the article calls out how “spontaneous encounters” are limited due to the urban planning and issues with American suburbia. Funny how just this morning, and throughout the return to office campaign, the key benefit for coming back to work has repeatedly been stated as the very same potential for “spontaneous encounters,” but with colleagues.
Ha, so my friend recently accepted a "remote" job. Shortly after he started, they nixed that and started requiring everyone to come to the office most of the time.
The best part is that no one from his team is in the office in his city. So now he has to commute 1.5h a day just to work remotely from the "office."
Friend or neighbor in a car? They get a wave because that's about all you can do because their window is rolled up and they're not going to stop anyway.
Friend or neighbor walking or biking? Pleasant 30 minute conversation about how our summers are going while our kids play together.
Most Americans want it to be that way, and that’s why it is that way.
Zoning laws didn’t push people into a car lifestyle. Americans created those zoning laws because they like the car lifestyle and want to perpetuate it. The same is true for suburban zoning in general. People have not been tricked into this: this is what they want.
Sadly, we have created a monster. I suspect many Americans now don't even know what a community without cars would look like, that it could even work at all.
The average American likely doesn't want a life without cars. That seems to be an HN obsession seemingly (my perception) fueled by people who have lived and stayed in very dense urban areas.
Creating larger spaces that aren't made for cars is great, but people will still need long-range individual transportation.
Correct. The car situation is worse there, which is why I think their theories are so whacky when postulated as "get rid of cars" because it fails to be relevant beyond those areas.
As a former resident of Manhattan, this is where I'm most resentful about car supremacy. I truly don't care that there exist car-centric suburbs. Anybody who lives there knows exactly what they're signing up for. What's insane to me is that we allow cars to dominate even our most urban spaces. When I would walk to work through Midtown, my senses were practically assaulted by automobiles. Honking, speeding, stereos blasting, engines revving, cars encroaching on the crosswalk, and on and on. It's an enormous quality of life issue and one of the things I hated most about living in NYC.
"Cities are loud and dangerous. This is just life in the big city!" No, no, no, and no. Cars are loud and dangerous. This is a choice. It's not an unavoidable fact of life in cities. We choose to live this way.
> What's insane to me is that we allow cars to dominate even our most urban spaces
NYC would be so much better if it weren't for all the car traffic. It's not the density that's strangling it, it's the car completely degrading the experience.
> "Cities are loud and dangerous. This is just life in the big city!" No, no, no, and no. Cars are loud and dangerous. This is a choice. It's not an unavoidable fact of life in cities. We choose to live this way.
Yes! Americans have a real lack of imagination when it comes to city life. Makes me sad.
They are. Via the same mechanisms - taxes paid to the county, who maintains that property. Plus, suburbanites bring a lot of money into the cities, even though they don't live there.
Cities could incorporate suburbs into their boundaries, yet cities don't want to do that, because despite griping about their lack of paying city taxes, they don't want to pay to maintain/manage those spaces.
I really believe the "suburbs cost cities money" statement is overplayed. Between county taxes (which feed back into the cities in those counties) and HOA (for neighborhood maintenance), they are paying for themselves.
If suburbs were truly paying for themselves, cities would love to incorporate them. As they do in countries where transit oriented suburbs actually do pay for themselves.
The truth is that row houses is the lowest density that still can just barely pay for maintenance of the roads, sewers, water lines, gas lines, electricity lines, and everything else.
Any lower density than that, and the taxes of the residents can't cover the actual costs anymore.
I think it's because the young people online are much more drawn to the active, exciting urban lifestyle than the average American. The average American would much rather have the safety, quiet, and just space that comes with suburban living. People want yards to play with their kids, and that sort of spread-out living just necessitates cars. Housing prices aren't high because of cars. Housing prices are high because people want their own personal space.
Nobody's going to build a rail system with a thousand subway stations connecting every neighborhood in a US metro area. That would cost like a trillion dollars, plus maintenance. It's just not feasible to cater good public transport to people living that spread out. And no one wants to walk miles to a less-dense rail system or take some slow bus route.
And outside of major cities, I've never heard of someone complain about cars. Most people are perfectly happy with cars. Sure they might think trains are cool, but they wouldn't want to move inward for it or pay whatever cost would be necessary for trains to come outward.
While all that might be true, it is also true that hardly anyone would be willing to cover the true cost of living in rural areas far away from things. In pretty much every country I'm aware of the urban population is strongly subsidising the rural. And that is only covering first order cost (just look at the massive subsidies to get broadband to rural communities), if we would put prizes on second order cost like pollution, CO2... rural living would become unpopular very quickly (the reality already is that there is a massive move into the cities not the other way around).
Could you be specific about how the urban population is subsidizing the rural? Also, where does most of your food come from?
What do you mean in regards to CO2? I'd suggest that many people living a rural lifestyle completely offset their CO2 footprint due to carbon sequestration. I know I have enough trees and vegetation on my acreage to completely offset my carbon emissions. But, of course, to counter your argument I really only need to offset the extra emissions that come with driving an extra n miles into the city.
You posted this comment once, it was flagged by users, and you deleted it. If your intention was to post a new version that didn't break the site guidelines, I think that's probably ok (albeit borderline). But in that case you should have removed this too:
> Love the "gosh if you want to eat we need to fund lifestyle ruralism with billions of dollars of infrastructure annually" whataboutism, like that's supposed to be some kind of a gotcha
That's obviously against the site guidelines. Please make your substantive points without doing that in the future.
Recreating your post after it was flagged and dead is classless. I'm surprised someone did this so brazenly. I'm not going to respond to all of the points that you raised that I think are false or misleading, but I'll respond to some.
> There's a lot of miles of power lines and roads for what is, in the end, maybe 10k people in that county outside the cities/towns.
The tldr of this is that the higher number of connections to the energy grid, the higher the cost of the grid. It doesn't really matter how you distribute them.
> But we don't need to be encouraging "lifestyle ruralism". That's extremely infrastructure-heavy and it's absolutely true that people living in, say, Mikado MI (pop 899) or along one of the state highways out there are using disproportionate amount of infrastructure funding relative to the number of actual people there.
I grew up near rural areas and lived in one for a bit. I don't know what "infrastructure heavy" you're talking about. My water was drawn from a well into a community water storage tank that was then pumped to the local community. This was repeated all through that area. Water, in this case, was a co-op as well as energy. Sewage was done on-site; I had an aerobic septic system. For all intents and purposes, with respect to the angle of your argument, the footprint of my town was miniscule compared to a city.
More anecdotally, when I worked for a water startup we had a way easier time getting into rural areas because many of them had never had public water infrastructure.
Uncivil, violates site rules. You can express yourself without putdowns.
> I'm not going to respond to all of the points that you raised that I think are false or misleading, but I'll respond to some.
Eh, rather dismissive yourself.
> I grew up near rural areas and lived in one for a bit. I don't know what "infrastructure heavy" you're talking about.
How many miles of roads and power lines in your rural area, divided across how many people?
Again, I very clearly expressed what I meant by "infrastructure heavy", but with you self-admittedly not really being a full and fair participant in the discussion, I can see why you might have some confusion.
> Recreating your post after it was flagged and dead is classless. I'm surprised someone did this so brazenly.
The saying goes that people use the "downvote" like a "disagree" button and when it comes to political debates people use the "flag" button like an "I really really disagree" button. If I don't see a particular reason a post is flagged then yeah, I don't really have a problem with recreating it.
I shouldn't be suppressed by average users for expressing a well-reasoned argument they disagree with, nor censured for a single disagreeable line. Even you yourself cannot avoid technical violations of the site rules, your comment itself is violating the same rules to the same extent as mine.
Realistically, that rule is a "please", as I've been repeatedly told when I point out violations of it, and virtually every comment has something that someone can be offended about. I'm not going out and attacking people here, it's just a "jaywalking" violation that everyone does and people fall back on when they're losing an argument. The strictest interpretation of the rule essentially forbids any sort of "active-voice" argument that's strong enough to make a positive point (because someone can ALWAYS find be offended by any positive point) and that's incredibly harmful to discourse.
If you have a problem, call it out specifically, or get dang, otherwise if people don't bother replying and are just using flags as a way to suppress opinions they disagree with then yeah, I don't really care and I'm not going to be suppressed just because of some meta-gaming from people who disagree with me so little that they can't even reply.
Similarly, I find your "won't respond to the comment because I disagree with it" against the spirit of this community and doesn't belong here either. If you have nothing to say, don't post at all, but "cheerleading" is not constructive or beneficial to the discourse here at all.
Spirit of the rules vs text of the rules, my fellow. Your comment violates the textual rules. Actually your post attacks me as an individual, so in that sense it's really kinda worse, isn't it? And on the flip side, I was dismissive of an argument in a single line of a 3000 character comment. Oh no.
> Similarly, I find your "won't respond to the comment because I disagree with it" against the spirit of this community...
Not what I said, I was just clarifying I disagree with most of what you said but I'm only going to respond to a few points. I didn't have time to respond to each of them because my lunch period was ending soon. On top of that, nobody here owes you some full-scale rebuttal to a long reply; I disagree that it's part of the guidelines. I'm happy to read them again though.
You're right, maybe I shouldn't have called it out. Understand that what you're callously calling a "lifestyle" is a life I lived, not out of a "lifestyle" choice but because I wasn't saving any money. I lived in a trailer; not exactly a lifestyle choice. Mixed with factual inaccuracies and misrepresentations, you're right - I probably wasn't the person to respond to this without two sentences of emotion.
It's not an offset if it would have been that way anyway - In other words, you owning/living in a rural area does nothing extra to offset carbon emissions, because that rural area would have offset it regardless.
The infrastructure-to-population cost ratio of urban areas is way, way higher than rural areas. A meter of footpath, road or sewer in a city is reused by (just spitballing numbers) 10x as many people compared to a suburb, and probably 100x vs a rural area. Infrastructure is just much cheaper in cities relative to the served population, because so much less land area needs to be covered.
Since people generally pay the same taxes no matter where they live, the net result is cities generally fund a lot of infrastructure for other areas, as they are so much more efficient.
There's nothing necessarily wrong with this for genuinely rural areas - we do need farms etc, so infrastructure built to serve them is well spent. The issue arises when we sprawl with suburbs, as they don't serve any particular purpose that couldn't be fulfilled by a dense city, but cost much more in terms of infrastructure expense.
I have no problem with people living in suburbs, so long as they bear most of the cost of living that lifestyle, rather than dense urban areas funding them.
That is arguably because US cities suck. They don't have good public transportation, the kind that even well to do people choose to ride regularly like they do in say Tokyo, London, Switerland, Netherlands, etc.. They also don't have good bicycle infrustructure. And they have lots of crime or crime of the types and amounts that get people to want to live in the safer suburbs. Even the cities in the US are usually designed around cars, not people
With the rising obesity rates in America I feel that doesn't help the situation either. Many would probably rather ride in a climate controlled car than get out of breath and sweaty walking. Which is somewhat sad since more physical activity including walking or biking would help a lot here.
I don't want a life without a car within the constraints of the current options for going car-free within the US-- mainly living in a large high density city, and still having to contend with vehicular traffic and pollution. But, I strongly desire life without a car.
If there was a 50K population max car-free walkable town with all the necessities available within said town, I would move there in an instant. I've searched for this, in the past, it doesn't exist. I live in the next best, a <50K population town where I can get most necessities via walking/biking, but have to contend with hostile vehicular traffic that is especially daunting on longer routes to the outskirts of town that are only serviced by freeways (like the college I used to work at)-- I am terrified to bicycle on these routes with 85mph traffic brushing past (technically those sections are not "freeways", but are indistinguishable save the signage "begin freeway" [no bikes] "end freeway" [bikes allowed]).
For long range travel, expand passenger trains. There is an Amtrak stop in my town, and I travel via Amtrak extensively to visit friends-- it is a very nice way to travel long distances.
I know a lot of Americans who are well-travelled and have seen world-class transit in Europe and Asia, and most of them still choose to live in suburbs.
The average American wants to live in a detached house that they own. This does not lead to dense cities. It leads to sprawl, which is what we got because it’s what we want.
Yup. And the options available to us have been limited by decades of zoning policy encouraging single-family homes only.
My girlfriend and I are about to move to the suburbs to be closer to her family, but it’s to an inner-ring suburb with excellent transit back into the city. There are maybe two towns for this in the area that aren’t outrageously priced, and even those two are above average.
I spent time in Singapore where living in dense high rises and traveling on a very well run public transit system is commonplace.
Same thing. I found that people who could afford cars bought them for the convenience (despite the 100% import duty and $100,000 COE charge for 10 year permit).
And same with detached housing. It’s was pretty much the ideal for families. Constant complaints of noise in apartment buildings, crappy neighbors, limited space.
Don’t get me wrong, many people like the apartment living car-free. Mostly, young, childless people. But when kids came into the picture or even wealth increased and people got older, preferences changed.
The problem is the vast middle ground between those two extremes that just doesn't exist in America. In Europe they seem to be more commonly called some variation of "villages". Single family homes with small lots, with larger community greenspace, and a small central hub with some shopping for necessities and a reliable connection to a larger public transit system.
Meanwhile, the American suburb seems to have been modeled after manor estates but shrunk down to a level where it doesn't make sense. Each property has more personal land, but not enough to be "self-sufficient". That slight lowering of density prevents easy walkable access to any sort of central community hub, which makes it financially unviable to have a small community shopping district. That makes a shared public transit access point difficult to implement, since there's no community hub. Everything else spirals from there, making cars (and particularly bigger cars - remember, you need to keep the "estate" supplied with the necessities from a store located a 20-30 minute drive away) the only way for a family to function.
I don't want to live in Hong Kong density, but I absolutely don't want to live in the typical American suburbia.
>Meanwhile, the American suburb seems to have been modeled after manor estates but shrunk down to a level where it doesn't make sense. Each property has more personal land, but not enough to be "self-sufficient".
> remember, you need to keep the "estate" supplied with the necessities from a store located a 20-30 minute drive away)
People don't live in the suburbs to start a mini-farm. If you have to drive 20-30 minutes just for necessities you live in a rural area, not suburbs.
Kids are noisy and have plenty of energy. You don’t want to be staying below me in an apartment building. The noise of my 2 kids jumping and running around would drive you nuts. And oh - they will have friends over as well. And if they’re doing band or music practice - oh boy :)
Yeah - they could go out. But they’ll come back in and its messy and noisy everywhere.
It’s just the way kids are. I guess folks need to be careful what they wish for. I’m all for accessible and densely populated housing. But I’m used to the noise.
I'd have no problem with having you as my neighbor. Living in a German brick apartment building, when my neighbor has his subwoofer on maximum, I can still barely hear it over the sound of my own breath.
I can watch movies at cinema reference volume at home at 3am and my neighbors don't notice it either.
Your problem isn't with apartment buildings, it's with shoddy american construction standards.
You're right - I do not want to live in dense cities. I did it for years, and hated it. I was happy when I was able to move out into a detached home where I can use speakers and not have to worry about a neighbor getting angry.
It's only one neighbor out of the 6 I would share separating walls with, but one is all it takes.
Not really. Small grocery stores lack variety (by necessity, when their potential market is limited to families living in a 1-2 mile radius). Two restaurants lack variety. It makes for stupidly boring food choices over time.
Frankly, I'd end up not using them, ordering even more over the internet, and interacting even less with folks nearby.
As living in such place.. It's still „oh let's drive to bigger shop or THAT butcher this time“. Or „other“ restaurant.
And people living downtown still do the same - driving to same big malls in outskirts, restaurants in other towns etc. The funniest case is when people live downtown and drive to non-downtown workplaces :)
> Zoning that allows ONLY single-family detached housing, and no retail or business, forces car-dependency.
A lot of suburbs are not like that. I've lived in the Bay Area suburbs for most of my life and I don't think I've ever lived more than half a mile from a shopping center with a grocery store and restaurants. Every main road has them. Between the main roads, there are houses.
I fall into this boat. I lived abroad for many years, did the digital nomad thing, have been really all over the world. I love walkability and have looked for it here in the US as a driving basis for housing selection. All that said, I absolutely will not share walls with someone else. I used to work nights, and sleep in the day, and I'm still a night owl. It is untenable to me to have to deal with complaints because I am watching Netflix at 9:30PM, or to have to have any shared systems which I am now limited away from being able to fix myself.
On the flipside, I don't want a huge place to live, so I am actively trying to find (or build) a small (less than 1800sqft) narrow (3 stories, like a detached townhouse) house that is extremely ecological (passive house standards) in a walkable area. When I considered permanently moving to Europe, places like this were actually not horribly uncommon, although they weren't as common as apartment blocks. In the US, places like this are near impossible to find because most houses are built by "production builders" who optimize for the largest square footage possible on a lot space allowed by local code to increase selling price, and do it as the lowest cost (meets code, maybe, basically same as getting a C grade).
Frankly, I'm not sure it would work. The population of the US is more than double what it was in 1950. I personally don't want to live in a dense population area - it's overwhelming, panic inducing, yet still somehow lonely.
So what would a car-less community I could tolerate look like? Probably a lot like it does right now, just with more commercial entities within a mile or two of my home. It would also be a lot harder for me to access bigger commercial entities (like Walmart, Target, et.al.) since it would involve public transit that is about an hour and a half away (it's 10m by car, fwiw) in a higher density (and cost) city.
I'd love better public transit. But public transit in rural areas (and there will always be rural areas as long as there are farms and ranches, and communities to support them) is minimal to non-existent.
Use is infrequent, meaning it would either have to be subsidized, which never makes folks in the city happy, or cost an arm and a leg per trip, making it impractical for rural users.
Yeah you have to draw the line somewhere. I grew up in a town of a few thousand people, 45m drive from the nearest "city."
With that population density it's never going to make sense to put something like light rail on that route. So these people will continue to use cars. And that's fine.. hopefully cars continue to get safer and easier on the environment.
I think it's the urban/suburban sprawls akin to LA that really could benefit from better transit/walkability.
True but not quite accurate. Locals influence zoning laws when they speak at city/town council meetings and go door to door trying to influence or get the support of their neighbors for them. It’s not “most” voters: but only in the sense that that is true for all public policy. Zoning isn’t special.
The streetcar “conspiracy” is a tired old cliche. Americans wanted cars. They would have saved the streetcars if they had valued them as highly as they valued cars.
That being a major factor in the demise of streetcars is highly disputed. There was an interesting conversation about this on hn last month. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32166175
At this point I think most Americans simply can’t conceive of a society that isn’t car centric. Some want a car centric society because they don’t know another way. Walkable communities are overall healthier and I think it would be best to get away from a car centric society even if it’s something people don’t desire. The average commute is something like 20 miles one way. This number increases as the population increases and maintaining that infrastructure long term is a waste of resources and environmentally unsound.
Manhattan apartments are subject to a lot of the same price forces as commercial equipment. Their cost reflects the ready access to money making opportunties.
They would be if there wasn't so much money to be made in Manhattan.
The price of Manhattan apartments has almost nothing to do with how desirable it is - other than the fact that desirability is largely a function of the financial opportunities there.
Park City, Utah is expensive and nothing like Manhattan - so is Malibu and Ketchum, Idaho.
San Jose is a large city and much more expensive than NYC (in terms of house prices). Outside of downtown and a few neighborhoods nearby, it's mostly a car-hell.
Los Angeles isn't far behind in terms of prices - it's the second largest city in the US - and the majority of it is less walkable than halfway decent suburbs.
On the flip side, Chicago is mostly walkable and bikable - yet it's substantially cheaper. Does that mean people don't want that? I doubt it.
You can find plenty of counter-examples based on price and population and trying to extrapolate what people want.
People like a lot of different things. Looking at one desirable place isn't going to tell you much.
If you can make an argument that Manhattan has so much financial opportunity BECAUSE it's walkable, bikable, mass-transitable - I'm listening. But keep Chicago in mind. Because it has all of those things - is the second most densely populated city and the third most populous - yet it's basically average price for the country - which makes sense, because it also has average wages and high property taxes...
You’re comparing incomparable values. San Jose house prices are high because you can’t amortize the land costs. Square foot by square foot, Manhattan land is far more expensive than San Jose. Chicago land may appear cheaper, but it’s only because they have higher taxes on it than San Jose.
> Square foot by square foot, Manhattan land is far more expensive than San Jose.
People can't finance land. You finance housing. Sqft / sqft for housing, Manhattan is not much more expensive. The land is much more expensive BECAUSE you can build much more housing.
Manhattan does not sit atop some massive pile of natural resources. Opportunity is great there exactly because there are so many people. Network effects are large. By the way, I do not think New York is expensive because it is desirable. It is expensive because it is desirable, there aren't enough places to live, and they aren't building more because of regulations. But it would not be expensive if no one wanted to live there.
This is pretty far afield at this point, but while Chicago may not be a developer's paradise, it's substantially better than New York.
In any case, though, the original question is whether population density actually makes a place less desirable. The mere fact that Chicago is not cheap (not simply inexpensive, but actually cheap) contradicts the claim that population density is something people don't want.
People want opportunity. Opportunity comes with density.
They don't want density for the sake of density.
NYC has better opportunities - that's why it's denser. It's not denser because it's more desirable, and then it just so happens that it also has opportunity.
This is true for Shenzhen and Beijing and Mexico City and Paris and London and Mumbai and every major city.
I'm not sure we're really disagreeing at this point. Density has a bunch of effects. It creates congestion. But it also creates opportunity. Without the people in New York, there would not be opportunity there. People _wish_ their front door led to downtown Manhattan, and their backdoor led to 100 pristine acres in rural Montana. What people _want_ is what they pay for. And that is to live in places with big network effects, which require large populations.
NYC is located at the mouth of the Hudson and one end of Long Island sound, two relatively sheltered waterways. For hundreds of years this facilitated huge amounts of resource extraction from the region. Upon this resource extraction economy resource processing was built. Naturally it was located where the labor was the the products flowed through, the port. From there industrialization and an industrialized economy way built upon the resource processing. Through little other than historical luck of geography of the industries (that really took hold in NYC was finance. It has been that finance industry that has carried NYC through the transition to a service economy.
So basically, NYC is valuable today because it was yesterday and if you follow the recursion back to the base case you find natural resources.
While the natural resources are now gone or irrelevant they were the startup capital for the NYC we have today. There is no inherent value to a mass of people unless there is some productive activity for them to engage in. NYC got lucky and developed a finance industry. See Detroit for what happens when you don't make the transition.
We are in agreement. In the past, natural resources were important for New York's population growth. Today, they are irrelevant, and the value of New York is in the network effects, which are due to the large population. "This is satire, right?" is a funny thing to write in a comment that doesn't contradict what I wrote at all.
In contrast to Manhattan, Tokyo apartments are cheap, or, at least, their price has remained flat when adjusted for inflation over decades. That's because of government policy that encourages housing supply. Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-housing-crisis-in-japan-ho...
If New York could similarly encourage speedier housing construction and replacement, as well as effectively building a similarly expansive and reliable transit network, they could achieve the exact same results as Tokyo. (Note: Even though Japan has had periods of economic stagnation and low birth rates, Tokyo itself has consistently grown in population with few exceptions as Japan has become more urbanized.)
If the suburbs are so great for housing supply, why do suburban Boston/San Jose/Austin/Denver homes cost so much? Why are Chicago's most prestigious zip codes more affordable than living an hour outside of San Francisco?
The truth is that the places with high housing prices don't have high prices based on whether they're suburban, rural, or urban, they have high prices when demand exceeds supply. It's that simple.
Agreed. My point was that the reason you can finance such high-density construction in Tokyo (and New York) is exactly because so many people want to live there, which in turn is because of the network effects created by the people who do live there. It's a virtuous cycle, if you can get it.
Why are cars and phones giant these days? Is it because nobody wants smaller ones, or because perverse market incentives have distorted offerings in a chase for product growth?
Why is the USA unbearably car centric? Is it because nobody wants to get around any other way, or because perverse market incentives have distorted the world around us in a chase for GDP growth?
Some people like cars. But the price premium of the small number of walkable places in the US (and the fact that that kind of infrastructure is literally illegal to build today) implies that there is a significant portion of people who like walkable places.
> Why are cars and phones giant these days? Is it because nobody wants smaller ones, or because perverse market incentives have distorted offerings in a chase for product growth?
Do you have kids? If you did, you’d know that many people want bigger cars. I drive one of the smallest cars you can buy in the U.S. Now that I have a kid, I’m going to buy a big SUV. Kids require a lot of stuff. Taking them on public transport is a huge pain. Even if you don’t have kids, I’m sure you’ve been annoyed by a stroller on the subway.
Those big cars are the kind of "perverse market incentive" I'm talking about.
Why do you need a big car to transport your children? Because:
- you can't walk anywhere useful with your kids (so you must get in a car)
- public transportation is inconvenient or expensive
- biking is dangerous
- the big car makes you feel safer because all of the other cars are big
Why are those things the way that they are? Because people chose to drive cars, live far from useful things in the suburbs, and that eroded the ability to bike or provide useful and affordable public transportation.
I grew up in a car-centric place. The "big SUV" as your only gateway to the outside world is effectively a prison. You can't do things on your own. You don't build a mental map of the world you live in. You don't get to do things outside unless it's in your yard or at some structured activity accessed by car. Why do you think the "teenagers hate the suburbs" trope is so common?
I know raising a kid is difficult, even though I have not raised one myself. I know that they require all kinds of stuff to take out into the world. But somehow in NYC people get around with a single stroller and a backpack with kids, frequently taking public transit.
> Taking them on public transport is a huge pain. Even if you don’t have kids, I’m sure you’ve been annoyed by a stroller on the subway.
Maybe at rush hour. But I largely just appreciate the fact that a parent is trying to raise their kid to walk places and live in the world, instead of isolating them in a car in a suburban hellscape. Again -- perverse incentives have made the world this way. It doesn't have to be this way.
Sorry, you don't have kids so you just don't get it. I didn't get it either before I had a kid. All of the reasons you listed, bad public transport, dangerous biking, safety, etc. have nothing to do with why I want to buy an SUV. There are just so many items involved with raising a child. Yes, you might be able to take public transit so your kid can see the doctor, as long as you time it to be at an off-peak time, but there are so many other cases where you need a large car. A very basic example: You have a young child in NYC and you want to spend the weekend with your parents who live in Westchester. Without a kid, getting on Metro North with a small duffel bag of clothes would be trivial. With a kid, you need to bring a crib, toys, stroller, diapers, multiple changes of clothes, and maybe even a high table with you. Good luck getting all of that on the train, especially with a screaming kid!
The failure in your reasoning is that you see parents on the train, so you think that's their only mode of transportation. Yes, you can take the kid on the train for certain errands. Other times, however, having a car is 100x more convenient. And that is true everywhere.
Not to mention that the more stops along the way, the more "legs" of a trip involving subway line changes, bus transfers, and walks you have to make Let's say you want to stop at a park and admire the scenery, stop somewhere else to get some ice cream, stop at the hardware store because you remembered you need something, and so on. Making all those detours is much easier with a car and you're way less limited in what you can bring back with you.
> Sorry, you don't have kids so you just don't get it.
I know you prefaced this with "sorry" but this is incredibly condescending. You're literally starting your argument with "it is impossible for you to empathize" -- but I have plenty of friends and family members with children and very much understand your struggle. Have a little more faith.
Your "very basic example" is exactly the kind of niche case trip where I would suggest you SHOULD use a car because of American infrastructure.
I'm mostly talking about daily errands and recreation in your home city. Going to the park, or the beach, or visiting some shops, or having dinner, or going to the doctor, or going to school shouldn't require a big SUV. If they do, I suspect you're transporting a lot more crap with you than you truly need for your kid. And you're ignoring the negative externality of imprisoning your child in a car-centric world where they have no freedom whatsoever.
I find it extremely condescending to say you understand and empathize with something you have no direct experience with. Like put your money with your mouth is. Instead of telling people to live a certain way, live that way yourself and get back to me. Imagine we were talking about something else, say race, instead of of child rearing. Would you really consider the opinion of a white person saying “I understand the experience of black people in America because I have a lot of black friends” valid? Sounds pretty crazy to me.
Please be respectful in your comment responses. I'm merely suggesting that you could raise a single child without a giant SUV. Child rearing and race are not the same experience. To imply as much is disrespectful to people who suffer as a result of racism in our world. It sounds like you have a lot of baggage to work out, I hope things get better for you.
Forgive me if I'm wrong, it sounds like you're in the "Before 1st Grade" phase of life with your kids. When my daughter passed that, there was the magnet school 45 minutes away (but 15 minutes at off-peak), play dates with kids at the magnet school who are flung all over the large metropolitan basin in which we live, Girl Scouts, Theatre Troupe, Acting Lessons, Martial Arts, Bike Rides, Park Days and various other extracurriculars. There are not enough hours in the day to make those trips using public transit where I live. And showing up on time for any of that using transit??? You've got to be kidding.
You realize that people were raising children for millenia before the invention of SUVs, and are still raising children in most of the world without them?
I have two children; for most of their childhood we did not have a car at all (though we occasionally rented a midsized one for road trips), now we have a small one. Traveling with a stroller is certainly a hassle, but they do fit on public transit and in small cars. The crib is probably the one tricky part, but there are several solutions that don't require an SUV.
It seems to me that the massive car and the habit of packing half the household into it for a trip sort of went hand in hand, but this is absolutely not the only way to manage raising children.
When your kids are just a few years older, you'll really appreciate that they can get themselves to their friends, schools, and other destinations without your car's help.
We didn't use a stroller on the T and instead opted for baby wearing. When they hit 1yo, we used a cargo bike and that still serves us extremely well to this day. In K-5, they bike themselves to school and camps (not alone, still escorted because cars are still present).
Thank you for raising your children in a sustainable way that allows them to participate in society instead of being carted around in vehicles. I'm sure US society creates plenty of roadblocks for that lifestyle that waste your time, money, and effort. But I'm sure your children will thank you someday (if they don't already!) for providing such a human environment to grow up in.
We must have very different kinds of kids. My kids hate the car, it's basically like jail to them, whereas on the bus we can talk and play together. We don't use the bus, but that's because bus service in our area isn't very good.
I think most Americans would like to have the conveniences of a walkable area and the space/affordability advantages of a suburb. Some parts of the world accomplish this by building many walkable towns and neighborhoods that people can live in. For some reason in much of the US we give people a binary choice of living in a small number of extremely expensive, dense cities -- or living in sidewalkless suburban strip-mall hell with a massive commute. I don't think any of this precisely "what people want", really: most folks are just given a very small menu to choose from.
Agreed. And we used to build those in-between places in the US; most of the remaining walkable small towns in the US were built a long time ago. (I’m about to move to one because yeah that’s what I’m looking for; glad I live on the east coast where there are still a few options.) But we’ve largely outlawed building any new ones.
Walkable towns abound in the US. They’re all what most would consider “rural” but a town that’s not even two miles wide can’t help but be walkable.
But people don’t want them, they prefer the suburbs or the city - the suburbs often because it’s near the jobs in the city and yet still has some of the spacing they want.
One solution is to stop building suburbs as they were in the 50s and build them as many small towns even if butted up against each other. Even the worst suburbs have shopping areas, etc, that could be spread out and made accessible.
> I think most Americans would like to have the conveniences of a walkable area and the space/affordability advantages of a suburb
I don't know about that. It seems to me that most Americans will sit and wait in their idling car for several minutes so they can get a parking spot that is 100 feet closer to the store's entrance.
I personally park my car immediately when I get in a lot and start walking, which makes it very noticeable how many people would rather hunt for a spot slightly closer. Also, in larger shopping centers my observation is that most people will move their car between each shop to minimize walking.
Most people want what they have been told to be desirable. No offense to free thinkers out there, but our mind is mostly shaped by our experiences in society.
It is ironic that the thread that demonstrates Americans' philosophy of car-loving also demonstrates Americans' philosophy of decision making. Sure Bobby, you're in control, this was all your decision :)
And yet, the most expensive places to live in dense areas are single family homes. Like how much does a brownstone in Greenwich Village cost? 15 million? Clearly in any environment, a single family home is the most desirable option. People may be willing the settle for a different option in exchange for some other benefits like having a lot to do, but given the choice they’ll still pick a single family home.
It seems a bit of a stretch to suggest that the public at large "wanted" to adjust zoning laws to end up with a car-centric environment. Automakers created the concept of jaywalking [1]. Judges defended the rights of the public to enjoy the streets without cars [2]. Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California, Phillips Petroleum, GM, and Mack Trucks were convicted of conspiring to monopolize the sale of buses and related products to local transit companies [3]. We live in a manufactured environment, and its manufacture was the result of a decades-long marketing and lobbying effort by industry interest groups, not some grassroots democratic movement.
That said, people generally resist any kind of change. That's _why_ it took nearly 50 years of lobbying and an unelected tyrant like Robert Moses to, for instance, really shift New York City's infrastructure in favor of cars. The question is how to make it clear to individuals why a life stuck in traffic isn't in their best interest anymore and hold the government accountable for making improvements.
The law against jaywalking is an excellent law. Look at some of those colorized YouTube videos of cities in the early 1900s, like this one: https://youtu.be/1Ok_lwYyHWo
It’s insanity. People dodging cars, cars dodging people and each other. At modern road speeds that would result in mass death.
Besides all that, yes of course we live in a manufactured environment. All environments are manufactured to some degree. And of course car companies lobby for things. But lobbying is not guaranteed to win. People strongly resist things they don’t like. You know what else GM was doing at the time? Selling lots and lots of cars to people who wanted to buy them.
Not necessarily. Lots more people would want to live in cities, but it's cities that are keeping people out.
You wouldn't want to build a 10 story apartment building out on the edge of town away from transit - but it's patently bizarre that cities like Seattle and San Francisco have single family zoning within walking distance of their downtown core.
> they like the car lifestyle and want to perpetuate it
Are you sure? Polls show that most people in US are fond of the walkable spaces of university and company campuses, European cities, Disneyworld, even shopping malls.
The car has done so much damage to our world and most people are completely blind to it. Obesity, climate change, isolation/loneliness, excess deaths/injuries from collisions, out of control housing costs, can all be tied back in a major way to car centric society. And yet people will defend their car and the "convenience" of it like their life depends on it, and force it down the throats of everyone around them. Boggles the mind.
The modern human sits for 95% of the day. We evolved to forage out in the environment for resources, not to wake up just to sit at breakfast then sit in the car then sit at work then sit in the car then sit in front of the tv or computer then sleep. It's no wonder so many people have issues with maintaining a healthy weight when they literally aren't moving in a given day.
Easy, supply and demand. Before cars, dense housing was the norm, but cars popularized spreading everything out as much as possible so you have room for wide roads and lots of parking.
Less density -> less housing overall -> decreased supply -> increased prices
Less density doesn't imply less housing, especially when empty land is cheap, as it typically is in the USA. You just use more space.
I hate cars, and I hate how expensive housing is, but as far as I can tell, housing is even more expensive in places (in the USA anyway) where cars are less necessary.
This is mostly due to supply and demand. Disregarding market forces, low density housing is some of the most expensive out there. This is due to higher per-unit construction, utility, transportation, and infrastructure costs.
Unfortunately, low density construction is the default in the USA. High density housing gets bogged down in reviews and permitting, and medium density housing is effectively illegal in most cities in the country.
If we had actually been building medium and high density housing over the past century, the housing problems we're experiencing today wouldn't be nearly as bad. But that housing is sadly rare, and we now have to play catch-up.
The problem is that the supply/demand argument is that the demand largely isn't from people, it's from investment firms. And investment firms don't give two hoots about neighborhoods, density, cars, or anything other than the property's value appreciating over time (which it will, since we can't (without spending gobs of money) create more land).
Also, my personal opinion: I never want to live in a dense, or even semi-dense population center again. Living in a single family detached home with a small yard is fantastic. I can use speakers.
Condos are much worse speculation vehicles compared to houses, since most of what you own is (depreciating) structure compared to (appreciating) land. To the extent that you want housing for people vs. speculators, you want multifamily.
Do you have a citation for this? My intuition is that the construction of low density track housing would have far less regulatory burden than high density housing. It also has a (more) robust labor force in the US especially compared with high density construction, a framing carpenter does not a steel fitter make.
> High density housing gets bogged down in reviews and permitting,
Yes, because it's more high stakes and should be subject to a greater level of scrutiny than a 1-2 story single family dwelling. Check out the Millennium tower debacle or that apartment building that collapsed in Florida if you think otherwise.
I don't have a citation for construction costs, and I will concede that there are many factors that may make some low density developments cheaper per unit then some higher density development.
However, construction is only part of the picture. Low density development imposes terrible financial costs for cities that contain them. That's because the taxable value per square mile is much lower, but infrastructure (sewer, roads, etc) has the same per-mile maintenance and replacement costs. The infrastructure maintenance costs in many low density developments is often greater then the amount of tax revenue the development generates.
For more information on the hidden costs of low density development, I can't recommend this video [1] by Not Just Bikes enough.
> has the same per-mile maintenance and replacement costs.
No it doesn't, the cost to tear up a street in a high density area is much higher than it is in a low density area, especially if we are looking at hidden economic costs.
You're comparing only the densest places (i.e. expensive places with mostly apartments) to only the least dense places, giant houses on big lots. Look at a pre-1950s / railroad neighborhood of basically any smaller/older city in the US, you'll often find a walkable, affordable neighborhood of single family homes.
Also - cheap land does not mean that it's cheap to build and maintain. Almost all of the infrastructure required to build (sewer, power, roads, etc) scale up with area, not density.
You should spend some time and look at what housing prior to cars was really like as you are very wrong that "dense housing was the norm".
Prior to cars, there were large "estate" houses with separate carriage houses for the horses. These homes often sat on very large plots of land. Prior to that, was old farm houses, where a neighbour could be a KM away?
You seem to be thinking of "row housing" which at least in north america was more a post-WWII design?
Not to mention the increased cost of maintaining the infrastructure for all of that suburban sprawl. The farther apart things are the more asphalt, water and sewage pipes, fire department coverage, school buses and drivers, street lamps, etc. are required. That money has to come from somewhere.
I'm working on a team to make alternative YouTube recommendations. Here is our list of similar channels for Not Just Bikes which includes dozens of urban design and transit channels like Oh the Urbanity! and Shifter:
A developer can only build if they can achieve a 5-6% return on total costs
So 5% of $50k = $2,500 of income, or assuming 30% expenses, $2,500 / 70% margin = $3,500 of income needed per stall per year, or almost $300 per month per stall of underground parking provided
Surface parking is less expensive, like $10-20k/stall but you get the point.
Where do the surface parking costs ($10-20k/stall) come from? That's astonishing to me -- I would guess that a dirt driveway can be almost free, a gravel driveway can be close to free, and a paved driveway costs a few hundred per car space.
Housing density becomes a problem above a certain level if everyone expects to use a car. Parking and traffic become annoying if not crippling, so communities widely support and enact bans on denser residential development.
Restricting supply like this can be fine if demand doesn't grow, but it can be a huge problem for housing affordability if your local economy is booming.
Car-oriented development seems to scale efficiently - bringing in a lot of new, cheap land - up until you hit the level of traffic that people will tolerate. Then it's done. New neighborhoods take too long to commute from. Densifying existing neighborhoods threatens parking, which people who live there still need, because they still live in an overall car-dependent metro. Overlaying public transit doesn't do much either, since people's origins and destinations are evenly dispersed instead of clustering around stations like they would in a real public transit city. Without transportation capacity there's no growth, and without growth it's a zero sum competition for existing homes.
You can get a whole hell of a lot further before you hit the physical limits of public transit network architectures.
If it helps, it's the result of a deliberate domestic propaganda campaign. I usually point to "The Real Reason Jaywalking Is A Crime" (Adam Ruins Everything)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxopfjXkArM for the story.
We can see what traffic was like just as motorized carriages began to mix with pedestrians and horses. Here is "San Francisco, a Trip down Market Street, April 14, 1906" upscaled and colorized: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VO_1AdYRGW8
You can see that, at low speeds and modest density, carriages and pedestrians flow together just fine. Although I'm sure there were still lots of accidents, everyone is more-or-less sharing the space. You can already see the problem brewing: horseless carriages can accelerate much faster than horse-drawn carriages.
Our homes are also designed in way that causes alienation from family members. Many rooms have TV and the seating is arranged in such a way that we can compulsively watch to dull our anxiety instead of having meaningful conversations with wife and kids. This is the default and without everyone’s okay in the family it’s hard to change this.
>Our homes are also designed in way that causes alienation from family members.
Have you been in a house from the 1800s or early 1900s? Walls and doors everywhere. Hell, there's a good chance the kitchen sink isn't even in the kitchen. People are much more readily in each others company (for better or worse) in newer houses with their big open spaces.
>Many rooms have TV and the seating is arranged in such a way that we can compulsively watch to dull our anxiety instead of having meaningful conversations with wife and kids.
Back in the "good old days" the kids would be doing some sort of labor (chores or otherwise) as their age and ability allowed and husband and wife would have spent more of their time doing the stuff needed to run the household. We spend far more time interacting with each other these days as a result of the sheer abundance of leisure time. Having daily leisure time with your SO, even if it's also screen time, is basically unheard of by 1920s standards of living.
The seating arrangement in a house is entirely up to you. Hard to believe, but there's not even a hard government-mandated requirement on where your TV is positioned or fee if you forego it. At any rate, most homes have far more flexibility in seating arrangements and remodeling possibilities than your average apartment does. They also tend to have more outdoor seating and arrangements that make it easier for social activities. The garage, too, if properly arranged as a workshop or craft center, can also be a great way to encourage social activity. One can even add a basketball hoop in the driveway, or cornhole in the back yard for additional possibilities.
I also dislike rooms arranged in the 'theatre' style, but my family does like to watch television occasionally. We have a small television cart that we can roll around. It not only lets us put it aside when we're not watching anything, but it can move between rooms. It is actually a computer monitor + speakers + computer + webcam, and we also use it for video conferencing.
I've seen so much anti-car, pro-walkability, pro-transit, pro-bikeability sentiment online recently.
I really hope this is proof of the younger generations -- Millenials, Zoomers, and younger folks even -- waking up to the idea that the USA in particular has become a toxic environment thanks to cars. WFH was a big wakeup call, I think -- once you step away from the commute for a year or two, trying to sit in traffic again seems insane. I guess it's a successful "unboiling of the frog," where we realized that car infratructure has been turned up for the last century to unbearable levels.
I hate cars. I don't want to use them on a daily basis. I'm cheap, and I don't want to own one, or maintain one. I try to do everything I can by biking or walking, or transit if those aren't feasible. It is nearly impossible in 95% of the USA.
Selfishly, I really want the USA to bring city centers back to livable levels by banning most cars and redesigning them for humans. Otherwise I'm absolutely going to end up moving to Europe eventually -- likely the Netherlands -- because driving a car is just so unpleasant for me. I'd rather not learn a whole new language and leave my family and friends so far behind, but especially since covid I've come to realize that driving makes me miserable, and I need other ways to get from my home into the world.
Where in the US have you visited where many or most people don't own cars? In the USA, there is one such city -- NYC -- where MOST residents don't own a car. Every other city has over 90% car ownership.
Same, everyone has this loaded idea that as soon as you visit a city out of the US it's a utopia. "Walkable-city" often means taking 2-4 different forms of transportation to get from A to B, and if you're going to 5 different places in a day before coming home(say class, the gym, the grocery store, a specific store for that one thing you need today, then dinner with a friend) it means carrying 1-2 bags with you all day and making 15 different metro line transfers, buses, etc and dealing with inclement weather and rush hour crowds where you can't get a seat. Have you ever been in a city with one of the largest metro systems in the world and had to physically push and get pushed into a rush hour metro car that's so packed you can't even get your phone out of your pocket on a ~38C day?
I have a feeling a lot of this sentiment is driven by digital nomads who booked a hostel next to a wework and do nothing but go to a coworking space for half the day then sightseeing and get the impression that everyone lives like this. I've stayed in more than one world class city and if you can afford it you eventually just start taking a lot more ubers than you'll care to admit.
Despite living in major US cities for much of my adult life, I do not enjoy ride shares. I far prefer walking, biking, or public transport. Even if it's hot out, or raining, or even snowing. As long as I'm not in danger of being run over by cars, I'm happy.
I don't think all cities outside of the US are utopias. I just think you can walk around more comfortably. I've taken public transport plenty, thank you, and I know it's not always as convenient as taking a car. I don't mind carrying around a backpack with items in it, or putting a pannier on my bike.
> I have a feeling a lot of this sentiment is driven by digital nomads who booked a hostel next to a wework and do nothing but go to a coworking space for half the day then sightseeing and get the impression that everyone lives like this. I've stayed in more than one world class city and if you can afford it you eventually just start taking a lot more ubers than you'll care to admit
Please don't paint everyone who wants car alternatives with the same brush.
Anyone who would stoop to the level of constant ride sharing doesn't like public transportation, biking, or walking. I loathe ride shares as much as I hate cars. They exacerbate almost all car problems in US cities.
Most of my friends -- a spread of PhDs, teachers, well-off tech workers, and blue collar workers -- have barely left the USA. I really enjoyed the time I spent in the UK for a college semester. It permanently ruined the US city experience for me -- even NYC is not as walkable as the small-ish city I lived in.
When my friends do leave the USA, it seems to largely land them at resorts, or guided tours, or other "on rails" tourist experiences that disconnect them from the day-to-day life of people who live in those places. Meanwhile I visit cities to explore on foot. I plan on doing some European bike tours soon to experience some of the small towns and countryside that I've previously missed out on.
Considering how much my friends and family love the walking and public transit experience at Disney World, I wonder how much they would enjoy just walking and taking public transit around other cities around the world. It's really not that different.
> When my friends do leave the USA, it seems to largely land them at resorts, or guided tours, or other "on rails" tourist experiences that disconnect them from the day-to-day life of people who live in those places.
I share your distaste for resorts and guided tours, but if a person can only get one week off, these are safe options.
For my first real trip, I had to quit my job to get sufficient time off. They would not allow time off even without pay.
Visiting Chicago and NYC were what woke me up to it. Those places are the closest you can get to a car-free lifestyle here. Yet they're still very pedestrian and bike-hostile areas.
30% of people can be a lot of people, expecially in a political environment where there are only 2 parties, and the district lines are optimized/gerimandered.
Also, you really don't have to travel to realize that life can be different elsewhere. In fact, if you're going for an out-of-touch idealized belief, not traveling is almost a benefit: see "Paris syndrome".
> Also, you really don't have to travel to realize that life can be different elsewhere.
I think you sort of do, or at least I did.
I like to think I realized quite well that life could be wildly different throughout the world - it's what motivated my initial travels.
Hearing about how the Netherlands does transit vs. actually feeling and experiencing it immersed over a month of living there is just an entirely different level of understanding.
In this example I went from thinking the NL style transit is pretty neato, to now thinking that transportation is one of the most fundamental pieces that forms a society and it's future. It's not just energy and moving mass around. Get transportation wrong and you will fundamentally break society in unexpected ways.
30% is 100 million Americans. Also, a passport was not required to travel in North America (not sure if that is still the case). I traveled throughout Mexico and Canada before ever having a passport, for example.
I take it you have not travelled in some time? This hasn't been the case since "9/11" when the rules were changed. you need a passport to travel between USA/CA (not sure about Mexico but i would assume it needs a passport too?).
I routinely travel internationally. I simply wasn't conflating what I do at the border with a requirement. I regularly crossed the northern and southern border without a passport in the 1990s.
Some US states have an 'enhanced drivers license' which allows travel to Mexico/Canada via car or boat. However, you need a passport to fly into those countries.
Consider that America has around 45 million immigrants, most of whom probably haven't seen much of the world either. Assuming all those immigrants have no native-born children (an obviously terrible assumption), then we have 50 million passports for 250 million native-born Americans, a 20% rate. Compare that to germany's 90% rate.
Sure... but compare the size and location of Germany with that of the United States. It's probably not all that sensible to compare rates here between countries, except perhaps European countries against one another.
Where, with a landmass the size of the US, in the world is it done better than in the US?
If the crusaders on this mission want to carve up SF/Seattle/Portland/DC/NYC to build whatever it is you think is better, please do. Good luck. You can't even build housing in SF, but go ahead. Redesign the cities to be whatever you want.
I'm completely done with cities and I'm not alone, never again to return. Even 78 people per square mile, where I am now, is slightly too many. Once the kids are done with school I'll reassess, and probably move even further out.
Do you realize how massively big the US is and how incredibly diverse of an experience you can have just traveling to the next state over? Having a passport/leaving the country isn't a requirement to see that there is a better or different way to live.
The entire US is built around cars so I don't think you'd be exposed to a different way of living in that aspect, unless you're a brave American tourist visiting Chicago/NYC willing to learn and use the subway.
I hate this argument because its always used to jutsify staying in the US.
do you realize how homogeneous the US is when compared to the diversity you get between different countries? and yes, I've been to all 4 corners and the midwest. There's more in common between LA and the midwest than between LA and southeast asia for example.
The equivalent drive in europe or asia will net you a rapidly shifting palette of languages, customs, holidays and foods. Not to mention the added perspective of seeing another countries politics and how it puts into perspective out own obsession with a two party system.
I think this is a pretty big assumption that doesn't really consider that not all people prefer densely packed urban environments.
I've visited Europe multiple times and lived in Austria for 7 months. I loved seeing new things that were so different from my midwestern home. Using the train was awesome, the ease of access to get good quality food, walkability etc.
However, returning to Europe in my 30s I don't have that same feeling anymore. Those cities give me anxiety now. There are far too many people in one area. Everyone lives in tiny apartments where they have to be careful about who they disturbed. Almost no one owns houses, much less any land to go with those houses. They're completely reliant on public transportation. There's a massive lack of access to any real nature. Everyone just seems really sheltered and most of them don't appear to have any knowledge outside of urban environments. There's also a very elitist attitude that their way of life is somehow better, even though most of them couldn't survive a day without having easy consumer access to everything.
Further into adulthood now I much prefer to live outside a city with some land and the freedom to do what I want on it. I can take my car into the city and visit whenever I want. However, I get to live outside of it with much better access to nature and imo a mentally healthier environment than a packed city. Large cities just seem packed with consumerism to me. People do nothing but go around and pay for products all day. Pay to eat, pay to have coffee, pay to go to a show. I'll visit and live elsewhere.
> I'd rather not learn a whole new language and leave my family and friends so far behind
You could live in New York, Boston, DC, Chicago, or other dense cities with decent transit options without leaving the US entirely. It is certainly not impossible to live in the US without a car.
EDIT: not really sure why this is downvoted. Just taking OP's statement that they would prefer not to uproot their whole life at face value. I have lived without a car in both the US and Europe, so I promise it can be done.
I have lived in multiple major US cities without a car. In NYC it's feasible, but impossible to visit family or friends who live in car-centric places. In most other cities you feel like a distant second-or-third class citizen. Swimming upstream gets tiring after a while.
> impossible to visit family or friends who live in car-centric places
Traditional car rentals like Avis, Hertz, etc., as well as carshare services like Gig or Zipcar enable this if you don't already own a car. Many people I know in SF do this.
I live in Germany. I'm 26. I don't have a driver's license, and neither do many of my friends. It's never been necessary. Between transit and cycling, it's possible to reach everywhere, easily.
The problem is that it's too hard to visit family and friends. The solution is to move to a different country where you don't know anyone or even speak the language?
If I'm going to take transportation to rent a car anyway, might as well live someplace I like more, no? It's about optimizing multiple variables, not making every variable of my life perfect.
One of the hardest parts about buying a home, apart from all the stuff that isnt fun about buying a home, is finding somewhere that is walkable to... anything. I've rented my whole life and spent my entire adult life in cities. The idea of having to get in the car to get milk or something from the corner store, or have to drive to ANY restaurant, or not have some type of walking/running path within a few blocks of my house is foreign.
Part of this is from living in a cities and in mixed zoning areas rather than neighborhoods but it just seems to odd that to get ANYWHERE one needs to drive. Even living in a city, but just a bit further away from a major area, you can run into this issue.
Wife and I have looked at the Netherlands as well for similar reasons. Jobs/visas are the main concern. Family is the other big one.
Any success filtering for walkability in the US when buying a home? As far as I can tell, "walkability" scores are borderline useless -- the small town I currently live in has extremely low "walkability," despite being able to walk or bike to everything I need, whereas the large city I just left has extremely high "walkability" -- despite the fact that walking around town was not pleasant due to high volumes of car traffic. Manually checking or restricting the search is not really a scalable option.
I mean, you just can't have a walkability score for an entire large city. There's a lot of variation. You have to look at specific neighborhoods.
This is especially true in north America where cities all went through a huge conglomeration effort in the second half of the 20th century and absorbed their suburbs.
Of course I'm referring to the address I lived at in those places. I'm mostly complaining that Zillow's built-in "walkability" scoring based on addresses is abysmally inaccurate for the places I've lived in.
Manhattan has a lot of car traffic. Short of the urban core of Philly, DC, Chicago, SF, or my favorite parts of Brooklyn (which also have a lot of car traffic), nothing seems nearly as walkable in the US. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see congestion pricing and fewer cars on the streets in Manhattan.
The best walkable suburbs I've visited, Montclair and Red Bank in NJ and Ardmore, PA seem pretty sad, small, and boring in comparison. Fine for a visit, but I wouldn't wan to spend three days in a row there.
Sometimes, people are looking for small and boring, like some parents who are raising kids and are no longer partying every weekend. (There are also pros and cons to raising children in cities; growing up in NYC I got a free transit pass in middle school and was able to take myself to places like the Met and the Guggenheim pretty effortlessly, and you certainly can't get amenities like those everywhere.)
There's nothing wrong with small and boring, the major issue is that generally the overwhelming majority of US housing stock and zoning laws are geared towards picket-fence suburbia, to the detriment of people who don't necessarily want that. Plenty of people certainly want that, but it's probably not anywhere near like 90% of people in the US.
Nothing wrong with small and boring, but even boring suburbs should have a grocery store within walking distance of most houses, which they mostly don't in the US.
Really? What do you call walking distance? Most suburbs I've spent time in will have a grocery store in driving distance (~5 miles away) but that isnt really walking distance if you are trying to carry any significant amount of groceries or trying to make the trip in less than 2 hours.
The majority of the world raises their children in densely populated and compact cities. It’s not about partying, it’s about social exposure.
I grew up in a dense city outside the US, and even as a not-particularly-social child, I still had plenty of friends I played with and hung out with, and also had tons of interaction with adults. Meanwhile I’ve seen my cousins grow up in suburbs over the past 10 years, and they interact with maybe 3 non-family members outside of school, because everything is like a 15 minute walk away through winding suburb streets. That kind of isolation is not healthy at all.
Filtering by neighborhood and knowing the neighborhoods. Not that helpful if you are moving from somewhere else but pretty easy if you live in the area already.
Town around 50000 is a good bet then. If you can work remotely, find a college town and live outside the center, about a mile. You can bike to anything, take the bus, or just walk.
I did this. I have 100 restaurants, too many bars to count, music and theatre (three!) and festivals and arts within trivial distances. No car needed.
Even smaller towns are viable, too. My New England town has around 5,000 people in it. Aside from the early closing times for restaurants and breweries, (8 or 9!?!?!?!), I have access to exactly the same amenities I had in cities before. And lots more outdoor-oriented things as well. Plus... no traffic.
My wife and I are seriously considering our options in smaller towns in New England. Many of them predate the automobile and have the sorts of qualities that are being talked about in this thread.
I highly recommend. Hanover/Lebanon, Burlington, and Montpelier are decent places to start if you want access to arts, music, theatre, etc. If you're willing to compromise on some of those things in favor of outdoor activities, there are a LOT of great small towns in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine that let you walk and bike to the basics.
If you enjoy biking to establishments, it's worth it to actively think about dirt roads and rail trails in your search -- dirt roads cut car speeds to safe levels, and rail trails let you avoid cars almost entirely. Both make biking miles better.
I've spent quite a bit of time looking at Vermont, specifically Burlington and Montpelier. I have a very good friend from who was born in Burlington and who moved back there to raise his kids. Those two cities are at the top of our list, but I'd also like to explore/research more of New Hampshire, Maine, and western Massachusetts. We spent some time in Maine, on the coast during the early fall, and really enjoyed it.
Having grown up in western MA I'd highly recommend it. There are lots of small towns with back roads for biking. There's also loads of state forest land and great hiking, as the Appalachian Trail passes through the region. The ski mountains are smaller than those to the north, but they're fine for kids and the bigger ones are a short drive away. It's a bit less rugged and outdoorsy than ME, NH or VT but the schools are the best out of the lot if that's a concern for you.
It's also almost evenly centered between NYC and Boston if you want to do weekend city adventures. You'll probably still need a car but if you live in the center of town you won't use it except for longer trips.
> but the schools are the best out of the lot if that's a concern for you.
That is how I became aware of western Mass, actually. FWIW education is a major driver for us since we have 3 young kids. My thinking waffles a bit because there's a list of criteria in my head, like being walkable, bikeable, having a downtown area, in addition to the more major concerns we have as a family around education, local economy, and affordability. I appreciate the reply!
Where? A town of 50,000 with 100 restaurants, many bars, and multiple theaters and festivals would be a highly desirable place to live for many, many people.
Not the original commenter, but as they mentioned "college town" I would offer up Evanston, IL (home of Northwestern University) as a good example. ~75k population according to Wikipedia, so a little bigger than the target, but lots to do within walking/biking range and you can take the L into Chicago if that's not enough.
Any college town, because students don’t have cars and necessarily have to takes buses or bike or walk everywhere. Eg Berkeley, Ithaca, Cambridge and more
Maybe. Two examples I've lived in or around are Chambersburg, Pennsylvania and Hattiesburg, Mississippi, with populations around 50k. Chambersburg is probably little bit more walkable because it's a little more dense, but neither are (in my opinion) comfortable for walking or biking outside of specific areas, and those specific areas don't have everything you need.
Not sure if this is the place you're talking about, but this sounds a lot like Portland, Maine. Portland has one of the highest restaurant densities due to being a tourist destination. It has a semi-dense downtown with a lot of very nice walkable areas. Look up "Portland Maine Old Port" to get a sense of what it's like downtown.
Unfortunately, there are relatively few places to live inside the dense part of town. The city is overly-zealous about maintaining historic districts and you'd better believe people get all up in arms about "changing the character of the neighborhood" every time a new development is proposed, even in non-historic and totally dilapidated areas. I've seen literally hundreds of millions of dollars worth of new housing and commercial projects be cancelled or indefinitely postponed due to this attitude just in the last 10 years.
While the city has a lot of potential, it's population has stagnated since the 1970s and the surrounding area has become a massive suburban sprawl. Many of the buildings downtown have been replaced with parking lots. Traffic is generally terrible, and the bus system has low coverage and poor frequencies.
Around 100 years ago, Portland was a thriving metropolis with electric trolleys going to every imaginable destination. All of those trolleys are gone now and their tracks have either been removed or awkwardly paved over.
Portland was once a vibrant inter-city train hub with hourly connections to the rest of Maine. The two primary stations, Union Station, and Grand Trunk Terminal, have been torn down. The current train hub, "Portland Transportation Center" is much further from the city center to make room for a large parking lot. It is about a 40 minute walk from what is considered the downtown area. 20 minutes by bus if your schedule happens to line up.
It's pretty disappointing how much better it once was. I'm doubtful that it will ever be as good as it was back then, but still hopeful. There are plans to move the train station back to where Union Station was. New routes to Lewiston and Rockland have been studied (although would apparently cost hundreds of millions to repair the tracks). The state has recently subsidized certain interstate train and bus routes to make them very affordable. And generally I think a lot of problems could be immediately solved by straightening out bus routes and increasing frequency, as well as obviously removing a lot of building-size restrictions and parking minimums.
> One of the hardest parts about buying a home, apart from all the stuff that isnt fun about buying a home, is finding somewhere that is walkable to... anything.
That's because if you want an individual home, you're giving up the customer density required to make those amenities viable. In a world with the internet, at-home delivery, and yes, cars, it's simply not economically viable to create a grocery store that only caters to 100ish families.
That’s just wrong. The village I come from in germany has 8000 inhabitants, pretty much only single/double houses, practically no flats and perfectly walkable. Multiple bakeries and grocery stores, never further than 15 minutes walk.
It’s just that these small groceries cannot outcompete supermarkets once people are in the habit of going everywhere by car.
No, I’m not. The stores are economically viable unless you have a car centric culture. Car centric culture makes walkable mid-density neighborhoods unviable.
Cars are no longer the only way to bring in goods from outside walking distance. Online orders can also supplant the need for cars in suburbs, while producing a significantly more options than a mom&pop grocery store.
And with Covid restrictions and work-from-home, deliveries and online ordering were cemented as normal behavior.
The bakery in my parents town is famous enough for their bread that some people drive 50kms to buy that bread. No delivery service will come close to that, no way. Though I generally agree with that: the need for individual cars will become less and less as more options become available.
Uh, somebody has to deliver those orders. And in the US, that's by car (van). You might make single-car households more viable with pervasive online ordering/delivery, but you don't necessarily change the core character of the neighborhood that way.
Oh, but he isn't wrong. It's quite likely that your 8000 inhabitants (which are a lot more than 100 families) live close enough together, just because of lack of giant lawns, so that your typical store owner is getting more than 100 customers.
So yes, it's not that you can't have single families, and it's not really about people having cars or not, it's the density, and therefore, it's the lawns and the streets that are too wide, making the number of places that you can go to in a 15 minute walk far smaller
> It’s just that these small groceries cannot outcompete supermarkets once people are in the habit of going everywhere by car.
This is true to a limited extent. If small grocers and bakeries were allowed to setup in mixed use areas they would do a whole lot better. However sticking them an average of 3 miles from their customers in a horrible strip mall kills them.
I would happily pay a premium for having a grocer just down the street instead of having to go 4+ miles to a supermarket. Being able to get a gallon of milk and some onions in 10-15 minutes from a place just down the street will always beat driving to, parking at, and walking around a 10 acre supermarket on a 50 acre parking lot. Just the stress of dodging all the parking lot speedsters is more than enough to keep me far from that place.
If small grocers and bakeries were allowed to setup in mixed use areas
That's the crux of the problem in the US. Vast swaths of land are dedicated to single-family homes (and ONLY single-family homes). You literally couldn't build a small grocery next to these homes if you wanted. And the hurdles to getting a zoning change as so high that developers just build strip malls on the outskirts of town/subdivision.
We're beginning to see some progress in the DC suburbs, with more mixed-use "village centers" being built in the 'burbs. My main complaint with these is the development is done in one pass by a giant corporate developer, leaving the area feeling very sterile (compared to an old urban downtown in a small city, which might not be as clean, but has a more organic mix of businesses). IMO, of course.
Yeah I hate this. I get that zoning exists for a reason but some regulation would lead to better mixed use areas so its not houses for 15 blocks then businesses for 5 blocks and repeat.
* Noise; aren't built to sufficient privacy levels.
* Smell; laundry, cooking, or whatever...
* not designed to scrub, filter, and direct exhaust.
* Patios == smoke or grill; even though those are banned by policy.
* Somehow cost more than renting elsewhere
* Rent seeking causes negative patterns
* Car parking hell
As much as the anti-car crowd wants to be anti-car, they still exist, and many of us still have at least one per adult. Even if my job and day to day stuff fit in that city, family and friends currently don't: the car isn't going away.
Yes these problems also exist when you rent in single family home (intended, often not fulfilled) suburbia, but they're less due to the lower density.
Doesn't have to be an apartment. Just has to be a house without a 40ft setback on a giant lot. I live on the right side of a duplex and there's plenty of density to support a grocery store in walking distance.
It seems bad appartments are leading entire generations into thinking all appartments have to be terrible, last-resort options. I'm renting a recently renovated appartment , and while it's not perfect, the sound isolation is so good, that my roommate can play games with voice chat and I can sleep in the next room. Only a ~5cm wall separates our rooms.
I think a future with comfortable, large, isolated apartments is possible, and even such "fancy" apartments are going to be cheaper than full houses, if there are enough of them.
* Noise is an easily solvable problem, with insulation.
* Proper ducts and exhausts can handle smells/smoke.
* high rents means there is a demand but not enough supply.
* car parking can be in basement, easily accessible.
Benefits of a high quality apartment.
* easy to secure/gate.
* grocery, pharmacy,... are < 5 min walk.
* a large pool, 2 hectare park inside the society.
* multiple badminton, tennis, basketball courts inside the society.
* above all allow my 7 year old to go for lot of activities on his own or with friends.
Your supposed easily solved problems run up against cost or local building codes. Apartments tend to suck because builders put the bare minimum amount of work/cost necessary to get a building up to code. They have shit insulation because it's cheap but up to code. They have bad ducting and poor ventilation because it's cheap but up to code. The building codes are generated more from danger avoidance and other liability more than occupant comfort or efficiency.
Suburban parts of cities often aren't zoned for high density housing because the NIMBYs don't want them near their detached homes. When everyone sees a house as an investment there's no incentive for them to increase housing in their city.
They spec cheap insulation and whatnot because after every party that they're legally required to do business (a dozen item long list of licensed trades and government entities) with gets their pound of flesh that's all there's money left for.
So the poor builder is being gutted by regulations and paying licensed labor? If not for those obscene costs they would use better more expensive materials?
How can you possibly believe such a thing? That is just an outright foolish assertion. The labor cost to build something to code is the same regardless of the quality of materials. Builders skimp on materials to pad their margins. Even if they used cheaper unlicensed labor there's no impetus to use more expensive materials.
If Brad the electrician wants to benefit from artificial barriers to entry that keep his job out of reach of Jose that raises the cost floor of a building. Now apply the same effect for every trade. Now add in the cost of dealing with obstinate government. Suddenly there's no money left to spruce up the building beyond the bare minimum and still come out the other side with an end result within the scope of "what the market will bear".
I was thinking house/condo but I've lived in apartments for most of my adult life and would have purchased several of them if I had the cash at the time.
They were not noise, in fact in one I only ever heard my neighbors one time in three years of living there, they were typically pretty spacious, rent didnt fluctuate that greatly, I didnt need/have a car most of the time but there was lots of street parking, and I don't have a great sense of smell but oders were never an issue.
Nice apartments exist. You just pay about the same as you would for them as you would on a mortgage.
In addition to the sibling comment, if the OP is looking for an apartment or condo, they will find exactly what they are looking for - housing with plenty of amenities within walking/biking distance. I live next to a 40k population city who has exactly that.
If they're not finding it, it's probably because they're looking for a low density housing option.
This just isn't at all true unless you define "house" as exclusively large lot single family homes with big back and front yards. Most dense and walkable places in the world are not full of high rises, they're a mix of high density houses and low to medium density apartments.
This mix is really rare in North America, at least and especially north of Mexico, but it does exist.
> a mix of high density houses and low to medium density apartments
Neither of which sounds very nice to me. I don't have a huge yard, but I do have enough yard to raise a few trees and firepit. If I lost that, I might as well be in an apartment.
And that still wouldn't provide enough density to support a variety of restaurants and grocery stores (not to mention things like employment for non-techies).
I grew up at 7k people per square mile. Almost all detached houses. My family’s was one of the smallest. We had a few trees and a fire pit. I walked to elementary, middle, and high school.
I think the key isn't so much making the single-family homes more dense, but allowing more mixed development mixed into the larger neighborhoods.
Take my neighborhood (south Reston, VA). The main road is about 2.5 miles long. There is a strip mall at both ends, leaving homes in the midde just outside easy walking distance (from my house, by footpath, it's nearly 2 miles to one end and a bit over 1.25 to the other). There is a major intersection about halfway down that main road. Instead of allowing a small shopping area, it's more houses. Hard to change now, but if it had been zoned mixed-use/light commercial at build time, there could be a coffee shop and small grocer there. And bring between 1/3 and 1/2 of the available customers in the area within walking distance of at least some of their regular errands.
Additional benefit of this would be reducing the size of the malls at each end, mostly by removing parking spaces, freeing that space for townhouse, apartments, or more shops.
Take my office... it's 1.25 miles away, and I walk. But, the complex is all offices. If there were a grocer there or on the way, I could eliminate my 1x weekly carload, instead grabbing things as-needed on my walk home.
Same office. I have coworkers who live closer than me, but refuse to try walking because the sidewalks and street crossings from their direction are less user-friendly. Crossing on/off ramps without signals. Crossing a 4 lane highway with 50mph traffic. Etc. Some simple crosswalk modifications could make the office complex walkable to some of these coworkers. But, traffic planners don't even appear to think of these things when building roads - it's almost 100% car-focused.
My office is close to 1.25 miles, takes about 30 minutes if I don't want to break a sweat. If I'm late, I ride a bike. That's probably the limit for me for regular/frequent trips. I can carry a mid-sized backpack that distance without problem, even with a laptop and a jug of milk or other moderately heavy items inside.
With the number of signaled intersections, I can't drive it any faster than the bike. But definitely faster than walking most of the time (though walking is a guaranteed time - driving that distance has taken 20+ minutes before because of traffic jams).
Basically, if it takes the same or less time than driving, I try to walk or cycle. Sometimes I walk the ~2 miles to CVS or Starbucks, but that's as much recreation as transport - I can drive it in 5 min. Nice to have the option, but if they were closer to 1 mile, I'd always walk.
That would be about what I'd expect (except I don't use miles!). But I'm wondering if that's typical for most Americans of your or older generations. I always figured the LA story gag of driving 5 metres to your neighbour's house was only a mild exaggeration of reality...
Edit - yes, that photo has sidewalks, but there are so many intersections and road crossing, it's not a pleasant place to walk. Many places don't have sidewalks at all, or have some, but they're disconnected from each other block-to-block. Or you have to walk across a massive parking lot to get to the shops. Much of suburban US really is quite dystopian in this regard.
If this link works [2], it's the intersection to enter th nearest shopping center to my house. Note the lack of sidewalk on at least 2 corners. Crosswalk only on one side (if you live on the close left corner, there's no way to safely walk across the street in either direction). Lack of bike lans on the crossing street (the street has some, but they inexplicably end JUST before the shopping center). And even if you do manage to walk/ride into the shops, you have to dodge cars trying to park before you get to the actual shops. I wish this was unique, but it's extremely common in the suburbs.
Wow that really is taking pedestrian-unfriendliness to the next level. I admit I struggle to understand the mindset of people who'd consider that a desirable place to live. I admit I chose the suburb I live in now precisely because it was so walker and cyclist friendly (many of the houses actually face on to a dedicated walking/cycling path. I tried to find a good photo but this was the best I could do: http://cdn-assets.alltrails.com/static-map/production/at-map.... We're ~4km (2.5mi?) from the city centre "downtown", but most shops/ facilities we need regularly are within 1km, mostly via that pathway)
There's a lot of grades of density between "standard American yard big enough to keep a sheep dog entertained" and "can't have even a fire pit" and if it's a house, even most higher density houses still manage to have enough room for a yard with a fire pit and maybe some trees.
But here's the thing: all those big spaced out houses with big yards leave less room for trees and parks that make everyone happy. Suburban spaces also tend to be bereft of trees overall because no one can stand to have their lawn 2m shorter so the street can have a boulevard.
The problem is that the overwhelming majority of land in the US is zoned in such a way where this is not legal, and as a result the relatively few locations that do accommodate this lifestyle have high premiums (both on a per unit and per sq ft basis)
I’m never all redevlopment is bad, but if part of the old parcels are the nice walkable shops and nearby residences, and we don’t really allow new ones, then it’s going to be a predictable net loss. A lot of these locations are grandfathered in and would not be allowed under their current zoning regulations.
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There’s a separate issue with new modern mixed use in the US where retail tends to have low occupancy. Partially this is because there continues to be a massive glut of retail space in the US, and partly because the new spaces tend to be too large to be profitable for anything other than chain stores, and there are only so many chain stores to go around.
Take a street like melrose ave. It's filled with pretty well leased, single story commercial real estate abutting low rise apartments and homes. Walkable? Sure, if you manage to snag one of the limited available leases in a 15 mins walk. Replace those commercial parcels on melrose with 5 over 1s, and there is no net loss here. The same commercial square footage is available, sometimes more if the the building extends further into the lot versus if the old building had a small surface parking lot in the rear, sometimes a lot more if more than 1 story is set to be commercial space. Not to mention the apartment stock swells up, supporting a larger customer base for these businesses when these apartments are inevitably leased out before long.
NIMBYs in this city bemoaned old Amoeba records loosing its "historic" low rise commercial building. But Amoeba just moved into one of these mixed used developments a few blocks away closer to the metro station, got more square footage out of the deal, and sold the old property for a lot of money. The city changes and it isn't a bad thing, in fact its typically a good thing that it changes as this keeps rents closer to the actual wages seen.
There is no premium in any city I've ever lived in for that. $/sq ft doesn't change if you're a block from the grocery store, it might actually be cheaper. That said, you don't need more, you just need one.
We moved to a smaller city(Tacoma) inside of a big city metro(Seattle) for about half of the cost of a SFH in Seattle proper and it’s great. Can walk and bike to multiple grocery stores, beach, parks, etc. If I get the big city itch it’s easy enough to scratch it.
Tacoma's nice. I lived there for a few years, and wouldn't mind moving back to that area. That said, where I lived (an apartment on the top of the knob west of the docks), I couldn't realistically bike or walk to anything of value other than the bus stop.
Yeah I can’t really speak outside of the north end in the past couple years or so, but proctor, stadium, old town, Ruston and even around 6th all have a nice mix of local and chain stuff now.
Hot take - walkability is super overrated. I don't want to go to the same 5 resturaunts I can walk to. I like variety. I work from home and don't commute, but when I do go out I want to explore.
Another hot take - Being in the middle of a city doesn't make one more social. Actually it can be more lonely ironically. You are surrounded by strangers.
In my current suburb I am good friend with all of my neighbors. We share vegetables from our gardens, have block parties, let children play together, it's extremely social.
E-bike then. I can get anywhere in a 2 mile radius in Seattle faster with my e-bike than with my car, and I always get a prime parking spot right outside where I’m going.
I understand there are a few places in America you can live where there are a lot more restaurants densely packed.
These also are the highest cost of living places in the world to live. It's not practical to think everyone could live like that. They also are miserable with homeless people, drug addicts, and crime. It also relies on a huge network of people commuting to those jobs to support that area.
You can't have 30 restaurants within a few square miles with all the people to support that living there in homes. You'd need a combination of super dense housing and people commuting. It's really inefficient.
> They also are miserable with homeless people, drug addicts, and crime.
What aspect of urban development caused these people to be homeless, drug-addicted, or criminal? Did the frequency of bus service get them addicted to drugs? Did the taller building height take their job?
We make this unconscious logical leap that there's some justification for human misery to be concentrated in urban cores. I live in a dense urban core right now, and I see human misery when I go outside. I think "boy, it'd be nice to move to an area where this miserable person isn't". But... it'd be ridiculous to be happy by pretending misery doesn't exist because it's not in eyeshot. If that were the case, we should just ship miserable people to the suburbs where I don't have to see them (that would be cheaper and more convenient for me!). The wealth density of an urban neighborhood is huge, there's easily enough money to relocate miserable people into even rich suburbs.
The better thing to do is to make choices that cause there to be fewer miserable people. I'm optimistic that the current debate around the urban-suburban-rural divide and the role of cars will make us recognize that there's huge mutual interest in the idea that _public spaces should be nice_, and that seeing the misery that results from our policy choices is a feature and not a bug.
I would say bikeability is the best. If you live in any quiter regions of most mid- to large sized cities in western europe and scandinavia you will have access to a huge variety of possibilites, restaurants, bars etc. and can access everything relaviely quick, while living in a quiet area. Biking is also fun imo.
I bike thousands of miles a year. I love it. I also don't want to bike to grocery stores and restaurants. Sweaty in the summer, and we get -30F in the winter and our city tends to be very windy with wind chills down to -60F.
A walkable city means groceries stores at a walkable distance, which means while walking home from wherever you were, you just buy a couple of things missing for tonight's diner. You're at home, no more sugar for a cake? just a 5 min round trip.
Ironically even in my suburb we have 3 grocery stores about a mile away each. But I only like going to the store once a week. Daily would be a waste of time.
I'd love to be able to bike to restaurants, but it would mean convincing the rest of the family to do the same! Any trip I can take on my own I do by bike though, providing there's somewhere safe to lock it up.
It's great until its cold or rainy. I don't really want to bike in the rain to a restaurant for dinner. Or even if it rained recently due to the water kicking up from the tires. I can walk with an umbrella just fine.
> walkability is super overrated. I don't want to go to the same 5 resturaunts I can walk to. I like variety. I work from home and don't commute, but when I do go out I want to explore.
5? Depends where you live of course, I have 100+ within 20 min walk, easily!
> Being in the middle of a city doesn't make one more social. Actually it can be more lonely ironically. You are surrounded by strangers.
Depends. If you go to the same coffee shop every day, you certainly start meeting people.. or sit on a coffee shop for a while on the street, on a park..
I mean it seems obvious to me that if you have 100+ restaurants within a 20 min walk, all with near minimum wage workers that is a lot of less wealthy people having to commute in to give you that experience. That's great for you I guess.
In my case you'd be off by at least an order of magnitude. You like variety, eh? I mean.. I can get any kind of cuisine at all that can be found in a big city... Not sure what suburbia has to offer on top of that. I mean, you do you. Just saying your argument could maybe use an accuracy adjustment.
That's fine. It's fine to own a car and use it for those things. What is absurd is using a 4000lb hunk of steel to go 2 miles down the road to get a gallon of milk, which is how the bulk of car centric america operates. The vast majority of the energy spent is just to move the vehicle.
The op was suggesting removing this infrastructure altogether so we could walk everywhere. I'm saying that is unrealistic because I like to go places I can't just walk to.
Whether I walk to the grocery store or not isn't super relevant.
I agree with everything you've said wholeheartedly. Personally I could never live in the city again - been there done that. It seems to be very popular here on HN though.
Probably going off on a tangent here, but I grew up surrounded by hundreds of acres of farmland and woods to get lost in the minute I walked out the door, which I still escape to as much as I can, whether it's family owned rural property or state parks/mountains. Working in tech early in my career made that escape harder to get to, but I wouldn't trade rural life for any amount of restaurants, social gatherings, or whatever else within walking distance.
My wife and I stayed in a suburb for 3 months while we were caretaking and working remotely.
I couldn’t step out my door and go out on a run, the nearest coffee shop was a 15 minute drive away, and no restaurants were open past 9 and often closed on weird days.
It felt like the only way to be comfortable in the suburb was to own more things and build your own castle.
We returned back to Chicago and immediately bought to secure our preferred urban lifestyle for the long term.
Yup. We've considered moving to the small IL town my wife is from. It's even fairly lively for a small town (they have like 7 restaurants instead of 3). But we visit for a month or so once or twice a year and by the end of the month we are dying to get out.
Even thought in Chicago MOST of the time we go to the same handful of restaurants, its the option to have a near countless amount that we COULD go to that keeps us from feeling like were going to the same few places.
So what you want is your regular 4 or 5 cafes/ restaurants/pubs you can walk to, and use PT or a car on the rarer occasion you wanna try something different. It doesn't mean walkability is overrated. For things like minor grocery shops or the post office or even hairdressers/barbers variety is surely not that important anyway.
I think with the popular conception/definition of walkability and the assigned importance of that conception is a little over-rated.
I personally feel like it overvalues commercial activity (restaurants, retail, grocery, entertainment). Obviously, it depends on how often you want to partake in said commercial activities as far as how you would value it.
I would love if the conception of walkability could also take into account:
'How far can I walk without having to worry about cars/crossing streets/waiting for lights?'
'How safe/comfortable is the walk? Will I be walking by people who will harass me/be high on drugs/try to sell me something?'
'How easy is it to string together a run without having to stop?'
'How busy are the sidewalks? Will I have to be dodging people on their phones all the time?'
'Is it easy to take a dog for a walk? Or are there limited green spaces?'
'Are there social/interest groups nearby that meet up?'
I find some of these types of factors much more important than closeness to X number of commercial venues. So a busy downtown street may get a high walkability score (i.e. Walk Score) because of the restuarants/retail/theaters, but it might be atrocious to my conception of walkability.
As an extreme example: Times Square in NYC is considered a "Walker's Paradise" with a walkability score of 100 on Walk Score. But it seems like the worst possible place to walk, and most NYC locals I know avoid that area like the plague.
I agree with this. Having been in times square, it was nothing but being constantly bumped, having to say "No" to people hawking their CD to support their burgeoning music career, and keeping your wallet close by to avoid being pickpocketed.
The strip in Las Vegas is not far behind. While people didn't tend to bump me, there was a never endings series of people trying to get me to buy their prostitutes for the night.
> I don't want to go to the same 5 resturaunts I can walk to.
I have 56 eateries (restaurants, cafés and bistros) in a 500m radius, and also 36 bakeries, butchers and supermarkets all of which offer warm, ready-to-eat meals. Am I a weird outlier?
> Hot take - walkability is super overrated. I don't want to go to the same 5 resturaunts I can walk to.
Not only a walkable city will provide you with some 50 restaurants at 10-15 minutes by feet, but what is more important is having groceries and other household shops at 5 minutes.
> In my current suburb I am good friend with all of my neighbors. We share vegetables from our gardens, have block parties, let children play together, it's extremely social.
All of this often happens in walkable cities as well.
Walking and driving are not mutually exclusive. You can drive and go to restaurants far away even though if you have 5 restaurants in walking distance.
Source: Last 20 years I lived in cities with population from 5M to 15M and I always had at least 10 restaurants at walking distance and I used public transport and cars to go to places way beyond the walking distance.
I don't think being in a city makes one more social. That being said, I have a close friend group who I don't live near. I meet plenty of people but having moved around a lot I don't have any close friends in my current city right now. I'm friendly with my neighbors but not friends with them. That's been true of just about everywhere I've lived, rural or urban.
I don't think I'd be more likely to make friends with my neighbors if I moved to the burbs. This seems to be driven more by personality and need than location, right?
Check out Portugal's golden visa program especially if you can WFH. Either way, the real estate program provides instant residency and only mandates 7 days of residency per year before citizenship (14 in the last year). After five years, you'll have a passport issued by a Schengen country that will allow you to work anywhere in the Schengen area.
Keep in mind that the US is only about 10% smaller than all of Europe combined.
While I would love more walking/biking friendly cities, what about all the rural areas? It would take millions and millions of buses or train connections to get to all the places I drive and would still be more of a hassle than just driving there myself plus I couldn't pick the scenic routes.
People in major cities have different needs than those in rural areas.
No one has said we should eliminate cars entirely. Cars make sense in rural areas, we should use them there. Cars don't make sense in cities, so we need alternatives.
I don't think anyone is advocating that rural America, or even most of exurban America, should be accessible by public transit. It's just that we literally only have one city in the entire United States that has a massive subway and bus system that operates 24 hours, which allows you to live without a car.
It'd be great to have more cities as dense as NYC in this country.
>It'd be great to have more cities as dense as NYC in this country.
Yes, but remember that density is not without its problems as well. Socially of course, but also practically--density requires more competent urban management for things like sewer and water, which the US is famous for being awful at.
In the not so distant past, even rural places had (limited) access to public transportation. My mother lived way out in the sticks, but there was a road nearby. The bus would stop for anybody standing on the side of the highway to take them into town or back. This was in the 1940s-50s.
This seems like scare-mongering, or FUD, in my humble opinion.
The reason that sewage and water is so hard to get right in the United States is in part due to sprawl, as well as the lack of political will to actually maintain infrastructure once it is built.
A bit of a deflection I'll admit but - look at the NY subway. It barely receives the funding to keep basic maintenance afloat. Compared to equivalently sized systems in Europe it fails because there's a massive political diaspora to overcome since culturally taking transit is "for the poors" (you know what that translates to) and we can't be giving them anything.
Similar holds true for sewage and water (for water, look at Flint Michigan). Housing, transportation, zoning, etc. are all the same problem. The reasons we fail at them are all connected and without taking a holistic approach we likely will remain bad at it. Pointing to any one thing and claiming "well even if we do that we'll still suck at 99% of everything else" isn't really a helpful description of reality, it just means there's more work to do.
I guess what I would really push back on in your argument is the point that higher density requires higher competence. At some meaningless level, sure, we have engineers that have to solve harder problems. But the reasons that the US is bad at a lot of urbanist policies isn't because we lack competency (you could just hire people from overseas) - it's because we've allowed ourselves to build a system that incentivizes that incompetency at multiple levels through restrictive zoning, endless veto privileges a la "community feedback" / NIMBYism, car culture and the social disdain for what is perceived as normal in other countries (trains, bikes), etc.
This isn't a problem with the US geographically or its people, and the problems have solutions. I think if you talk to most people in cities they probably agree wholly or in part on a lot of fronts, even if there's still a prevailing "got mine" attitude depending on where you ask.
I don't think we need that level of density to warrant public transit. Singapore has one of the best public transit systems in the world (highest customer satisfaction rate), at 1/5th the density of NYC.
Oh absolutely, I just love living in NYC and whenever I think of where else I'd live my answer is always a city that isn't in the US. In a country this big you'd think there'd be more than one of us.
This is a false dichotomy. You can have single family homes with walkable shops/schools.
I visited Nashville recently. Developers can pay a small fee to not put in sidewalks. Kids, adults and pets walk on the road in million dollar home neighborhoods. People don’t even have the option to walk because of ingrained car culture.
1. Commercial production of food and timber begins literally at the city line around most European cities. There's not the ring of suburban hellsscape. One one block, there's a city. And the next, farms begin.
2. Rural European villages are also compactly built. If you work for farmers or just want to live among farmers, you still might not need a car for your daily necessities.
3. Even if you are a farmer, you have the option of living in the village and commuting to your fields. Your machine barn is also right near the village, which means you are not the only person watching it day to day. And since you commute to your fields, leasing them to your neighbor for a season is easily done as a matter of course. Want to take a sabbatical? Walk next door, sign some papers. Done.
Europe also has substantial rural areas, and they drive cars there. No one is saying we should abolish all cars and all car infrastructure. But things like residential only zoning and stroads that take a useful tool such as a car and make it a vital necessity are dumb.
While I generally like the idea of city centers, I think that this kind of anti-car stuff comes off like wild-eyed propaganda. For instance, the title suggests that the places were built for cars alone, kind of like the garage where Jay Leno keeps his collection. No. The suburbs were built for people driving cars. Not just cars. People getting rides in cars, avoiding weather, sitting comfortably, transporting the handicapped and the infirm and the older folks. Car haters need to remember that most people love cars because they work in all kinds of weather and transport them to work or health care or entertainment etc.
As for the bit about human connection, that's kind of silly. Life is what you make of it. For every lonely suburbanite trapped in a house with a two-car garage, I can show you a lonely city dweller who doesn't even know the name of the people in the apartment down the hall. I've lived in NYC and that is VERY common.
I don't really like driving myself. I prefer to walk, or when the weather is good, to ride a bicycle. But I can easily understand why others want to buy a car. They're very useful and the car haters who deny this come across as fools or shills.
I don't think car haters deny that cars can be useful, particularly in the environment we've constructed here in the USA. Hell, I own (half of) a car, because I want to visit family and friends who live a couple of hours away, and there's no train or even bus that could bring me to them.
> The suburbs were built for people driving cars. Not just cars. People getting rides in cars, avoiding weather, sitting comfortably, transporting the handicapped and the infirm and the older folks.
No, they were built for cars. Giant 4-lane 45 MPH stroads with no sidewalks that "connect" neighborhoods for cars, but isolate anyone without a car... those are built for cars. Driveways are built for people to get to cars, and some cul-de-sacs are built for children to play (but not teenagers to do anything interesting outside the yard -- they might get in trouble).
A lot of us just want SOMEPLACE in the USA where we can live without a car. NYC is the only place I can think of that accomplishes that, but with median rent hitting 3-4k/mo, that's out of reach for all but the highest earners. There are some cities and towns where you can occasionally do things outside of a car if you're willing to pay a premium and deal with poor infrastructure, but it all feels very fringe -- as if you're doing something you shouldn't.
Remember that wanting places without cars does not mean we want to ban cars, or stop people from using them in rural areas, or blow up the suburbs, or anything that wild. We just want to de-emphasize cars in dense environments so we can walk around!
No. You're missing my point. Those giant four lane roads were built for cars AND people moving together. The people are a big part of the equation. All of them are going some place. Some might be going to yoga. Some to church. Some to work. Some to the hospital. Etc. Yes, some might be doing something completely worthless and bad for society too, but, in general, people are the ones using the roads. The cars are only vehicles.
There's a slow movement back to urban environments, in part, because people understand the tradeoffs. But it comes off as foolish to pretend that these suburbs and four lane roads were imposed by some distant, evil presence. No. They were created by city planners trained by the best universities. They were created by progressive folks who wanted to build a nice place for people to live. This is what people wanted-- and many still want it in some form or another.
In suburbs, those stroads are essential to get people from place to place. IMO that "essential" ends at the edge of a city -- at high density, cars selfishly dominate public spaces, and actually detract from that environment's utility. It's a scalability problem; single occupancy cars can only move so much meat. Walking + biking + transit can move a lot more meat in a dense space.
I think a lot of people do want those suburban environments even today. I'm not sure many people want today's US city center environment that has been compromised by the car.
You may want to look carefully at the motives of some of those 1950s and 1960s planners. The phrases "White Flight," "Redlining," "Blockbusting," "Steering" would be a good place to begin.
I think it's just the case where there is a handful of extremely vocal anti-car people. Mostly everyone else likes them and doesn't feel the need to defend them because it's the status-quo.
"Transport of the handicap and infirm... ", Cars are not ideal for disabled people. As an epileptic, the driving restrictions are one of the worst parts of the disease. I feel like I'm in a prison. I can't drive to the store, I can't drive my kids to school, I can't drive to do anything recreational. I'm literally stuck at home and 100% dependent upon someone else to do absolutely anything. Even if someone is nice enough to drive me somewhere I feel so guilty for taking their time away. Biking here sucks too, the local roads are like freeways (60+mph). The bike "lanes" are a joke. Cars are a requirement. It's so goddamn stupid and it really, really, really sucks for people like me. Its hard for me to convey how infuriating it is. Cars are not ideal for the disabled and infirm. There are a non-negligible amount of people in a similar situation as me.
>I've seen so much anti-car, pro-walkability, pro-transit, pro-bikeability sentiment online recently.
The usual political activist group has switched to this. The laptop class wants to ban cars. We could discuss if that's a good idea or not.
Societal cost of transportation is insane. Imagine where you have a society number of amortized cars sitting in drive ways doing nothing. What a huge waste of society's wealth.
What would be the cost difference if we simply had driverless vehicles that could pick you up, do whatever you need to do, and then move onto the next person. Sure there would be peak times and all this but for the most part you far better utilize transportation.
The cost is immense. Car ownership is stupid. If only we had a legitimate driverless option. Free market would shift because of this alone.
>I really hope this is proof of the younger generations -- Millenials, Zoomers, and younger folks even -- waking up to the idea that the USA in particular has become a toxic environment thanks to cars.
No certainly not. The only proof is the political activists have shifted their intentions. perhaps we find out later?
>I hate cars. I don't want to use them on a daily basis. I'm cheap, and I don't want to own one, or maintain one. I try to do everything I can by biking or walking, or transit if those aren't feasible. It is nearly impossible in 95% of the USA.
Solar powered pedal assisted ebike that's enclosed so even in the winter you could zip around and get where you need to go. It's an ebike so hills arent a problem. In the summer you could take windows and doors off.
If there's situations where there's too much snow? Ok I'll just not go, staying home. It's enclosed for rain. I dont need AC or heat.
But $10,000 for something that'll get stolen?
Looking at building my own from scratch as a winter project this year. I am estimating I could build something equivalent for probably $2000.
Yeah, tourist-centric destinations can do things like this. We do it where I live too, in the summer. Closing down a few streets is a world away from banning cars from downtown. How many people can actually live in an area like that?
If I can do everything I want in my city -- exercise, drink, eat, buy groceries, meet up with friends, etc. -- without a car, why wouldn't I be able to live there?
I expect in this situation you'd be able to store your car in a secure garage on the edge of town if you want to own one. Or you could take public transit or bike to rent a car on the edge of town. Or you could take a train to wherever you want to go and use another method of transport once you get there.
Is there some kind of deep intrinsic human need to sit in a car within 1000 feet of your home that I'm not understanding?
…though as the video states, autoluw doesn’t mean completely car-free. I tend to agree that it’s probably the best balance rather than eliminating all cars from the area.
Boston has recently closed down major roads for pedestrians to great success. Most businesses ended up selling out entire inventories on those days during the weekend because their walk in traffic literally increased exponentially.
There's been a growing movement to permanently close down certain roads around Back Bay to encourage this behavior as well because restaurants and local shops love the increase in customers.
Ann Arbor MI closed Main Street for the summer months to allow restaurant patrons to sit outside. I think this began during year 2(?) of covid. This especially makes sense in a college town when the students are away (half the population) and the reduced traffic is relatively easy to shunt around the closed off areas.
Conversely, Kalamazoo MI closed off a major downtown street year-round around 1975 to encourage foot traffic, but found few takers especially in winter. After a decade or so of declining attendance in general (as interest in the downtown also faded) they finally reopened the street to motor traffic.
Oh hey, I grew up in Kalamazoo and went to school in Ann Arbor. It's been so long since I lived there I might be remembering wrong, but I just don't remember that much to do on the street in question (compared to somewhere like Ann Arbor). When I lived there, I think it was open to traffic, but a single one-way lane? Parking never seemed to be a problem if you were willing to park a block away.
So as a two car millennial American family that makes regular trips into our city center, we never use our cars going into the city. It's just stressful, streets are narrow, parking's expensive and car-jacking and vandalism are more likely. Just makes more sense to take the bus, cheaper too when you count the cost of parking. I also like having places to walk to from my house.
That said, I like having my own house with my own land. That house and land is freedom to live how I want (within reason) without worrying if the neighbors will complain about my watching The Mandalorian at 1am. A car is freedom to go wherever I want whenever I want, and I use said freedoms on a regular basis. It's also carrying capacity, instead of making multiple inefficient trips to a local market multiple times a week I can get all my family's groceries in one trip once a week. Ditto for outdoor supplies, small furniture, Christmas Trees, etc. Never mind that WFH doesn't work for a lot of jobs, and not just low-paying ones. Many good jobs require a car to get to them.
So I think there's a good middle ground here. Make city centers less car friendly and denser to discourage car use, improve walking infrastructure in the suburbs (more sidewalks/bike trails that actually go places).
I'm all for a wide range of options, but cars are not a universal evil. The frog is not being boiled, this is what a lot of us see as a better life. Granted there are plenty of people doing it wrong, but that's always been true.
Well said. I do something similar -- I live someplace with a bit more breathing room that's bike friendly and walk friendly for some basic things, and I never take my car into any city center.
> Make city centers less car friendly and denser to discourage car use, improve walking infrastructure in the suburbs (more sidewalks/bike trails).
To put it a bit more concretely: Remove street parking in cities. Expand sidewalks. Build more public transit and bike infrastructure. Create light rail with parking lots outside of cities so you can get in without a car. Let people use cars as before in rural middle-of-nowhere america, and mostly the same in the suburbs (lower speed limits and build more sidewalks and connecting paths, so you can walk between neighborhoods).
Most who discuss better urban planning and focusing on less car-only design wouldn't consider having a SFH with land (now this depends) an issue even in a city or neighborhood adjacent to a city. A quarter acre of grass? Probably not except at great cost. A deep lot with a garage? Yea that's pretty practical. Ideally you'd have a mix of SFH, condos, apartments for rent, granny flats, and other housing options so you can accommodate people in different stages of their lives and at different price points.
Then of course as most would live in this mode, those who want large lots or lots of land would move further away.
> It's also carrying capacity, instead of making multiple inefficient trips to a local market multiple times a week I can get all my family's groceries in one trip once a week. Ditto for outdoor supplies, small furniture, Christmas Trees, etc
Is it really inefficient if it's a 10 minute walk away, or on your way home from your job? I think you'd really have to sit down on that and look at the whole context.
For oddball trips like a Christmas tree you have options including delivery, but what most people would suggest is that sure you still have a car for those trips (maybe one per family instead of two) but for most activities you don't have to drive. We get stuck on edge case scenarios so much that we over-optimize for them. It's like EVs. Many are like "but what if I go on a road trip", well how often do you go on a road trip? Once/year? Weekly? If it's once/year, well, figure it out.
Here you can see cars of course, but you can also see that many homes do in fact have deep lots which can be customized with grass, pavers, whatever you'd like. Of course not all homes have those (depends on socioeconomic capabilities) but you are also 5 minutes from a gigantic park with lots of green space.
In German Village you have cars, many homes have off-street parking, lots of pedestrian traffic, lots of bike traffic, tons of locally owned businesses and restaurants, and community events. I think people want more of this and wonder why we can't build like this anymore. Personally I think it's because developers, the government, and automakers are all heavily incentivized against it (not necessarily out of malice). Unsurprisingly, locations that are walkable like this have the highest property values despite often having crappy schools. If they had really good k-12 schools the property values would be immense.
Not in the US, but I grew up in large city in a developing nation. Someone fooling with your car wasn't common, but it wouldn't be a huge surprise either. I regularly took public transit: it was cheap, plentiful, and well used. Obviously you wouldn't do anything silly like stuff a giant money-almost-falling-out wallet in your back pocket, but otherwise I felt perfectly safe.
We shouldn’t spend a dime updating suburbs unless it is to transform them into small towns with an actual main street. The design of the average suburb is impossibly inefficient, and the tax base rarely supports the cost of maintaining infrastructure.
I'd take it further and argue city centers should not be for residential use to begin. Cities can be built like a huge huge shopping mall, you park outside and do your work, enjoy your shopping etc, you don't have to live there.
No, this would be disastrous for cities. Downtown businesses depend heavily on foot traffic, and you’re going to get a lot more of that if there are people living nearby.
I think you're describing street-car suburbs. There are, I think, 3 of them in North America! Bad news... you're not even close to the first person to think like this, and the houses in those places are absurdly priced:
> It's also carrying capacity, instead of making multiple inefficient trips to a local market multiple times a week I can get all my family's groceries in one trip once a week.
This is pretty weird to me.
Whenever I've had exposure to a household like that, what actually happens is they buy way too much food to keep track of it, and either you eat too much or it mostly goes bad in the fridge. I find this oddly stressful, too, the feeling of wasting food or needing to use it before it goes bad.
Whereas I like to plan a day at a time and be close enough to markets that I could potentially visit every day and it's part of the daily routine.
I feed two kids. If I did my shopping at Costco, I can tell you the food would go bad before I had a chance to use it. I find the idea of Costco pretty stressful.
I'm not necessarily talking about just corner stores either. I have several full on supermarkets in walking distance.
I find your comment weird. Make 1 trip to get all of the stuff you need for an entire family in one trip per week, or make 1 trip a day to get stuff for just that day, waiting in line to checkout 5-7 times, taking up valuable time you could spend doing other things.
I think suburban and car-oriented grocery stores give people a skewed impression of how time-consuming it is to check out at a grocery store. If everyone is loading up their cart, the lines are going to be long because everyone has to unload it at checkout. By contrast, if most people are there for just a few things, you speed through the line if there even is one.
Bonus if it has a self-scanner like this one to further speed things up, though unfortunately we don’t have any like that near me: https://youtu.be/kYHTzqHIngk
Pretty much the only time my wife and I use our car is for groceries. We plan out the week, buy only the perishables that we need for the planned meals and get in and out with ~5 bag of groceries in an hour, hour and a half with a commute.
I've lived in highly walkable, pro-transit areas. It does have benefits, don't get me wrong. The flip side of the coin is that those areas usually have high population density. That comes with a lot of its own cons - noise pollution, air pollution, annoying neighbors you can hear and smell through your walls, etc. To avoid these cons, a lot of Americans want their own house on their own property and doing that means moving to a lower population density area which means less walkability, less transit, more cars.
Noise and air pollution are in part caused by cars. Meanwhile in the suburb, you have lawn mowers and leaf blowers, which I absolutely hate with a passion.
I don't know about annoying neighbors and smells. That seems to be a design and engineering issue.
> I don't know about annoying neighbors and smells.
If you live in a lower income area, get used to your condo/townhouse occasionally smelling like marijuana and/or tobacco whenever the neighbors decide to hotbox. Also get used to arguments and loud music late at night on weekends.
> That seems to be a design and engineering issue.
I'm sure you could build hermetically and acoustically sealed condos that keep out all unwanted noises and smells, but those sound like "rich people" condos that are not very economical.
Sounds like issues that an HOA (if you're into that) or the police/311 ought to address in a city. I assume that's why these services exist -- to resolve conflicts between people who live in dense environments where there is no option but to resolve the conflict.
If those issues go unresolved, that's a dereliction of city government and apartment administration duty.
If I have a kid who is learning music, your plan screws over any opportunity they have to practice at home. I've lived in newly built apartments and even those are not sound proof.
Not to mention public transit is dirty and unsafe in any major city in the US because there is way too much tolerance for disorderly and disruptive people.
The cost of decent insulation is a low percentage of overall cost. Also don't know if low income family can afford a nice/safe house in suburb, multiple cars etc.
> Noise and air pollution are in part caused by cars
Having lived in a Berlin Altbau flat, in a dense central neighbourhood, I can say that's not the biggest problem. At least not when at home.
Crappy neighbours are. For both noise and smells.
Techno blasting behind the wall. Arguing families and shrieking children, through the wide open windows. Passionate cigarette and weed smokers (plenty of them in Berlin). Smoke from cooking wafting through the Hof.
This is even a bigger problem if you are unlucky to have to live in a commie block (pretty much anywhere in Central Europe). Even more neighbours, even denser.
Noise pollution: Caused by what? Probably cars. (Sure, some sirens here and there, but rural and suburban living doesn't make you immune to the sounds of train crossings, highways, jake brakes, motorcycles, etc).
Annoying neighbors, smell/hearing through walls:
1. Easily mitigated through smart building design and practices, enforced by building code.
2. You can have completely detached single family homes and still build walkable transit-oriented suburbs just by sticking to some simple development practices:
- Banning subdevelopments that disconnect form the city street grid, requiring residential neighborhoods to fit into a holistic city plan rather than farm parcels being sold where the city greenlights residential development projects without an ounce of thought to how it integrates with the town/city.
- Prohibiting neighborhood designs that increase walking distance, like winding roads and cul-de-sacs.
- Building traffic-separated, safe, pleasant cycling and walking infrastructure that offer a workable alternative to driving
- Building roads with traffic calming measures in mind. For example, unnecessarily wide suburban neighborhood streets encourage speeding.
- Properly funding transit service and removing social stigma against transit usage ("I won't take the bus that's for poor people" - we literally need government ad campaigns to help change minds on the issue just like those used to promote seatbelts.
- Prohibiting parking lots against streets, like in big box store developments. Parking should be required to exist in the back of the lot wherever possible.
- Removing mandatory parking minimums. Believe it or not, real estate developers don't naturally want to build parking lots that can't make a return on investment. They're often required to by the city to make them in order to...you guessed it...help ease traffic!
- Prohibiting excessive dead space/green space/setbacks in developments.
Overall, I don't agree that there are downsides to walkable areas that have to exist.
I've seen that stores against the road thing in a Food Truck cooking competition TV show. Did a good job of tricking some contestants for a bit until they realized the scale of the area was still large parking lot sized and the street was just the no consumer doors (or very infrequently used 'side' doors) face of strip malls with parking lots.
Density can't be faked by flipping the lot into the middle of the block. It can be made real at a city level by design and engineered accommodation interfaces. Public owned mega parking venues at the edges that interface between the city core and external regions. A utility layer and isolated areas for vehicles to deliver or traverse the city.
Well, I'm not saying "go ahead and build parking the exact same size as a Walmart parking lot right behind everything and all our problems are solved."
And I'm advocating for a holistic solution here: doing things like restricting the location/size of parking in addition to other measures. They all work together. Nobody's going to walk/cycle if all the pieces aren't in place.
Remember this also: You don't have to eliminate cars to reduce trips and lessen dependency. The choice on whether to use a vehicle can be left up to the individual, but if there is no realistic choice then the end result will be that the spaces we see in our lives will be maximized for vehicular use rather than a more balanced paradigm.
Great example is this business park in the Netherlands, where it's really obviously built quite well for cars with ample parking, it's nowhere near the city center, but it doesn't exclude people from getting there other ways. So, there's still a lot of space used for car-based infrastructure, but it's not anywhere near 100% car usage like you'd see in an American suburban business park: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDXB0CY2tSQ
Let's say that Walmart builds 500 parking spaces when there is no realistic hope of walking, but what if there was a frequent bus line stopping right in front of it, housing in close proximity, and separated bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure that felt safe and inviting. Would they build those same 500 parking spaces on their own free will (with more of them sitting empty) or would they build fewer parking spaces for a lower overall cost? Essentially, we should be prodding the "free market" to get closer to our desired outcomes rather than giving them only one choice.
If you have a situation where people driving to the grocery store use a car 100% of the time (for all the heavy bags), but maybe they only use the car 25% of the time to get coffee or get to the park to take a walk, that's still a win over using the car for 100% of activities.
Noise pollution: Caused by what? Probably cars . . . rural and suburban living doesn't make you immune to the sound of . . .
Noise pollution in the city is just a fact of the population density. Speaking from experience, if you've lived there for some time your hearing won't even be sensitive enough to truly appreciate
the difference in a rural area.
It's just never going to be <35db in the city like it is in the rural community that I live in where I get to wake up to bird song. It took me 3 weeks when I moved back from living in the bay area to "hear" how quite it was, years of living in the city had desensitized my hearing. Sure, cars and especially fast moving cars contribute to the din of the city, but considering how loud it was even when the streets were empty in the middle of the night, I think that HVAC, elevators, and subways along with people being people create plenty of noise.
In the rural area I live in I can hear a car coming down the road from over a mile away at night, even with terrain in the way, and because of the low density most of the time throughout the night there are no cars. There is just no way you are going to be able to attain that level of quite with urban population densities - the 24/7 public transit would be louder.
Most of the noise in cities does come from cars. You're right that cities will never be <35 dBA, but most rural areas are not usually that quiet either. For example, even slight wind will cause ambient noise in wilderness to 40-60 dBA. Cities without cars can easily average <55 dBA. See this video [1] or this research [2] for sources.
Rural areas are obviously overall quieter, but that's not very relevant because we can't have 100% of the human population living in rural areas. That's impossible.
My overall point is that cities/suburbs that have fewer cars have less noise, and that reduction of the usage of individual vehicles is a major contributor to city noise. Just compare decibel levels standing in a residential block of the Upper East Side or inside Central Park versus the exit of the Lincoln Tunnel.
The loudest noise ain't coming from the HVAC and elevators, nor the underground subway.
That subreddit occasionally hit the front page, and lemme tell you, it's full of really fun and nice people who are able to take a nuanced and complex subject and handle it with care.
I work from home. I'd still rather drive most of the time than rely on transit and live anywhere more dense. E-biking is nice and I do it for exercise often, but I wouldn't want to do it in the snow or rain, even with perfect separate bike lanes, no matter how much Netherlanders insist it's no big deal.
My car has a comfortable seat, good sound system, a lot of my stuff in it, climate control, and no drug addicts accosting me for money inside it.
I'll be glad to see bike infrastructure and more rail lines built out but I would never want to live somewhere without a car.
> I work from home. I'd still rather drive most of the time than rely on transit and live anywhere more dense. E-biking is nice and I do it for exercise often, but I wouldn't want to do it in the snow or rain, even with perfect separate bike lanes, no matter how much Netherlanders insist it's no big deal.
Yep. Not to mention, biking excludes a lot of people and is pretty ableist to be honest. I for one get sick very easily and having to bike during snow/rain seasons would mean I'm having a permanent low-mid grade cold.
Recumbent bikes, e-bikes, and other alternatives (https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2012/12/06/who-else-benef...) make "bike infrastructure" accessible to pretty much anyone. Considering the fact that it's impossible to live in the USA outside of a nursing home if you lose your ability to drive due to old age... I'm not sure accessibility is a great argument for car-centric infrastructure.
They should also be able to walk. If they can't walk, I suspect assisted living is the only option.
Imagine you were diagnosed with epilepsy today, and it was so severe you lost your license to protect others. You can still walk around, take public transit -- probably even ride a bicycle. Where would you live in the USA today?
> If they can't walk, I suspect assisted living is the only option.
This is just a terrible take. I have wrecked knees and there are times when I can't walk any significant distance, and I'm not even 50 years old.
The f-cars people reek of ableism and it gets really tired, and I'm not even speaking from a position as a disabled person (more like occasionally inconvenienced).
It's only ableist if your community is built solely around the car with no alternatives for these people who rely on cars for mobility due to these issues.
> If they can't walk, I suspect assisted living is the only option.
No, as mentioned in my sibling comment (and in the post you linked to earlier!) bike infrastructure also helps people who can't walk. Mobility scooters work fine on a bike path and people who can't walk (or have trouble walking) are among those who would use one.
You just need your city design to accommodate it. Bike paths help, as do ramps into buildings or ground-level entrances.
(I really wish we could popularize a term other than "bike lanes" for these in the US to acknowledge that they're useful for far more than just bikes.)
All of them with an ebike and bike infrastructure. Hell, a golf cart would be an improvement due to the efficiencies of moving a smaller mass to get to your point A and Bs. Many nursing communities in Florida are in fact golf cart centric. I'd rather have the elderly in command of something that only goes 20mph and weighs 40 lbs than something that is capable of factors more that speed at orders of magnitudes more weight.
That's amazing, and it just goes to show if you allow these things in the regulatory environment (they are not allowed currently), then they will be built and purchased by people who benefit from them. It's just a better tool for a job in 99% of the cases. Using a car for each and every trip you take in your life is like using an excavator, when all you need is a hand trowel.
Absolutely. It seems strange to lock yourself into a metal box for 2 hours every day as you move back and forth between the same two destinations 220 times per year, not getting anywhere in the process. I also hope this has been a wake up call for most people.
Furthermore, driving is a lot more expensive than people realize, somewhere on the order of nearly 15% of people's expenses! or more! it's not just gas, but maintenance, parking, insurance, registration, smog, and that doesn't even count all the externalized costs.
> Selfishly, I really want the USA to bring city centers back to livable levels by banning most cars and redesigning them for humans. Otherwise I'm absolutely going to end up moving to Europe eventually -- likely the Netherlands
There isn't a single US city which meets your criteria?
Nope. And I've tried. US cities are so dominated by cars that other modes of transportation are an afterthought.
If you've ever tried to bike on an icy bike lane (when the car surface was cleared days ago), been honked at by aggressive drivers on residential streets for daring to walk or bike, been yelled at by a driver parked in a bike lane, or been stressed out by a street corner that becomes completely blind to traffic due to a huge parked car... that's what I'm talking about.
I'm not the grandparent, but I've looked a lot and I don't think there is a single city. New York is the only place you can reasonably live car free without feeling like you're handicapping yourself to make a statement, but it's also very specific type of city that comes with a lot of other baggage (e.g. expensive, overly dense and urban, arguably not where you want to raise kids, etc).
There are plenty of cities where you can live parts of this life, for example when you're young. But when it's time for a family there's basically nowhere in the US you can avoid the house-and-two-cars typical American lifestyle (except New York City with lots of money).
Cities in the US with strong public transit have only ended up building moving toilets for the homeless. There are a number of bigger issues that come first before billions more in public funding goes into larger wheeled toilets.
I hope it's a trend, but I think it's more likely that the government will do everything it can to do what's most profitable for the biggest lobbyists. Cars create a huge amount of pointless fake economic activity and bullshit jobs that will never go away.
I think a lot of anti-car people underestimate how much people like their cars. People spend way more on their car than they need to. It's another thing they can customize and personalize.
I'm in central Texas and cars are somewhat necessary because of weather. Not enough businesses have employee showers, so biking or walking is often not a realistic option.
I also think if real self-driving cars are developed, it's going to fuel sprawl like nothing before. We will look back on cities of today and think they were decently dense.
These days, I'm pretty much in the pro-car camp. In my 20's I didn't like them and chose to live in pretty small places as close to the heart of the city as I could and I got by with a bicycle and small motorcycle. Then I had kids and we moved to the 'burbs for all the usual reasons. Now that my kids are at college I think my wife and I would like to move further out of the city where we can have a smallish house with enough land for things like a big workshop, greenhouse, gym, sauna, etc... When we get old enough that we aren't as engaged with our hobbies, maybe we would head back into the city for the closing chapter of our lives. I don't think that type of arc is all that unusual. People want different things in different parts of their life.
I drive no more than once or twice a month, to get to the coast or the mountains (or all of Europe via ferry/tunnel) or to move heavy stuff around. It didn’t cost me much but it’s reasonably fast and a joy to drive on country roads.
I can’t think of anything worse than having to drive every or even most days, to work or the shops or to see friends.
I walk almost everywhere, cycle most of the rest, take public transport if it’s really raining or really far (or I am late) and take the occasional Uber when none of those is an option and I still don’t want to drive.
So I don’t think there should be no cars, just [almost] no cars in the middle of most cities and towns, and no need for anyone, anywhere to own one to have a reasonable life.
I feel like I'm in a similar boat. You could characterize me as a car enthusiast; I love driving them, looking at them, talking about them, and a weekend drive across the state to sightsee and go camping is just about as good as it gets.
However, I also don't really want to use my car every single day to commute, or do basic chores. I see my car as an exploration/recreation/hobby, and I love it! But do wish that it wasn't necessary for the more boring parts of life, too.
I lived 22 years without a car in Boston. I finally got one a couple of years ago and also love having it, despite the fact that I only use it about 3 times each month. I don't know if I'm anti-car, but I'm definitely a strong advocate for the vision that cars shouldn't be required to live a full life in more places, especially in the US. In the US, there's so few places where living without a car is feasible, and all of them are incredibly expensive, so clearly there are Americans who want this. But for some reason we still seem to design new communities around the car.
This is exactly why I live outside the US in a country with walkable urban communities suitable for families, even though there are far fewer career opportunities and much lower compensation. I keep thinking about going to the US for the career boost and doubled pay, but just can't stomach the thought of driving everywhere to do anything, especially with kids.
I can relate to this! I lived parts of my life in car-only and walkable places. I so prefer walkability!
But, it has downsides.
Walkability, in a rich country, means insane real estate prices (in a poor country people don't have enough disposable income after food, clothing etc to create an auction effect).
In a poor country on the other hand, it means crime. In rich country even poor people have cars so crime is more equally distributed, but in poor countries, living in a place where jobs and shipping is unreachable on foot, you are also shielded from almost all crime, but in a poor country all walkable places are dangerous.
In other words, walkable places are only good if you are rich and live in a rich country.
Walkability in rich countries is expensive precisely because lots of people want walkability, and that want is underserved. It's signal that we should allow more of it to happen!
Walkability is expensive because density. Walkability = density. And density means that real estate is small and there is a competition to get it. A walkable place just can't be big to stay walkable, and it has to include a lot of things to still be liveable.
A suburbia can cover entire continent easily and stay cheap because land, on the scale needed for private houses, is almost free. It just doesn't work this way with liveable cities that have to be small, and quickly lose attractiveness as you move away from the very core which is normally only a few hundred meters in radius.
European cities look nice for a tourist but people living in "nice" parts of them are living there either because their ancestors bought their apartments pre-WWI, or because of one-off luck, or because they are rich. Vast majority still lives in the outskirts that look a lot more like Soviet Union than "Europe" the way Americans see it.
I'm pretty lucky for an average American, all things considered, and live in an area with a grocery store 15 minutes away by foot, and most everything else under 30 minutes by bike. Public transit isn't amazing, but there's 60 miles of light rail and a decent bus network. My family of 4 still needs (wants?) one car, but we only put about 8000 miles a year on it.
All that said, I feel a bit trapped here. I've yet to find somewhere else in the United States I'd like to move to if I had to move. Manhattan would be fun, but whoa boy...
This was my experience to a tee. I had been commuting about 80 minutes a day for work. Then we had the pandemic. I have been at a fully distributed company, and I love it. You would have to pay me an extraordinary amount to give up the quality of life I have working from home.
Maybe I'm just not exposed to these ideas because I live in the Midwest, but this entire post sounds like some weird borderline clinical phobia of cars and driving that just doesn't jive at all with my experience, except perhaps a hatred of long car commutes. I can't imagine ever hating cars so much that I'd want to move to a new country...
Where do you live in the Midwest? If you don't live in a dense city environment, and you don't walk or bike much, it makes sense that you would struggle to understand the problems with cars linked to that lifestyle.
If I lived in a dense city, I wouldn't drive cars except on longer trips and would have no reason to rant about other people using them in normal, legitimate ways.
Have you been exposed much to the alternative to car commuting? I used to live in New Orleans, and commuted 45 minutes each direction by car, usually without traffic. I moved to San Francisco and commuted 40 minutes by bus, each direction. The difference in experience of these two commutes is something you truly need to experience for yourself.
On public transportation, you don't have to be engaged with the road. You can read. You can text with people on your phone. You can watch a TV show. You can get caught up on emails, or slack messages you need to handle. Commuting in general sucks, but not having to have your mind fully engaged on a specific (and frankly boring) task the entire time is an amazingly freeing experience.
Now I live in Tokyo and mostly work from home. The commuting experience here (for most routes) is even better. It's fast, comfortable, highly accessible and extremely quiet. I'm eventually moving back to the experience, but to be honest I'm a bit worried about my reverse culture shock when I have to downgrade my transportation experience.
I absolutely hate driving everywhere when I go back to visit my family. It's dangerous. It's expensive. I have to figure out where to park, worry about damage to the car, stay sober, and not be sleepy. Driving is in most ways a worse experience than using public transportation.
Life is very short. If living in a walkable city is a major goal of yours, just move to one now rather than waiting and hoping your not-walkable city will transform itself.
First of all, it probably won’t. But more importantly, even if it does, 20% or more of your remaining healthy lifespan will elapse while it’s happening.
>>Life is very short. If living in a walkable city is a major goal of yours, just move to one now rather than waiting and hoping your not-walkable city will transform itself.
I agree, and not really sure why there are so many posts on this topic on HN - there are plenty of places to move and live if you want to be someplace where you can walk to or bike to.
There are also plenty of places where you can move to, buy a bit of land with a SFH and enjoy that lifestyle if that is what you prefer.
Why do some people have such a strong need to tell other people how they should live? or expect them to change to suit someone else's idea of what is 'better'.
Immigration is difficult, expensive, and isolates you from your family and friends. I don't think it's surprising that people born in the USA are frustrated that they must immigrate to life the lifestyle they want.
You might say that the people who want to drive cars everywhere are telling the walkability folks how to live. I just want to live in a walkable and bikeable place where I'm safe from aggressive car drivers within a few hours of friends and family. That place sadly does not exist. Would it be so wild to make a few neighborhoods in the US a bit more human-centric and a bit less car-centric? It doesn't have to change everything. Just a small number of cities and towns.
There really aren’t “plenty” - slots to live in places like this come up rarely and are fiercely competitive. If you’re not making FAANG money you have no real chance of owning one. And the reason it’s this way is suburban preferences have so dominated government for so long that it is either a historical oddity or an extreme swimming-upstream exception when a walkable neighborhood exists.
My old boss packed up his family and moved from the Midwest US to London after he joined a new company that had offices there. Seems like a lot of folks from the states are moving to Europe.
This works for some people, but others like myself have too many close ties locally to pack up and move. (As much as I'd like to if things were different.)
And broadly speaking, while that may be good for the individual I don't think it's good for society. We need some people fighting for walkable cities where they are, else we'll never get any more of them. And the highway widenings continue unabated...
Move or ask local candidates what they're willing to do to address the issue.
Usually it takes something bad happening.
I also don't think a lot of the changes people want will be coming to US cities as quickly as they hope. I've worked in the architecture/urban planning world and despite the people doing that work knowing what's best for a city, it's the engineers, politicians, and people with money that end up making the decisions unless there is some very vocal asks. There's also a ton of red tape that stands in the way, especially in CA, of anything being built in a timely, cost-efficient manner.
One can hope though. Small stabs at progress are being made.
The Netherlands is pretty rough without a car. Public transport is pretty bad compared to other European places. I'm dutch but live in Barcelona now which is a lot better. In the Netherlands everything is privatized so each line has to run a profit whereas here they view it as an investment into making the city liveable. So even people in the cities own a car to get around and the results are massive traffic jams.
Same with health care, there's an excellent public system here which is free (paid by tax) but in the Netherlands you pay a private company a lot and there's penalties if you use it.
If you live in a big city in the Netherlands and don't need to leave it much you'll be ok work public transport but there's a huge housing crisis there too so city apartments come at a huge premium.
FWIW I love not needing a car and I hope I'll never need to own one again or even drive one. I've always found it so stressful.
In Barcelona you can go to many places without a car, but has awful traffic everywhere (and they drive really fast on the big streets). Plus, the police kicks you out of the street at night. I don't think it's a nice place to live.
I never even had to sit in traffic. I can bike to work through a very nice meadow and forest in about 15 minutes. But after working from home for 2 years, doing even that nice of a commute seems like hell. Never again.
I've always wanted to bike, and the city finally said yes, let's make the city bike-friendly.
And then they go ahead and just paint a white bike lane right next to the car lane. Yea, even when politicians listen to their constituents, they just half ass the effort.
I'm not risking my life to ride in that bike lane, so I still use a car.
Yeah, I live about 15 miles outside Philly and don't know anywhere nearby safe enough to ride. Local drivers think nothing of missing you by only a foot or two, often at a speed difference of over 20 MPH.
Even offroad spaces set aside for bike routes often cross busy highways without proper signage, putting riders and pedestrians in the crosshairs of fast turning vehicles that are surprised to find anyone on the road who's not motorized. With the rise of big big SUVs and even bigger trucks, those who are not likewise encased in a large metal cage are just too easy to miss. Or hit.
From what I recall growing up, Vancouver's bike lanes were not well-recieved (by what I imagine was a slight minority) when they started taking lanes from traffic. "They're always empty", "They're unsafe", "What about the cars and increased wait" were some of the complaints I remember. Over time, they've gotten dramatically better, and public opinion is shifting as they improve.
Bike lanes become more common, so they grant access to more areas instead of getting you 90% of the way there, so they can be used, and people can take advantage of them, and see (or know someone), that uses them. It all ends up being a positive feedback cycle for bicycles.
They may not be popular in your city, but if they can keep the political motivation up for a few election cycles, it can work :)
Yeah that's why I love living in Vancouver. You never need a car if you live remotely close to downtown... if you live downtown-ish you basically just walk everywhere or bike. It's so great. Back in my country I was all the time in car traffic...
You should move to the netherlands then. Not everyone needs to live in a dense concrete jungle. You should -choose- that, though. I understand why you hate cars, so move to the urban center and figure out a way but you don't have a right to force that on me.
I guess I am the opposite. It wasn't hard for me to find walkable places in the cities I have lived it because I planned my living around not having to drive much. There are still things I have to drive to like seeing my parents and family but everyday things like groceries, bars, food, haircut, etc were easy for me to do walking it all the cities I have lived. Also I lived in the suburbs of those cities so it isn't an urban core thing. For me as long as I prioritized walking my locations have been walking friendly.
I always thought it was strange when people would say "The automobile represent freedom". I grew up in a "streetcar suburb" and later moved to a big city. So for me, cars were always viewed as an expensive annoyance you might need depending on your life circumstances, but certainly not something you'd go out of your way to buy unless you needed it.
But as I got older and lived briefly in a suburb of Houston TX it finally clicked: the way so many subdivisions are planned you are quite literally trapped inside your subdivision unless you have a vehicle. Need to buy groceries? Get to school? Go hang out with friends? You need a car. You aren't heading anywhere interesting without one.
So I get why people have a romanic idea of the automobile, but that romance is a side-effect of poor urban planning.
I think the original idea behind the suburb is that you don't have to interact with anyone you don't want to interact with. A much nicer way of saying that is they are more efficient. Or at least that was the original intention. The layout of the subdivision is that maximizes the lawn space you get, for the amount of routing (e.g. traffic intersections) to whatever your destination was. And since driving is nominally the fastest way to get somewhere, the suburbs were how you were going to do it. It's like someone decided on the efficiency goal, and looked at what was the fastest means of transport, and derived from there.
Maybe you could say there might've been some redlining too – just put the folks you don't want to interact with in that subdivision over there –, but in all, the problem is that it ultimately becomes: only efficient at one thing, and that's getting to work and back home. And it got terrible even just for that because cars as a means of transport doesn't scale well with population. Then public transit becomes a hack to try to make it work. In the Bay Area and DC, you have highly efficient transit systems that are good for getting to downtown, and pretty much terrible at most other things. In both places, you still need cars for the last mile, when you're leaving "downtown." In the Bay Area, only the Mission District is truly walkable, of all the non-downtown neighborhoods it connects. So now there's car sharing at most of the BART stations. But at least we have them. Not sure if there are any for the Caltrain.
This style of planning is neither quirky nor incompetent: it is dead center orthodoxy of the entire North American urban planning profession, body of regulation, and all of the intellectual edifice behind it since WWII.
I lived in New York City my entire life and I am now wanting a house. I am tired of living in an apartment building. This idea that people live together communally within buildings or neighborhoods is very overrated.
I have lived in multiple apartments and never has there been a real community there. The building has one holiday party and out of 144 apartments maybe 15 people show up. The posts on the chat board that the building now provides is more about neighbors complaining about each other.
I know people who live in houses and they have more communal respect then the people who I have lived with within the various buildings I have lived.
I understand why people have houses, I just cannot afford one right now.
> I lived in New York City my entire life and I am now wanting a house. I am tired of living in an apartment building. This idea that people live together communally within buildings or neighborhoods is very overrated.
I feel the same way. I grew up in an urban environment, moved to rural areas, now back in an urban environment. I can't wait to get out of here. Too many people, too much noise and too much energy spent looking over your shoulder. I don't understand the desire to be around people just for the sake of it. I'd rather live on the quiet "un-walkable" outskirts or suburbs of a city and occasionally go in if I need to. More than anything I hate the lack of privacy that comes with city life.
> too much noise and too much energy spent looking over your shoulder.
That's the bane of american cities. They're noisy, and sociopathy is tolerated by the authorities. Living abroad has shown me cities, significantly more dense than the US, that are neither noisy or unsafe. Walkable cities can be quiet, almost eerily so. America needs more urban environments like that.
> Living abroad has shown me cities, significantly more dense than the US, that are neither noisy or unsafe
Just because you can find quiet isolated pockets in any given city doesn't mean the rest of it is like that. All cities are loud and require being very aware of your surroundings, some more than others. I've spent months traveling through many European cities and been victim of crime and saw a lot of crime. As for being quiet, that's ridiculous. There are still tons of cars and constant construction even in the most walkable cities. Even in Venice where there are no cars it's pretty loud until you wander off into some back walkways.
Yeah, certainly, they were smaller. Lived for a number of years in Ghent and Leuven. Like living in a palace. There's nothing that compares to it here. :(
Yeah, I have yet to live in an apartment with a sense of community. In the apartments I lived in, neighbors barely acknowledged each other. I lived in one complex for six years and couldn't tell you the names of any neighbor: most folks just quietly walked in, shut their door, and stayed inside. When I moved to the suburbs, I actually had more community, as neighbors actually came to introduce themselves when we moved in, and they still happily make small talk when we cross paths.
I love dense urban areas, but I'm not sure I buy the human connection angle. I've never felt so alone when living in cities. Something about constantly being surrounded by people makes you less likely to want to get to know them.
Now that I live a bit more rural, I've found myself much more likely to get to know people. It helps that things aren't always busy or packed, and I can linger a bit more and have more pleasant conversations.
My experience has been the same. In urban areas, people seem to me to be less friendly than in suburban areas, maybe out of a sense of maintaining their own space. If you become acquainted with a neighbor who turns out to be annoying or clingy, there's very little refuge.
It's interesting, I had the opposite experience. When I lived in SF in my 20's, I knew all of my neighbors: some I'd party with, some I'd walk my dogs with, and later, when I was older, we had a nanny share with the family who lived next door. I knew the brothers that ran the corner store and I knew the family that ran the coffee shop next door.
When I lived in smaller town, I didn't know any of my neighbors. People walked from their side door to their cars and would only say hello if they happened to make eye contact. My wife and I prioritized walkabilty and bikability when we chose our house, but even then it was a struggle.
There are exceptions, but now that I'm back in a city I once again know all of my neighbors. I regularly have lunch with another dev who works from home down the street, and we hang out with the family across the street a few times a week. Our neighborhood isn't the "NYC in the 70's" image of an urban area that some people from small towns think of when they think of big cities, it's cute tree lined block with 2k sqft houses.
It isn't as simple as building things closer and removing the lawn. The author completely forgot about rain, snow, and ice. Very few Americans will put up with freezing weather, perhaps marching through miles of it, putting in 9 hours at the factory, and marching back home again.
High density is for young people. I've lived in ultra high density for decades and it's starting to really hurt. I sleep poorly due to noise (mostly from neighbors) and it's not fun to go for a walk anymore. I'm looking for a rural place to purchase a home because sorry, I just don't want to tolerate people's selfishness anymore. Density should come with more rules, both laws that are enforced as well as cultural rules, and in American cities it seems chaos and lawlessness are embraced as tolerance and compassion.
I've lived in a city for a while. I'm through. People are rude, loud and even dangerous: putting aside criminality which is being essentially decriminalized (we've removed bail for all but attempted murder in my city, and prosecutors are progressive and are systematically reducing charges on violent crimes so they are misdemeanors, because they're trying to reduce incarceration), cars and e bikes have become dangerous to pedestrians. You're literally never relaxed walking outside on a sidewalk now.
There is a middle point between city center and car-dependent sprawl. We’ve just mostly outlawed building any new places in this in-between style, so the only ones remaining are those that have been this way for well over a century.
I've lived in:
- Chicago
- Baltimore
- St Paul, MN
- Minneapolis, MN
- Cincinnati, OH
They all feel exactly the same with regard to the complaints in the post you are replying to.
When I was younger, cities were excellent and I would never have imagined wanting to live outside an urban center.
Now I am older and have kids and have massively different priorities than I used to; I wouldn't live in any city in any country anywhere. If it's not a suburb, count me out. I value my space, my yard, and my control over my ambient environment. I value my multiple cars that can get me to where I want to go when I want to get there. It's nice and quiet and people are fewer and more predictable. Yes, there are tradeoffs -- the culture sucks, but I can leave my house and go elsewhere for culture. I don't need it right outside my house. It makes my life harder to manage.
I read it and assumed Portland. Courts have been letting people walk for things like race-based hate crime (think assaulting a young girl on her bike for being Japanese American).
Another example, police arrest a guy for assault, jail/courts let him out before figuring out who he is.
Others say it is a straw man, but it isn’t when you’re living it.
Edit: I’m an urbanist and I want nearly everyone to live in a city; but that isn’t a reasonable ask until cities are safe, clean, quiet (as can be; aka rules for noise pollution are enforced), and furnished with usable amenities like parks. It pains me to say it, but the current trend for US cities is not it.
Sounds like you should move to a rural place, and that's great! There's plenty of that in the US. And it sounds like you live in a place where biking on the sidewalk is legal, which I agree it shouldn't be (it's not here in NYC). But let's not throw away high density living because old people think the kids are making too much noise. As a New Yorker, I prefer the boisterousness of the city, because it sounds like joy to me. [1]
Yep. The freedom to mod your exhaust systems and blast your stereos does not trump other folks rights to peaceful sleep. Basically somebodies entertainment does not supersede other people's basic biological needs.
I mean sure, no one is happy about dirt bikes revving at 2am. But that happens so infrequently, why even bring it up? Gentrification sounds like the rich person across the street from me that just moved in yelling at the group of black people laughing and having fun on the street at midnight. It’s Brooklyn, get over it.
It sucks for pedestrians but I can't blame the bikers when the alternative is getting ran down in streets without bike lanes. But if there's a proper protected bike lane then there's no excuse for being on the sidewalk or going the wrong way.
Not blaming bikers (especially e bikers going 30 mph) for threatening pedestrian safety because theirs is threatened by cars on the road is utter nihilism, and the type of attitude that encourages me to leave the city.
Another point against high density, so-called walkable cities. Going to my main rant above, high density without law enforcement is misery for any normal person.
The e-bike drivers jumping onto the sidewalk delivering door dash has certainly increased, but it’s not that bad. I’m dodging people with their dogs taking up the sidewalk a lot more than I am bikes.
But really, it’s all good. I choose this to the alternatives any day!
This article is ridiculous drivel. The author's point is basically that complaining about noise is another form of white people oppressing people of color? The author is complaining about being told to quiet down in libraries and homes.
Let me give some perspective on the other side of this situation. In college one year I had 8 AM classes each day of the week which meant that if I wanted to have time to exercise I had to wake up at 6 AM to have time to eat, exercise, and shower. In order to get enough sleep I had to get into bed between 9:00 and 9:30. In college dorms I consistently had to call the RA and file noise complaints because were playing music and talking loudly. Good sleep is essential to your health, your freedom to experience joy by being loud as the author describes does not trump my right to basic peace and quiet. It's the same principle from COVID where people didn't want to wear a mask: your freedom ends where mine starts.
A home or a library is not the place to be loud and boisterous, go to a student cafe or a bar or a restaurant. As somebody who suffers from tinnitus it feels like the same principle of how maddening it can be to never experience silence.
I think a lot of people underestimate the impact that excess noise (and of course lack of sleep as a result of that) can have on your mental health. And of course people just chalk it up to old people complaining about kids. I'm in my 20s.
I’m sorry that the city noise makes it hard for you to sleep. As someone with tinnitus as well I know how it can be. Personally, for me I like to have the background noise of the city because it sounds like life to me. The loudest, most distracting thing to me is to be in a sealed up house with climate control and no outside noise, it makes the tinnitus really bad. Last time I found myself in that situation I had to find a way to open the windows, to at least hear the wind and the insects.
> I'm looking for a rural place to purchase a home because sorry, I just don't want to tolerate people's selfishness anymore. Density should come with more rules, both laws that are enforced as well as cultural rules, and in American cities it seems chaos and lawlessness are embraced as tolerance and compassion.
Have you lived in a rural area? If not, you should find a way to try it out before taking the leap. City folks tend to have the idyllic version in their head, without realizing how loud ATVs and shotguns sound at 2 am.
I grew up in a rural area, and I experienced zero instances of loud ATVs and shotguns where I lived, at any time of day. This view sounds like a TV trope, which one might lean on if they don't have much in-person experience of living in a rural area themselves.
The advice to try it before you buy it is sound though.
There was no accusation of making up anything, as I cannot possibly know your personal experience.
What I was doing was pushing back on using comically outlier events as something representative of rural living, that the GP would have to reckon with if they were to live in a rural setting. Nobody I know who has lived in a rural environment has ever experienced what you highlighted. If you did experience that, it sounds like you just had shitty neighbors or you lived next to a recreational area where that is more likely to happen, and I would caution against extrapolating that experience to being the norm among rural residents.
The irony is I never have been woken up by ATV's and shotguns in decades growing up in a rural environment, but have certainly been woken up by those things a number of times in urban environments.
It's great that you experienced the idyllic version, but note that the phrase "rural area" glosses over a diverse array of places, and that your experience may not be universal.
I think more universal rural challenges for people that are from more populated areas are... difficulty breaking into the community as an outsider. Lack of medical services. Lack of restaurants. Lack of services in general. I lived in some fairly populated suburbs for a decade or so before moving back to where I grew up in a fairly rural small town and the adjustment has been fairly difficult. Haven't really had any issues with any ATV's or shotguns in the middle of the night... I mean I'm sure it has happened but its not such a recurring issue that I'm losing sleep over it. We aren't too far from a fairly popular snowmobile route but I rather like the occasional whine while I'm cozy in bed!
My major criticism of living in the city is that everything is just really difficult. Sure, my apartment is only a 15 minute walk to the grocery store, and not a 10 minute drive, but it’s really damn hard to carry a big load of groceries for a mile. My apartment is on the third floor so moving any furniture in or any outdoor gear is a huge hassle. I have nowhere to store anything. I don’t have laundry in my unit. I have shitty heat in the winter. The building has mice. Oh, and this is in a nice part of an expensive city!
Maybe not starting from scratch, what is happening in reality is that the car-light movement is growing, and cities are calming traffic. I think this effort will continue, because quality of life in these places is just objectively better.
I was in Boston recently, and the experience is so much better than 10-15 years ago, just because many core neighborhoods are calming traffic. Many other cities are taking similar measures.
imho it's not nearly going fast enough (e.g. I'd like my kids to be independently mobile), but nonetheless, it's happening.
For most of human history, we have lived in settlements where we slept a stones toss (not even a throw) from our neighbors, for security and also because traveling a long distance for daily activities took to much physical energy.
This was true whether the settlement was as city, town, or village.
The discovery of petroleum and the invention and popularizing of cars enabled people to build and live an imitation of the aristocratic lifestyle.
Ironically, the aristocrats in their hilltop palaces and castles weren't nearly as isolated since they would always have a cadre of personal attendants to serve them.
Quite reasonably, nobody wants to go back to the poverty and hardships of village and tenement life, of course. But people quite reasonably have identified what was lost in the shift away from that spatial arrangement.
Every time I'm on the west side of LA I think about how we could have built a gorgeous, walkable city like you see all over the Mediterranean, but instead we got LA.
Of course there's a little glimpse of it in that part of LA, but you still just can't easily live in LA without a car.
It's pretty easy to be car light though. Every artery has at least one bus line. A bike going 12mph is faster than traffic on surface streets in my experience when you account for filtering to the front of the intersections at lights (I take the lane otherwise); I regularly beat cars I see on my commute or errand runs. Plus there are grocery stores and restaurants in every neighborhood. You can probably get all your basics within 2 miles of your place. 300 days of sun means you can do this all year, and if you are in the valley where its pretty hot, you can just buy an ebike and not pedal too hard and wear white. Lack of humidity means you cool off as soon as the bike starts moving or you are in any shadows.
Santa Monica is a good model for how the rest of the west side will look after the city finally implements the bike lane plan they created in 2010, and imo that is one of the most bikeable cities in the country.
I always snicker at these "built for cars" screeds, as though the "cars" are empty self-serving machines that are fulfilling their own needs.
Every car has at least one person in it. That person is going shopping, going to work, socializing, etc., or servicing the needs of others - my plumber's van is essential so that he can fix my plumbing.
So no, places are not "built for cars" - they are built to satisfy human needs, and it turns out that cars are an excellent way to do that.
Just because it's a person doing necessary things doesn't make the structures themselves noble. If you stand before it and actually look, the scale of a single suburban four-lane intersection is just mind-boggling. The resources put into just one of these in terms of time, money, human effort, skill and ingenuity inspires awe but also disgust. People would shop and socialize without this. Is there really nothing better, more effective for these goals, we could have found to spend such tremendous skill and wealth on? I am ashamed of us if this is the best we can come up with.
Most cars have only one person in it, despite taking up as much space as 10 people.
Most cars are parked for most of the day, which is a complete waste of space. Stores need huge parking lots, which are usually mostly empty, to accommodate the busiest times.
Cars are a horrible way of fulfilling human needs. Going shopping? The corner store next to your apartment should have everything you need for daily life. Work? It's 2022, most people can work from home. Socializing? If it involves alcohol, you better not be driving.
A plumber's van is the only valid use case for a car you listed. City streets should be restricted to commercial vehicles and public transportation only.
I love the car and car culture. I've road tripped across the U.S. and live in an RV. I will never go back to living in an apartment. There's no human connection there. I spent years living in apartments and maybe met one or two people, with no meaningful connections ever developed. Cars are great for road tripping, and America is highly optimized for it. You can, with the same vehicle, without unpacking once, travel from the Atlantic ocean to the Pacific ocean in a matter of days. You can visit the mountains, beaches, camp in hundreds of national and state parks (for cheap or free).
In Florida, some of my fondest memories was jumping into two cars with my teenage friends and riding out the one hour drive to Daytona, where we'd drive our car literally on the beach and then plop down right next to it, sneaking sips of Natural Light that we illegally smuggled there between sessions of football and boogey boarding. Then we'd get back in the car and be back before curfew.
All of our vacations were to the Smokey Mountains, a mere 9 hour drive from central Florida. Dad would drive overnight in our minivan while us kids slept in the back seats. We'd pull up to a cabin first thing in the morning and excitedly rush to our claim our beds for the few days we'd be staying there. Despite sleeping a little rough in the car, we were more than energized by the newness of the locale and the existence of elevation we were quite unfamiliar with back home on the relatively flat peninsula, and we'd proceed to hike the woods around the cabin to survey the land.
Plenty of human and natural connection is to be had with your own vehicle in America. And I wouldn't have it any other way.
Your positive examples all have one thing in common: they're not happening in cities. Just because a car makes sense in the countryside or beach does not mean it makes sense inside of a city.
A problem with our approach to urban planning is that we get large, sterile apartment buildings or detached single family homes but absolutely nothing in between. If that missing middle was allowed by right, you'd find what I enjoy right now: both human connections and a car-lite lifestyle.
Neither is people willingly moving there. Dense urban living might appeal to young people but once you build a family and priorities change to peace & quiet, safety, good schools, and stable property values, dense urban living loses most of its appeal.
I grew up in a rural town (originally zoned for agriculture) where slowly over the next three decades became a town where rich doctors, lawyers, and accountants live now. I always get a kick seeing a certain individual sell a plot of farm land to build condos that now sell for $600k each next to a pond where I would fish as a kid. My ancestral home costs $80,000 and the land alone today is worth nearly a million dollars. Florida is definitely a case study where while zoning is relaxed, planning has little to zero forethought.
Growing up during this transition sucked. My family was poor so I didn't get a car until I was 21; there were also no sidewalks to walk anywhere, nearest bus stop was 3 miles from my home. It blew, I had to rely on my parents to do anything. There was no independence for me. If I wanted to go to a friends house that was 2 miles away, I'd have to walk across 3 difference highways and busy roads; highly dangerous for a 12 year old.
I remember visiting a cousin that lived Cambridge, MA and I was so jealous that she was able to do what she wanted without a car. She was 14 and had access to nearly the entire Cambridge/Boston/Quincy area by virtue of just walking. Bonus? My Aunt and Uncle had a SFH in Cambridge.
It is possible to develop areas like this. It's not a switch you turn on or off, but we purposely limit these areas to the affluent:
Now nearly 15 years later, I can live a similar lifestyle my cousin did but only because I have a well paying tech job.
edit: after reading some other replies you made, I'm not trying to make an either or situation but simply give people a choice on where to live. Walkable communities are extremely popular in the US, it's where land value is extremely high and homes are desirable. It's not just limited to NYC or Chicago or Boston, there are walkable towns in Minnesota (Milwaukee Avenue, Minneapolis) and even Florida (Seaside); if there were more walkable cities in the US I would bet my life's labor that they would become populated easily.
Those values are totally compatible with dense urban living! I have kids and enjoy all of those things in a walkable/bikeable community (Boston, MA). Most Americans have never seen it work so they think it's impossible. The reality is that it's illegal to build these places and the environment found here was built before NIMBYs strangled it.
I think you are discounting the desires of others. I personally love having my little slice of land. Cooking for myself in my own kitchen. I don't mind a drive every couple of weeks to get some more food. I know all my neighbors and bbq with them occassionally. I don't wish to break up dense city culture, why do you want to break up my preferred suburban culture? Can't we live in peace rather than dumping on each other's life choices?
They're talking about wanting dense urban living, and you're talking about preserving suburban living. Having one doesn't remove the other. Good, dense, urban living, however is very often shut down by suburbanites, because they work in cities, and actively shut down any attempts to reduce cars (and car amenities) in cities.
Once you build a family you need 3 bedrooms and probably don’t have $1.8 million for such a condo. But the reason condos cost so much per square foot is regulation. Fundamentally, they should be cheaper than comparable houses.
>But the reason condos cost so much per square foot is regulation.
Can you cite any specific examples of such regulations here? I currently live in a condo that was converted over from an apartments (quite common). If anything, the reason a condo might cost more per square foot is that smaller houses cost more per sqft period (less sqft to 'divide' fixed expenses across).
Try a zoning map, like San Francisco. Multifamily structures are illegal on the vast majority of the land. In those areas that do allow multifamily, it is mostly very small ones. And even when a large multifamily structure is permitted by zoning, it can be years of environmental litigation and discretionary review hearings.
Most areas in the US have regulations along the lines of "Ratio of floor area to size of lot must be no higher than X, must have at least Y parking spots per unit, building must be no taller than Z stories" which greatly increases the cost of multi-family housing units.
The Netherlands seems to pull off having a high fertility rate [1] and high population density [2]. Anecdotally, my friend who was born there in the late 1980s described being allowed to travel alone starting from a young age. I had one American friend born in the same generation who was allowed to bike around LA in his mid-teens, and my parents almost called CPS on him.
The idea of the post is that American cities are badly designed, and IMO current criticism makes no sense without looking at European cities and how American cities could look more like them.
Completely agree with you, and its telling that virtually every response here has been "That's only true in the US!". I've lived in Japan, and its true, urban living there is much better for families. But the premise of this thread is American cities and why people choose to live elsewhere, dependent on their cars. And the answer is precisely what you've said.
American cities are not only unpleasant families and the many people who don't fall in the young, single, relatively wealthy professional class, they are actively hostile towards them. Almost no one in the suburbs lives there because they love suburban life. They live there because it's the lesser evil compared to living in the city, given their personal situation. The people here calling for bans on cars are treating cancer with cough medicine. If people want to remove the American dependence on cars, they need to make American cities a more than a playground for the young professional class, and make them places a large proportion of Americans would actually want to live in.
> If people want to remove the American dependence on cars, they need to make American cities a more than a playground for the young professional class, and make them places a large proportion of Americans would actually want to live in.
This is precisely what happens when you remove cars from cities.
Maybe you think that because the only dense urban living options available to you are the car hellscapes?
I've been raised in Warsaw (a dense capital of Poland). I've had good schools within walking distance. I've had access to quiet green spaces within walking and biking distance (they weren't paved over for parking lots). I've had lots of places to hang out with my friends, who lived nearby, or whom I could reach myself via frequent, reliable, and affordable public transport.
And Warsaw wasn't a particularly utopian city. Just built with decent public transport and without NIMBY zoning policies.
I'm just giving a counter example that dense cities can be appealing for raising a family, and even an unexceptional city like Warsaw can manage it with the right priorities. The fact that something exists doesn't mean it's the only and forced option.
These "Cars Bad" articles are always written from the perspective of people who live in cities, and like city living. If you live in Chicago or NYC or SF, of course we should have fewer SFHs, more apartments, fewer cars, use mass transit, make things walkable, and so on. It's hard to disagree with that.
But if you live in a county with 50 people per square mile, none of these things make sense. Cars are basically required, apartments don't make sense, mass transit is nonexistent, and nothing is walkable, and that's often why people move there.
I like the USA because you can choose where to live. If you want to live in a concrete honeycomb, walk everywhere, take the subway, great! Move to the city! If you want to depend on a car and live where you can't even see your neighbor's house let alone hear it, great! Move to the country! One choice is not objectively better for everyone.
And so are schools, and lighthouses, and all kinds of other things that benefit society. Subsidizing polluting nomads who eat up highway capacity and free parking isn't an intentional policy that we've all decided to do because we like the result.
EDIT: which is to say that cities can exist as the tax-generating powerhouses that they are _because_ they subsidize public transportation. That subsidized city transit is why we can afford to maintain the highway system.
Yeah, but not on the level of NYC, Chicago, SF, and LA (which actually has decent public transport (for the US), despite the reputation). Yes, then there are cities like Houston, but they are paying for 16-lane urban freeways, which have to at least cancel out any cost savings from not having much public transport.
It seems like a chicken-and-egg problem. Spending on public transit means there's budget for infrastructure. Highways being built means there's budget for infrastructure.
Budget for infrastructure means infrastructure gets built.
I'm anti car too... but your argument about maintenance/tax money is heavily flawed. Both systems need government assistance. Also heavier vehicles pay a significantly larger portion in registration for this reason.
Even if someone is in the very top percentage of usage and pays no property tax?
And just to be totally clear; right now no one is paying their fair share for driving, since no one pays a cent to cover their emissions. People who's home has a gasoline engine are just super-duper not paying their share.
Author compares post college life to his residential campus and concludes that walkability promotes human connection? That's... ...an opinion, to put it charitably. Cities have been known for fostering alienation and dehumanization long before the invention of the automobile. People who move out to my car-necessitating suburb routinely cite the enhanced feeling of community by having a small town feel centered around the school district, local businesses, churches, and responsive civic organizations that make a difference. I think the author needs to get out of his bubble.
The USA is really hostile to anyone who doesn’t want to have a car or perhaps more importantly can’t have a car. Who can’t have a car? People with certain disabilities for one.
Not a car-centric life has its origins in keeping poor people out and redlining. Now neighborhoods might not be legally segregated (sunset towns still exist however) but if those houses are so expensive that poor people can’t afford them then it amounts to de facto segregation.
You will hear counterarguments like “how can a highway be racist?” but when you look at what neighborhoods were destroyed to make room for that highway and the net effects of intergenerational wealth creation it turns out a highway can be racist.
Even something like turning right on red is so hostile to cyclists and pedestrians. This was originally introduced in the OPEC oil crisis to reduce car idling but despite clear evidence that it increases danger to cyclist and pedestrians it’s still here. Why? Driver convenience trumps everything.
When it comes to walkability most Americans still want their cars and will nearly always choose more space over walkability.
Even when they do want walkability what they talk mean is they still want their large house on an acre lot that happens to be walkable and that just doesn’t scale.
I also believe that America’s car worship contributes to the profound selfishness and lack of empathy of most Americans. It’s a bubble that allows you not to have to deal with other people.
It's not even that they're built for cars. They're simply just not built for humans to walk around.
If you've ever been in a situation where you're visiting a friend in an unfamiliar neighborhood and the map is telling you that your destination is physically just "right behind this house", a mere 50m away, but the front street you're currently in is a long crescent without cross access to the back street where you're trying to get to, you've experienced the frustration of modern planning with no afterthought for human access.
I'm no expert, but I've done my fair share of traveling. One thing that's always been very noticeable to me is the strong correlation between highly cohesive communities and the many seemingly disorderly pedestrian paths crisscrossing their neighborhoods.
One of the major frustrations I have with my current town is the "last tenth of a mile" that is often disconnected from any sidewalks, or is blocked off with no path through. We're a dense inner ring suburb with a decent selection of stores within 1/4 mile of tens of thousands of people. But for me to walk to the grocery store or dollar store, There are a couple of short sections of the walk where the sidewalk simply ends and I have to walk in the street. Also, a lot of commercial areas will be completely fenced off in the rear, so pedestrians in the residential area behind them have to take a long circuitous path to visit them. There sometimes seems to be no thought given to how pedestrians would access some areas.
>Selfishly, I really want the USA to bring city centers back to livable levels by banning most cars and redesigning them for humans.
Sadly though this doesn't help the millions of people who also aren't within walking distance of said city centers. We'd need to rebuild our public transport as well which is also desperately needed.
I certainly agree that the US planned too much around cars and not enough around walking/transit/cycling.
I am however often skeptical of the comparisons to university life. While walkability absolutely does help foster connection, I don't think you can attribute all of the differences just to that. There are other major differences between life in university and life outside that also make a big difference in fostering connection:
- Only 5,000-50,000 people in universities, compared to millions in cities. You're more likely to live near friends and more likely to run into them.
- The vast majority of people in university are in the same narrow age group
- Most people in university have more free time than those who work full time
The biggest apple/orange problem with OPs comparison is that in a university, there is a competitive admission process. Universities are planned, elite communities. You can't do that in a city. "Oh sorry NYC is now for people with 1400+ SAT only, sorry buddy, you're gonna have to go to Detroit."
I guess you can price people out, but that does not really have the same effect as the psychometric screening that universities do.
I live in a small remote town on an island, and I could not be happier. Silent, big houses, everything I need in shops and restaurants, and incredible scenery every day. I used to live in the big city when I was studying, and it was horrible. I used to have a window open just to get some air into the horrible apartment I lived in, and the windowsill would have a layer of asphalt dust.
The big city has a few things that you can't get elsewhere, but you can always just travel there when you need to/want to.
I love my car and I love driving to work every day. Cars enable privacy, freedom from bias and judgement, and a place to think. Also freedom from getting murdered on the Caltrain. "Loneliness is dangerous" is easy to say when you're on top of the social hierarchy with a job at Vox. Also, what a misleading lie of "a majority prefer to live in cities, suburbs, towns"; the survey "cited" gave 6 options, and 31% chose rural areas, and the "majority" comes from the other 5. I find it more surprising that 30% of Americans actually prefer to live in the woods.
Yeah, it's frustrating to always see "people should use public transit" in opinion pieces every week without ever making efforts to discover why people aren't - for me, like yourself, it's safety. California public transport feels entirely unpoliced to me. I live next to a transit station in southern california, which goes to places I often want to visit, but I don't ever ride it because I read news about people getting attacked on it. Which of course happens when there isn't even the bare minimum of fare verification/enforcement at the stations.
I spent a few years living in India, where most major cities require you to go through a metal detector/bags though X-ray to board. Plus decent security coverage at the stations. Yeah, it takes a lot of human resources to do all that, but really gives the population confidence they can safely take the metro to work and back.
I see these articles focusing on cars and density, and don't seem dive into details of policy decisions.
This year I moved to a city (Spokane, WA) with an abundance of parks and a few smaller commercial businesses within the middle of residential areas, and the amount of interactions I have with neighbors has exploded. Just yesterday, I'm in front of my house breaking down cardboard for recycling, and met someone new just walking over to a nearby park with their dog. This never happened to me in the last 3-4 cities I lived in.
My sense is that policies like parking minimums, restrictions on small commercial businesses in residential areas, access to parks, might actually have a bigger impact than simply trying to have lots of people living on top of each other.
Not that density is bad, or necessarily good, I just don't see it as particularly significant to improving social interaction. Simply stacking people together isn't going to fix this problem.
Too reductive. If you go to places like Weber County, Utah there's lots of human connection and it's also built for cars. There are lots of things causing people to feel lonely in the modern world and cars are only a part of it. And if you live in certain parts of the country the car is a great tool for feeling more human connection (by getting you to a church or other place with people similar to you for example).
I like driving, and I don't want it to be taken away from me. I don't want my whole city and society to be re-engineered because of "climate" concerns.
When my wife and I bought were looking for a home in 1993, our #1 requirement was that it was a walkable urban environment with a minimum of restaurants, bars, and parks, and preferably, other entertainment as well.
We narrowed it down to four towns in the area near both our jobs, and settled in a town of about 12,000 that is 2 square miles in area. Our neighborhood of single family homes is mostly 50ft x 90ft lots. There are several apartment complexes in town, and also several high rise apartment buildings.
We had a few bars and restaurants when we bought the house, there are more now, plus a very good performing arts theater, a movie theater, and several good parks. It really hit all the points.
The added kicker is that we have a light rail stop in town that can deliver us to Manhattan in 85 minutes.
In spite of that, we know a lot of people that question why we didn't take that same amount of money and buy a much larger house on a full acre out in the suburbs. They really just don't get it.
Wow, is this article seriously going to ignore free time and responsibility?
Of course it was easy to make friends in college, because you had a light schedule that allowed leisure time and to actually do something with spontaneous events. It seems the author also ignores the recent research that shows that shared context is a huge contributor to building friendships, which college provides. And of course if you worked and went to school, you had very little time to build meaningful friendships.
Once you have a house, you have home maintenence. Once you have a job, you have as much or more work than in college. Your coworkers are likely to have families... not so much in college. Those coworkers and their family schedules are not going to be as similar as two college students.
Even removing commutes entirely, doesn't provide much additional leisure time to build friendships if you have a house, family, etc to be responsible for.
Check out what we’re doing at Culdesac. We build cities for people, not cars.
We’re building a 1000 resident car free neighborhood in Tempe, AZ. It is under construction now. Over 25 buildings are vertical and the first residents move in later this year.
No, you're building an off-campus college dorm for ASU. Calling that development a city is a joke. You have fewer amenities within walking distance than the apartments closer to the campus, which have parking.
I was interested in the concept and applied for a position on the team but was rejected without a phone screen. Thought my enthusiasm would at least warrant a preliminary discussion.
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