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> When cities make it difficult to meet and work with others, as they do when they sprawl This doesn't follow. It's incredibly efficient, in time and effort te
by superuser2 10y ago
> When cities make it difficult to meet and work with others, as they do when they sprawl
This doesn't follow. It's incredibly efficient, in time and effort terms, to get around sprawl. You just drive at 65mph on the wide-open freeways and up the parking lot with plenty of open space in front of every conceivable destination. I've never spent more than 30 minutes making a point-to-point hop where both points are in sprawl. Average case, more like 10. Traffic jams == not sprawl-y enough.
Thirty minutes for any public transit trip in San Francisco or Chicago (at least the parts I can afford) is like a once-a-year pop-the-champagne-corks celebration. Ten, forget it. Not gonna happen ever unless it's the corner store. Getting anywhere useful is usually abut 50 minutes. (I'm pretty sure this is the CTA's SLA. No matter the distance - past a point, roughly 50 minutes. Implies some design effort and a sophisticated balancing of slower and faster lines).
Sure, bus tickets are cheaper than car ownership, but our time is worth something too.
>just agglomerations of many towns without a center
This is precisely what the pro-density anti-car people on HN advocate: dense walkable neighborhoods, with no real solution for medium distance transportation. Tiny markets where local businesses get to price-gouge you because going to a competitor means lighting your afternoon on fire.
- rspeer 10y agoThere are three grocery stores within a 15-minute walk of my house. Two of them are next to the nearest subway stop; they add no more to my commute than walking through a parking lot would add to yours. The subway gets me to many useful places in 30 minutes. My time is valuable, and I spend none of it stuck in traffic or looking for parking. Advocating for density means that more people have the option of living this way. You've been served badly by public transit, but you seem to be saying that public transit should be as bad for everyone as it is for you.
- sjdchid 10y agoThe list of cities I can get to from Oakland on BART in under 30 minutes is pretty long.
- superuser2 10y agoThirty minutes of time on a BART car, sure. Suppose you live in the premium housing really close to the BART, so your walk is only five minutes to the station. Then another five getting through the fare gate and waiting for your train. Then your destination is an easy ten-minute walk from the BART. Great, but that's not a 30-minute trip, it's a 50-minute trip.
- sjdchid 10y agoGranted, this is true for the more distant cities. But if I'm going to San Francisco or Berkeley (let's be honest, where the hell else would I want to go), the train ride itself is less than 15 minutes.