Hence the "with office areas and places of interest being several miles apart each".
That's of course a design decision (urban planning). The average US city prioritized cars over efficiency, the environment and people actually having a chance to connect and build an urban culture (like NY or Chicago or SF has -- or had) outside of strip malls.
Another reason is that things are generally very spread out in the US. Since it was taken for granted that everyone has a car, house lots are large and commercial areas are far from residential areas.
I agree with this. With cars came the idea that different parts of the city could be optimized for different things. Work in one place, shop in another, sleep in yet a third. But that means you have no option but to spend a lot of time traveling between these places.
Note that this is not just due to geography but to actual urban planning/architecture. Post-WWII US cities were explicitly designed for cars, and that's a disaster ecologically and practically.
See also Ivan Illich's Tools for Conviviality which has a long analysis on why car-oriented cities has a terribly-low efficiency.
It is obvious to me: American cities are designed around cars and only cars.
Old cities in Europe and Japan were designed around people walking around, basically because there was not anything else when those cities were created.
They had small streets, only some of them were demolished and started anew, like Lineal in Barcelona or Castellana in Madrid. Public transportation like subways improved the situation, but it was a problem at first. Now it is something that people are starting to value, walking(or public transport) for shopping, for work and to see friends.
Cities like Boston, Detroit, those were cities designed for cars. As a student I lived a year in Boston and was shocked on how much the city depended on cars. Let's not talk about L.A, even more.
I've visited the U.S. a couple of times on holiday and even from that perspective, it's stunning just how many places are designed exclusively around the car. Even just walking from one shop to the next is awkward as they often have fences or hedges to separate them, so you have to walk from the shop, through the extensive car park, onto the main road that has no sidewalk and then into the next car park.
But yes, you're right. If you design exclusively around the car then not using a car becomes very awkward. Also, without any meaningful public transport, the suburbs also lock in car usage.
However, car usage is only really practical up to a certain density of people due to their poor space usage. When you get more people using cars, you need more roads and car parking space. This tends to separate the various amenities to fit in all the extra space, which then means that more people will need a car to travel to them due to the extra distance. That leads to yet more roads and more separation of the shops etc. until you reach a point where there's massive congestion at popular times. However, building more roads leads to induced demand and even more congestion, when the actual solution is to move facilities closer to where people live/work so that they're not forced into driving everywhere.
You're so focused on driving I feel you're missing the point of designing the space so driving isn't necessary. Your axiom is 'work is far away'.
But the point is it only happens if it's convenient to be far away. Design your city in a way it's convenient to be nearby and it'll be nearby. The problem is this design is completely at odds with private car ownership.
So...a car dependent city then. They tend to have their office buildings distributed fairly evenly throughout the metro area and have a supermarket in pretty much every neighborhood. Every daily need and lots of non-daily needs are less than 20 minutes away.
Just admit that you want public transit and high density and stop trying to weasel around saying so. All of the benefits professed about dense living already exist in most car dependent cities, with the only difference being the mode of transportation used. In a car dependent area, industrial areas are also part of the 20-minute neighborhood without the downsides of having to live a 20 minutes walk from them.
Outside of a handful of cities (mostly on the West Coast) that failed to expand their infrastructure when their populations grew, people in car dependent areas already live in 20 minute neighborhoods. You just disagree with their lifestyle and transportation choices. If someone comes along and builds lots of 100 story skyscrapers when the transit system can only support 10 story buildings, the same issue will befall your beloved dense public transit dependent city.
it's a good counterpoint. but basically we're saying the car is a good bandaid for the foolishness of city planning (spacing things way too far apart, having the stores be min of 2 miles from most houses, placing disproportionate office space to housing ratio, nearest library like 4 miles away and yet its the size of an amusement park).
So maybe many people just really hate car dependency and long commutes which should push us to move away from such a model of urban planning. More offices seamlessly integrated into middle density housing similar to a lot of cities like Stockholm where big towers and suburban detached homes are more rare.
Your idea is actually how car-dependent cities are laid out. Look at a map of Phoenix for a textbook example: the city is laid out on a square mile grid with retail/offices on the grid corners. People may drive to go shopping, but that's a choice, they could walk there (if they want to brave the heat) since for most of the city the nearest shopping area is less than a mile (1.6 km) away.
That assumes a value judgment about what is a “well designed city.” Sprawling car dependent cities offend my personal aesthetic sensibilities, but there is a reason that the biggest internal migration trend in the US is away from cities like New York and to cities like Houston and Phoenix. Being able to easily drive everywhere can be very convenient.
This may be true for an individual musing whether to purchase a car in a given city where they happen to have a choice, but from an urban planning perspective, designing a city for cars imposes the same issue as a result of decreased density. All that automobile speed is wasted passing highways and parking lots. As the joke goes: Houston is an hour away from Houston.
Building a city around cars means building it around people who live far away. The people who live out in the suburbs and commute in get a lot more out of the roads than the people who are a block away from every place they need to go.
In a well designed city 24 miles is a ridiculous commute. How much of your drive is through a) the middle of nowhere or b) land itself dedicated to automobiles?
Unfortunately, if you haven't lived in a well-designed city it's hard to truly understand the lunacy of US urban "design". Cities there are as though they were built for 100 foot tall collosi, with everything spread insanely far apart. Of course, the collosi in question are cars, and in serving cars we made them a necessity, while destroying places that actually served humans.
> Most US cities that could benefit from urban planning and redesign are that way because they're densely packed car-centric areas.
I mean, in Europe we've largely repurposed medieval towns to car usage, with much worse constraints in terms of preservation of historical buildings. US cities can be much more radical and much more easily, if they really want to.
> It's not just the narrowness of the streets: they're also short and not on a grid.
The US suburbs with their hierarchical residential < collector < highway system were designed for cars, however most networks in the US city centers were designed before the invention of the car.
The only parts of cities like that that are actually "designed" are the downtown and a few special developments. The rest just grows as people move and buy land and open businesses.
Most people drive cars, and most people prefer having some room to breathe, and there's no shortage of space, so lots are made big enough to have parking and empty space, etc.
There's not some kind of anti-walking design conspiracy here.
That's of course a design decision (urban planning). The average US city prioritized cars over efficiency, the environment and people actually having a chance to connect and build an urban culture (like NY or Chicago or SF has -- or had) outside of strip malls.
reply