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Comment by rsaz | Hacker News Reader

Its really incredible the ways in which living in a walkable neighbourhood can improve your life. More activity from walking around, less pollution, better views etc.

One thing I’ve noticed is I tend to see small businesses in walkable areas more often. Not sure why that is, but its another benefit I haven’t seen discussed quite as much.

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Here’s my suspicion, from having lived in both car-centric suburbs and a dense city:

When you’re driving somewhere, you typically have a destination in mind. You’re often moving too fast to spot smaller businesses that probably don’t have enormous signs, and it’s probably not convenient to just suddenly stop and park your car if you do happen to see something interesting. And everyone already knows about the big chains, but not so much about small businesses, so they’re less likely to be your initial destination.

By contrast, when you’re on foot, you’re moving slowly enough that you can take in anything around you, so you’ll spot small places more easily. And if you do decide to stop in, you’re right there.

(Cycling is somewhere in between, but I’d say closer to walking than driving in these respects.)

All that, in addition to having the need to shop for as much stuff as possible during a single trip. People will fill up their entire car at costco, but if you're walking or cycling, you don't typically have as much cargo carrying capacity. So a massive costco, walmart, or target trip doesn't always make sense.

Splitting up the errands while walking or biking will result in either multiple trips to a big box store, or every time you leave the house, you knock off a few items on the list from the nearest store. The nearest store probably isn't a big box store since they have so much parking, so they aren't really around walkable areas as much.

Car-dependent areas need a lot of requirements to thrive. They need large setbacks, minimum parking allotments, throughput requirements on entrances and exits, etc. Walkable areas have minimal setbacks and can have no minimum parking allotments. This lends itself to smaller building footprints and correspondingly lower building and maintenance rents. Smaller, lower-revenue businesses can afford to rent these smaller locations out. Correspondingly small businesses in walkable locations need to spend less money on signage (as only those on foot will need to see it) and marketing as foot traffic naturally leads to serendipitous shopping.

In particular less cars means paths that are more suitable to walking in all weather - having a treed foot path instead of a boulevard outside your house makes a big difference in heat exposure to pedestrians and buildings. If you look at old Iberian (especially Portugal) you'll see very aggressive tree placement coupled with narrow alleys to try and keep paths walkable when things get really hot. It's night and day comparing the tight shady paths in Porto to the sun blasted avenues common in Florida - while the temperatures are pretty close the experience is entirely different.

Regarding small businesses in walkable areas, I think maybe the flip side of the same phenomena is a partial explanation. Big box stores, large corporate office parks, etc, don't work in walkable areas; they need a large footprint and wrap themselves in a lot of parking and they want people to get in and out of those parking lots easily so they do best on an arterial. If the big businesses are structurally pushed away from walkable areas, small businesses will naturally be over-represented there. Plus they can benefit from serendipitous discovery in those locations, since their marketing budgets may be nil.

It's interesting but that isn't actually always the case - a lot of cities use oversized blocks (blocks that are both taller and wider than a row of buildings - see Barcelona[1]) if this is the case then large department stores can expand into the courtyard or gardenspace interior of the block and, of course, in a lot of European cities a lot of malls are built vertically and underground - sometimes lying underneath a road with entrances on both sides.

Large stores can work in walkable cities and they do have a place - but they are usually for relatively rare needs (so more likely to be focused on clothes or specialty groceries).

1. https://media.istockphoto.com/photos/aerial-view-of-barcelon...

In Tokyo usually the large stores have small footprints but many floors, like the new Ikea in Shibuya (formerly Forever 21) - 7+ floors but each floor is maybe the size of 2-3 boutiques.

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