Survey after survey shows a shift in favor of Americans saying they want to live in walkable communities.

Nearly two-thirds (64%) of respondents said they would pay more to live within walking distance of parks, shops, and restaurants, according to the latest Community and Transportation Preference Survey from the National Association of Realtors®—shared first with Realtor.com®.

But intelligent people who probably did just fine in geometry in high school do not connect what they learned to the two-dimensional reality of their neighborhoods.

But enthusiasm drops when walkability becomes a question of what gets built nearby. While 63% say small-lot single-family homes would be a good idea in their community, support falls to 51% for townhomes, duplexes, and other attached housing, 44% for rental apartments, and 40% for condos.

When you set up the geometry that includes those large lots and lots of car storage storage space both at peoples’ homes and nearby shopping centers, the car infrastructure ends up taking up a lot more space than the actual houses, yards, and stores. Things get more spread out and quickly become unwalkable.

There are some potential solutions I can think of. Mixed use (commercial and residential together) is the obvious one. But people have at least an impression that this means more crime and noise. Setting up cities in a more linear way is a possibility – a long, narrow commercial main street with a long, narrow strip of housing behind it including single family homes and lots if that is what people want. Safe, protected infrastructure for bikes, scooters, golf carts, and whatever light low-momentum vehicles we come up with next – these let you cover those distances that take too long or are too boring to walk. Maybe they need to be covered in some climates. But most importantly, there has to be a safe, protected middle ground for light, practical transportation modes that fall in between walking and heavy highway vehicles. And the resistance to this basic concept is just enormous, for some reason.

Traditional public transportation definitely should play a role, particularly along that linear main street. But when things are more decentralized and randomly laid out, vehicular transportation may need to be more on-demand, whether public or private, human driven or autonomous, and I think we should just experiment with all combinations of these until we figure out what works for a particular community. If we can decouple the need to get around in vehicles from the need to store all those vehicles in a stationary manner steps away from our homes and businesses, that can free up a lot of space.

I can picture all this in my head just fine, and then the painful process of change on the ground is measured in decades if not generations, so now at age 50 I wonder if I will see a freaking safe protected bike lane in my neighborhood during my natural lifetime (and my neighborhood is one of the most walkable neighborhoods in one of the most walkable cities in the USA!).