It’s a city mostly of tourists and it’s not walkable.
New York, Boston, SanFrancisco, Seattle are all ideal walkable cities and some of the most competitive expensive desirable places to live in the US. Or look at most of Europe.
Most people in most of the world don’t live in the suburbs with a car and a yard. Most don’t want that. Americans do because we’ve been conditioned to think the city is bad (dirty, violent, expensive, not white) and Americans therefore don’t think it’s livable because they’ve never tried nor set cities up for success. Tons of people around the world and in the US grow up and raise kids in the city without a car and do it well.
SF is basically 7mi x 7mi - you can literally walk across the whole thing if you had to, so all neighborhoods are close by definition. But most of the city is also a grid which makes for easy navigating (with the exception of some of the hilltops where the road follows the terrain). There is great public transit, but its centered around the "valleys", so you still have to walk up which kinda sucks. Beyond the geography, SF has one of the better public transit in the US (maybe top 5, after NYC, Chicago, DC, maybe tied with Boston). The city is not made for cars - most places don't have parking, most commercial establishments go up against the sidewalk instead of putting a parking lot along the road. Its highly varied street-frontage that makes it appealing to look at (as opposed to long stretches of featureless walls). Regular crosswalks, narrow roads (so its easy to cross and cars go slow). All the street-level stuff you'd want but wouldn't find in a post-war American city.
Seattle is similar to SF but "less" - crucially though, seattle culturally accepts a post-car life. The city feels like a post-war city that knew what it was doing. The city is really green-lighting lots of development downtown to make a very walkable urban core (as opposed to sprawl). It has a much more nascent and mediocre public transit system, but its there and its growing. Seattle has narrow (but not as narrow as SF) roads, and dedicated sidewalks and bike lanes and all the other "not-car first" features built out in the densest areas and being added slowly in the periphery. The urban planning is clearly not focusing on the car throughput but instead the livability of the neighborhood for residents when changes get made.
NYC is probably the best American city to live without a car, due to the extensive subway system, but also it's regular grid makes it easy to navigate (in Manhattan at least). You'll have everything you need close to you (eg groceries), and extensive transit to get somewhere far. Every road has crosswalks and lights to keep cars under control and minimally in the way. Its so dense that the street fronts aren't used for parking and instead feature the building right against the sidewalk, often with commercial activity (restaurants, cafe, shops, etc).
I think Boston and other north east neighbors are pretty similar to NYC, just smaller cities so less "stuff" integrated into the grid/transit coverage - which increases the odds that the thing you need exists in a car-only area. I don't drive and I couldn't function in Cleveland, but Boston/NYC/SF/Seattle are fine. Providence RI (small city south of Boston) is too small to have a built-out public transit system, but once arriving in the city you can do most day to day things on foot, but you'll need a car to travel across the city or long distances conveniently - but its no where in population compared to NYC/Mexico City or even SF.
I think the deciding factor for walkability is how built-out the city was in the pre-car era (which may vary nation to nation and city to city), and how accessible cars became to the population. Eg. NYC, Paris, Mexico City predates cars by many years, so of course they'd develop alternatives. Meanwhile, LA grew proudly through the automobile, so people don't want to change the city to make it walkable.
Guess the original point is I wonder how walkability scores are calculated and what criteria are considered - presumably for a city as a whole it's an aggregate of the scores of the constituent neighborhoods (how ratings can "make sense on paper" but differ between residents throughout)
In regards to the article mentioned about SF being a good biking city - I laughed because in my extensive experience the best biking in the area is heading north across the gg bridge and in to marin and beyond. But that's beyond the scope of any "city" centric rankings
Im no biker since I’m too nervous about getting hit. I don’t understand how people get on the road next to cars. With hills like SF no way would I do that either. I can just imagine myself hurtling down the hill into oncoming traffic.
I don’t quite understand the rankings either, but I can say from loved experience that I can walk everywhere I needed, so far. Of course every neighborhood is a bit different, too.
Maybe. But there's plenty of people (literally billions) that would prefer to live in a dense, walkabe city. The atmosphere, culture, and freedom that brings is beloved by many, including myself.
Venice is having trouble because the city is ful of tourists, who don't buy "normal every-day things", don't use/need residential infrasturcture, and don't work in the city. Coupled with the thousands of AirBnB's that take revenue away from the city, the poorly developed local economic sectors, and the lack of modern residential infrastucture, you have a city in rapid decline.
Venice is depopulating because it’s not a livable walkable city, not because it’s walkable.
Because no it isn’t.
The very next street is farms and villages. There are no suburbs, at least none that would be recognizable in the US. There are a few single family home neighborhoods, but not that many and their yards tend to be small and the developments limited to 5 to 10 houses.
I have a trolly line that goes right to our house and a bike path that will take me right down the to local cafe or the city center.
Urbanization in the EU is absolutely nothing like the US. There are some countries that have more unchecked development than others, but absolutely nothing like the US. Many people have cars, but the car culture is nothing like the US either.
I guess too many cyclists found themselves taking an unplanned swim in the canal.
Suburban houses are flats on the ground. They have all the downsides of apartments and all the downsides of houses with none of the benefits of either.
The Soviet model of small flat + country house is probably the only serviceable one. You have a house with enough land to actually grow something and you have a flat that is close enough to everything else that you don't need a car in your daily life.
Living through the pandemic in an apartment and having witnessed some of the most rude, antisocial behavior from my building-mates both to myself, to other building-mates, and to the building staff, I no longer want to live in an apartment or other shared housing ever again.
There's a trend in some suburbs towards duplexes or triplexes, but even those share more characteristics with a "house" rather than an "apartment".