4 ms·

> The dream of car culture is that we as individuals can live in a huge area, with vast potential for interaction. But the truth of what we have built is that w

by xienze 10y ago

> The dream of car culture is that we as individuals can live in a huge area, with vast potential for interaction. But the truth of what we have built is that we are cut off from one another. No, the dream of car culture is that regular people can afford to live in their own detached house on a nice-sized plot of land. Which is what we have. You can build dense cities in the US all you want, but there will always be a sizable portion of the population that says "I can pay $X to live in a small apartment in the city or a big house with a yard in the suburbs. Hmm..." It's an obvious choice for many people.

bitslayer 10y ago
Regular people can afford a detached house in America, for some definitions of regular. I used to be part of the working poor, and having a car did not make me feel free, it was a constant stress. I went through a series of old clunkers, and the threat of it dying was a real threat to my continued livelihood. Millions of Americans live that way today. Car culture is self-propagating; it excludes other options via the built environment. The more convenient we make it for rich people to drive faster, the more deadly we make it for those who cannot reach that bottom rung.
oftenwrong 10y ago
Regular people are only able to afford their suburban lifestyle because the US has massively subsidized car ownership. >You can build dense cities in the US all you want No you can't. Dense cities have been outlawed by misguided zoning codes and traffic engineering standards.
- xienze 10y ago
  Outlawed? I think that requires a citation.
  - bitslayer 10y ago
    http://netinfo.ladbs.org/ladbsec.nsf/d3450fd072c7344c882564e5005d0db4/72f24c5fab8bd39788256a160067e2e2/$FILE/Summary%20of%20Parking%20Regulations%20final.pdf http://netinfo.ladbs.org/ladbsec.nsf/d3450fd072c7344c882564e...
  - SteveMouzon 10y ago
    Euclidian use-based zoning has been the law of essentially every city in the US beginning about a hundred years ago until the rise of form-based codes like the SmartCode mandates that uses be separated: housing into subdivisions, retail into strip centers & shopping malls, and offices into office parks. This means that you have to drive pretty much anywhere. So if you look at the gross density, just the space required for larger streets, collectors, arterials, and expressways guarantees a substantially less compact city. This is exacerbated by the large setbacks required by those ordinances. This was celebrated by the architects; Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacre City celebrated the ideal of every home sitting on an acre of land. Contrast that with the Tuscan town of Pienza, Italy, which sits on a bit over 11 acres of land and which contains over 2,000 residents. Just looking at the numbers, Americans would think it must be some horrible slum. But it's such a fabulous place that it attracts close to a million visitors a year, if I recall correctly. It would be completely illegal to build Pienza in countless American towns and cities, and on many counts. In reality, Pienza would probably violate close to 90% of the conditions in a conventional Euclidian code.
  - sonthonax 10y ago
    Regulated out of existence.
hx87 10y ago
> No, the dream of car culture is that regular people can afford to live in their own detached house on a nice-sized plot of land. Implicit in that dream is a reasonable (<1 hr) commute, which is increasingly out of reach.
- ghaff 10y ago
  It's really not in general outside of a relatively small number of in-vogue cities. Yes, there are places that have bad commutes (that don't even necessarily involve driving into or out of a city core) but it's actually the exception in the US generally.
- xienze 10y ago
  Well the fact that many people willingly choose to have commutes that long kinda implies that the "one hour rule" isn't hard and fast. And as another poster pointed out, those massive commutes apply to cities like LA, NY, and SF. Outside of those bubbles the dream of suburban living and short commutes is alive and well. Mine is 10 minutes.
ashark 10y ago
Apartments aren't the only dense, urban/suburban housing. Sensibly-scaled suburbs and urban neighborhoods that maintain mixed use zoning and the right density to allow walking for many or most errands/shopping and are still close enough to business centers that they're a reasonable public transit trip away at worst are a thing. Often the houses are close together, if not attached, they have no front yard as we know it (garage empties directly onto street, if there is a garage), narrow mixed car/pedestrian streets on a grid leading to larger arteries, and very small back yards. See e.g. Tokyo. Start modifying those things—single-use zone residential areas, require minimum yard sizes (rather than, say, maximum) and setbacks from roads, pretty soon you're back to requiring cars, necessarily, because everything's too far away to walk. Which means more and wider roads. Which pushes everything farther apart. Now you need useless "green space" to separate these wider, faster, busier roads from places where people are. Pushes everything farther apart, more driving, more cars. Parking lots that could each hold an entire 20,000-population old European city start popping up, maybe even by law, because everyone's driving and they need places to park. That pushes everything farther apart. Those parking lots and the big-box stores the service are hideous and dirty. More big buffers so the nearby neighborhoods don't turn into low-home-value ghettos. The edge of the city is now several times farther from the center than before, and those in the center have to travel several times as long to reach the country. Public transit is now guaranteed to be awful for most of the city because there's insufficient density to make it work. As a "bonus" on top of all the wasted time and lower quality of life that stuff's causing and despite all the added greenery (mostly space to make up for being too far from parks and real human-oriented public green spaces, like lawns/yards, and gigantic grass buffers for ugly, noisy, dangerous roads and parking lots) the whole thing's far less green, in an environmental sense. Do all that, then make all the urban schools terrible so middle class families with kids (can afford two+ cars, can't afford private school) can't (responsibly) choose to live there, and you've just invented most American cities. As someone with a family who'd much prefer to live in the former environment, I don't feel like the suburbs and car culture are something we chose. They're the only realistic option, in most of the US—not because it must be that way, but because that's how it happens to be here. And yes, to preempt the usual retort (not to imply that you'd necessarily dredge it up, xienze, just in general) of course we could move overseas or to one of the handful of areas in the US where there are both jobs and nice (for our definition of nice) areas to live, but that's far from the only factor in choosing one's home. Doesn't mean it isn't frustrating to have such limited housing/lifestyle options. The tricky thing is you can't have both. Once you build an American-style 'burb on the edge of a city, it gets much harder to expand past that with traditional urban neighborhoods. Ring the city with American suburbs and that's all you're gonna get afterward. It's like a barrier. No such thing as free lunch, and all that. Seems like city development options are either nearby-rural+decent-urban, or distant-rural+car-only-suburbs+awful-urban.

by xienze 10y ago

bitslayer 10y ago

Regular people can afford a detached house in America, for some definitions of regular. I used to be part of the working poor, and having a car did not make me feel free, it was a constant stress. I went through a series of old clunkers, and the threat of it dying was a real threat to my continued livelihood. Millions of Americans live that way today. Car culture is self-propagating; it excludes other options via the built environment. The more convenient we make it for rich people to drive faster, the more deadly we make it for those who cannot reach that bottom rung.

oftenwrong 10y ago

Regular people are only able to afford their suburban lifestyle because the US has massively subsidized car ownership. >You can build dense cities in the US all you want No you can't. Dense cities have been outlawed by misguided zoning codes and traffic engineering standards.

xienze 10y ago
Outlawed? I think that requires a citation.
- bitslayer 10y ago
  http://netinfo.ladbs.org/ladbsec.nsf/d3450fd072c7344c882564e5005d0db4/72f24c5fab8bd39788256a160067e2e2/$FILE/Summary%20of%20Parking%20Regulations%20final.pdf http://netinfo.ladbs.org/ladbsec.nsf/d3450fd072c7344c882564e...
- SteveMouzon 10y ago
  Euclidian use-based zoning has been the law of essentially every city in the US beginning about a hundred years ago until the rise of form-based codes like the SmartCode mandates that uses be separated: housing into subdivisions, retail into strip centers & shopping malls, and offices into office parks. This means that you have to drive pretty much anywhere. So if you look at the gross density, just the space required for larger streets, collectors, arterials, and expressways guarantees a substantially less compact city. This is exacerbated by the large setbacks required by those ordinances. This was celebrated by the architects; Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacre City celebrated the ideal of every home sitting on an acre of land. Contrast that with the Tuscan town of Pienza, Italy, which sits on a bit over 11 acres of land and which contains over 2,000 residents. Just looking at the numbers, Americans would think it must be some horrible slum. But it's such a fabulous place that it attracts close to a million visitors a year, if I recall correctly. It would be completely illegal to build Pienza in countless American towns and cities, and on many counts. In reality, Pienza would probably violate close to 90% of the conditions in a conventional Euclidian code.
- sonthonax 10y ago
  Regulated out of existence.

hx87 10y ago

> No, the dream of car culture is that regular people can afford to live in their own detached house on a nice-sized plot of land. Implicit in that dream is a reasonable (<1 hr) commute, which is increasingly out of reach.

ghaff 10y ago
It's really not in general outside of a relatively small number of in-vogue cities. Yes, there are places that have bad commutes (that don't even necessarily involve driving into or out of a city core) but it's actually the exception in the US generally.
xienze 10y ago
Well the fact that many people willingly choose to have commutes that long kinda implies that the "one hour rule" isn't hard and fast. And as another poster pointed out, those massive commutes apply to cities like LA, NY, and SF. Outside of those bubbles the dream of suburban living and short commutes is alive and well. Mine is 10 minutes.

ashark 10y ago

Apartments aren't the only dense, urban/suburban housing. Sensibly-scaled suburbs and urban neighborhoods that maintain mixed use zoning and the right density to allow walking for many or most errands/shopping and are still close enough to business centers that they're a reasonable public transit trip away at worst are a thing. Often the houses are close together, if not attached, they have no front yard as we know it (garage empties directly onto street, if there is a garage), narrow mixed car/pedestrian streets on a grid leading to larger arteries, and very small back yards. See e.g. Tokyo. Start modifying those things—single-use zone residential areas, require minimum yard sizes (rather than, say, maximum) and setbacks from roads, pretty soon you're back to requiring cars, necessarily, because everything's too far away to walk. Which means more and wider roads. Which pushes everything farther apart. Now you need useless "green space" to separate these wider, faster, busier roads from places where people are. Pushes everything farther apart, more driving, more cars. Parking lots that could each hold an entire 20,000-population old European city start popping up, maybe even by law, because everyone's driving and they need places to park. That pushes everything farther apart. Those parking lots and the big-box stores the service are hideous and dirty. More big buffers so the nearby neighborhoods don't turn into low-home-value ghettos. The edge of the city is now several times farther from the center than before, and those in the center have to travel several times as long to reach the country. Public transit is now guaranteed to be awful for most of the city because there's insufficient density to make it work. As a "bonus" on top of all the wasted time and lower quality of life that stuff's causing and despite all the added greenery (mostly space to make up for being too far from parks and real human-oriented public green spaces, like lawns/yards, and gigantic grass buffers for ugly, noisy, dangerous roads and parking lots) the whole thing's far less green, in an environmental sense. Do all that, then make all the urban schools terrible so middle class families with kids (can afford two+ cars, can't afford private school) can't (responsibly) choose to live there, and you've just invented most American cities. As someone with a family who'd much prefer to live in the former environment, I don't feel like the suburbs and car culture are something we chose. They're the only realistic option, in most of the US—not because it must be that way, but because that's how it happens to be here. And yes, to preempt the usual retort (not to imply that you'd necessarily dredge it up, xienze, just in general) of course we could move overseas or to one of the handful of areas in the US where there are both jobs and nice (for our definition of nice) areas to live, but that's far from the only factor in choosing one's home. Doesn't mean it isn't frustrating to have such limited housing/lifestyle options. The tricky thing is you can't have both. Once you build an American-style 'burb on the edge of a city, it gets much harder to expand past that with traditional urban neighborhoods. Ring the city with American suburbs and that's all you're gonna get afterward. It's like a barrier. No such thing as free lunch, and all that. Seems like city development options are either nearby-rural+decent-urban, or distant-rural+car-only-suburbs+awful-urban.