I’ve been saying this for years, if people were serious about reducing drinking and driving they would be investing in viable alternatives such as cheap night buses and safe (registered) taxis.

I love the idea of walking except that when I used to walk to the bar to meet my ex -boyfriend the street harassment (which was always so much worse Friday and Saturday nights) soon put a stop to me doing that.

Spent three years in Austin without a car. No problem. Course I lived in west campus the whole time.

I wrote a paper about this last semester in college—about how making cities more walkable/improving transportation insfrastructure has like, a trillion upsides, one of which is definitely reducing drunk-driving related deaths.

I got an A. But the point is!  Agreed, definitely agreed.  I live in Sacramento and here it’s basically impossible to get around without a car unless you live in Midtown (I don’t) and even then, lots of people in that area drive as well.  We have Amtrak and a light rail system, but it’s not very comprehensive—it only has a couple of lines.

Also, despite having more trees than people, it’s incredibly uncomfortable to walk places here.  I used to walk home from my high school and eventually stopped because of all the street harassment.  But aside from that issue I also acquired asthma from crossing overpasses and just overall bad air quality.  Major streets don’t have much in the way of trees/shade for pedestrians either, and the sidewalks are puny.

As you can see I had a ton of fodder for that paper just by opening my eyes and walking around the city here. u.u

Having grown up in the place that invented car culture (Detroit), I have gotten many astonished looks when I suggested walking to any location that was even one block away. (Detroit is also one of the fattest cities in America, but that’s another blog post)

Better public transit would also reduce the problem of drinking and driving. Metro announces a fare increase about every 90 days but they never use this money to keep the trains running 24 hours a day. There are no bars in my ridiculously family friendly neighborhood, so I must rely on public transit to hang out with friends.

purpleshoes, I agree but I don’t know what can be done about street harassment. As I have gotten just as much of that crap riding the Metro as I get on any sidewalk.

Car-free in Los Angeles for about 25 years—but I moved here from Boston, London, and a decade in New York, so as soon as I could, moved to a walk city part of L.A.

Grew up in the suburbs of New Jersey, and even there, driving bored the shit out of me. Couldn’t wait to move to cities with public transport.

Actually spent like $40 or more a day on taxies when writing for a TV show out in the valley (although they pay you crazy money to do that.)

Don’t have any depth perception (lazy eye), so that’s one of the reasons I hated driving, I’m sure. Have driven, maybe, three years total of my life.

Would rather go nowhere than drive, and if I can work L.A. without a car…

If you live in Austin without a car you are lucky, period. I am living here half time after living in SF and Manhatten. It is such a sprawling,  car-oriented city - with public transport a 10th order thought. It doesn’t help anybody to pretend otherwise.

Walking places is great if you live in a big urban area with excellent public transportation and/or walkability, and of course if you’re physically able and don’t have, say, little kids to deal with. Not sure what the point of the post is - that the small number of people who do their drinking at neighborhood bars within walking distance from their homes but who drive, need to be encouraged to walk?

People living in big cities forget that there is often an infrastructure existing around people who don’t drive because the city is car-unfriendly and/or parking costs an arm and a leg. People in San Francisco go out drinking and don’t drive. They also take a lot of taxis, buses and BART; they don’t limit themselves to the bar down the block.

Funnily, where I live, there are an awful lot of people who already walk to their neighborhood bars. It’s not because they are fans of Mother Earth, it’s because they’re drunks who have lost their driving licenses. One dive always has a large number of bicycles out front; again, not because it is patronized by Critical Mass riders.

@mythago I don’t think what you’re saying about big cities is really always applicable—there are lots of smaller cities that are walkable (like, here in CA, Davis) and bigger cities in which sprawl and auto-culture makes getting around by walking almost impossible.

I think the point of the post is that making urban spaces more walkable not only has environmental benefits, but can also help reduce the amount of drunk drivers.

But I also noticed a lot how the culture of driving everywhere causes people to hop in their car mindlessly and drive to places that are totally walkable.

One thing I find odd about my visits to car culture is that, in a lot of situations, it’s just not done to walk places that are perfectly walkable.  Purely on a social level. 

More on the topic of the post - another thing I find odd about car culture is that there’s no sense of “your local”.  Here in New York, if I want to grab a few beers on a weeknight, I’ll usually go to the bar around the corner, or to another nearby bar that is also convenient to the people I’m meeting up with, so that everyone can drink as much as they want and still get home safely.  I’d never just randomly go to some pub on the Upper West Side.

The selection of a bar back in Louisiana seems to have nothing to do with anything like that - it’s just taken for granted that everyone will drive everywhere, even if there’s going to be drinking.

I always bring my little kids to the bar Mythago. 

Joking.

That said, one thing that SUCKS about Boston is that the T stops running at 1am - last runs out around midnight on some lines, and buses end often well before that.  This means intense taxi competition or having to drive if a concert runs later or we stay out later.

Totally ridiculous that they can’t run the lines later than that on Friday and Saturday, but Boston is always in full reverse gear when it comes to Things That Can Be Moralized About.

Yeah, that was annoying in Boston.  Though the bars close at like 3 in the afternoon, which is the other annoying thing about Boston. 

there are lots of smaller cities that are walkable

And there are plenty of smaller cities that may not be super walkable, but where it’s possible to pick the bar that’s a 20 minute walk from home as opposed to a 5 mile drive.  Something doesn’t have to be next door to your house to be “walkable”.  I spent some time living in Baton Rouge, LA, which is by no means a “walkable city”, but where, chances are, if you live anywhere near the middle of things, there’s a neighborhood bar you could probably walk to if you gave a shit.

I was car-free until a year or so ago but I finally broke down and got a used Ford because of (1) grocery shopping and (2) the heat in the summer here. I got sick of having to take three showers a day just from walking to work and stores from June to August. That, and although this city is fairly walkable in the part I live in, often they’ll inexplicably close off a whole section of a sidewalk for construction, without also closing off (or least directing) the traffic in the lane next to it. So you either have to go in this big ridiculous circle, or hang on for dear life and walk briefly in the middle of a street.

I do own a car and I use it now and again - hard to shop for groceries for four people, two active adults and two adolescent boys.

My community does not have any neighborhood bars by law.  Too bad, because I would probably hang out their with my neighbors if we did.  However, Davis Square Somerville is 2.5 miles away.  There have been times when I’ve found myself too drunk to drive home from there, and I’ve either walked home or called my husband to bike over and drive home (and ditto to get him).

That makes all the difference.  Being able to walk home rather than drive drunk is important, even if you drove there in the first place.

One thing that often gets lost in these discussions is that it’s possible to be car-light, even if you can’t be entirely car-free.  There is a middle ground between driving to the corner store for a quart of milk and walking 3 miles on the shoulder of an interstate in 90 degree heat to do a big grocery shopping excursion.

My community does not have any neighborhood bars by law.

Thank you for reminding me why I can never move back to Boston.

Austin is way car-oriented, Don.  I just lived near campus, worked at home, and shared a car with my boyfriend.  I also had a bicycle, so basically about a 4 mile radius at all times without a car.  That covers all you need…if you live in central Austin.  We also had good bus service.  But most of the city sucks.

mythago, my point is that even small changes can create big psychic payoffs.  It never even occurs to many people they don’t have to drive that half mile to place X unless something….say no parking lot….pushes them into it.

Like what Opop said @12.  The definition of “walkable” that most people in super car-centric cultures have is way different than what someone living in New York thinks of.  A 15 or 20 minute walk is often considered completely out of the question.  I’ve seen people drive to a neighbor’s house down the street, but you saw a lot less of that around UT’s campus, even with non-students.  Why?  Because there wasn’t any parking, and the sea of kids walking everywhere normalized walking.  People who would have totally driven the same distance before found themselves choosing walking. Sometimes, not even consciously.

So here’s the other thing: 20 parking spaces (plus aisle, plus buffers) is about 5000 square feet, or 5x the amount of space used for actual humans. Which in any decent location is going to roughly double your capital cost. For that kind of money you could have an effing valet service or an on-call taxi to drive people home and deliver them to their cars when they’re sober.

But yeah. After living in a small city/college town and then new york, the idea of putting bars out in the middle of nowhere where people have to drive their and back just freaks me out. Among other things, it makes clear the complete derision with which authorities view drunk-driving laws; otherwise they’d just station a couple dozen officers in the parking lots of randomly-chosen local bars.

I think “normalize” is the key.  For years we were pretty much the only ones walking our kids the 2/3 mile to school on most days.  When gas hit $3 a gallon, we suddenly had company as a number of parents abandoned the SUV and grabbed the dog for a good walk to and fro.  Some are still walking at lest 2 to 3 times a week, for fitness and social interaction. 

Several told me that if we hadn’t been hiking it for so long, they never would have thought of it or would have thought it too far for their kids.

The same can be said of the couple across the street.  When one of their cars died, they looked at our single car for two adults and two kids and they realized that if we could get by with one, certainly they could get by with one.  They have put the savings into travel.

Amanda, if you ever read Deer Hunting With Jesus, you might also realize that part of the problem is laws against public drunkenness in some states.  Just walking home drunk can get you arrested, and if you are impaired you might think that driving home might work and that you should take your chances.

No insights here, since I don’t drive and rarely drink, but I just wanted to to say I really LOVE your posts on health, lifestyle, food, environment and the connection with them.

And in case you’re interested, here’s a titbit about the Smart Growth law your new state, NY passed:
http://www.streetsblog.org/2010/06/22/smart-growth-law-is-coming-to-new-york-now-what-happens/
It’s supposed to emphasize walkable urban development.  We’ll see.

I wonder if discouraging people from driving home from bars and clubs would help with the “date” rape stats any, too? I imagine if would be somewhat harder to walk or bus home with a drunk, drugged or otherwise non-consenting woman than it would be just getting her into your car right outside the bar.

I have no idea. *shrug*

The nice thing about a half-hour walk home from the bar is that you’ll be sober again by the time you get home. 

I’m curious, too, about the level of self-control when you know you have to change subway lines or walk a mile in the dark, as opposed to when you know you have to drive home.  My guess is that since drunk driving is such a taboo, a certain level of denial is encouraged for the drivers.

I lived in the USA for six years, in a small college town in central PA that is itself walkable but for certain grocery stores, movie theaters and malls. I didn’t have a car and never had any problem getting anywhere. Most of my friends, though, would drive always drive everywhere. I lived in a house that was literally right across the street + parking lot from a grocery store, and my roommates drove to the store to get a carton of milk. I never understood that. Campus was a half hour walk from our house and I remember only taking the bus when the weather was bad. I considered that half hour of walking to be one of the most precious times of the day for me: a time when I could be alone (the path crossed a wood) and relax / exercise. Everyone thought I was a freak, and sometimes my roommates thought I was too shy to ask them for rides to places, so they would offer to take me to the store or whatever. They had a really hard time believing that I freely chose to walk when someone just offered to give me a ride.

I should mention that I am European, and Europeans have a different attitude towards driving. I have never owned a car, and I have no intention of getting one any time soon. In the Spanish town where I live now public transportation is pretty good and not expensive, so I sometimes use it when my walk would have to be longer than 45 mins. Anything under 45, I’ll always walk (weather and shoes permitting).

I don’t know a lot of people (in new york at least) who allowed themselves terribly complicated transit pictures on the way home. A couple of crosstown bus drivers told me their route was packed at closing time; the bars I met friends at were on the same local. (And the “local” bar was four short blocks, which anyone can do if they can walk at all.)

I think for Bagelsan’s point thing work a little differently: in a city, you can meet a bunch of friends at a bar and then all meander your separate ways when things are done; in a non-city, partly because of drunk-driving laws, get-togethers may be more likely to be at someone’s house, with a sort of tacit assumption that you’re stuck there when you get too drunk to drive. There’s also a much more plausible route to “let me drive you home” if you’ve gotten somebody snockered.

I live in California.  Not one bar I know isn’t surrounded by signs claiming the nearby parking for the businesses next door - to keep the bar patrons from squatting on parking all day (or night) long, suffocating them out of business.

This is why we have that zoning law - they consume parking, so they must pay for parking.

How should we deal with this?

Non-walkability does make going out to bars a huge pain. Because my friends and I try to be responsible, we always have to plan ahead and negotiate who’s going to DD (depending on how many carloads of people we have and the sizes of our respective cars), or will we meet up at someone’s house and cab it (extremely expensive around here), or will we go downtown where we can walk/bus between bars, and all crash in a hotel room for the night (honestly not much more than a cab, if you pick the right hotel).

The problem has led to an interesting business model: Guys on scooters who will come to you anywhere in downtown, fold up their scooter and put it in your car, drive you home, and then ride their scooter back downtown to get the next customer. Costs about the same as cab fare, except you don’t have to go back and get your car the next day.

While I can’t walk from my house to anywhere except a gas station, I have started walking between errand destinations. Most of my errands are at big sprawly strip-mally shopping centers where you’re obviously intended to park in front of one store, shop, then get back in your car and drive half a mile to the next store. When possible, I walk that half-mile between stores. It’s a really small thing, but I’ve taken to doing it just on general principles.

Boston has some weirdnesses in terms of blue laws and transit ending too early, but I fell in love when I lived there one summer because it was the most eminently walkable place I have ever lived. Admittedly, I was in a very central location (National Science Foundation internship that included free housing in a dorm essentially right on Harvard Square), but it seemed like everywhere was reasonably walkable.

I also experienced no street harassment there that I can recall. I actually felt safe walking alone pretty much all times of day and night, in the parts of town where I lived and worked. It was the most independent I’ve ever been. Walkability means freedom and independence to me, because I can just wander and explore, change my route and my plans, without having to worry about where I’ll park my car or how the heck I can turn around in this maze of one-way streets.

Amanda @19, a 15-20 minute walk can be a pretty big deal if it suddenly started pouring out, or it’s forty degrees, or you’re wearing your fancy dancing shoes instead of sneakers. And even in a “walkable city”, your life may involve going to places other than the corner bar, like the cool restaurant downtown, or the new dance club on the other side of the city, or your friends’ party a few miles down the road.

And let’s not forget that distance != walkability. Yes, there are probably people who could walk to that bar half a mile away instead of driving. But perhaps they have a reason other than “durrrr, love driving” that they’re not doing so - such as, that’s a half-mile of unpaved road, or a half-mile of sidewalk with no street lights, or a half-mile that goes through a really creepy and unsafe underpass, or a half-mile where a woman walking alone can expect the assholes who DID drive to harass her. 

Rather than gently punitive measures like no parking, I’d be more in favor of making it easier to walk or avoid driving; taxi stands, lit and paved sidewalks, security and police patrols so that people felt comfortable walking to and from the bar, rather than “Okay, dumbass, you have nowhere to put your car, figure it out”.

You’ve missed the point.  This is a zoning regulation designed to minimize the number of new bars started.  By mandating a larger parking area based on square footage of the bar, either the new bars (I assume the old ones are grandfathered) have to be smaller, meaning fewer customers drinking, to fit into the space they’ve bought, or larger bars will have to have an outsized parking lot, making their start-up costs higher, possibly prohibitively high.

Cities, especially suburban ones, use this kind of thing all the time to discourage building that they don’t like but can’t simply prohibit.

myth, you speak to me as if I don’t live in Brooklyn.  I’ve negotiated all that and more. You know how much cheaper it is to buy a good coat, umbrella, and good shoes than a car?  We’re talking thousands of dollars, and that’s before gas and insurance. 

This isn’t an either/or proposition.  You’re implying that my sole and only suggestion—-despite years of blogging about other ways to make cities more walkable—-is reducing parking.  Reducing parking is a good way, in conjunction with other strategies.  That’s so obvious I can’t believe I have to say it.  My point is that even if you make walking easier, a lot of people balk because they haven’t wrapped their mind around it.  Sometimes a little stick makes people chase the carrot.

a 15-20 minute walk can be a pretty big deal if it suddenly started pouring out, or it’s forty degrees, or you’re wearing your fancy dancing shoes instead of sneakers.

It’s not as if those things never happen in more sanely developed places.

Here, you carry an umbrella if you think it might rain.  You get the best winter coat you can afford.  And if you can’t avoid wearing uncomfortable shoes for whatever reason, you just sort of accept that you will have a blister the next day.  And life goes on.

Cities, especially suburban ones, use this kind of thing all the time to discourage building that they don’t like but can’t simply prohibit.

Which is funny, because they don’t seem to do fuck all against ridiculous sprawl.  Even though it’s a lot easier to hire a city planner and put a few zoning ordinances in place than it is to ban alcohol forever.

Reducing the number of bars is aiming at the drinking part of it, Dana.  And I’m skeptical that it actually works.  All it does is drive people to have more house parties.  I’m generally opposed to the puritanical methods, as they rarely work nearly as well as play safe methods.  For instance, telling people just say no to sex works not nearly as well as telling people that sex is great but use a condom.

or it’s forty degrees

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Going with laugh on this one.

such as, that’s a half-mile of unpaved road, or a half-mile of sidewalk with no street lights, or a half-mile that goes through a really creepy and unsafe underpass, or a half-mile where a woman walking alone can expect the assholes who DID drive to harass her.

Sidewalks, better lighting, and safety measures created by increasing the amount of foot traffic that comes from making things more walkable is actually a very cheap and easy policy to pursue.

Dana, lots of developments, most all of which are not alcohol-related, have minimum parking requirements. The point was that in the case of bars in particular, minimum parking requirements are particularly stupid.

When I lived in Chicago, I just about never drove at night, despite having a car for all of the post-college years. It was too hard/expensive to park wherever I was going, and if I had a half-way decent spot in front of my building, I’d be damned if I’d give it up and have to park five blocks away at 2 a.m. to 3 a.m. or whenever I got home. Usually I’d take public transportation out and take a cab back.

Every other place I’ve lived, I’ve intended to not drive or at least drive less, but when it’s easy to park at restaurants/bars and you have a driveway, it’s easy to drive. It’s also harder to take public transportation (less frequent service, less convenient lines) and harder to find a cab on the street.

At least now, there’s lots of stuff in my neighborhood, so by sticking really, really local, we walk a lot more. Of course, we have to drive the kids to grandma’s house first. So ... less impaired driving, but no reduction in the carbon footprint.

Snowmentality, where do you live? That’s awesome.

In Montreal some years back, there was an organization call Nez Rouge that had a similar idea. You signed up for an annual membership, then if you were out and didn’t want to drive home, they sent a two person team - one would drive you home, the other would drive your car. I think it was about $15-20 per use. People drive to bars all the time, but making the decision not to drive home means having to get your car somehow in the morning, assuming it hasn’t been towed. That’s a huge factor in (non-habitual) drunk drivers deciding to drive home.

The not-wanting-to-pick-up-your-car thing is a big deal, and I think it contributes to the denial that Opop was talking about.  Your ability to do risk assessment when you’ve had too many is severely crippled.  If your car isn’t even near the bar when you leave, temptation is basically removed.

I’m sure most of you enjoy walking everywhere you go.  I don’t enjoy a twenty minute walk anywhere.  I would rather ride my bike but Pittsburgh is not a bike friendly city and even then I would like the protection of a steel box-framed vehicle for sheer safety reasons.  I’m not against more walking, I had a corner store when I grew up that I visited weekly.  But I enjoy driving my vehicle, living in Pittsburgh due to the hilly terrain combined with no serious retail existing in neighborhoods created a suburban living situation that makes using a car inevitable. 

But I support public transit getting private roads for their speedy travel.  Which is largely the biggest issue for everybody.  By pushing buses onto the main thoroughfares it slows down general traffic and slows down bus travel.  In Pittsburgh they started to make private bus ways and now they can reach the suburbs faster than a car can during rush hour so people do take them now.  If this approach was applied city-wide for all times public transit would be in better shape.

Actually, Pittsburgh is one of the most bike-friendly cities in the US.

Has anyone read Superfreakonomics? They claim that its more dangerous (to yourself) per mile to walk drunk than to drive drunk. Their solution is, of course, not to drive drunk, but to get a taxi. I’m honestly not sure I buy into this idea. Their study seems valid, but I wonder about some of the details. I also don’t think you can discount how much worse it is to create a danger of death to random passers-by than just to yourself.

It’s not valid at all, as it underreports walking.

Actually, Pittsburgh is one of the most bike-friendly cities in the US.

I laughed hard.  Talk to intellectuals who don’t live in the University East End.  You will not want to ride a bike outside of that zone.  It becomes torturous hills that rise close to thousand feet.  It has wonderful bike trails through the city but riding in Downtown zone or towards the suburbs the traffic becomes dangerously congested or fast.  I’m not 115 lbs and I prefer my trike so I need a bigger birth than most commuter bikes.  That being said, no, Pittsburgh is not Bike-Friendly in a realistic sense.

No way, it’s simply too much of a hassle to wait hours for a 3 bus ride and the idea of waiting for a bus at midnight even in some of the nicer areas is a non-starter as well.

This is what I was getting at with buses getting private raised roads or trolley’s getting private expressways.  It would make simple intra-city travel in linked towns like that much more effective.  Visiting the Akron-Canton-Cleveland corridor I experienced a series of cities that were maybe an hour apart by road but clearly had commuters between them.  Those kind of expressways would make public transit viable in those zones. 

Public transit is also highly dependent on the more affluent using it, which is something that the affluent would never think to do unless they went to places the affluent wished to go at a rapid rate of speed.  In so many places around Europe and Japan they use bullet trains and MAGLEV technology yet we’re dragging our feet here.  It’s pathetic, the anecdote told in @46 would easily be remedied by a speedy train like that.

Has anyone read Superfreakonomics?

Yes, sadly.  Boy howdy did they hop on that Wingnut Welfare train.

I live in California.  Not one bar I know isn’t surrounded by signs claiming the nearby parking for the businesses next door - to keep the bar patrons from squatting on parking all day (or night) long, suffocating them out of business.

Nobody cares about the nonexistent harm to their business done by spillover parking from bars that get going after all the shops around them have already closed. They put the signs up so they can tow the cars of people who don’t see the signs, and then ding those people for a couple of hundred dollars to get their car back.

@ paul #20:  I don’t know what the cops are doing where you live, but out in my suburban living area, they do camp bars on weekends.  They camp the roads in between bars all night too, knowing that people are barhopping for the different specials and bands.  They set up roadblocks on the major thoroughfares between where people live and where the bars are located.

There is nowhere to drink within any walking distance or even just a short drive distance.  I don’t drink for that reason.  It’s a forty-five-minute drive to get to where the entertainment is.  I will sometimes go to a local bar, but only if there is a backroad route so that I can drive where there is little to no traffic on the way home.  I hate doing it, so it’s rare that I do.

At the beach, there is a little industry that popped up of college kids on huge tricycles with a bench seat attached to the back.  They hang outside the bars, and when people are ready to go home or to the next bar, they pay for a ride.  It’s very nice.  Wish they had something like that at more places.  The only problem is, yeah.  It’s a drive to get to the bar scene, so you have to park your car, and there’s a chance it will be towed or ticketed if you don’t get to it early enough the next morning.

LOL—when we moved to the place we did, one thing that attracted us was a lovely neighborhood bar that was walkable. When we finally made it up, we asked our friends who wanted to go out with us to that bar in question, only to learn it had burnt to the ground a few months earlier. We’re hoping to get another bar before much longer but it’s been a long dry spell.

I think a lot of people get behind the wheel drunk because they have this pathological fear of having to leave their car and come back for it (which, yes, would be a hassle), and they’re also banking on the “familiarity” of the route home—something they’ve driven multiple times before and they know the curves and the stop signs, etc.

Amanda wrote:

Reducing the number of bars is aiming at the drinking part of it, Dana.  And I’m skeptical that it actually works.

Another aspect (that I should have added last night) is that it forces the establishments to be more expensive to build, and that puts the pressure on them to be more “upscale” to recoup the greater initial investment faster.  Suburban communities would much rather have an upscale bar than a down-home rowdy place.

Zoning boards aren’t looking to make your fun at a bar easier or safer; they’re looking at reducing the problems they see with bar patrons.

Once again, Dana, your explanation would be believeable were it not for the fact that retail and residential developments also have parking requirements—no one’s claiming it’s a zoning conspiracy to drive out retailers and residents. Since you shouldn’t be drinking and driving in the first place, it would make sense to make sure that bars were walkable.

Suburban communities would much rather have an upscale bar than a down-home rowdy place.

Of course, I’d imagine that the bars in a community would reflect the larger makeup of the community.  If it’s a middle class area, it’s pretty unlikely that a skeevy dive is going to open in the neighborhood at all, regardless of how parking is divvied up. 

And don’t most neighborhoods have a direct say over what bars can open where and who can have a liquor license and things like that, without having to resort to gaming the system via parking policies?  I know my area has community board hearings about it, and it can be quite difficult to get a liquor license in certain circumstances.

Of course, what you say ties into a suburbanite mentality which I agree is one of the culprits against livable streets - extreme class-consciousness and the attempt to tie anything that is different to The Poor.  Both in a public policy sense (this is why you can’t have nice things like bike paths and public transit), as well as in a social sense.  Friends and family who live in deep suburban sprawl seem to think they are locked in a constant struggle with some sort of eighteenth century mob who wants nothing more than to invade the neighborhood and ruin everything.  And the suburbanites are willing to deny themselves almost anything in order to keep that imaginary mob out.

I haven’t investigated the Superfreakonomics claim that its more dangerous to walk drunk than to drive drunk enough to really have any good scientific comments on its accuracy. But it just *seems* wrong to me. I wonder if it has to do with what counts as “drunk”. I can see that if I were so drunk that I couldn’t stand up straight, walking home would be dangerous since I might just collapse in front of a car. But I pretty much never get that drunk, and if I did I wouldn’t consider driving or walking anywhere. Usually its more like I"ve had 3 or 4 glasses of wine over a couple hours. I feel like I could probably drive safely *if nothing unexpected happened* but I would never risk it because a big part of driving safely is being able to react quickly to the unexpected. Someone cuts you off? You better be able to hit the brakes fast enough, and a few glasses of wine can slow down those reaction times enough to be dangerous at the speed of driving. That same slowness of reaction times doesn’t seem like it would be as much of an issue if you are walking on a sidewalk.

Geogami, off the top of my head I’d guess that it’s all a matter of stats.  There are cops making traffic stops and busting people for driving drunk every night of the week.  On the other hand, the numbers of drunken walkers are probably relatively few.  And because it’s not a huge issue in our society, there aren’t cops standing around waiting for a drunk person to come walking down the street.  And one is only likely to report a drunken walking related accident if something goes VERY wrong.  All this implies that the police would have only a few cases each year of drunken walking, but the outcomes as reported to them would be HORRIBLE.  Whereas I’d guess that a large portion of DWI’s that get doled out don’t actually involve death or grievous bodily harm, they’re just the result of a routine traffic stop.

That said, one thing that SUCKS about Boston is that the T stops running at 1am - last runs out around midnight on some lines, and buses end often well before that.  This means intense taxi competition or having to drive if a concert runs later or we stay out later.

Ha. If only.

Here in Buffalo, the last bus that takes me home leaves at 10:15 and only runs on weekdays.  On Saturdays, the last bus is at 6pm, and on Sundays it’s at 5.  My backup bus, from which I have to walk about 45 minutes to get home, runs until 11:45 on weeknights, and until 10:30 on weekends.

The routes are on a hub-and-spoke model that makes it difficult to go anywhere except the hub (and there’s not much at the hub); the only places within walking distance to buy food are a convenience store and a nearby WalMart, and a Target about an hour’s walk away (that’s a walk now, in June, when the sidewalks and road shoulders are clear; in January it’s slower and much more dangerous).  And this was a location I chose because it actually had better-than-normal public transit access to downtown and the university.  If my roommate didn’t have a car, I’d be screwed.

Public transit in this city, from what I can tell, is built on the model that the only people who will take it are poor people, and the only place they need to go is to work.

jfpbookworm wrote:

Public transit in this city (Buffalo), from what I can tell, is built on the model that the only people who will take it are poor people, and the only place they need to go is to work.

While I don’t know about Buffalo specifically, in most places public transportation exists only because it is heavily subsidized by the taxpayers.  Perhaps the buses quit early because the support model for them is such that it’s simply unreasonable to subsidize a service for a diminishing number of riders.

Maybe that’s part of it.  On the other hand, to talk about Buffalo specifically, you’ve got cases like this, where a service is in demand but is getting blocked for other reasons:

...the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority, which oversees public transportation in the area, released internal documents to show it had tried for more than eight years to get the mall owners, the Syracuse-based Pyramid Companies, to allow the No. 6 bus to stop in the mall’s parking lot. A Pyramid official blames the N.F.T.A. for not moving the bus stop to a safer spot on the mall’s perimeter. But a former owner of a shoe store at the Galleria came forward to say that in his lease negotiations with the mall, a Pyramid official had assured him that “you’ll never see an inner-city bus on the mall premises.”

@56 - I’m guessing they were mostly (only?) counting cases where a drunk person stumbled in front of a car. Which is very bad for the drunk person, but also probably traumatizing for the driver (but probably not fatal for the driver).

I have lived in college towns where you could get arrested for public drunkenness “for your own safety” but it wasn’t usually about car accidents. I have also lived in college towns where the police seriously did hang around giving people BUIs—biking under the influence. If you aren’t coordinated enough to drive safely, you probably aren’t coordinated enough to ride a bike safely, but again the difference is that you’re more likely to hurt just yourself than to hurt other people. I think riding a bike home drunk after a party is probably something done mostly by college students in certain areas, but I don’t know the statistics on serious injuries.

Amanda @32, if these people are horribly car-centric and the existing big stick of DUIs is not persuading them to take the easy walk to the corner bar, are you really saying that a few less parking spaces is going to be the tipping point? 

And really, you’re talking to me as if I’ve never negotiated those things either, or have no idea that a car costs more than an umbrella. (Though I am puzzled at the idea that people buy cars just to avoid walking half a mile to get drunk on weekends.)

Dana—yes, that’s the idea, to keep public transit from being a complete option, so that it will be successfully hobbled.

Suburban communities would much rather have an upscale bar than a down-home rowdy place.

Of course, I’d imagine that the bars in a community would reflect the larger makeup of the community.  If it’s a middle class area, it’s pretty unlikely that a skeevy dive is going to open in the neighborhood at all, regardless of how parking is divvied up.

Middle class people can be pretty skeevy when they get drunk.  That’s why they get in their cars and drive downtown to Beer Disneyland, where it’s okay to vomit and pee anywhere you like!  Because cities are gross and you’re not making them any dirtier, they should be happy you graced them with your presence.

They know exactly what they’re trying to avoid.

And don’t most neighborhoods have a direct say over what bars can open where and who can have a liquor license and things like that, without having to resort to gaming the system via parking policies?  I know my area has community board hearings about it, and it can be quite difficult to get a liquor license in certain circumstances.
Comment #54: The Opoponax on 06/25 at 09:50 AM

Ahahahahaha. 

There’s not a lot one can do once the bar is there unless actual illegal acts are taking place, and even then, you’ve got a quality of life issue until that gets resolved. 

Therefore, misrepresentation when building a bar can be incredibly imaginative.  Remember our discussion of bar dress codes?  Bar owners/managers spend a lot of time and energy sending out signals about their intended clientele, but they generally send out a different code to the prospective neighbors.

If they said it was going to be a slice of Victoriana and plan to build a replica 1850 mansion, in six months your neighborhood would be filled with Goths and Steampunks.  If it’s a “sports bar” that means the baggy pants and backwards baseball cap people would put in an appearance.

Not that I’d personally mind either, but many would. 

I live in an area with a huge, *huge* concentration of bars (and no offstreet parking for any of them).  It changes the mood of the street a lot if the wrong kind of bar comes in, and by “wrong” I don’t mean goths or African-Americans, I mean the kind where the patrons yell “WHOOO” when they exit the bar because they’re So! Drunk! after those two Coronas. 

There’s also the kind where the patrons stand in the sidewalk six deep talking loudly and redfacedly about something money-intensive and where is that damn valet with their car, so you can’t get past them with your groceries.

If you look at the Long Beach regulations, the number of required spaces per 1000 SF goes up as the “undesirability” of the business increases.  Taverns and dance clubs require a lot.  Libraries, offices, restaurants, much fewer.  So, as others said, it’s partly a way to make it more expensive to run an “undesirable” business. It’s probably also a way to separate the business physically from its neighbors, so you don’t have a bangin’ dance club cheek by jowl with your house.

The nice thing about a half-hour walk home from the bar is that you’ll be sober again by the time you get home.

I know people for whom that would be considered a disadvantage.

If they said it was going to be a slice of Victoriana and plan to build a replica 1850 mansion, in six months your neighborhood would be filled with Goths and Steampunks.  If it’s a “sports bar” that means the baggy pants and backwards baseball cap people would put in an appearance.

I know which one I’d rather have in my neighborhood.

I haven’t investigated the Superfreakonomics claim that its more dangerous to walk drunk than to drive drunk enough to really have any good scientific comments on its accuracy. But it just *seems* wrong to me.
Comment #55: geogami on 06/25 at 10:02 AM

Me too.  It seems too one-dimensional.

I’m trying to think of ways a person WUI is or could be different from a person DUI.

1.  More likely to be WUI against his/her will because s/he’s post-DUI conviction.  So might be more risk-taking, more likely to be extra drunk, more likely to be physically incapacitated by alcoholism on top of the impairedness.

2.  More likely to be walking near places where people DUI.  So get hit and hurt by the DUI driver who might hit and run and escape the statistic.

3.  More likely to be so intoxicated they realize they can’t drive.

4.  Walking because they had a fight with the person who was driving, or someone else at the bar, therefore emotionally distracted and perhaps acting out.

5.  A better target for mugging or assault because presumed less able to fight back.

I haven’t investigated the Superfreakonomics claim that its more dangerous to walk drunk than to drive drunk enough to really have any good scientific comments on its accuracy. But it just *seems* wrong to me. I wonder if it has to do with what counts as “drunk”.

It has to do with them measuring miles walked against miles driven.

(It also has to do with every other thing about it being bullshit, but that’s the only one you need)

hat’s why they get in their cars and drive downtown to Beer Disneyland, where it’s okay to vomit and pee anywhere you like!

I find it hard to believe that the only mature and conscientious individuals in the United States live in Manhattan, Brooklyn, certain parts of Chicago and Boston, and maybe the Bay Area.  I mean, I would love to believe that, because it would confirm all my coastal urban elitist fantasies.  But I know it’s not actually the case. 

As loathsome as I find suburbanites (snark), I’m fairly certain that they don’t piss and vomit all over everything all the time, in any establishment that serves beverages stronger than ginger ale. 

There’s not a lot one can do once the bar is there unless actual illegal acts are taking place, and even then, you’ve got a quality of life issue until that gets resolved.

I thought we were talking about the process of opening a bar?  I mean, if you’re talking about zoning, parking spot allocation, and disincentivizing certain types of development, I think you’re probably talking about BEFORE the bar is in place.  In which case, yeah, AFAIK there are usually regulations in place at the local and neighborhood level to give residents a degree of choice about what kinds of drinking establishments are allowed to open, and where, and what kind of licensing they should be given. 

Here in hedonistic never-sleeps New York, we even have special hoops we make proprietors jump through if they want to allow dancing!

It changes the mood of the street a lot if the wrong kind of bar comes in, and by “wrong” I don’t mean goths or African-Americans, I mean the kind where the patrons yell “WHOOO” when they exit the bar because they’re So! Drunk! after those two Coronas. 

I agree, and it’s part of why I love living in the biggest city in America.  We ghettoize those sorts of bars in crap neighborhoods like Murray Hill, and sane people know never to go there.  But I don’t really see why college bars would be opening in droves in middle class suburban neighborhoods (unless it’s a college town, in which case, you probably knew it was a college town when you moved there).

If you aren’t coordinated enough to drive safely, you probably aren’t coordinated enough to ride a bike safely

This is something I have learned from experience.  I take the subway now if I think I might have more than a couple beers.

It has to do with them measuring miles walked against miles driven.

I don’t quite see off the top of my head why that’s a problem. If you have already driven to a bar or party and you’re deciding between driving home or walking home, you have to go the same number of miles either way.

I thought we were talking about the process of opening a bar?  I mean, if you’re talking about zoning, parking spot allocation, and disincentivizing certain types of development, I think you’re probably talking about BEFORE the bar is in place.  In which case, yeah, AFAIK there are usually regulations in place at the local and neighborhood level to give residents a degree of choice about what kinds of drinking establishments are allowed to open, and where, and what kind of licensing they should be given.
<blockquote>
Yes, that’s why I wrote about how the people opening a bar get very creative about how they describe what it will be like, and then it turns out it’s not like that at all. 

Was that part missing from your copy of this web page?

You might also be familiar with the idea that people who have a lot of money have more political power than people who don’t.  If you are in a suburban area that’s losing status, you might not have the pull to keep a bar out that the friend of the Governor is backing, for example.

Not all suburbs are wealthy, I’m sure you know.

It changes the mood of the street a lot if the wrong kind of bar comes in, and by “wrong” I don’t mean goths or African-Americans, I mean the kind where the patrons yell “WHOOO” when they exit the bar because they’re So! Drunk! after those two Coronas.

I agree, and it’s part of why I love living in the biggest city in America.  We ghettoize those sorts of bars in crap neighborhoods like Murray Hill, and sane people know never to go there.  But I don’t really see why college bars would be opening in droves in middle class suburban neighborhoods (unless it’s a college town, in which case, you probably knew it was a college town when you moved there).
Comment #68: The Opoponax on 06/25 at 05:44 PM</blockquote>
Ah, yes, the old “you knew it was a college town when you moved there, so you cannot complain about anything the students do.” 

Nope.  People who live in Murray Hill still have a right to live in a non-shithole.

I’m guessing that miles walked versus miles driven doesn’t measure exposure time to dangerous things like DUI drivers.

(p.s. sorry about the formatting mess)

Yeah, its not measuring time. But if you have to go to a specific place, your choice isn’t between driving drunk for 10 minutes and walking drunk for 10 minutes, its between driving drunk for 10 minutes and walking drunk for more than that, maybe 30 or 40 minutes. So the time SHOULD be different, its the distance that would be fixed in most cases.

The study results still feel wrong to me, I’m just not sure that is the issue. Seems more likely to me that they aren’t properly measuring how many people walk around after a few drinks.

geogami, they should probably count the distance drunk people walk to their cars, anyway, which could be a few blocks depending on where they are.

My 1960s version of suburban sprawl still has a Walk Score of 74 (www.walkscore.com) I can walk to two grocery stores, a Target, two Starbucks (one closed; we had three within walking distance), a Mexican, an Indian, a Persian, a Chinese, and a Japanese restaurant; a Radio Shack, and so on.

The closest bar is a half mile away, but here bars tend to be dive bars or biker bars, not the sort of place you can relax in with your friends.

I had to laugh a bit at myth—young people in SF tend to go to huge dance clubs, which congregate South of Market, which is not within easy walking distance of most SF’ans. Which is good for those who don’t want to walk past people puking on their shoes (or your shoes.)

Drunks walking home tend to be vulnerable—walk with a buddy or take a cab.

There is this sad catch-22 going on in a lot of places, where people don’t feel safe walking alone on deserted streets, but the streets are deserted because people don’t feel safe walking.  And I have heard many instances of victim-blaming for someone who was attacked while walking alone at night, “why was she walking there at that time of night, anyway??”  I live in New Orleans now, fortunately quite close to the streetcar line, but if it’s after midnight I rarely see another soul for the 3 blocks from the streetcar stop to my house, and it sometimes is kind of creepy.

The best thing for making walking safer is to have more people out and about.  The safest I ever felt was when I lived in the Castro in San Francisco.  This was because there were gay men out cruising 24/7 so the streets were never deserted (and of course, these guys aren’t interested in harassing or attacking women).  I had no worries at all about my safety walking to the 24-hour market at 3 AM by myself because there were always plenty of other people around. 

It seems if you can achieve some critical mass of people out and about, it will more easily perpetuate more walking b/c people will feel safer walking.  But I don’t know how to get that critical mass to begin with.

It seems if you can achieve some critical mass of people out and about, it will more easily perpetuate more walking b/c people will feel safer walking.  But I don’t know how to get that critical mass to begin with.

In my city, many neighborhoods have regular “safety walks” where a group of people goes out into the streets after dark to put a human presence out on the sidewalks as well as to report any suspicious activity.

Another problem I’ve seen is that in neighborhoods that have crime, pedestrian traffic of the sort that would patronize local bars and restaurants is considered, in and of itself, evidence of crime, so they don’t want eating/drinking establishments that are going to attract people because they think “people walking around at night = crime,” rather than the fact that steady pedestrian traffic, and thus witnesses, prevents crime.

Superfreakonomics is completely famous for reductionism, a common form of truthy smells like science fail.  I don’t know a single economist of biostatistician who doesn’t hate it for those reasons - vast oversimplifications make for quick calcuations, but they don’t make for an honest analysis.

Mythago, somehow I don’t believe you have ever been to Long Beach, either.  Most of it was built out before cars were common - my friend and I used her car once to get to the airport.  The rest of the time we walked or biked.

Long Beach is a perfect location for neighborhood bars - and I puzzeled not only by your know-it-all defense of bullshit, but your ignorance of communities in your own state.

“The fetish for “personal responsibility” that supersedes any attempt to write policies that actually encourage better choice-making is particularly irritating when it comes to straight up public safety considerations like reducing drunk driving.”

In addition to the fact that such stuff affects the safety of other people, not just the decision maker, I would add as well that the fact that drinking impairs judgement should be even more reason to favor policies that encourage better choice making over personal responsibility.  I mean, if anybody needs to be nudged in the right direction, it’s a person who’s had a few drinks under their belt.

“Thank you for reminding me why I can never move back to Boston.”

Hey now, Somerville≠Boston.  I live in Boston and there are at least three bars within a 5 minute walk of my home. 

Yeah, going out would be much easier if a few buses (66, 47, and 39 would be nice) ran later, or even if they just made one extra trip at 2:30.  But despite the early shutdown, I have never found myself stranded because the city is just so walkable.  Which I think, in a way, underscores the significance of this parking spot situation.  Even if the buses and T ran 24/7, as long as there are available parking spots, there will be people who just prefer driving, and refuse to recognize that anything can impair their ability to do anything.  But, when parking is nearly impossible—like in a lot of Boston—people will figure out driving-free ways of getting where they want to be, even if the MBTA isn’t helping them much.

Of course, there are also people who hate driving and only do it because the MBTA sucks, and ideally we would have 24/7 mass transit and effective deterrents to driving while shitfaced.

“This is a zoning regulation designed to minimize the number of new bars started.”

In Long Beach?  Not likely.

“Another aspect (that I should have added last night) is that it forces the establishments to be more expensive to build, and that puts the pressure on them to be more “upscale” to recoup the greater initial investment faster.”

O.o

Again, what?

I worked for the Land Use Services Department of San Bernardino County for a while (hardly the most upscale place in CA) and 20 spaces for every 1,000 sq ft of tavern floor sounds pretty par for the course to me.  The people that write the parking portion of zoning laws do not sit down and think “oh, let’s just add more parking spaces to drive away the non-trendy chains!”  Especially not when the actual trend is for places that look pretty - ie, not like seas of asphalt.  (They use other zoming laws to keep the non-trendy places away.)  They think “hmmm…1,000 sq ft of dining space equals about 50 guests at maximum capacity, at an average of 2.5 people per car means that we need 20 spaces.”  End. Of. Story.

The fact that you may want to encourage people arriving at a drinking establishment to bring fewer cars does not enter into their thinking either.  Which, I agree with Amanda, is rather stupid.

“Amanda @32, if these people are horribly car-centric and the existing big stick of DUIs is not persuading them to take the easy walk to the corner bar, are you really saying that a few less parking spaces is going to be the tipping point?”

See: Hollywood.  Not that I go there often, but on the few times I have, I have seen more people walking out and about at night (and in places not always considered safe) than just about anywhere else in SoCal I’ve been to.  Because while many of us still have to drive to Hollywood, parking and driving is a big enough pain in the butt (and expensive enough) that it’s just that much easier to park your car in one place and then walk from the restaurant to the comedyclub/theatre and then to the bar than it is to drive from place to place.  Which is very not true of most everywhere else in SoCal.