There isn’t really a wrong way to explore cities, but when we visit a new city we do
try to optimize for seeing as much of it as we can because we like to leave places feeling like
we wouldn’t need to visit again, even though we might want to. So, what’s the best way to
explore a new city if you want to get the most out of your visit: walking, driving, cycling,
or taking transit? We’ve taken some trips over the past few years covering places as different
as Newfoundland, Vancouver, San Francisco, and the Netherlands, and we have opinions!
Walking is the simplest and most direct way to explore a new city, and on every trip we
do a lot of walking, often covering more than 20 kilometres or 12 miles a day. The magic of
walking is that you have perfect freedom. You can go in any direction, you can stop at any time and
take some pictures, sit down, go to a cafe, or do whatever you want. You have nothing to park,
no transit route to memorize or follow. You’re also going at a pace that’s really conducive to
seeing things. You do need an urban environment that’s pleasant or at least possible to walk in,
but there’s a basic standard for this that most cities do offer. On our trip to California we
found that many roads and crossings, especially in Berkeley and Oakland, weren’t as pleasant or
safe for pedestrians as we’d like, but you could still expect sidewalks everywhere and we didn’t
fear for our safety in the way that we probably would if we tried to bike on some of those roads.
The biggest problem with walking is that there’s a limit to how long
and far you can walk, even for younger people who are pretty used to walking.
If you expected us to be completely negative on vacationing by car, you’d be wrong. We wouldn’t
want to rely on a car for basic needs day-to-day, but road trips here and there can be fun,
and cars can give you access to more rural or remote areas that it can be hard to replicate
with any other mode, depending on where you’re going. On our recent trip to Newfoundland,
we drove to some provincial parks and national historic sights with a friend, and a few years ago
we drove the Cabot Trail in Cape Breton Highlands National Park, also on the east coast of Canada,
which we highly recommend during the fall colours. The problem with cars comes, of course, when they
collide with cities. Cars can be a good way to get to a city if necessary but they’re usually
a pretty bad way of experiencing the city itself. You’re going too fast and you’re usually traveling
through less appealing environments like highways or arterials where there’s not a lot of life.
Cycling is probably the best way to explore a city, in an ideal world.
Bikes combine the speed and mobility of cars with the flexibility of walking,
especially because you can easily park your bike and become a pedestrian if you want,
certainly more easily than parking a car to walk around for a bit. The biggest challenge is that
not that many places are bike-friendly. Even in North America, most cities have a walkable core,
and you have to get pretty far into the suburbs before walking is truly horrific.
But outside of Denmark or the Netherlands, most cities just don’t have anything approaching a
complete bike network where you can casually bike in any direction you want and know that there will
be bike infrastructure, in the same way that you can walk in any direction and be pretty sure there
will be sidewalks. We saw this cycling around Vancouver and San Francisco, which have pretty
good bike networks by North American standards, but we spent a lot of time planning our routes.
We didn’t have the same spontaneity that we had on our trip in the Netherlands. Another city we
visited recently, St. John’s, Newfoundland, had virtually no bike infrastructure at all. We saw
some brave souls on bikes but we had no desire to join them and stuck to walking ourselves.
Another big challenge for seeing a city by bike, even if there’s good bike infrastructure,
is finding a bike to use. We’ve traveled on an intercity bus with our full-sized bikes down with
the luggage and it was kind of a miracle that our bikes survived. You can also get a folding
bike to take on the bus, train, or in your car, although the 20-inch wheel models that
we have don’t fold down quite as small as we’d like. It works, but it’s not as convenient as
if we had a smaller-wheeled Brompton. Once you get to the city, most places have bike
share programs accessible to tourists, but the time limit — typically 30 or 45 minutes — makes
them more useful to locals and visitors who know the city rather than tourists who want
to casually bike around, who don’t want to always be watching the clock and hunting for stations.
Also, the annual passes for bike share are by far the best deal, much better than paying per ride,
but they don’t make sense for short-term tourists. Montreal and Antwerp have good weekly pass options
too, but Toronto and Vancouver don't. And finally you can also get traditional rental bikes for the
day. In the Netherlands we rented bikes from our hotels and in San Francisco we were, surprisingly
enough, able to rent bikes from the transit authority at their Downtown Berkeley parking
garage bike station. For some reason they didn’t come with kick-stands, a big surprise because they
weren’t mountain bikes or anything. Day rentals like this are the most convenient option but also
the most expensive, at 20 to 30 dollars a day. It’s hard to justify that cost every single day,
which is fine. On our trips we mix walking and cycling days and it helps us to cover more
ground overall because walking and biking tire out somewhat different muscles and movement patterns.
The final option for exploring cities is transit, which is usually more available than
bike infrastructure. There are a lot more good transit cities out there than good cycling cities.
Transit isn’t as flexible as cycling because you can’t follow the exact speed or route you want,
but it covers medium-to-longer distances better and if the city you’re visiting has a day or
week pass, you can hop on and hop off without worrying about the cost of each ride, which is
closer to the flexibility of cycling, especially on street-running transit like a tram or streetcar
with lots of stops. We do find ourselves not using buses that often in new cities though.
As a visitor, the schedules and routes aren’t as easy to understand compared to
trams and especially rapid transit, especially when you don’t have data
on your phone because that’s roaming and you don’t want to spend the money.
Elevated transit like the Vancouver SkyTrain or San Francisco BART is always a treat for
its views of the skyline, neighbourhoods, and natural features like the mountains,
although taking pictures or videos through the windows of the train usually doesn’t work out
quite as nicely as you hope. Sometimes you can get good shots of the city from a platform,
although sometimes your platform is in the middle of the highway. Underground metros
or subways don’t give you the same views, obviously, but in a lot of cities the metro
is itself a destination that you want to see for the architecture and art and just because it’s
an iconic part of the city. Another good use of transit on a trip is to save money or get
a bigger hotel room by staying outside the main city and taking transit in. For our trip to San
Francisco we stayed in Berkeley with a 30-minute BART connection to the city. This was only a good
idea though because we had things we wanted to see and do in Berkeley too. If at all possible,
we avoid staying in hotels off by the airport or industrial areas of the city, even if they’re a
really good deal, because we don’t want to have to do a long commute to get anywhere we would want to
see. It’s fine to commute in for some things but it’s much better if you can also casually walk
around and see things in the morning or evening without having to make a whole trip out of it
Obviously, all of this is caveated by the fact that walking and cycling are not just how we
get around in our daily lives, they’re also two of our main hobbies, so your mileage may vary.
There’s nothing wrong with seeing a city from a tour bus if you want a more relaxing setup.
You might also just be less interested in city exploration. Lots of people visit places for
the food or the beaches instead. Thanks for watching through to the end of the video,
and a special thanks to our supporters on Patreon.