Some things are just too good to be true, and one seemingly attractive place to live and work is hiding a pretty major downside: This walkable city with a robust public transportation network is Boston.
Oof, you’ve gotta read the fine print in these situations!
A city with accessible, tree-lined sidewalks and dense bus and subway coverage might sound like pedestrian heaven on paper, but don’t go packing your bags just yet—unfortunately for anyone seeking independence from a car-centric lifestyle, the city in question is Boston, Massachusetts. This city comes so close to offering a comfortably human-scaled vision of urban living, and if not for being Boston, we could easily see ourselves settling down here for life. But the fact that this city is Boston will definitely be a dealbreaker for most people, because what good is walkability if the places you’re walking are just Boston Common or Boston’s Copley Square?
It’s a shame how nice this city could be if it had stuck the landing by not being Boston. We’d love to have dinner options within walking distance of our home if they weren’t all overpriced Irish pubs serving gummy colcannon and clam chowder that looks like something a seagull coughed up to feed its young. It would certainly be great to have this much greenspace around too, if it wasn’t always overrun with Red Sox-capped Bostonians barking non-rhotic slurs at each other with every intake of breath. And while the train can take you to some great places like NYC or Portland, Maine, the vast majority of stops on the MBTA are just places around Boston, or worse, Greater Boston.
Yeah, that’s gonna be a fly in the ointment for sure.
For what it’s worth, there are definitely some cool ideas about greenscaping and sidewalk optimization here that could really shine in a city that doesn’t come with the baggage of being Boston. A city that could boast this level of public transport infrastructure without being in the 617 area code would basically be a dream come true. But unfortunately, this town doesn’t show any signs of not being Boston anytime soon, and much as it pains us to say it, that’s gonna be a hard pass from us.
Looks like the search for a nice, walkable city with no hidden drawbacks continues. Here’s hoping the next place we find won’t lure us in only to let us down by being Boston!
