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“Leave Your Car in the Garage”

Trawling through some real estate brokerage sites, typically in fairly dense small towns and pre-war suburbs, a refrain keeps catching my eye: “Leave your car in the garage.” The listing will then note the proximity to trains, schools, etc. I’m not sure who first came up with this rallying cry — and based on what I’ve seen in some of these towns (pedestrians being mostly people moving to and from their cars) I wonder if it might be more real-estate bluster than anything else — i.e., the potential of walking is there, as is the potential for the great room to be great and the massive chef’s kitchen to produce fare worthy of Grant Achatz, but in the end this potential gives way to some real or imagined vehicular reality (I need to get groceries, it’s just easier). But I can’t say I’ve ever seen a real estate ad that promised: “Take your car out of the garage, often!”

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 6th, 2010 at 8:11 pm and is filed under Etc.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to ““Leave Your Car in the Garage””

  1. Peter Smith Says:
    July 7th, 2010 at 1:24 am

    about the closest i can think of is the ‘You could be home by now!’ signs on downtown apts/condos. but, it’s good.

    and walkscore just got a grant to fix their rankings so they become meaningful. good news all around.

  2. Eric Fischer Says:
    July 7th, 2010 at 11:34 am

    Fizber.com has “drivescore”, which is an exact copy of walkscore except claiming all the places you could drive to instead of walking. And as far as I can tell it is actually serious and not a parody.

  3. Steven Vance Says:
    July 10th, 2010 at 10:35 am

    I like the “You could be home by now signs.” If I had to live in the suburbs (say, for a job or with family), I would ride the train and see which apartments are closest. Then I’d write down their names and numbers and start checking availability.

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How We Drive is the companion blog to Tom Vanderbilt’s New York Times bestselling book, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), published by Alfred A. Knopf in the U.S. and Canada, Penguin in the U.K, and in languages other than English by a number of other fine publishers worldwide.

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