It sort of blows my mind that the town I grew up in back East — some of the oldest suburbs in America, whatever that’s worth — is trying to embrace sustainability and new urbanism.
Of course, it makes perfect sense. Long Island’s got dozens of walkable downtowns that are just steps from a train station (grade separated, heavy rail) where trains leave every 20 minutes or so and get you into midtown Manhattan in less than half an hour. And, just like where Goldy grew up, people walk to the train station. The procession of men with trench coats and briefcases walking a mile or more home from the station at 6pm was (is!) quite a sight.
I think the older towns – and especially dense ones like those in/near NYC – are set up nicely to be urban role models. Seattle was formed mostly before cars became popular, and shouldn’t be too hard to convert either. It’s the newer towns and cities that will be hard to bring up to speed. Imagine converting Los Angeles to a dense walkable city – it may be easier to bulldoze and start over.
Totally. The infrastructure stays with us forever. Although there are walkable parts of LA (from back when it was a streetcar city), but not many of them.
I’d say nassau county on long island is a lot more walkable then suffolk. Here you really need a car unless you plan to walk to the nearest bus station, or catch a cab to the train station. Downtown are pretty nice. Port jeff, huntington, northport etc. Here it takes two hours to get to Manhattan from suffolk county. It’d be nice to get electric train service from port jefferson to huntington, the diesel train sucks if you ask me. We do a lot of long island seo but plenty for clients in the city and 2 hour trips each way is 4 hours out of your day.