Everyone has their own definition of “walkable”. For me that’s not, plus it’s getting to the point where the books i’d likely get would be annoying to carry. But also do you mean literally walkable or “don’t need a car”. The latter includes transit and micromobility

I walk to my library but it’s less than ten minutes. Especially since they put up parking meters, walking ten minutes is more convenient than finding change or feeding a profiteering app company.

Unfortunately the best part of my towns downtown is a mile away so less convenient. Most of the time I’ve lived here I’ve decided to drive the mile but since pandemic I’ve been far more likely to walk. I recently went to a diner where a newly opened trail made it a nice walk despite it being over a mile.

And the definition of walkable changes over time as well. As a young adult I lived in Boston and considered essentially everything walkable. While I was also a big user of transit, they tended to be too slow and crowded when you can walk instead. Most of my driving was to move my car for street cleaning or snow removal

Walkable means all you need is in reasonable walking distance.

I wouldn’t consider my neighbourhood to be particularly walkable as it’s a suburb (in Europe) but my library is about 15 mins walk away.

Sometimes the amenity you need isn’t in that walkable range, but cycling is a great alternative.

By the way, count the actual time it took you to walk that. From personal experience, Google Maps always says a considerably higher number

I wouldn’t walk any distance for a library.

But even it was a place I actually wanted to go, 10 minutes walking distance is about the maximum. For anything more there has to be a tram (or at least a bus).

A walkable environment also means good public transport.

A reasonable amount of time would be 15min-30min

Longer than that there needs to be transit

In general no

However, a sunny Sunday, walking 1h to do something may be part of the fun.

For distance above roughly a km, I use bicycle or even bus/train

I can, and have in the past, it’s not that big of a deal, but it’s not something I do regularly. Here’s the thing, 4km takes about 1h walking, 30min by bus/tram, 20min by car (then another 10min finding a place to park), or 15min by bike. This is why bikes are so ubiquitous in European cities, you can get to places usually much faster than by public transport, and sometimes even faster than cars since they have to do weird paths and skip entire neighborhoods.

I normally would take public transport for such distances, mostly because I don’t own a bike and sweat more than I’m comfortable with when I ride one, and don’t mind the extra 15min of listening to music.

No. I would walk ~5-20 minutes to a bus/train station that would take me there.

Edit: for < 4km I would walk. Why does Google think that would be such a long journey in terms of time (which my first response was based upon)

A walkable city has libraries in every alternate neighborhood. So one is generally at most 1~1.5km away. But anything more than ~800m, I’m taking the bus anyway.

No, but walkable places would probably have public transport access as well? If so I’d take the bus. I think I generally consider 15-20 minutes to be “walkable” if I need to go often (train/metro stations, grocery stores). For the occasional trips I’d consider 1 hour walk one way. Anything longer I would probably skip or find alternative ways to get there (including taxis/ride shares)

If that’s the round trip, yes. I do that daily. But one way? No.

Probably not. And no, I’ve done maybe an hour, but more likely 45 minutes to a library in a car centric city, and now somewhere with public transit I don’t think you’re ever more than a half hour walk from one

This is part of why I’m so vocal about increasing walkability. There’s a cascading effect with increasing walkability as more and more is easily walkable less people need cars and there’s more demand for walkability and mass transit solutions.

The fact that I’ve lived in cities (including major ones) where the public transit is a bus that comes every hour and I’ve lived where it’s faster to take the train to go to a lot of places. If transit sucks, only the poor take it. In many places the bus is treated as welfare not mass transit. It can’t improve until the area is willing to invest in distant returns. Not investing however will eventually hit growing urban areas with worse and worse conditions and traffic

3.7Km

It is more like 40-50 minutes if you’re in the town with actual roads, not just a corn field.

would you walk an hour and 15 minutes to go to say, the library?

Walking more than an hour just to get to one place? No, unless walking is a sub-goal. You know, the weather is nice, no tasks for today…

Yes. I would but no it would not take that long. I walked to and from work 3 miles for awhile and it was about 45 mins. A neat thing with walking is that the time is very consistant. If I walked pretty much as fast as I could and was lucky on street lights and such I could almost make it in 35 minutes but if I took my sweet ass time it was hard to get to an hour. If I was taking one hour and 15minutes I should be able to get to a library that was 5 miles away. I have regularly walked to my current library in recent times and its about a mile and a half away but I have not really kept track of how long it takes me.