West Coast baby
Another fix: remote work for all who can. No more traffic, no more living close to economic centers (expensive housing), leaves a lot of available housing in the cities (no more homelessness).
this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2023
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My biggest worry is that people already have no sense of community. Third places (is it still a third place if we remove going in to work?) can't really exist in suburbia. People sit inside when off work, drive to work isolated from everyone, then sit at work mostly not building a community. Americans have no sense of community, which I would blame for most of our current political issues. People spreading out and not going in to work (I'm not in favor of this, just not looking forward to this one effect of it) can only further degrade any sense of community that currently exists.
I don't understand how you're gonna have a good sense of community when you share 1sq mile with millions of others in a large city. What percentage of people can you even engage in friendly banter with? The community we have in our modest sized town is so amazing, my wife and I talk about how grateful we are to live here.
Our kids can walk to a dozen different houses where they can play. We are close enough with all those families that we could drop the kids with any of them if we needed to. There are tons of parks and great recreational sports activities to be outside.
I do respect others who choose to live all crammed on top of each other. I love the culture that big cities offer. I just couldn't live there, it's too impersonal.
The community would be those who you see at the same café or whatever. Ideally places would have some kind of board or system for people to organize activities. These could be political or just something fun, like a board game night or other things.
As for the kid thing, in many cities the kids will commute to school or other places on their own. We've created a system where that's unsafe in almost all locations in the US, but it isn't required. We have a society of helicopter parents, partially out of necessity because kids can't get anywhere on their own.
I understand what's trying to be said here but I'd pass on that.
I've lived in apartments most my life. Now that I live in a home that has a backyard, a garage, can't hear what my neighbors are saying, don't need to pay for laundry, don't need to go down an elevator to throw away garbage, and don't have to worry about people pissing in the elevator. I'm not going back to an apartment.
All those issues are not intrinsic to apartments. We can have nice apartments too. Sure, cheap ones will cut corners, but it's not required.
There is a middle ground between single family housing and high density housing, it's just not less common in the US than either apartments or single family housing.
Medium density housing, duplexes, quadruplexes, and town homes.
And yeah crappy apartments with little to no sound dampening are really common. At my brother's apartment I can hear his neighbor's coffee pot turn on both outside and inside the apartment building. Shit's got tissues for walls I swear.
I can't hear my neighbors, don't need an elevator, and don't need a garage because I don't need a car. I don't have a back yard but I'm pretty close to a massive city park. This apartment is pretty okay.
Meanwhile the suburbs were just crushing isolation and cultural wasteland. And needing to drive everywhere was awful.
Yeah it won't really solve it in a single city though. NYC has tons and tons of dense urban housing but still insane housing prices.
Not as much as you think. Here’s some trivia for you: which urban area is more densely populated, NYC or LA?
The answer is actually LA. Everyone imagines Manhattan or Brooklyn when they think of NYC but actually a huge part of the city in an economic and cultural sense consists of low density suburbs, enough so that it brings the average below famously sprawling LA. Allowing more density in these neighborhoods would likely help reduce the cost in the core of the city. Some neighborhoods might remain expensive—if you’re competing with investment bankers who will pay any price to be in walking distance of Wall St, adding more housing in other boroughs or satellite communities won’t help with that. But it could make a dramatic difference on overall cost of living in NYC. It’s only expensive because way more people want to live in a relatively small urban core than can fit there.
The same solutions can solve or greatly mitigate these problems in virtually every American city. This is because even large, older cities that predate the horrific car-centric development of the post-war era are surrounded by huge swathes of this type of development.
Anybody claiming one general solution will fix every single grievance they have sounds a step away from buying essential oils.
Don't get me wrong, it will help, but no every pet problem will not be magically solved by waving hands and going "just do better urban panning, duh"
Just don't romanticize your proposed solution to a degree where you think you can slap it in and problems solve themselves.
I mean the overarching problem being talked about here is not having well planned cities (ie 15 min cities) that provide housing for everyone.
The solution mentioned would absolutely solve or go a long way to solve all the problems mentioned in the meme.
I don't disagree that it would improve things. But don't just expect something to fix all the problems magically, especially not when it's basically waving your hands and going "just city plan better this time around." It won't be magical, 40 years down the line when this movement of new planning strategies is finally finished, it will already have been outdated for 35 years. These problems are hilariously complicated.
Outdated? The things that people are now advocating for are things that used to be commonplace:
- being close to shops, work, and third places
- large areas of inner cities left for public parks
- roads not yet dominated by cars
- majority of people relying on decent affordable/free public transport or walking
Sure. And now we clearly know that it would've been better to develop things that way in the first place; instead of rapid relatively unplanned sprawling residential. At the time these developments were being mostly planned, zoned, and legislated, that was seen as the right strategy.
That's literally my point. We don't know everything, don't expect magic fixes. This will be better, it will need improvements.
I mean without researching I know that Tolkien was pro-car and then flipped to really anti car early on (I think either 10s or 20s). There was no doubt others that saw that car infrastructure was bad for society. I think you can probly blame a really strong car lobby for how bad we ended up.
Its's also not that crazy to undo, look at the Netherlands. There is at least one example where they got rid of canals for motorways, realised it was terrible and put the canals back. Amsterdam also was a mess of roads and it only took 20 years to get to what it is today.
Hindsight is 20/20 yadda yadda. It's very easy to look back and see what the correct solution might've been (well, until you dig into it, normally, then it becomes much harder). It's so so so much harder to have a solution in front of you and be justifiably confident you were on the right side of every issue for the rest of time, especially when it comes to engineering.
We all wish we could wave a magic wand and fix every problem with all of our various solutions, but it's simply unknowable and unfeasible.
That point about the car lobby is one I see a lot. It's of course true... But probably not in a way that makes it a boogeyman in the same way we're aware of lobbying now. Let me put it this way, did automakers lobby hard for car centric transportation, downplaying downsides? Almost definitely. Did people generally feel cars may lead to greater social and economic prosperity than the alternatives? Yeah, probably so. There was push back, for sure, but there was pushback on the existence of electricity too. And what's more, did we even have the modeling and research to be able to definitely say cars wouldn't be worth their cost then? No we didn't. We don't even now, but on balance we have enough that people are generally favoring different urban panning priorities in certain spheres. We don't even know that the science and engineering that went into vehicles wasn't worth it. It's unknowable.
This is a long winded rant to say, we know better now, shame on us for not improving now, though we are. We will know even better in 20 years, 40 years, 100, shame on us then if we don't improve then. But there are no magic bullets in life. We see one solution, but even what that solution looks like in the details can make or break it, and those details will need to be different for every community, both spatially and temporally. What we build now, even if it is a super perfect solution to everyone it effects, may not be right for people 50 years from now. Life is fundamentally chaotic and we can only ever hope to do the best we can with what we've got. And to that point, people are people, we will never be perfect, never be able to achieve even that temporarily perfect solution. There will be good and bad implementations, things won't be implemented to anyone's ideal, there will have to be compromises and time and knowledge constraints.
No magic solutions.
Hindsight is 20/20 does not make a good argument here. Cars are bad for people, we have the studies and the research.
- they kill a higher number of people than other modes of transport.
- on average car drivers are more unhealthy and die earlier than people who self propel/use public transport
- fumes and particles from cars lower the air quality in cities and are responsible for more deaths than just collisions
- even if you go full electric particles from the tyres released at speed are terrible for people
- car parking is a massive waste of land in city centres
- commerce benefits more from cycle infrastructure than car infrastructure because more people are likely to get off their bike to go in to a shop they didn't intend to go to than car drivers who have to find a parking space
There are definitely more examples of why cars are bad in urban settings. Banning cars in city centres is the very easy solution that would make everyone's lives in the cities better today. It's also not a super crazy solution, cars didn't always occupy space in cities.
Also car drivers are not the majority in cities or even some contries but somehow the whole population is beholden to them.
Yes... We have studies now which show many of these things... Okay so you're just kind of repeating talking points here instead of holding conversation. Have a good one!
Apologies if I ended up just listing things you already knew. I think your reply annoyed me as your conclusion that we will know even better 20 years from now while correct can be used as an excuse to wait till we know better. If I have to wait 20 or more years to get pedestrian/bike first infrastructure where i live, when there's plenty of examples of it working elsewhere I'll be fuming.
You probably will yes for many areas. Public works are slow.
But you're missing the point here. The point is that if we start making xyz changes now, say a bike lane, in 20 years we'll have figured out "ooh shit we shouldnt built it like this oops". Improvements which maybe solve one issue, may cause others, we'll find out later. Nothing is a magic fix.
But as you said public works are slow. If we build it now, people benefit from the change while we figure out how to improve beyond our current thinking/physical situation. If we wait everyone has to deal with the current issues potentially forever since we should always wait because there will always be a better idea further down the line. Yes it'll never be a perfect solution but its still objectively better than the status quo.
Also yes there my be unforseen issues caused by our implementation but there will be unforseen benefits as well. Is the glass half full or half empty....
There is also semi-related known benefits like in the case of major public works and investment in infrastructure, they are usually pretty good for the economy.
I understand your point that there is no such thing as a magic bullet solution. However you saying that in response to proposing well done cycle infrastructure as a solution is a perfect example of "perfection is the enemy of good".
I'm saying it in response to someone stating one thing will fix basically every problem they care about without any complexity. It's actually the opposite of what you think I'm saying here, because the prior line of thinking leads to people upset and angry about 'bad implementations' of their idea instead of learning of the exceptions.
You are super funny
Someone got upset eh