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Comment by onorton | Hacker News Reader

I think the difference being is that you don't have to get in the car just to leave it. I myself live about 5 minutes walk from a major train station in London whose trains go past my flat and it only takes me another five minutes walk in the opposite direction to find a completely different area.

Now, some of the commuter towns of London are a different story.

Edit: Making it clear I'm not using the train which I realise could be misconstrued from my previous wording. The train station was just a reference to how busy my local area can be.

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> I think the difference being is that you don't have to get in the car just to leave it.

Again there is an innuendo that this is fundamental bad.

In my experience (having lived in London for decades), for most people who live within 5 minutes of a major train station, which is not most Londoners, it’s not even practical to have a car at all, and even if you do, just getting out of the city can take an hour.

London is great if you like urban environments and don’t like cars. But I don’t see why that should be a universally held preference.

I don't mean leaving the city by public transport or whatever. I mean leaving the monotony of a particular area which I thought you meant in your OP.

Streets in London typically aren't the same for literal miles, whereas they can be in the case of some American suburbs where you need a vehicle like a car to escape it.

To be clear, my reference to the train station was to indicate how busy my local area can be. But despite that, you don't have to walk very far to find somewhere a bit more tranquil.

> Streets in London typically aren't the same for literal miles

Is this meaningfully true? South london for example has enormous areas with architecture that is just as ‘the same’ as American suburbs.

It’s definitely true that American suburbs are lower density and the houses are typically larger, but again that seems like just a preference.

Okay, but the person to whom you're responding is point out the value-laden, or judgement-laden sentence, and you're now changing the subject a bit.

It was assumed by the GP that houses looking similar was bad, and now it is assumed by you that said similarity extending beyond a five-minute walk + five-minute train ride is bad.

To both your point and the GP's, similarity may often be in the eye of the beholder. I live in a suburb and feel like I see quite a lot of variety on my block, and even more variety if I walk a block to the west, or two blocks to the north, where there is an apartment complex and some retail buildings. It could be that you would look at my block, or my neighborhood, and say they all look the same to you. I don't know! I've spent enough time in dense cities around the world to form the opinion that most dense city centers lack much variety on a block-by-block basis, but again, others might see it differently.

In any case, whether there is or is not visual variety is a separate issue from commutability, I think,

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