Comments by "" (@kaitlyn__L) on "City Beautiful"
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Motor industry lobbying, and the postwar boom in population and housing. Plus of course, the Interstate system, which was built through the middle of many neighbourhoods and split them in twain.
Then there was also “white flight”, where middle class white families almost all moved out from cities into suburbs on those postwar government subsidised mortgages. (Poorer and black families had to stay in the cities, whose tax revenue thus fell dramatically, creating criminogenic conditions, which led to the 60s and 70s’ urban strife.)
Of course, it’s not solely down to motor industry lobbying. In the 50s especially, when all of it was new and roads were mostly free-flowing, having to drive was treated less like a burden and more like an exciting new opportunity. Roadside attractions and motels and road trips quickly became part of the cultural zeitgeist, where people went on holidays without planning them because the infrastructure was all there to accommodate them no matter where they found themselves.
Big box stores also didn’t quite exist, the closest was a big department store and that’s a very different experience. So most people just drove to “main street” very nearby their suburb, and with no traffic congestion, it didn’t seem like an imposition.
After that new model of lifestyle began to settle-in, the first supermarkets began to pop-up. But they were still small compared to today — more like a modern Aldi or Lidl. And they were always just on the outskirts of the suburban area, so the drive compared to “main street” was still similar.
But then megamarts/hypermarkets and the modern mall began to appear, built further-out from living centres to get the economies of scale on their land purchases. For a time they were just an “option”, a further-afield drive for rarer or larger or specialty items. But their economies of scale started bringing the margins for the smaller supermarkets down, and they started going out of business. Some of them were replaced with smaller strip malls but not all of them.
In a way, it’s a lot like the Malthusian Trap of agriculture, where every step along the path creates further lock-in with a ratcheting effect.
And of course nowadays even the hypermarkets are struggling to compete with even larger, even more centralised, “fulfilment centre” warehouses. The companies needed delivery networks to get them to the final store anyway, so delivering them to the home isn’t that much additional overhead. Cut out the actual stores, and the total overhead can even be lower than a hypermarket.
And every time enough of the stores go out of business and remain vacant, sooner or later it’s re-zoned as more residential, further increasing sprawl, which further increases car dependence, which further increase’s people’s need to buy more of their daily needs at once to make up for the gas costs, which drives further business monopolisation.
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The part about malls was kind of trippy to listen to, because there's always been (semi)covered markets called malls in the middle of cities accessed on foot. In Europe anyway (eg Covent Garden Market).
I had to keep telling myself to add-in "motor oriented" at the start, since it was really a reinterpretation of the concept, how to get people to drive there when they could no longer easily walk to it from their home or place of work. Of course it had to be much bigger and offer far more choice to justify the distance, since it would be the only one nearby rather than just one of many in a city centre.
And indeed in many European cities and towns these locales were never demolished, and merely had lots combined by newer business tenants who installed miniature versions of their stores much like you'd otherwise see in an American mall.
Of course some of them now have underground or multi-storey parking somewhere near, some of those with pretty crazy-distant elevated walkways from the parking to the historical locale, but a lot are still purely designed to be accessed from the street level.
I suppose a Strip Mall is the motor-oriented reimagining of... just a regular uncovered shopping street? Like Oxford Street, or Buchanan Street. Except instead of a wide pedestrian boulevard/limited-traffic street, it's car parks.
That stuff about exurbia was pretty depressing too. It still looked so... dead from overhead. I'm sure there's places like that here too, but almost everyone I know who prefers a rural lifestyle rents a farm house here. So, instead of just being separated by giant lawns, they're separated by actual farms, grazing fields with animals, small grain warehouses, and forests. And you actually are a mile away from anyone else, instead of just what looks like half a street's distance hastily camouflaged with a few trees on the property line.
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@computernerdtechman so, have you ever had the scenario with a missing ingredient for a recipe? What’s your workaround? Also, here’s an economic argument for you: even ignoring gas prices, time is money. Given your wage or salary, is it worth the extra time going to a centralised location? I know you said it’s a 10 minute drive, but that won’t be taking traffic, parking, loading up into your trunk, unpacking on the other end, etc. What else would you be able to do with that half an hour? Again, bearing in mind I’m not advocating for switching entirely to local shopping, just using it for smaller and fresh items. Larger and long life items would still be bought en masse once a month.
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@computernerdtechman I didn’t say they would. I said they compete with each other.
So you might save 80 cents on a larger bottle of ketchup, but that doesn’t offset the gas costs, so then you’re incentivised to always “stock up” to make it “worth it”. So instead of being able to pop down to the store for bread and milk and ketchup, you try to only go when you need a big weekly/fortnightly shop.
No one who lives near a corner store exclusively relies on them. The idea that one store has to be the best option in all cases is ridiculous. Larger, further away stores simply get visited less frequently, and have far less sway over the economy at large.
Say you want to cook something for a date, but you’re missing one ingredient. Do you want to drive all the way to the hypermarket, find and deal with parking, walk to the store, find the right aisle, get tempted into impulse buys, and then go home? Or do you just cook something else and wait until the next large grocery run perhaps? A corner store allows a 5 minute walk to pick up that one ingredient without disrupting the flow of your cooking, and you’re in and out in 5 minutes too.
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@thewhitefalcon8539 The dry answer is it costs more in labour AND more importantly in land. The space you’d fit 2 detached houses in could fit 3 semi-detached ones. Also you go from 8 outside walls’ area down to 7(.. or 6?), so it’s a bit of savings on raw materials too, plus marginally simplified plumbing and electrical. This is all reflected in full-detached usually being, last I looked, 20-50% pricier than semi-detached in the same development. Then market demand does the work.
There’s definitely no widespread romantic attraction, it’s just a more accessible option for Owning Your Own House. Though I know a few people actually prefer it because it feels less lonely or whatever.
(And sometimes there’s a wider goal like converting a big barn into a house, where it’d be an outright mansion as just one house and one unit is still absolutely huge and sound-isolated even when built semi-detached.)
So I can understand why, when the land was cheap and the roads weren’t so long, they made use of the extra space over there and just defaulted to detached. But keeping it as a forced policy choice, expanding further outward so every new development is an ever bigger drain on the finances of the region, is bonkers to me. Especially when house prices are a known issue!
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@peterbelanger4094 absolutely. Honestly at this point, despite the common refrain of city cars, they’re far more functional in rural areas.
Tons of rural houses already have a weatherproof socket or three on their outside walls, for various garden implements. If they don’t wanna bother with a faster home charger (just going to shops etc), they can just plug into that. Plus it’s much easier to get rooftop solar in rural areas, and then you get almost-free charging when it’s sunny.
With even 150 miles of range you get 100 in winter, and most cars are coming out at 200 or even more anyway, and adding heat pumps which reduce the winter penalty by a huge amount too.
And in a rural area it’s more out of your way to go refuel, so refuelling at home (by the sun or no) and only ever needing to visit a specialised facility on longer trips is very appealing to a lot of people who sometimes spend 20-30 minutes each way to go refuel. Some folks I know who previously resisted the idea of EVs because they don’t like driving automatics, when I mentioned always driving away with a full tank, that’s made them eager for an EV to come that fits their needs and budget. And a lot of potential candidate purchases are coming out in the next few years.
In all; I think with another 5 years of battery improvements and more used cars entering the market, rural and suburban households basically have things sorted out already. All of the challenge lays in the city (dwellings and businesses) and for the highway fast chargers. Especially since half of everybody lives in cities right now and that’s expected to only increase. We’ve absolutely got to have adequate charging infrastructure in cities. And right now in most countries it’s extremely patchwork on a county by county basis.
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@리주민 that works well for electric scooters and motorbikes but with these skateboard chassis for cars, you’d have to like undo a bunch of structural bits just to get to it, and stuff. So they’d have to be specially designed for it; whilst electric motorbike used a relatively small standard shape battery anyway. And then there’s the question of who designs that standard for cars, multiple proprietary battery swap techs would be worse than waiting at a standardised plug IMO. If, say, EV adoption had been pushed hard in the ‘90s as originally planned, and they could’ve worked out a standard ahead of mass adoption, then it could be a great idea. But we’re arguably too late for it, at this stage. Though commercial fleets (vans, taxis etc) may yet take advantage of the technology, since they’ll have a lot of identical vehicles anyway.
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@_Aemse I wasn’t already familiar with that, so I just read the Wikipedia page, but as far as I can tell, that’s simply a standard private company? If they did even light measures like a simple equity option, I didn’t see it, but I may have missed a paragraph. May I ask what basis you said this? If you read something that made my worker-ownership thing sound familiar to you about them, I’d like to read it, as it would be interesting for a holding company to operate in that way. Most practical examples so far are in manufacturing, restaurants, retail, and things like that. Although there’s one or two who run their own financial institutions too.
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@pathtobillions8070 an important facet — that’s how the ones without captive audiences behave. When you factor in geographic proximity to employment, family, education, and so forth, many people can only look in a small area. Prices are already rising for apartments in even middle class areas, without adding anything new or even doing maintenance in some cases. Just raising the price because the rest of the street is doing it. Since pricing is usually done by street and not by the amenities on offer in each building. On the street I live, each building down the street has more units per same size block, and they achieved that by removing more and more storage space from each one. The bottom of the street has twice the units per floor as the top of the street. And because pricing is done by street, they all charge the same. So, you want to live near the top of the street if you can help it, or you’re getting massively ripped off.
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@nunyabidness3075 would you rather go back to how it was before the amendment, or just to have done it differently?
Also I’m half a mile away from a train and wish I was closer! Where I live, properties far away from good public transport are half the cost of well-served ones. Because they’re so popular when they’re available, and businesses spring up around them, and so forth. So I must admit I find the property value temporarily reducing kind of a strange focus, given the rebound and growth afterwards. But I can understand that sometimes the short term effects are far more alarming, just like periods of high inflation.
What exactly do you imagine when you say “bail out” the homeowner? Like with a payment to get building rights and planning permission? That’s exactly what the UK government is doing with HS2, and while it’s inflated the budget (and made it unpopular with some for that reason), the people with stakes in the route are/have been negotiating compensation.
I find interesting that you made that remark about expecting everything for free though — we expect to pay for it with our taxes. (Or indeed, expect our taxes to be spent more responsibly to enable what we’ve already allegedly paid for.) Especially because a lot of these things pay for themselves, and keep economies healthier. It should, IMO, be within everyone’s self-interest to want measures which help society to be more stable and safer and more productive, even if that might look like a few folks here or there get a free ride.
I understand the individualistic impulse to envy anything “unearned”, but even purely self-interested motivations should prefer the big-picture outcomes IMO. I think 100% collectivism and 100% individualism both miss the key fact that we are both simultaneously, we are individuals but we also cooperate and compromise in larger society. And society affects all of us.
To give an example, even if you love driving and are committed to your vintage car (I sure am, I love my 80s and 90s hatchbacks), better public transport is cheaper (in road maintenance etc), improves air quality, reduces congestion, and makes YOUR driving experience way better. Plus it’s nice to have the option of a reliable alternative when the car is in the shop, or you’re stone cold drunk after a birthday celebration.
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@JulieWallis1963 I understand it’s a very common thought among sighted people, who aren’t often aware of the accessibility features in modern computers. (Some are really useful for everyone, like extra shortcuts to open apps, or B&W modes, or mono audio for one headphone listening.)
But it’s also SO common an occurrence that it can be frustrating for blind people to keep answering over and over again. (I do try to answer it when I come across it to save them some of the hassle, but of course that’s not possible in this instance lol)
It’s kinda like how the first thing people say when they see my wheelchair is “what’s wrong with (me)?” Most don’t even couch it in a “if you don’t mind” or “if it’s alright to ask”. Literally 90% of the time, that’s the first thing people say to me in a public space.
Lastly, very few blind people are “totally blind”, just as very few deaf people are “totally deaf”. It’s not binary, there’s a gradient, and one becomes legally blind or deaf when the impairment becomes severe enough to affect daily life and require countermeasures. Before eyeglasses were common, even strongly-myopic people were Legally Blind!
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@BonaparteBardithion yeah, not in common parlance. But since we're talking about jaywalking laws, I figured I'd use the strict legal definition of the term instead. Here in the UK it's common to see tiny signs at the edge of people's driveways which has arrows and marks where the "public highway" begins (and, consequently, where the driveway and private land ends). Often they're embedded in the paving, so many don't know they're there until they go looking for them. So, perhaps strangely for you, the times I see the term the most is actually precisely in quiet residential streets. Anything else has a special name: main road, high street, dual carriageway, motorway.
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efficiency is higher, sure, but internal combustion engines still lose 60-80% of the energy to heat... so that's still not great compared to trains which are almost universally electrified for cities and commuter routes, and electric motors are 90-98% efficient. plus the optimal speed is rarely reached outside of a segregated fast highway (aka motorway or freeway or autobahn) so that argument is pretty irrelevant for city driving, which is usually 20-30mph. certainly driving a highly aerodynamic vehicle with a small engine will do far more for efficiency than trying to drive the same car fast all the time. and auto-start-stop turns off an engine completely when stuck in traffic. i know it used to take up to 5 seconds to fire up the engine again, but the car i learned to drive in was a 2020 model with the feature and now it takes less than half a second, easily the engine was up and running again quicker than i could take my foot off the brake and onto the accelerator. basically even if driving is still common and still based on burning fuel, there are many better mitigations than trying to avoid stopping the car at all costs, even by doubling the person's commute distance. after all, if a person who got 30mpg suddenly had half the distance to drive, at a crude calculation they would use the same fuel as if they'd switched to a 60mpg car for the same distance. mpg is measured in distance, not average speed, after all. it's also worth noting many engines don't have a linear relationship between mpg and co2/mi, the lower fuel economy also generates many multiples the same co2 per engine mile on average, in most cars. even when the engine is physically the same, but tuned to product more power in the ECU. i know not everybody wants to live in a city, some can't stand hearing any traffic noise at all, or need to see a forest and birds out of their window. but certainly we should make city living easier, safer and more convenient for people who live there, and enabling walking journeys and quick subway or bus connections makes that much easier (and accessible to all teens) than driving – which absolutely has its place in a city, even the best public transport system still isn't suitable for many disabilities, either you need to carry too much equipment with you or the nearest station is still just too far from your house bc of the disability, or whatever - so there will always be some place for cars in cities, as they'd be breaking disability accessibility legislation otherwise. but i don't believe cars need to be a first class citizen in dense city cores, and i'm personally happy to wait at traffic lights, knowing each person crossing the road is potentially one less car sharing the road with me, and making my journey less crowded and more pleasant as well. easily worth 2 minutes at some traffic lights. (plus if you have a shorter distance to travel, even in a car, you're going to deal with fewer traffic lights.)
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I'm perfectly content staying in my modern build apartment... the kitchen is much larger than, say, a terraced house from the 40s-60s would've been, and many people are still living in those passed down from their parents. Yes they have a garden, but I prefer warm and quiet anyway. I've never overheard my neighbours doing anything except for occasional drilling and hammering now and then. I live a quarter of a mile away from a convenience store, so it's easy to pick up essential groceries without straying too far. I'm just happy there's been no post for weeks! Usually there's a ton of junk mail – a problem no matter where you live! Plus I still have a great view of the city from high up, and can watch various lorries, emergency services vehicles and so forth make their way through the empty streets. I'm actually thoroughly enjoying it. I dunno man, it's fine if you'd personally find it hellish to go without a garden or whatever, but... any apartment block built in the last 20 years is probably better sound insulated than any thin wooden American 50s house.. my floor is perfectly level, which is nice for laying round things on a table... my water pressure is great because there's a pump in the basement supplementing the mains pressure... I could go on. Certainly to characterise all dense housing as slums is wildly inaccurate, hell, just look at the price some people pay for them in places like New York and London. There are poorly maintained and overcrowded apartment blocks, mainly from the 60s and left to rot, but there are plenty of people crammed into houses too small for them too, in poorer neighbourhoods or regions that were deliberately cut off from the local area (such as Easterhouse in Glasgow, which had a lot of 2 and 3 storey houses, and a few apartment blocks). The density of the housing doesn't really affect whether or not a place will be neglected and turned into slums or not, building owners and absentee landlords decide that. As for the current coronavirus, being separated from the apartment across the hall from you or the house across the street from you really makes no difference, you're both sealed up in your own home anyway?
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@shotelco oh okay, biofuels from the decomposition. (gonna be honest, I skimmed most of your comment because I'm already extremely familiar with the chemistry there.) I guess that applies more to blackwater than greywater, which is what I was thinking. In the UK, "wastewater" is usually close to greywater, while the blackwater we would tend to call "sewage". So that's why I had trouble imagining where the energy lay.
But, like, fair enough. I'm all for biogas from food and farm waste. Collecting the solids from sewage treatment and putting them into the digesters seems like a decent idea, I guess.
Like, I'd certainly prefer to burn bio-methane instead of north sea gas or shale gas. Especially if the methane would otherwise go into the atmosphere, since it's more insulating than the CO2 it releases.
But in the longer term, I would suggest sequestering the methane from sewage, when we don't need it for the energy.
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@Anti Tengu well, true, I think discretionary laws are bullshit because it's transparently an excuse for the officer to do something "when he felt it was needed", "if he thinks you're a troublemaker", etc, which will always involve unconscious biases or outright hostility. But, like, they're not meaningless if he follows through, right? So they're essentially a threat hanging over their presence every time. "If you piss me off, I'm using these discretionary charges against you", kind of a thing
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Apparently they're not doing it anymore??? I'm like, why the fuck not. But there's a campaign to bring it back? Allegedly modern tweens are often crossing the road with headphones on without even a look, let alone a stop. And obviously not a listen. Very very strange. I still always take out one headphone while looking, and I never chance a small gap just because I'm in a hurry. Some of my very earliest memories with my dad involve crossing the road to get to the park, where he'd run through the stop, look, listen, then we crossed the road as quick as we could. Come to think of it, even without a TV/online campaign, shouldn't've these people's parents taught them? Well, I digress...
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