1) It’s boring to walk in suburbia! This is especially so in Irvine, where draconian zoning codes mean that every house, condo and apartment looks exactly like every other house, condo and apartment nearby, the strip malls all look basically alike, etc. Paris is pleasant to walk around partly because it is so damned beautiful. The architecture is beautiful. The street signs are beautiful. The landscape is beautiful if you’re atop Monmarte or near the Seine. On a relatively short walk you can traverse adjacent neighborhoods whose aesthetic is distinct.Conor has pulled rank as a Southern Californian and there's only so much I can do to mess with that, but I'll venture a couple of disagreements. First, it isn't architectural monotony that makes walking through suburbia so dull, but the folks. People in suburbia tend to differentiate firmly between dressing to be seen and simply dressing to leave the house. In cities, on the other hand, everyone leaves the house dressed like they might encounter the new love of their lives on the subway (which, given how beautiful everyone is in New York, isn't out of the question). Walking in New York is fun because everyone does it and because everyone is interesting. If more suburbanites took their daily promenade more seriously, they would present themselves more vividly and walking suburbia would become much less dull.
Seville is beautiful too, but it is a much less wealthy municipality than Paris. Far less is spent on aesthetics, but the buildings still have a lot of character. The streets are also deliciously, absurdly convoluted. There are curvy one lane streets, impossibly narrow alleys, weird diagonals, an old Jewish quarter where there are no cars allowed. Traversing all that in a 1.5 mile walk is far more exciting than walking on identical looking square blocks.
New York City isn’t as beautiful as Paris or as quaint as Seville. In midtown it is downright ugly in parts. But even the ugliest neighborhood is so dense that there is a lot of liveliness on the street. The city keeps the senses entertained. No walk is a long, boring slog.
2) Short blocks are important to a walkable city. It’s the difference between doing three sets of ten jumping jacks, or 30 jumping jacks — the former is just less intimidating, even if irrationally. Blocks break things up. They give a sense of constant progress. They vary the landscape. They also create a grid, which is great because it allows the pedestrian to vary his route, going one way on the way to the market, another way on the trip home and a third way the next day. Any automobile commuter should be familiar with how tiresome it seems some days to drive that same route. It’s the same way when you walk, but the people who planned communities like Woodbridge built long blocks, and "planned" the route people are supposed to take to get from their home to the store.
3) Parking lots are awful to walk through. It’s just no fun to walk across a big piece of asphalt where cars rule. You either pick your way through parked cars, or walk around the perimeter feeling like you wish there was a shortcut. Neither option is very appealing, because the mind wishes for a better option that isn’t afforded. Another way to understand this is to think about how in a large strip mall, anchored say by a supermarket at one end, and a Target a quarter of a mile away across a vast parking lot at the other end, shoppers will often move their cars rather than walk across the parking lot between shops… even though these very same people are perfectly comfortable and happy walking across an indoor mall between, say, Nordstrom and Macy’s.
Merely having stores in Irvine that fronted on the street, so you walked right from the sidewalk into the door, and putting the parking below ground or in back of the shops, would result in more people finding it attractive to walk, though many wouldn’t understand exactly why.
4) The streets are too wide in Irvine. As a pedestrian, you’ve got to wait forever to get a signal, the cars move so fast that it’s difficult to run across against a signal like you often can in New York City on the smaller streets. Narrow streets also make things more lively by allowing you to interact with stuff on the other side of the street.
5) 1.5 miles is a bearable walk to a supermarket, but there is no reason why there couldn’t be smaller shops even closer to home where you could pick up milk or a six pack of beer or toilet paper… except that cities like Irvine decided to completely segregate residences and even low impact businesses like corner stores.
To step back from amateur sociology, I'll offer the obvious point that lots of people don't walk because they can't imagine themselves doing so. Having walked to the store even once breaks that psychological barrier in an important way, which is why I support parents who refuse to buy cars for their teenagers. Teenagers, like addicts, are crafty; they will come up with clever ways to get from A to B without a car of their own, and the habit of walking, biking, or carpooling short distances may persist even after they do have immediate access to cars. (It did in my case.) Don't underestimate the power of having those memories in your arsenal.
I can't really argue with shorter blocks and parking lots, but Conor's fifth excuse strikes me as incomplete. Plenty of concession to commercialism are necessary, but #5 sounds like one that isn't. It's nice to have cozy "third places" (coffee shops, bookstores, barbershops, etc.) less than a mile away, but what happened to residential third places? A lot of my favorite Party of the Right stories take place in dorm rooms that were taken to be always-open informal gathering places where an open door meant free booze and free Socratic conversation. (Ask me about the time [name redacted] accidentally threw a pumpkin out of an Old Campus window onto a cop car, or the story behind the term "doornography.") I can think of two reasons why the practice of the unscheduled social call has declined. First, people these days are too literal-minded to pick up on a host's unspoken signals, and so they're don't feel confident in assuming that they could tell whether the host wanted them to stay or leave. We're all anxious about not wanting to intrude. Secondly, cell phones have made "I was in the neighborhood" an implausible excuse for just stopping by; if you were in the neighborhood, you would have called first, and calling beforehand transforms an informal visit into an arranged meeting. When the informal call dropped off the map, an important excuse for taking a walk went with it.
I don't want to denigrate Conor's list. It points towards concrete policy choices that would go a long way towards making suburbia more walkable. Still, Irvine sounds like a place where the dearth of walkers has more to do with the people than the landscape; sociological reasons matter, too.
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