Comments by "" (@timogul) on "City Beautiful"
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@Coffeepanda294 Well, you argued that they couldn't. If say a group of thieves wanted to sneak around, they could park in one part of a neighborhood, use footpaths to travel around it, and then hit homes that are less traceable to their vehicles. Without footpaths, they would also be able to move through back yards, but would be much more conspicuous while doing so.
In any case, if home owners do not want strangers walking beside their homes, then that is their business, not yours. If they choose to buy homes in neighborhoods that prevent such things, then that is their choice to make.
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@StephenRichmond89 Yeah, some things can be tricky. The Disney Contemporary has a monorail running through it, but it's harder than it might seem, and even then it's only like 50ft off the ground. I think it's a better idea to build relatively small archology towers, equivalent to a small town, but then you could have multiples of them within blocks of each other if you wanted. On the other hand, if you had a single massive city, then you could also invest in massive "industrial supports," like having entire 50-story towers within it that are just massive freight elevators, capable of lifting entire houses up to a higher level if you wanted, and then broad boulevards along the way that link areas of the building.
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@NJ-wb1cz In a democratic society, the government Is the people. The people passing regulations are doing so because they were elected by the people of that area to make policies that they would prefer. If the people in a given area do not like their regulators, they can vote them out.
Also, socialism does not mean that you don't own anything. I have no idea where you got that from.
As for noise and traffic, while it is possible to regulate that directly to some degree, preventing, say, loud music or something, any reasonably successful business will have a minimum amount of noise and disruption from customers coming and going, you cannot "regulate that out" without making the business impossible to run. Not to mention that it could attract rowdier customers that would care less about following "regulations" of their behavior. You propose solutions that might work in some ideal scenario, but not in the real world.
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@TheSuperappelflap We don't need to reach zero emissions. The Earth does sequester carbon at certain rates, so while we need to have a net negative carbon footprint at a global level, that would still allow a fairly significant amount of carbon output, it would just be offset by carbon sinks elsewhere in the system. But again, a lot of the carbon produced in manufacturing and transporting cars and batteries can be reduced over time. For example, green cargo ships would greatly reduce the carbon costs of transportation.
Public transport is good for areas where that can be done effectively and efficiently, but that is not true in many areas. There are tens of millions of Americans who cannot reasonably be serviced by public transport, because they are too spread out and it is not worth building public transit in their areas.
It's worth noting that while you claim "batteries are bad," most green energy relies on batteries too. Even if you have a 100% electrified public transit network, that would almost certainly require massive batteries to maintain the power to it, as most of the green forms of energy are transient. So, you're completely wrong on all counts. please educate yourself before commenting again.
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You point out how each house in a suburb is "bland" because they are very similar, but isn't the same true of apartments? If you have a large apartment building, holding dozens of families, isn't each of their homes no different than the one next door? What difference does it make, other than each suburban home coming with a yard and a lot more space to live in? And sure, you can build fancy craft-built homes instead of prefab ones, but those will cost more, and not everyone can afford that. The whole point here was to provide a house that more families could afford.
As for "corner stores," putting a "corner store" in an average suburb would be a bad idea, because they could not get enough foot traffic to sustain their business. Not enough people would live nearby to it at once. That is why car-centric shopping makes more sense in suburbs, although many modern communities are built with a large "commercial hub" within a reasonable walking/biking distance of the homes, for people who choose to visit them that way. A development that started around 2000 or so in our area has a grocery store and dozens of other businesses in a roughly central location to many of the new homes, but you can't build out too many different stores spread too thinly, or none could get enough business to be sustainable.
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@StephenRichmond89 Generally, yeah, but "cost effective" is relative. So long as you have plenty of room to spread out as much as you like, it is not cost effective to build to this level of density. On the other hand, if you had a country with very little footprint to work with, and you need to get more and more out of every square foot, then building up is the only way to do that (aside from building down, which has its own issues).
And you can't just build super tall, thin towers, because you run into issues where the elevators become super inefficient to use, and people end up "trapped" on the upper floors because it takes an hour to reach the ground, so if you're going to build tall, you also have to build wide in some way, and spread out goods and services so that people don't need to travel all the way to the ground most of the time,
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I like the idea of arcologies, but they need to be carefully designed. "The Line" sounds dumb. There is an arcology I want to see made though, based around the concept of four tall towers about on the scale of the original Twin Towers, all linked at every 50 floors or so by open or semi-open promenade rings, allowing you to easily cross from building to building without having to travel more than 50 floors. You would have food and commercial spaces on the 1-2 floors around these promenades, making them similar to a mall, and commercial/light industrial spaces would be in the middle-most floors between these bridges (ie floors 25-ish, 75-ish, 125-ish, etc.), so furthest from the bridges. I assume that the housing nearest the promenade levels would be in most high demand, because they would be most convenient and get the best light, while those directly under the promenades would be the lowest value, but the goal would be so that nothing you would need in an average day would be out of reach within +- 50 floors of your apartment, and no service you would need on an annual basis would require you to leave the building, so plenty of people would stay in the building just a much as a New Yorker might stay inside the city.
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@ People in the suburbs want to take cars though. You can ask them yourself. They don't want to have to walk for an hour or two to reach a store. What you mean is that you don't want them to drive, which is something else entirely. People who actually don't want to drive live in walkable urban areas instead, which is also an option, just one that plenty of people do not prefer.
As to parking, are you legitimately claiming that without zoning laws, suburban commercial developments would have LESS parking than they currently do? How? Why? Businesses want BUSINESS, and to do that, their customers need to be able to park outside. No developer would build a strip mall on a plot of land with no parking, because no businesses would want to move into that space, knowing that they would not get enough traffic to pay their rent. It's possible that such regulations exist, but if so, they would be redundant, and probably just a holdover from other times.
As to density, that's generally determined by the community itself. If they want higher density, then they will elect people who will provide it. If they do not want higher density, then they will elect people who will block it. It's their choice to make.
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@BreadPickles Yes, but that's because that's what the people of that community want. See, that's the difference, you being in a community does not give you the right to change how that community functions, but that community has the right to determine how it functions. If the majority of your community does not want what you want, then your two options are to either live with it, or find a different community that better suits your preferences. Either is entirely possible.
Also, it's a misunderstanding to think that the high cost of housing in those areas is caused by a lack of availability, it's rather the other way around. Those areas are only viable because they have high costs of living. They require high value occupants to be profitable. If you took a low density, unwalkable area, and you "revitalized it" to be a very walkable area, then the cost of living in that area would skyrocket.
You don't like cars, so building places that are accessible to cars is bad for you, but that's very different from it being bad for most people.
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@BreadPickles Yes, supply and demand is what led to the current balance of drivability and walkability.
And I'm not talking about utility costs, I'm talking about business costs. There are two types of "walkable" areas, there are high quality walkable areas that are clean, have access to a ton of food and shopping options, high speed and convenient public transit, etc. Then there are low quality walkable areas, where you have little option but to walk places, but there are relatively few good food or shopping options, dingy conditions, and minimal public transit.
The latter is easy to achieve, but the former requires a high-income local population, because you are losing long distance traffic in exchange for high quality close in traffic. If you do not have a critical mass of high quality local traffic, then you cannot turn a profit, local businesses go under, and you end up with a food desert area. IF you try to build a high quality walkable area, then the cost of living will automatically rise to meet that needed amount.
It's impossible to "increase supply" your way out of that problem, because if you ever did build sufficient supply of high density housing to overcome that curve, the result would be a short term period of lower housing costs, but then the least efficient of those neighborhoods would start to die off due to lack of revenues, and become low quality neighborhoods.
Highway infrastructure may be expensive, but it also allows not only for the transit of the goods that even dense urban areas rely on, but also it allows customers to reach thousands of businesses spread across a hundred mile range or more. It costs more, but provides more in return.
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@BreadPickles Europe built their communities differently than in the US. You could rebuild the US to be more like Europe, but it would cost more than it took to grow Europe into that organically over the last century, and the public would not AGREE with you that this is what they want.
Supply and demand plays an obvious role in housing prices, but as I said, it it not a system that you can abuse to get the outcomes you want with no downsides. If you build more supply than there is demand for it, then that would drive prices down, but at the cost of unsold units, and therefore commercial failure for the people building it. When you build housing to match demand, then the cost of highly walkable areas will always be more expensive per square foot than lower density options, so there will always be that trade-off. This exists in Europe just as it does in the US.
Your argument about small businesses is entirely wrong. Small businesses fail because bigger businesses can outcompete them on economies of scale. Since the bigger business can stock more items and sell more items, they can charge less per item and still turn a profit. It is impossible for small businesses to keep up with this without someone putting a thumb on the scales in their favor. People aren't more likely to spend more in a walkable area, because while they might not visit as many stores, they are more likely to spend more in the stories they DO visit than in a walkable area, because they are more likely to pick things up from several departments of a large store than they are to enter several different smaller stores.
The infrastructure costs issue is a real one, but it's one that the public has decided they are fine with. They would prefer the current model, and the associated costs, over a more concentrated model. Higher density communities would be more efficient, but efficiency isn't everything.
I'm glad you're engaging with people that have opinions different from your own. These discussions are important to have and we aren't having enough of them. I just think we should build our society that has something for everyone, and that does include people who want to live in high density, walkable areas. But many don't. And we obviously can't build walkable, high density areas outside of the downtowns of our biggest cities, because then those areas would become "downtowns of our biggest cities."
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@ As for parking, yes, many parking lots are mostly empty a lot of the time. This is not a bad thing, because at the times when they do have more than expected customers, there is space for them. If a parking lot is mostly empty during the highest volume periods, then the core business is not doing well, and in many cases they will add additional retail space attached to that parking lot. Again though, for the most part, the parking available to a business matches the demand for it, and under no scenario would you see significantly less parking space than you currently do, because the businesses could not operate with less. Maybe the regulations are better than I thought if they get it so right.
Out of curiosity, if you believe that businesses would put in less parking than they do, and that "regulations" are the only reason for the existing amount of parking, what incentive do you believe there would be for local governments to require MORE parking than the consumers actually need? What is the benefit to them in having an unused parking space? Wouldn't local governments have every incentive to ensure that every square foot of land were put toward a productive purpose? A wanted parking space is of value, but an unwanted parking space would have no more value to the government than it would to the business.
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@ Subrurban areas are no more likely to be financially insolvent than high density urban areas are, have you seen the finances of the major metropolises lately? Any area has the potential to be insolvent if they make poor decisions, but plenty of both urban and suburban areas have managed a balanaced budget. Strong Towns has a particular message they want to promote, so they cherrypick examples that suit their case, this should not be unexpected.
As to your comment on parking lots, so is an apartment building a waste of space when people are at work and it is mostly empty? Pretty much ANY land use will be unused for a significant amount of the day, that does not mean that it lacks value when it IS fulfilling its function. Now ideally you can use parking space efficiently, have vertical garages rather than large lots where possible, perhaps put solar panels over them so that they can also generate energy. Obviously design them in ways that drain efficiently, etc. There are good and bad ways to handle this, but parking in and of itself is not a bad thing.
At the end of the day, walkable towns do exist. You can move there right now if you want. You already have that choice. The only thing you currently lack is for ALL communities to be walking-dependent, and that's something that I doubt America will do any time soon.
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@BreadPickles I'm not saying that the low density infrastructure problem does not exist, only that it is a manageable problem. It is a negative to such communities, but urban communities also have negatives, and any community will need to balance negatives and positives. Sprawling communities do have higher infrastructure costs per resident, but these costs can be managed by a responsible government. A poor government will fail to manage these costs, but the same is true of high density urban areas.
I'll also point out that urban areas are not more solvent on a residential level, they are only more solvent because they currently have higher density of businesses. As more and more businesses have shifted to work from home policies, this advantage has become less and less viable.
Again, car-centric design has clear negatives to it, as does walking-centric design. You seem to personally prefer the negatives to walking, and that's fine, but one is not objectively better than the other. It all just comes down to which set of pros and cons you prefer. Most Americans prefer the pros and cons to driving over the pros and cons to walkability. Maybe that will change, but you have to meet people where they are, not where you are.
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@ Bikes can be faster for some short trips, but for example it takes me five minutes to drive to the store from my house, including traffic lights, but it would take me over half an hour by bike, without air conditioning, and with far less cargo capacity, so I'd need to make more trips. But we are talking "Car-centric design" here, if a place is car centric, then traveling it by car tends to be much faster on anything more than a very short trip. If the infrastructure is intentionally inefficient for cars, then that's more the fault of the infrastructure than the car. The more people prefer to move by car, the more cars will be on the road, so the more adapted the environment needs to be for those drivers. It makes no sense to make life inconvenient for people.
And yes, you list a bunch of potential negatives to cars, I'm not arguing those don't exist, I'm saying that people WEIGHT those pros and cons, and more of them PREFER the balance of car ownership over the alternatives. You don't have to agree with them, you just have to accept their right to not agree with you.
And yes, a lot of those are the benefits of suburbs, but suburbs cannot function without cars. I live near a pretty walkable suburban area, one in which at least some of the community can reach a lot of food options on foot, and that's all well and good, but I doubt anyone in that community lacks cars, because they likely have jobs that require a car to reach, and want access to the many stores that are outside that community. Suburbs are inherently too spread out to be completely self-sufficient as a walkable unit, they need to have the flexibility that cars provide.
And no, suburbs did not predate cars. Unless you mean those built around train lines, which did exist, but tend to have ceased being suburbs by now, because the city grew up around them. It would be inefficient to run a rail line out to every suburban development these days. That time has passed.
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@BreadPickles To your first paragraph, the things you mention as "downsides" are things that are necessary to have a large numbers of cars. I think every driver would agree that everything would be better if they were the ONLY driver on the road, with no other drivers taking up space, but that's an unreasonable expectation. If everyone who wants to drive is able to, then the infrastructure has to take them all into account, and if you build roads in a way that supports only 50 cars per minute, when 100 cars want to pass through there each minute, then ALL of those cars will end up having a bad time of it.
This is far from impossible, and MOST road systems handle this just fine. The worst problems out there come from road networks that were originally designed 50+ years ago, around completely different traffic conditions and with far less understanding of traffic management, and have since been jerry-rigged as best they can, but are still far from the most efficient designs possible. The same is true of many rail networks, of course.
Also, the 1/3 of Americans that prefer to not drive are already not driving. They would not be "removed from the road" they were never there in the first place. The amount of people who currently drive but would prefer not to would barely be a statistical blip. That isn't to say that you can't convert some people from driving to other methods of transportation, but you don't achieve that by making driving intentionally more annoying, you do it by providing legitimate alternatives, like building out rail networks. If people can get on a train from near their house and skip a two hour commute, they might. If you add intentional annoyances to expand their two hour commute to a three hour one, then they will just be annoyed any time the topic of "walkability" comes up, and vote accordingly.
And yes, if you are building a suburb, you can build them to be both walkable and car accessible. I mentioned the one near me that I think does a good job at this. But you can't make it too unfriendly to cars, because if all the workers and school buses set out in the morning, you can't have a three hour back-up because you're trying to funnel things through narrow, winding lanes. You need to design the traffic flows around the peak traffic requirements of the area.
Buses and trams can sometimes work, but often run inconvenient schedules for most people to work around, and/or are massive cost to the community. You talked about suburbs not being able to pay their own way as it is, if they had to also fund convenient bus routes that would blow out any chance of sustainability.
And if you are genuinely making the argument that people should have options, then I have some excellent news for you. You, yes you, currently have those options. There are already communities that meet your needs, out there, in America, as we speak. All you need to do is move to one. The more people move into them, the more that will get built.
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@BreadPickles Well again, quality walkability is necessarily expensive, It's a tripod, "walkability, quality, affordability, pick two." If you're asking to have great walkability AND have it be cheap, then sorry, that's out of anyone's control. It'd be like drivers complaining that they don't want to drive, because they'd prefer a chauffeur, but it's too expensive.
Drivers already pay the costs of their driving in terms of gas taxes, home taxes, and income taxes. You could argue that some of that cost is carried by people who do not themselves drive, but the same is true of pretty much any tax or government program, it's just inefficient to try and calculate every person's exact "fair burden" down to the penny. By and large, the costs and benefits of car ownership are distributed more fair than most programs.
Comparing Amsterdam to most US cities is silly, and demeans us all. European cities are fundamentally different in their overall design than most US cities, as they were built up on centuries of history. It would be possible to rebuild American cities to be more like their European counterparts, but would cost a LOT more money to do so (making the resulting housing even less affordable), and it needs to be done by expanding rail options first, not by making car options worse as a first step.
As to your point about lanes, it is true that simply adding lanes is not always a solution, although it is often a solution in many cases. Once you reach a certain number of lanes, you do get diminishing returns from adding more, but the actual solution there is to build entire alternate routes to reduce traffic on that first route, and also to increase the efficiency of offramps to reduce choke points. If you try to funnel too much traffic into a single off ramp, it will cause congestion no matter how many lanes you have, but if you have efficient methods of peeling off traffic much earlier in the process, it flows much more smoothly. As I noted above, many of the worst traffic areas suffer from having built their infrastructure many decades ago, and so the overall big picture shape of them is not an efficient way to distribute the traffic that flows through them. This is not an inevitability of cars, it's just poor planning that is difficult to adjust for. The same problem can happen with rail networks, or even with pedestrians in some places, such as stadiums.
But I agree, the best way to help pedestrians is to advocate for the changes that don't come at the expense of drivers.
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@BreadPickles You keep listing negatives to car use, and for the most part, I don't disagree that those negatives exist. I don't think that they would come as a surprise to most Americans. I just think that most Americans agree that the benefits of car use significantly outweigh those negatives. It's not that people are making poor choices for themselves, it's just that the choices that work best for them are not necessarily the choices that you would want them to make.
Trains will always be more efficient at cars for carrying passengers from one location on their route to another. Trains will also always be more expensive to build and maintain that single route than an equivalent highway route, and far less flexible at delivering passengers directly to their destination than a car is. The benefit to cars is that drivers can start at a location relatively far from a major arterial highway, they can all meet up at that highway, travel along it to a point near their destination, and then split off from the highway to drive to a point at, or very near to their destination, all without even exiting their vehicle. Outside of dense urban areas, it's very difficult for rail networks to compete with that even in ideal hypotheticals, so while I do think we can and should be doing more than we have, I don't foresee that ever resulting in a less car-centric overall environment, without some major black swan changes to the way people interact with the world.
As to suburbs, as I've said, it's complicated. Everyone agrees that it would be nice to live in a suburb without any cars driving around. . . so long as they could still drive wherever they wanted. It's difficult to design a suburb to have the maximum amount of walkability and nature and comfort, as if cars weren't even a factor, while also having the infrastructure to allow all the occupants to get to work without massive traffic jams. You want to try and divert major traffic as far from the housing as you can manage, but without causing it to take an extra ten minutes of weaving around to enter and exit the community. There are ways to manage this balance, but it's never going to be the best at both factors, it's always going to be a compromise.
And you can also build these suburban communities to be self-contained, with enough businesses and food and shopping to sustain at least some portion of the community's population at least some of the time, but again, this is never perfect, and the more of his you have, the more expensive the community would become in order to sustain all of these businesses. You could not achieve this with very low housing costs, because the businesses would go out of business. I think that a lot of suburban areas built within the last few decades have been designed to be walking and bike friendly, but it will always be a balancing act, and it will always come at a cost.
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