Wheres the best city for living 100% car-free?
Welcome to Philadelphia, where I don’t know a single person who lives within city bounds who bothers owning a car. Many make some use of a carsharing nonprofit called PhillyCarShare, but many do nothing but foot-power and public transit. It’s not as cheap as a much-smaller city, mind you, but people familiar with Boston/NYC real estate often express great surprise at how cheap Philly is, and people used to cheaper places seem to simply find it pricier, not unaffordable (a la SF/NYC). The basic trick is to live just far enough from Center City (what we call the central downtown area) that prices drop off, but close enough to walk; there’s also a good-if-you-ignore-NYC-next-door public transit system. I know plenty of people living in the city on not-terribly-well-paying jobs, in perfectly acceptable neighborhoods, who don’t own cars. (Major note: Everyone I know lives relatively close to Center City – there are huge swaths of the city that aren’t really doable without a car. It’s just t
To address the OP’s description of wanderlust, the US is not the place to explore without a car. Like everyone’s already mentioned, there are cities of various sizes and price points that one can easily live on foot and public power alone. However, in a vast majority of the cases, you’ll be restricted to the city itself – especially for the smaller cities, and those outside the NE corridor. If you want to travel… see a bit outside your local haunts, a car is really the only economical solution in the States. I don’t mean to belittle the country, nor do I care to comment on the causes. It just is what it is, and the US will remain car-centric for some time. Verboseness aside, if you want a more walkable city than Portland, you’re probably going to pay a premium for it. In the meantime, save up a bit for tickets to the outside world.
The people I know who live in “the city” that make modest wages all tend to have two attributes in common: 1. They don’t live in Manhattan. They live in outer Brooklyn, or Queens, or Staten Island, or the Bronx, or Jersey City. Which is fine if you work or hang out in Brooklyn, or Queens, or Staten Island, or the Bronx, or Jersey City. But it’s not when where you really want to be is in Manhattan. So instead, you spend a couple hours every day shuffling to and from the place you really want to be, and have to twist arms to get anyone to come out and visit you. It also means you aren’t walking, which was the whole point of the question. Then there are borough-specific drawbacks: Brooklyn (can be far depending on the neighborhood, can be nearly as expensive as Manhattan if you’re in a “cool”–i.e. close to Manhattan–area… and the subway lines aren’t the greatest), Queens (really far out, subway lines even more sporadic), Staten Island (suburbia, and you don’t even have a subway line),
