6 ms·

It could also fit inside a decent-sized airport. Several large factories are bigger than this. Heck, so are single farms. The idea that there's a trade-off bet

It could also fit inside a decent-sized airport. Several large factories are bigger than this. Heck, so are single farms. The idea that there's a trade-off between centres of high culture and highway interchanges is entirely absurd.

willvarfar 10y ago
Can you have "high culture" and cars? Empirically, all the towns and cities I like to visit are the non-high-rise pedestrian ones. They don't have to be old, but it helps. My visits to the US have given me a very jaded view of what constitutes culture in the US. Small towns with small roads can be nice in the evenings, and that's about it.
- pif 10y ago
  > all the towns and cities I like to visit ... Warning: "like to visit" != "like to live in"
  - smcl 10y ago
    We can clarify with the person who said that, but the two are one-and-the same for me. I'd guess that it's pretty rare for someone to like visiting pedestrian-friendly, compact old cities (Paris, Prague, Edinburgh) but prefer to live in modern car-dependent ones (Atlanta, Dubai etc)...
    - pif 10y ago
      You seem to imply that a city can be either pedestrian-friendly or car-dependent, but there is an intermediate state: pedestrian-and-car-friendly. Furthermore, pedestrian-friendly is nice if you manage to sleep in a nice accommodation at a walkable distance from your centers of interest: this is usually the case when you visit a town as a tourist, but not so easy when you leave there.
      - willvarfar 10y ago
        Pedestrian-friendly cities have good public transport systems. For example, in London only half of families have a car, and very few have two: http://content.tfl.gov.uk/technical-note-12-how-many-cars-are-there-in-london.pdf http://content.tfl.gov.uk/technical-note-12-how-many-cars-ar... When I lived in London, and later Stockholm and Malmö, I didn't have nor need a car. Sweden was particularly pedestrian-friendly.
      - Piskvorrr 10y ago
        On the walkability and livability of Prague: having lived there for a few decades, I claim that you can't have both: mostly, you'll get a lot of talk for walkability, and a lot of construction for drivability (which has, so far, only brought more traffic into the city). Worst case, you'll get an intermediate state that's pedestrian-and-car-hostile (there are such places right in the city center, where a north-south freeway had been rammed through). However, for all the roadbuilding of the past 30+ years, the city remains well walkable, in a loose sense: the dense public transit network (a dirt-cheap yearly pass, trains running separate from all other traffic, semi-separated light rail, and an auxillary bus network) allows me to move about easily: walk a bit, hop on, ride a few stops, walk a bit again. This way, anything is within my "walking" distance. So, even though I'm not living in the city center, I can get there within half an hour (or in half an hour by car, hunting for parking spots included). This, I believe, is the crucial part: walking by itself is okay for short distances, but needs efficient public transport on longer trips: "we'll just buy a bus or two" doesn't cut it. (So, yes, it's easy even when living here: walking is not a tourist attraction, it's a mode of transport; and I even see a lot of tourists on the metro, "doing as the Romans do": using public transport as an extension of their legs.)
    - randallsquared 10y ago
      Given tourism rates and where those tourists are from, I think it's super-common to like visiting pedestrian-friendly, compact old cities but prefer to live in modern car-friendly ones. I'm such a person myself: visiting those places is fun, sort of like visiting a Humanity & Crowds theme park, but where I live I want to relax and have some separation.
      - madcaptenor 10y ago
        Me too. When I moved from San Francisco to Atlanta I traded a public transit commute for a car commute. I still spend the same amount of time getting to and from work but I don't have to spend it physically crammed in with other human beings.
        icebraining 10y ago
        To me that reads as "I no longer can use that time to read or do something productive". Each to their own, though. Though it depends on the conditions of the public transportation - being crammed in a bus is very different from having a seat on a train or ferry, as I usually do.
        madcaptenor 10y ago
        When I had a public transit commute, I rarely read, even though I read a lot in general. Even if I had a seat concentrating on anything was too difficult. I listened to a lot of podcasts, which I still do in my driving commute, and those had the side benefit of drowning out the noise of humanity. My favorite commutes have been walking commutes, but I haven't had a job where I could do that in years, and I bought a house which isn't within walking distance of any jobs I'd want so that won't happen for the foreseeable future. Unless the walk from my bedroom to my home office counts as a "commute".
        hx87 10y ago
        For me, crammed into a bus/train isn't that bad, provided that A/C is run at full blast and the direction of airflow is top->down. This means that winter commutes by public transit in the northeast is absolutely miserable, since they never ever turn on the A/C to dehumidify the space, even if humidity is close to 100%.
  - willvarfar 10y ago
    I have lived in London, Stockholm and a few other big but pedestrian-friendly cities. Stockholm was particularly nice in summer. I did not own a car. Public transport worked great. I now live in the countryside, but in a quaint village in a country with only quaint villages. So, my point is that I think that car-friendly and people-friendly are exclusive. I was careful to say it was my opinion, as I guess that everyone who agrees with the article will upvote-and-move-on and those who come to comments will be doing so to disagree with it ;) Venice is particularly interesting: it has a massive carpark where residents leave their cars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poundbury https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poundbury is another. I have never been to Poundbury, but it seems from what I've read like the kind of place I'd like to live.
    - blowski 10y ago
      Have you heard of Motopia? http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/motopia-a-pedestrian-paradise-154650693/?no-ist http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/motopia-a-pedestrian-p...
- mseebach 10y ago
  > Can you have "high culture" and cars? Yes. The centres of high culture from centuries ago were also centres of traffic and trade, they were not pleasant "liveable" cities, indeed, they typically had huge slums. The origin of the word ghetto is a neighbourhood in Venice. Today, it's UNESCO World Heritage at all, and probably on the list of places you like to visit (and, incidentally, smaller than a Walmart) -- but 500 years ago, it was a prison for jews. Whatever future generations will recognise as high culture of our present day is very hard to predict, and I'm not at all certain that they will consider the absence of car infrastructure a key feature. Silicon Valley, being ground zero of the information revolution, certainly has a decent claim, and it's nothing if not cars all over.
  - thaumasiotes 10y ago
    > Today, it's UNESCO World Heritage at all, and probably on the list of places you like to visit (and, incidentally, smaller than a Walmart) -- but 500 years ago, it was a prison for jews. Medieval cities had separate Jewish areas due to Jewish demand, not gentile demand.
    - mseebach 10y ago
      According to the Jewish Virtual Library: “In 1516, the doges, Venice’s ruling council, debated whether Jews should be allowed to remain in the city… but their residence would be confined to Ghetto Nuovo, a small, dirty island; it became the world’s first ghetto.” http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/appeal-launched-to-save-the-worlds-first-ghetto-9866294.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/appeal-launch...
    - Piskvorrr 10y ago
      [citation-needed] - unless you're talking about some alternate-history medieval Europe, your claim is patently wrong.
      - thaumasiotes 10y ago
        Try to know what you're talking about before telling other people they are "patently wrong". Here ( http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/165247/yiddish-ashkenazi-woodworth?all=1 http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/16524... ) is a discussion of a history of Yiddish (the original work being in Yiddish, I think it's forgivable to read a discussion instead): > Nineteenth-century Jewish activists, demanding rights of citizenship, created the story that the Jews had been locked in ghettos since the Middle Ages > For Weinreich, based on both the linguistic and historical evidence, there could be no doubt that up until the 18th century “the Jews wanted to be by themselves. … Separate residence (strange as this may appear in the light of present Jewish and general conceptions of rights) was part of the privileges granted the Jews at their own request” so they could worship together; provide for their own slaughterhouse, bathhouse, cemetery, and social halls; study together; run their own rabbinic courts; supervise tax collection; and when necessary, protect themselves from attacks. > Archeology supports this part of Weinreich’s argument. Befuddled tour guides in Prague struggle to explain why, given the expectation of exclusion of Jews, the city’s famous Jewish quarter, Josefov, is so central to the old town. (One misguided explanation is that the Jews were given land near the river that was too marshy for the other city inhabitants, prone to flooding and disease-bearing miasmas.) But Prague’s Josefov is not an isolated case—it is typical. Weinreich’s point is that exclusion could also be exclusivity; restrictions also came with designated privileges. In Trier, Mainz, Aachen, Cologne, Worms, and more than 100 medieval towns in Central Europe, the Jewish district was both a central and a prime location, close to the economic heart of the city. The German Bishop Rüdiger, granting a charter of the city of Speyer in 1084 wrote, “I thought that I would increase the glory of our city a thousandfold if I were to include Jews.”
- jerf 10y ago
  I took a moment to find the interchange. It appears to be the 285/75 interchange [1]. Eyeballing it based on the scale in Google maps, if you zoom out until you see Atlanta itself... and it takes quite a few zoom levels... it looks to be 12-15 miles from the Downtown Atlanta you'd be concerned about, or, in terms more relevant to the current discussion, approximately 20 Florences laid end to end. The numbers are quite approximate, but the orders of magnitude are definitely correct. Several of the Florences that would be laid end-to-end to get to Atlanta as the crow flies appear to be going in places that have virtually nothing there and could actually go there. I can't tell from Google maps if perhaps that's all swampland or something, but a lot of it isn't utilized, regardless of the reason. If you want to make the point that cities should be more walkable or whatever, this is a terrible hook to do so with, because the existence of large interchanges has nothing to do with the cities not being more walkable. These large interchanges, in general, do not exist in downtown areas, and if you still complain about them it starts to sound more like you have no idea how large the world is. It comes off less like trenchant criticism and more like Puritan-style "those damned car owners are having fun and they should be stopped!". [1]: https://www.google.com/maps/@33.8901712,-84.462566,3749m/data=!3m1!1e3 https://www.google.com/maps/@33.8901712,-84.462566,3749m/dat...
  - rycfan 10y ago
    FYI, since 285 is a loop and 75 runs all the way through Atlanta, there are two 285/75 interchanges. While I think you're correct in your selection, here's the other one for completeness: https://www.google.com/maps/place/33°37'55.6%22N+84°24'02.8%22W/@33.6321154,-84.4029567,784m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x0:0x0!8m2!3d33.632111!4d-84.400768 https://www.google.com/maps/place/33°37'55.6%22N+84°24'02.8%....
    - madcaptenor 10y ago
      This is of practical importance. There are two 285/85 interchanges as well and I broke down at one of them once, and the tow truck thought I was at the other one.
    - hexane360 10y ago
      And you can tell that it's a loop because it has an even first number. #: Main Highway ##: Main Highway [Even]##: Loop [Odd]##: Spur One of the great things about the interstate system.
- HelloMcFly 10y ago
  > My visits to the US have given me a very jaded view of what constitutes culture in the US. I am saddened by your comment here. The US has such a wealth of diversity in its cities, towns, and country-sides to offer that I can't possibly understand how one could dismiss everything in the country so categorically. Yes, even Atlanta, a city that I find is terrible to visit, but great to live.
hugh4 10y ago
> Heck, so are single farms. There's single farms bigger than a lot of countries.
- epimetheus 10y ago
  There's single buildings larger than a lot of countries. The Boeing plant in Everett, WA is over 399 km^2 in floor space. That puts it larger than something like 45 Sovereign states/countries[0]. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependencies_by_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d...
  - AshleyGrant 10y ago
    The Boeing plant is 0.4 km^2, not 399 km^2. 1 km^2 = 1,000,000 m^2.
    - epimetheus 10y ago
      You're right, I posted without thinking and didn't do the math. It's on par with Vatican City though (slightly smaller), but yeah, that 45 country figure is way off. Thanks for that correction.
peteretep 10y ago
> Heck, so are single farms. That's not a farm... > Anna Creek Station is the world's largest working cattle > station. It is located in the Australian state of South > Australia. Its area is roughly 6,000,000 acres (24,000 > km2; 9,400 sq mi) which is slightly larger than Israel That's a farm! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWl8EbNN8NM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWl8EbNN8NM)
- aroch 10y ago
  I wager that Kidman Beef Co probably wins this particular distinction. Their grazing lands are in the ~30-35K square mile range -- or the size of Ireland!
hammock 10y ago
I wonder what a comparison of the throughput of an interchange vs. an airport looks like? The East LA interchange (busiest in the world) serves 550K vehicles per day[1] while Hartsfield (busiest airport in the world) serves 278K passengers per day[2] [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Los_Angeles_Interchange https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Los_Angeles_Interchange [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_world%27s_busiest_airports_by_passenger_traffic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_world%27s_busiest_...
SteveMouzon 10y ago
That was never the point. Instead, the point was that when we require high-speed expressways in our cities, the land requirements blow up insanely and the land is then useful for pretty much nothing else. Contrast that to Florence which required much lower speeds and therefore could use the land for many useful purposes. Obviously, Atlanta has nodes of high culture elsewhere, but they certainly can't put any of them here. As for the proportion of how much land use blows up at speed, consider this: at 5 mph, making a right turn requires just a 15' turning radius, which occupies 225 square feet. The largest curves in the Atlanta interchange (the ones for which you don't have to slow down) have a radius of close to 900', which occupies about 810,000 square feet. So to go 14 times as fast (70 instead of 5 mph) you have to occupy 3,600 times as much land.

willvarfar 10y ago

Can you have "high culture" and cars? Empirically, all the towns and cities I like to visit are the non-high-rise pedestrian ones. They don't have to be old, but it helps. My visits to the US have given me a very jaded view of what constitutes culture in the US. Small towns with small roads can be nice in the evenings, and that's about it.

pif 10y ago
> all the towns and cities I like to visit ... Warning: "like to visit" != "like to live in"
- smcl 10y ago
  We can clarify with the person who said that, but the two are one-and-the same for me. I'd guess that it's pretty rare for someone to like visiting pedestrian-friendly, compact old cities (Paris, Prague, Edinburgh) but prefer to live in modern car-dependent ones (Atlanta, Dubai etc)...
  - pif 10y ago
    You seem to imply that a city can be either pedestrian-friendly or car-dependent, but there is an intermediate state: pedestrian-and-car-friendly. Furthermore, pedestrian-friendly is nice if you manage to sleep in a nice accommodation at a walkable distance from your centers of interest: this is usually the case when you visit a town as a tourist, but not so easy when you leave there.
    - willvarfar 10y ago
      Pedestrian-friendly cities have good public transport systems. For example, in London only half of families have a car, and very few have two: http://content.tfl.gov.uk/technical-note-12-how-many-cars-are-there-in-london.pdf http://content.tfl.gov.uk/technical-note-12-how-many-cars-ar... When I lived in London, and later Stockholm and Malmö, I didn't have nor need a car. Sweden was particularly pedestrian-friendly.
    - Piskvorrr 10y ago
      On the walkability and livability of Prague: having lived there for a few decades, I claim that you can't have both: mostly, you'll get a lot of talk for walkability, and a lot of construction for drivability (which has, so far, only brought more traffic into the city). Worst case, you'll get an intermediate state that's pedestrian-and-car-hostile (there are such places right in the city center, where a north-south freeway had been rammed through). However, for all the roadbuilding of the past 30+ years, the city remains well walkable, in a loose sense: the dense public transit network (a dirt-cheap yearly pass, trains running separate from all other traffic, semi-separated light rail, and an auxillary bus network) allows me to move about easily: walk a bit, hop on, ride a few stops, walk a bit again. This way, anything is within my "walking" distance. So, even though I'm not living in the city center, I can get there within half an hour (or in half an hour by car, hunting for parking spots included). This, I believe, is the crucial part: walking by itself is okay for short distances, but needs efficient public transport on longer trips: "we'll just buy a bus or two" doesn't cut it. (So, yes, it's easy even when living here: walking is not a tourist attraction, it's a mode of transport; and I even see a lot of tourists on the metro, "doing as the Romans do": using public transport as an extension of their legs.)
  - randallsquared 10y ago
    Given tourism rates and where those tourists are from, I think it's super-common to like visiting pedestrian-friendly, compact old cities but prefer to live in modern car-friendly ones. I'm such a person myself: visiting those places is fun, sort of like visiting a Humanity & Crowds theme park, but where I live I want to relax and have some separation.
    - madcaptenor 10y ago
      Me too. When I moved from San Francisco to Atlanta I traded a public transit commute for a car commute. I still spend the same amount of time getting to and from work but I don't have to spend it physically crammed in with other human beings.
      - icebraining 10y ago
        To me that reads as "I no longer can use that time to read or do something productive". Each to their own, though. Though it depends on the conditions of the public transportation - being crammed in a bus is very different from having a seat on a train or ferry, as I usually do.
        madcaptenor 10y ago
        When I had a public transit commute, I rarely read, even though I read a lot in general. Even if I had a seat concentrating on anything was too difficult. I listened to a lot of podcasts, which I still do in my driving commute, and those had the side benefit of drowning out the noise of humanity. My favorite commutes have been walking commutes, but I haven't had a job where I could do that in years, and I bought a house which isn't within walking distance of any jobs I'd want so that won't happen for the foreseeable future. Unless the walk from my bedroom to my home office counts as a "commute".
        hx87 10y ago
        For me, crammed into a bus/train isn't that bad, provided that A/C is run at full blast and the direction of airflow is top->down. This means that winter commutes by public transit in the northeast is absolutely miserable, since they never ever turn on the A/C to dehumidify the space, even if humidity is close to 100%.
- willvarfar 10y ago
  I have lived in London, Stockholm and a few other big but pedestrian-friendly cities. Stockholm was particularly nice in summer. I did not own a car. Public transport worked great. I now live in the countryside, but in a quaint village in a country with only quaint villages. So, my point is that I think that car-friendly and people-friendly are exclusive. I was careful to say it was my opinion, as I guess that everyone who agrees with the article will upvote-and-move-on and those who come to comments will be doing so to disagree with it ;) Venice is particularly interesting: it has a massive carpark where residents leave their cars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poundbury https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poundbury is another. I have never been to Poundbury, but it seems from what I've read like the kind of place I'd like to live.
  - blowski 10y ago
    Have you heard of Motopia? http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/motopia-a-pedestrian-paradise-154650693/?no-ist http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/motopia-a-pedestrian-p...
mseebach 10y ago
> Can you have "high culture" and cars? Yes. The centres of high culture from centuries ago were also centres of traffic and trade, they were not pleasant "liveable" cities, indeed, they typically had huge slums. The origin of the word ghetto is a neighbourhood in Venice. Today, it's UNESCO World Heritage at all, and probably on the list of places you like to visit (and, incidentally, smaller than a Walmart) -- but 500 years ago, it was a prison for jews. Whatever future generations will recognise as high culture of our present day is very hard to predict, and I'm not at all certain that they will consider the absence of car infrastructure a key feature. Silicon Valley, being ground zero of the information revolution, certainly has a decent claim, and it's nothing if not cars all over.
- thaumasiotes 10y ago
  > Today, it's UNESCO World Heritage at all, and probably on the list of places you like to visit (and, incidentally, smaller than a Walmart) -- but 500 years ago, it was a prison for jews. Medieval cities had separate Jewish areas due to Jewish demand, not gentile demand.
  - mseebach 10y ago
    According to the Jewish Virtual Library: “In 1516, the doges, Venice’s ruling council, debated whether Jews should be allowed to remain in the city… but their residence would be confined to Ghetto Nuovo, a small, dirty island; it became the world’s first ghetto.” http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/appeal-launched-to-save-the-worlds-first-ghetto-9866294.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/appeal-launch...
  - Piskvorrr 10y ago
    [citation-needed] - unless you're talking about some alternate-history medieval Europe, your claim is patently wrong.
    - thaumasiotes 10y ago
      Try to know what you're talking about before telling other people they are "patently wrong". Here ( http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/165247/yiddish-ashkenazi-woodworth?all=1 http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/16524... ) is a discussion of a history of Yiddish (the original work being in Yiddish, I think it's forgivable to read a discussion instead): > Nineteenth-century Jewish activists, demanding rights of citizenship, created the story that the Jews had been locked in ghettos since the Middle Ages > For Weinreich, based on both the linguistic and historical evidence, there could be no doubt that up until the 18th century “the Jews wanted to be by themselves. … Separate residence (strange as this may appear in the light of present Jewish and general conceptions of rights) was part of the privileges granted the Jews at their own request” so they could worship together; provide for their own slaughterhouse, bathhouse, cemetery, and social halls; study together; run their own rabbinic courts; supervise tax collection; and when necessary, protect themselves from attacks. > Archeology supports this part of Weinreich’s argument. Befuddled tour guides in Prague struggle to explain why, given the expectation of exclusion of Jews, the city’s famous Jewish quarter, Josefov, is so central to the old town. (One misguided explanation is that the Jews were given land near the river that was too marshy for the other city inhabitants, prone to flooding and disease-bearing miasmas.) But Prague’s Josefov is not an isolated case—it is typical. Weinreich’s point is that exclusion could also be exclusivity; restrictions also came with designated privileges. In Trier, Mainz, Aachen, Cologne, Worms, and more than 100 medieval towns in Central Europe, the Jewish district was both a central and a prime location, close to the economic heart of the city. The German Bishop Rüdiger, granting a charter of the city of Speyer in 1084 wrote, “I thought that I would increase the glory of our city a thousandfold if I were to include Jews.”
jerf 10y ago
I took a moment to find the interchange. It appears to be the 285/75 interchange [1]. Eyeballing it based on the scale in Google maps, if you zoom out until you see Atlanta itself... and it takes quite a few zoom levels... it looks to be 12-15 miles from the Downtown Atlanta you'd be concerned about, or, in terms more relevant to the current discussion, approximately 20 Florences laid end to end. The numbers are quite approximate, but the orders of magnitude are definitely correct. Several of the Florences that would be laid end-to-end to get to Atlanta as the crow flies appear to be going in places that have virtually nothing there and could actually go there. I can't tell from Google maps if perhaps that's all swampland or something, but a lot of it isn't utilized, regardless of the reason. If you want to make the point that cities should be more walkable or whatever, this is a terrible hook to do so with, because the existence of large interchanges has nothing to do with the cities not being more walkable. These large interchanges, in general, do not exist in downtown areas, and if you still complain about them it starts to sound more like you have no idea how large the world is. It comes off less like trenchant criticism and more like Puritan-style "those damned car owners are having fun and they should be stopped!". [1]: https://www.google.com/maps/@33.8901712,-84.462566,3749m/data=!3m1!1e3 https://www.google.com/maps/@33.8901712,-84.462566,3749m/dat...
- rycfan 10y ago
  FYI, since 285 is a loop and 75 runs all the way through Atlanta, there are two 285/75 interchanges. While I think you're correct in your selection, here's the other one for completeness: https://www.google.com/maps/place/33°37'55.6%22N+84°24'02.8%22W/@33.6321154,-84.4029567,784m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x0:0x0!8m2!3d33.632111!4d-84.400768 https://www.google.com/maps/place/33°37'55.6%22N+84°24'02.8%....
  - madcaptenor 10y ago
    This is of practical importance. There are two 285/85 interchanges as well and I broke down at one of them once, and the tow truck thought I was at the other one.
  - hexane360 10y ago
    And you can tell that it's a loop because it has an even first number. #: Main Highway ##: Main Highway [Even]##: Loop [Odd]##: Spur One of the great things about the interstate system.
HelloMcFly 10y ago
> My visits to the US have given me a very jaded view of what constitutes culture in the US. I am saddened by your comment here. The US has such a wealth of diversity in its cities, towns, and country-sides to offer that I can't possibly understand how one could dismiss everything in the country so categorically. Yes, even Atlanta, a city that I find is terrible to visit, but great to live.

hugh4 10y ago

> Heck, so are single farms. There's single farms bigger than a lot of countries.

epimetheus 10y ago
There's single buildings larger than a lot of countries. The Boeing plant in Everett, WA is over 399 km^2 in floor space. That puts it larger than something like 45 Sovereign states/countries[0]. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependencies_by_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d...
- AshleyGrant 10y ago
  The Boeing plant is 0.4 km^2, not 399 km^2. 1 km^2 = 1,000,000 m^2.
  - epimetheus 10y ago
    You're right, I posted without thinking and didn't do the math. It's on par with Vatican City though (slightly smaller), but yeah, that 45 country figure is way off. Thanks for that correction.

peteretep 10y ago

> Heck, so are single farms. That's not a farm... > Anna Creek Station is the world's largest working cattle > station. It is located in the Australian state of South > Australia. Its area is roughly 6,000,000 acres (24,000 > km2; 9,400 sq mi) which is slightly larger than Israel That's a farm! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWl8EbNN8NM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWl8EbNN8NM)

aroch 10y ago
I wager that Kidman Beef Co probably wins this particular distinction. Their grazing lands are in the ~30-35K square mile range -- or the size of Ireland!

hammock 10y ago

I wonder what a comparison of the throughput of an interchange vs. an airport looks like? The East LA interchange (busiest in the world) serves 550K vehicles per day[1] while Hartsfield (busiest airport in the world) serves 278K passengers per day[2] [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Los_Angeles_Interchange https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Los_Angeles_Interchange [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_world%27s_busiest_airports_by_passenger_traffic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_world%27s_busiest_...

SteveMouzon 10y ago

That was never the point. Instead, the point was that when we require high-speed expressways in our cities, the land requirements blow up insanely and the land is then useful for pretty much nothing else. Contrast that to Florence which required much lower speeds and therefore could use the land for many useful purposes. Obviously, Atlanta has nodes of high culture elsewhere, but they certainly can't put any of them here. As for the proportion of how much land use blows up at speed, consider this: at 5 mph, making a right turn requires just a 15' turning radius, which occupies 225 square feet. The largest curves in the Atlanta interchange (the ones for which you don't have to slow down) have a radius of close to 900', which occupies about 810,000 square feet. So to go 14 times as fast (70 instead of 5 mph) you have to occupy 3,600 times as much land.