Comment by bluGill
21 hours ago
I said bike distance not walk distance. Typically bike speeds are about four times faster than walking speed so your hour walk is fifteen minutes.
I don't know Sacramento, but if it is as hilly as San Francisco you want an ebike which makes the hills level and is even faster.
Sacramento is largely flat. Topo view w/ bike routes indicated: <https://www.google.com/maps/place/Sacramento,+CA/@38.5615711...>
It has reasonably good biking infrastructure, for the US, but suffers badly from sprawl. There's also the summer heat.
San Francisco is hilly (tough riding), but quite compact. It's generally possible to avoid the worst climbs with modest detours.
Sacramento's sprawl means that it has roughly 1/4 the population density of Sacramento. Travel distances are correspondingly longer, and much commercial development (office, retail) is in suburban hubs / malls / office parks, rather than either downtown or in neighbourhood shopping districts, as with SF.
Again that sounds perfectly bikeable. You seem to be confusing not walkable with must have a car but bikes would just fine.
While the large malls are likely only reachable by cars, I expect small malls are closer and in bike distance.
The issues would generally be 1) traffic (a genuine hazard) and 2) bike parking. Many locations have few, if any, bike racks, and often other street furniture (signage, posts, fences) is poorly-suited to securing a bike.
Downtown / midtown areas are often far more amenable than outlying locations, particularly at malls and office parks.
This isn't to say that you cannot bike places, or take risks (collisions, theft), but it's additional friction. As I said, the infrastructure, by American standards, is actually pretty good. I'm just highlighting the limitations / caveats.