LogFAQs > #979433156

Count_Drachma posted...

Overall, being able to walk anywhere -- without being stuck in a city -- would be nice.

To really be walkable, an environment needs to be at least somewhat urban. You don't necessarily need a big city, but businesses need a certain number of people to be able to reach them if they're to survive. That either means you get walkable areas that have a higher population density, or you get lower-density areas that are difficult to walk around because of all the car infrastructure needed to bring people in. This is why big box stores have become so common in North America: With the shift to suburban living and people having to drive everywhere instead of being able to walk, that's necessitated larger roads, larger parking lots to hold the cars of people that have to drive there, and stores that can carry a large enough variety of items to reduce the number of trips people have to make.

You can usually get perfectly serviceable grocery stores within lower-density neighbourhoods that are walkable, since everybody needs groceries fairly frequently and that makes it pretty easy to hit the required customer count (albeit with less variety than you'd see from a bigger store), and often smaller communities will have general stores to hit various essentials that would otherwise come from a store too specialized to be supported, but otherwise you can generally only pick two of having an area be walkable, having places to go, and not being in a city.