an hour to get across town is normal and not the crazy thing car brains imagine it to be.

i try to walk 4 miles a day and often i burn those miles going to the library