That sounds awesome! I’ve never been to the UK, but I also live in a city called London haha.
Is the biking infrastructure decent? Biking is faster than the bus in almost all cases here, but the infrastructure is terrible so I’m afraid of getting hit by a car lol.
Perhaps people moving around can help bring new ideas and shake things up, creating these smaller but fun cities.
I get the driving thing so much! Even right now I schedule my errands for outside of rush hour because driving through traffic is just draining.
My suburban friends are used to it, but as someone who has lived suburban and in/around downtown, I much prefer the random walkable trips.
In some cases, businesses got fat tax breaks on their campuses in exchange for the business that their workers would bring to the area, so cities are leaning on those businesses to end WFH, but that’s a band-aid of a fix if I ever saw one.
I worry that this is the case for my office. It's in a giant trendy building in a non-trendy (mildly sketchy) area and I think it's on the list for gentrification. On top of this, there's not enough housing and the area is pretty disconnected from other more populated areas. Public transit to get there is only slightly faster than walking from where I am (~40mins bus vs 1hr walk).
I would love to see our downtown heal and build more housing, instead of trying to flip the next "up and coming" area of town.
This was the most relatable horrible smell in this thread for me
They lumped migrants in with pedos and criminals 😐