How walkable is your town? (Hempstead, Brookhaven: apartment, university, calculating)

[Crookhaven]

Originally Posted by rocafeller05

Add Rockville Centre to the list. The RR area is not a dump.

Not the area....the Downtown.

If Sunrise Highway is the Downtown....Im sorry.

crooks

[I_Love_LI_but]

My address scored an 89.

[orchid924]

My previous address was 100 out of 100 and now 17 out of 100. What a difference?

[nancy thereader]

There is at least one other downtown that's not a dump by the RR: Port Washington!

Manhasset is nice, too.

[azzurrony]

Garden City isn't a dump by the RR either. We scored a 63 out of a 100 though. Not as good as I would have thought. But that's because we are about a mile away from Franklin.

Good to see people walking.

[Crookhaven]

Originally Posted by azzurrony

Garden City isn't a dump by the RR either. We scored a 63 out of a 100 though. Not as good as I would have thought. But that's because we are about a mile away from Franklin.

Good to see people walking.

Agreed and a proper downtown too.

[TheJickler]

Cool website! For fun, I did where I grew on in Islip: 54, much better than I would have expected.

Where I live now, in Providence RI: 86. That sounds right. I have everything I need within walking distance, for the first time in my life.

[sean sean sean sean]

55 in North Wantagh, not bad for being surrounded by nothing but strip malls. Actually, I'd say for the type of place I live - which would be classical LI Levitt-style suburbia - it's laid out extremely well. I do walk up to the stores very frequently, it only takes 5 minutes and saves gas. I know a lot of my neighbors do as well. Two major bus routes stop right around the block and we've also got the bike path to Jones Beach, which is basically right behind my house. We should really have more dedicated biking/walking paths on LI, I think they'd get a lot of use. I could survive without a car but wouldn't want to....I could take the bus to work from my house, but it would turn a ten minute trip into almost an hour.

So has car culture failed us? I'd say yes and no. The modern concept of the "suburbs" I think, may have gone a little too far from what it's original intentions were, literally and figuratively. I say this all the time on these forums, I don't think having a huge property and being so far apart from other people is such an ideal way to live...it's definitely not the way I want to live, at least. I think what should be the answer for future development on LI is as simple as looking back at the early suburbs and the cities they surrounded. Case in point, my former home - Albany, NY. A much smaller metropolitan area than the NYC/downstate region but a perfect example. I lived at three different addresses within this city, here's how they fared:

Center Square Neighborhood - 91: This is downtown Albany, pre-suburban. I lived in a two story mid-19th century apartment building. The only place I ever drove was to work, everything else was right outside my front door. On the weekends, my car rarely moved save for adventures into the countryside and trips back to LI. It predated the car, thus the layout of the neighborhood was conducive to walking.

Pine Hills Neighborhood - 82: These are some of the earliest suburbs, right around the turn of the century. I lived in a crumbling mansion on a hill which had been hacked up into several "somewhat" liveable apartments. The neighborhood fabric itself was strictly suburban, however since it was designed at a time when the automobile was in it's infancy and the trolley reigned supreme, having a car was not a necessity whatsoever. All the shopping and entertainment needed was easily walkable, and though the trolleys no longer ran the modest bus fare downtown and frequent service made commuting a breeze. I didn't even have a driveway!

Delaware Neighborhood - 74: Now we're in the 1930s, the suburbs are starting to branch out. The original owners of this once grand two story duplex would have most certainly had a car, which would have made it's location on the southern outskirts of the city still convenient to downtown. The score is still relatively high as the Delaware Avenue corridor holds many stores - though the buses only run twice a day. Necessities were placed close by, however the emphasis is now on commuting elsewhere.

That's as far as the suburbs should have gone, IMO. Brooklyn and Queens were meant to be Manhattan's suburbs - while still having their own "downtown" areas for most towns. Nassau is caught somewhere inbetween (having once been a part of Queens). The LIRR makes many Nassau towns bedroom communities, but what about all the others in between? I don't believe anything in Suffolk should really be considered suburbs of NYC whatsoever. Long Island's two eastern counties need their own "city", and modes of traveling to and from it that work better than sitting in parkway traffic.

The only place this is really doable, is the area which once supported this exact infrastructure: Central Nassau County. Hempstead, Garden City, Mineola, etc. At one time, it was possible to commute to this area via every LIRR branch save for the Port Jeff line. The trackage is still there throughout Garden City parking lots and backyards. When these lines were installed, people viewed it as progress - not as the nuisance it would be treated as nowadays. There is actually an entirely separate unused LIRR easement running from GC to Bethpage which could be re-activated to support commuters from far into Suffolk County, they could run both Main Line and Montauk Line trains on it. It's impossible to run NYC bound bullet trains from the Town of Brookhaven as clamboy/Crooks has proposed in the past, but having a commercial/transit hub in Nassau with real jobs would be an easy commute from that far out.

The car would still be an absolute necessity in Suffolk, but many towns could become the bedroom communities that Nassau is now, and development in Nassau could aspire more towards the village center style and diverse living accomodations that predated the modern suburb.

Unfortunately, it'd never happen....but if I somehow had the power and influence, that's the way I'd do it, as well as many other things.

Good topics lately clamboy, I enjoy thinking about these things....wish I would have taken some kind of urban planning courses in college.

[LilTownBlues]

It gave me an 85 out of 100.
I do not agree, it should be lower.
I am going to my car and drive 4 blocks to the drug store and buy anything just so I can burn some gas in protest.

[sirtiger]

Current residence
Walk Score: 80 out of 100 — Very Walkable

Prev in manhattan
Walk Score: 92 out of 100 — Walkers' Paradise

Where I grew up in queens
Walk Score: 92 out of 100 — Walkers' Paradise