Comments by "Daniel Kelly" (@danielkelly2210) on "City Beautiful" channel.

  1. We should remove at least 50-75% of urban highways in the US. A few of them are okay, but in general they're awful for cities.
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  2.  @Nedlius  Nah, stay here. Zoning reform will mean the old built-environment can be made more like those outside the US.
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  3.  @tek1645  London in Ontario is known as "Fake London".
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  4. I'm not sure I fully agree with this reasoning. You don't really need skyscrapers to have downtown density (although they can help). Manhattan is a bit of an outlier and is not a good baseline of comparison. Cities like London, Paris, Rome, Athens, etc. have very dense cores with relatively few skyscrapers (London) or without skyscrapers (Paris). In the US Washington, DC has a dense core despite a citywide height limit of 12 stories. At any rate, downtown is being redeveloped with taller residential buildings in mind (quite a few of them, actually) and it's probably only a matter of time before DTLA bears more of a resemblance to downtown Chicago or downtown Philadelphia than it currently does, but it's never going to have the same importance to the LA area that the cores of those cities do to their respective regions.
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  5.  @cmdrls212  People have plenty of space outside car-centric sprawlburbs.
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  6. It'd have been nice if they'd kept the 3rd Avenue el at least.
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  7. West Falls Church is going to be re-developed as TOD in the near future. Additionally, the area south of the station formerly occupied by the high school is going to be a new TOD.
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  8. People always say Texas is too hot to do anything outdoors. Not sure what the appeal is.
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  9. Yeah, Americans march to their own beat. There's lots of demand here for single-family home-only neighborhoods where everything needs to be accessed by car. In most Americans' minds this is a "nice neighborhood" (preferably on a cul-de-sac, too).
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  10. I think it has to do with U.S. culture. There are things that exceptions are made for in order to meet another cultural or national goal. Owning your own home (and in modern America, this means a detached single-family home, far from any commercial bustle or noise) and having space between you and your neighbors is seen almost as an American birthright. Some very pro-car advocates have admitted that, yes, U.S. suburban zoning and subsidizing automobile infrastructure is heavy-handed government intervention in the economy, but it serves the higher goal of making Americans into "independent" landowners (and thus less dependent on the state) and it also grows the economy (at least in their estimation), so this philosophical contradiction is considered justified. Somehow they’re saying that these un-liberal and redistributive state policies make Americans more independent of the state. It’s a bit weird, but very "U.S.".
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  11. In New York and Boston, maybe some parts of Chicago. Elsewhere getting around by anything but the car is considered, well, pedestrian.
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  12. What are you on about here?
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  13. Sounds like that's market price for parking then.
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  14. Sure, as long as they're not just car-oriented spaces and have transit and good bike infra.
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  15. Flyability is very important.
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  16. Houston effectively has zoning, it's just they don't call it zoning.
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  17. It's also the case that is what was built due to R1-type zoning. Hardly solely the "free market" in action.
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  18. Pretty much everything you said isn't true.
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  19. That's why there should never be any improvements. Improvements mean displacement.
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  20. I don't think paths can “save” most American suburbs. Paths or not, US suburbs are typically built at low, car-oriented densities. Your average person isn’t going to walk 3-5 miles to the store and back even if there’s a very nice path to do it on.
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  21.  @Plan73  Happily older zoning codes are going the way of the dodo.
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  22. Nah, wrong.
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  23. Who cares about parking? Not everything needs to be based on the needs of cars.
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  24. It's the US. Building things here usually happens at a glacial pace nowadays, even more so for transit.
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  25. Why?
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  26. Suburbs are close to BS themselves.
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  27. Lol, wut? @DesertStateInEU 
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  28. Downtown Houston is pretty dull for a city of its size. I remember going there on a Saturday once and the place seemed abandoned, like something from a post-apocalyptic movie.
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  29. It also really depends on where in the US they're located. Many inner-ring suburbs aren't cheap at all. It's hard to make generalizations (Daly City is an inner ring suburb of San Francisco that's as expensive as the city proper).
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  30.  @JohnFromAccounting  Sounds like case for more transport. Send a memo to Albanese!
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  31. Are there any big cities (1 million population +) run by Republicans as an example? I can't think of any.
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  32. The only thing they fixate on more are gas prices.
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  33.  @danielgreen1557  There was a plan approved back in 2011 for TOD at East Falls Church but it "fizzled out" due to strong NIMBYism. Agree the area is not really walkable. Not sure if the still-approved plan can just be re-started at some point or if they'd have to go through the approval process again. Looks like in the interim attention will shift to West Falls Church, much like it did from Vienna to Dunn Loring when the Vienna development plan was scaled back to adding some residential only.
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  34. Lolwut? No, not at all true.
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  35. Lol, wrong.
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  36. Most people don't buy stuff in bulk.
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  37. We invented cars so we wouldn't have to walk.
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  38. That's not correct.
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  39. Government policy can fix this.
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  40. Yeah, there are less than 10,000 people living in downtown Phoenix. It was never really big to begin with, and by the time growth started happening for Pheonix in the mid-20th century it was pretty much all suburban.
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  41. The suburbs are the way they are because that's what people like. People don't want interconnectivity. They want privacy and safety from crime.
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  42. The Soviets really seemed to like underground rail in their cities, probably due to the harsher winters in much of the region and so that the stations could double as bomb shelters.
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  43. US parents prefer their kids to get to school via the school bus or by being driven there.
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  44. We have great infrastructure for cars. Everything else, much less so.
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  45. We like our suburbs like they are. Nice, safe, clean, and quiet!!
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  46. Dallas (and the rest of the Sun Belt) will probably never have transit like older US cities. It's too spread out, and the locals don't want it anyway. It's the same story in Houston and Austin. Texas is built around the car, and not much will change that.
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  47. Well, they don't suck, and the fact that so many people live in them means people obviously find more opportunities there. :D @aaronlandry3934 
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  48. It does as far as elevated rail. Usually, if a way can be found to not have a subway tunnel built it will be selected. But the US isn't nearly as interested in investing in public transportation as India is.
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  49.  @Jayayess1190  I think it started with New York's Manhattan... "downtown" was south ("down") on the map... the less developed part was "uptown" (north on the map).
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  50. They probably won't do so as much when gas hits $10 a gallon.
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