Walking around New Orleans
When we visit cities, my husband and I do not rent a car. Our idea of a vacation does not include driving!! We are always glad to take public transportation, or even just walk.
It was exceptionally easy to do this in New Orleans. I spent the majority of my time in the city taking the streetcar or the bus and walking between neighborhoods. The streetcars serve touristy locations exceptionally well and have a mobile pass system you can use to buy bulk access to all public transit for several days at a time.
Getting around this way was easy and agreeable! The city is small and dense and often extremely walkable, like many cities founded before the invention of the automobile. It is a human-scale place. I spent a lot of time wondering if this is part of the reason it's been so successful as a tourism destination - many tourism hotspots, including of course Disney parks, offer a sense of escape-from-the-norm because they are human-scale and walkable.
We did have a pretty unusual time walking in some parts of the city. Probably because it is the off-season, there were a LOT of sidewalks blocked off for construction. I had to see a lot of disabled folks and parents with children step right out into traffic to avoid this stuff. Sometimes, it was literally just a work crew car parked on the sidewalk? But the narrow streets made car speeds so incredibly low, we just had to roll our eyes at this stuff rather than rage about it.
The tourist areas are particularly dense - the French Quarter in particular is SO compact and pedestrian-oriented that I'm surprised they even allow non-residents or non-workers to drive there.
Modern American cars with bumpers taller than many (short) adults simply don't belong in places like this.
I was curious what locals thought about that, and was able to find several massive debates on this topic on the New Orleans subreddit, lmao. A lot of people saying "permitted drivers ONLY, NOW!!" and other people responding with a dense, insistent inability to imagine a system like this working in the city. It seems like it's a fraught topic right now.
I saw a ton of cyclists in the area and hope to put up a blog post soon of my favorite cycling-related pictures from the trip. The city has a rent-a-bike system which seems undermaintained and underresourced - the entire fleet is apparently ebikes, which is pretty cool, but it's also strangely missing. Throughout our trip, we rarely saw a single dock with more than exactly one blue bike locked up at it. The first time we saw a full docking station, we lost our minds. This became kind of a running joke for us - docking stations near the river in particular seem like they've been completely abandoned. Whether that's due to theft, poor maintenance, or something else, I don't have the knowledge to speculate.
Biking and micromobility seems like a very common transit solution for a lot of people. I saw tons of people on e-scooters (and of course all the weird escooter variants you could imagine). I saw loads of people on regular bikes. There are tons of two-passenger tricycles and tricycle-bikers you can hire to ferry you around the French Quarter and Central Business District areas. I saw a guy on a handmade bike frame which was a big circle with a pink star on the inside?? It was incredible and I'm so mad I don't have a better picture of it. When we went to some nearby quiet residential neighborhoods we saw tons of people on bikes there, too. Everyone was just in mixed traffic, though I did notice a good number of (shitty, paint-only) lanes on major roads.
We did not, however, rent our own bikes at any point. We were getting by just fine with the trolleys and buses, and then later in the trip I came down with something that left me feeling pretty sluggish and tired every day, so I wasn't really in a position to bike.
I don't live here, I can only learn so much from reading Reddit arguments, and I have very little familiarity with the history of transit and bike networks in the city, but I'd call New Orleans an exceptionally easy place to visit without renting a car, and definitely in the top tier of places you can go in the US if you plan to get around by foot.
When you think about cities in the US to visit without a car, you've got to have a big heart and a high degree of tolerance for bullshit. New Orleans has nothing like the train coverage of NYC or Chicago, and we had to contend with summer heat and humidity, but the city is extraordinarily dense, and the "main attractions" are all pretty much in the same place... or, at least, connected to the French Quarter by streetcar and bus. We went out to City Park on two separate days to visit that area and see the art museum, and that streetcar ride is brainlessly easy - as is the ride to Metairie Cemetery, which we visited to find the tomb of my great-great grand uncle.
When I was reading up about transit and streetcars and rent-a-bikes in the city, I saw a lot of stuff online that I recognized from Los Angeles - a widespread cynicism about whether the city could ever get better at providing these services to people. It's a sentiment I'm familiar with and see all day, every day in my own city... but have zero respect for anymore.
It's been a multi-decade conservative project to get us to expect little from one another, to expect little from our cities, and to keep our hopes low. I am a completely random person... but I was really impressed by everyone I saw biking around the city with bikes loaded up with panniers, zooming around on Vespas and ebikes, and riding the bus. It made me kind of jealous!! I think everyone here should ask for more, and should tell the doubters to shut the fuck up. I think this place is really special!