Walking built into everyday life is "revolutionary?" Seriously? I think just about any European city dweller can tell you that. This is not revolutionary, it's just commonsensical, self-evident fact everywhere else.
Life in the suburban/rural US (i.e. most of it by surface area) is a very non-classy way to die, at the mercies of some of the most perverse planning and design humanly imaginable. I deal with the implications of that in the sprawling, automobile-centric catastrofuck that is Atlanta every day -- and I have it "good," I live downtown!
Also, a very, very important insight:
"It’s also because New York is old and filled with attractive architecture and interesting street scenes—since, as it turns out, aesthetically pretty places lure people out of their homes and cars."
Bingo! Even though there exist places in the US where it is possible to walk, in principle, it is not a compelling aesthetic or interpersonal experience. Consequently, it is unmotivating and unfulfilling, so, unsurprisingly, people don't do it. Taking a walk in otherwise comparably "inconvenient" ways from a purely logistical perspective in many cities in the world is an interesting undertaking; people are interesting, nicely dressed, there is nice architecture to look at, engaging and attractive public spaces, etc. That has a lot to do with why people do it. Most of the US is a horrific existential blight in that respect, even many of the parts where sidewalks exist and the distances required are theoretically manageable.
As a European living in a US exurb, it's fascinating how little it takes to kill community.
I'm not talking economically or actually kill it. The economy is strong here, but there are no sidewalks, or public squares. There is obviously main street, a terrible place with gas stations and McDonald's and IHOP and Home Depot and no one walking between them, because why would you?
There are business parks, the one I'm in and the one directly across the street. Not that I've ever walked over there, what would I do, it's not like there's a nice open air restaurant there, or any kind of a place to eat, it's just offices like ours, but no one we do business with.
And so we're like islands, and the private residences are a lot like islands too. Most people do know their immediate neighbors but your neighbors just down the street? Where would you run into them? Unless you're already friends when/where would you rub shoulders together?
I know it's not malice that designed this.. I can't really call this a town even though it legally is.
It's just that people want a big yard and a quiet neighborhood and there's a lot more land then in the old world. And people like to organize things, zone them, here and there, and who would ever want to walk, you don't need sidewalks.
But boy does it ever result in a strange place to live. For me living involves doing stuff like going out. But people in the suburbs just reside here, they do go out, they drive to some place, they don't go as in walk out here though. It's like we don't really live here.
Most people do know their immediate neighbors but your neighbors just down the street? Where would you run into them? Unless you're already friends when/where would you rub shoulders together?
Most commonly, communities in rural and suburban US form primarily around churches and schools; and secondarily at places like bars, the library, the YMCA, or charities.
Also, "just reside here" tends to mean a lot more in a suburb than a city. I "just reside" in my apartment in the city, I live in the neighborhood. In a suburb people don't just reside in their homes, they live in them. They have dinner parties and outdoor BBQs. Their kids play ball in the back yard with the neighbors and hide-and-seek in the nearby woods. Even a modestly priced home has room for a workshop, a library, a garden, and an entertainment center. In the city, you'll be lucky to pay through the nose for enough room for one of those things in a decent neighborhood.
Sort of, although you still have access to nearby islands and there are communal places such as those I mentioned. It's more isolated than the city, but it's also not always like being totally alone and devoid of any community at all.
I think you might be attributing a lot to malice. In fact I think if said European cities and NYC were built after cars were invented, they would be similar to the sprawl in e.g. California.
"Homicide, AIDS, and drugs are characteristically New York ways to die young, of course, so it’s no surprise that when we sharply decreased the fatalities they caused, we caught up with the rest of the country. But here’s the thing: It’s not just that we’ve conquered these urban blights. Cancer and cardiac arrest are down, too. The number of people in the city dying from heart disease has dropped by a third in the last twenty years, and cancer rates have slid by nearly a fifth. And again in these cases, New York is getting healthier faster than the rest of the U.S."
Proposed: More walking; better health care access; less crime -> attracting more wealthy-healthy residents, bans (like smoking, trans fats)... They're making NYC sound like what we always thought California was supposed to be.
But neither NY state nor Calif can muster effective state legislatures. Oh, well, there's another post waiting to be written.
That's only one point of several in the article, but I agree that it is one of the most questionable:
"She and a group of scientists assembled 3,075 seniors in their seventies and asked them to traverse a 400-meter course, walking as fast as they could. [...] For every minute longer it took someone to complete the 400-meter walk, he had a 29 percent higher chance of mortality and a 52 percent greater chance of being disabled. People who walk faster live longer -- and enjoy better health in their later years."
The article doesn't explore the alternate explanation that healthier seniors are able to walk faster. (...although, to its credit, it does raise the possibility that people who like to walk are more likely to move to New York.)
Really interesting piece, good stuff. New York's funny for me, because I did all my working, living, and visiting of NYC only in the last five years. I'm old enough to remember hearing of New York as a dirty, dangerous place, but I never experienced any of that outside of movies like Coming to America. I talk with older relatives about spending time in Harlem, in Queens, in the Meatpacking District, and they're like, "New York?! Be careful!" And my reaction was, "...umm, it's one of the safest cities in America." People don't believe it.
IIRC, Freakonomics had a chapter talking about the reduced crime in New York. It's been a few years since I read it, but I think Friedman's conclusion was that the reduction in crime had less to do with the broken windows policy and more to do with the fact that NY tripled their uniformed officers in that timeframe. Uniformed officers walking around an area is one of the largest deterrents of crime anywhere. Some good stuff in that book, anyone who liked this piece would do well to check it out.
Okay, I didn't read it, but I'm wondering if they mention the obvious: That lots of people in NYC are migrants who arrived in their 20s or later, which increases the longevity for simple mathematical reasons.
If most of the population arrives at age 20, it would almost totally cut out infant mortality. As the article points out on the first page, infant mortality has the greatest effect on their longevity numbers: "By the same logic, one infant’s dying during childbirth -- 77.8 years too early -- is equal to ten people’s succumbing to lung cancer at age 70."
However, the article is not only about how much healthier New York is relative to the rest of the country -- it's also about how much healthier it is relative to itself about ten years ago. One has to wonder if the immigration rate of 20-year-olds has increased that much in that time.
Life in the suburban/rural US (i.e. most of it by surface area) is a very non-classy way to die, at the mercies of some of the most perverse planning and design humanly imaginable. I deal with the implications of that in the sprawling, automobile-centric catastrofuck that is Atlanta every day -- and I have it "good," I live downtown!
Also, a very, very important insight:
"It’s also because New York is old and filled with attractive architecture and interesting street scenes—since, as it turns out, aesthetically pretty places lure people out of their homes and cars."
Bingo! Even though there exist places in the US where it is possible to walk, in principle, it is not a compelling aesthetic or interpersonal experience. Consequently, it is unmotivating and unfulfilling, so, unsurprisingly, people don't do it. Taking a walk in otherwise comparably "inconvenient" ways from a purely logistical perspective in many cities in the world is an interesting undertaking; people are interesting, nicely dressed, there is nice architecture to look at, engaging and attractive public spaces, etc. That has a lot to do with why people do it. Most of the US is a horrific existential blight in that respect, even many of the parts where sidewalks exist and the distances required are theoretically manageable.