11 ms·

I visited the US (particularly the bay area) for the first time recently, and I was baffled by the sparsity of buildings. Suburbs and shopping areas are so far

I visited the US (particularly the bay area) for the first time recently, and I was baffled by the sparsity of buildings. Suburbs and shopping areas are so far away that you need a car to go anywhere, and in turn you need massive expanses to held all those vehicles, which means that stores are even more spread apart, which essentially becomes a snowball. Being used to high density housing and underground parking spaces all those open parking lots seem nonsensical to me, even more considering the alleged housing shortage over there.

smallnamespace 8y ago
This is just an example of 'path dependency', i.e. 'history matters'. It's not baffling if you consider that sparse, car-driven infrastructure makes a lot of sense in a country with low population density, and population density has tripled in the US since 1930 [1]. At that time, Germany's population density was about 6x the US's. However, changing transportation infrastructure is a chicken and egg problem. People get upset if you take away their parking spaces and build densely when efficient public transport doesn't exist yet and they still need to own a car. Yet building efficient public transport is at least a decade-long endeavor and requires either buying out or leveraging eminent domain to carve out space for the necessary infrastructure. Local and state officials aren't going to stick their heads out to support this unless voters will politically reward them for starting a project, but probably not being around to see it finished. If you want a regime that can efficiently bulldoze its way to the public transit and cheaply, then one way is to copy China, give power to governments to 'strongly encourage' the sale of any rights of way needed, don't open it up to public review and leave it completely in the hands of more-or-less capable technocrats. Is that a price you're willing to pay? [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/183475/united-states-population-density/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/183475/united-states-pop...
- zkms 8y ago
  > don't open it up to public review and leave it completely in the hands of more-or-less capable technocrats. Is that a price you're willing to pay? Given that in US, "public review" for any kind of infrastructure (regardless if it's an apartment building, a cell base station, a railway, a power plant) means soliciting input from the most meddlesome moralistic NIMBY normies who have as little respect for other people's property rights as they have appreciation for the societal benefits of public infrastructure works -- and then giving them the authority to use their concern trolling to obstruct/delay/kill whatever project is considered. It actually turns out you don't need to go full-on PRC to build cities with apartments and dense single-family houses with modern, high-capacity railways (all of which help reduce both the need and impact of parking spaces) if you're willing to tell these people to pound sand, and remove the land-use laws that they use to enforce their capriciousness.
  - firstplacelast 8y ago
    This is absolutely correct. NIMBYism has adversely affected more Americans than Russia. Since it follows that NIMBYs are more anti-American than Russia, we MUST put sanctions on their ability to affect their fellow Americans.
    - dang 8y ago
      Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?
- ProfessorLayton 8y ago
  Exactly. Furthermore, the US is a comparatively young country. A lot of cities with great public transport either already existed before cars were around, or had the necessary population density to support mass transit. I recently came back from a visit to London, and did not once need a car (I did take an Uber because I wanted to see what it was like to drive from the left side!). It was fantastic being able to take the Underground anywhere I needed to be, but it was very clear that it was only possible because the city was already there and densely populated before the arrival of cars.
  - Sharlin 8y ago
    To a large extent it’s about path dependency as well. You simply aren’t going to fit car infrastructure in a dense urban area whose streets were originally made for horses and pedestrians. It’s not like several European cities didn’t try though, in the heyday of car-oriented urban planning from the 50s to the 70s. Insofar as those attempts succeeded they are now being undone in favor of transit and walkability.
  - felipemnoa 8y ago
    >>I recently came back from a visit to London, and did not once need a car Well, to be fair, if you are talking about a specific city in Europe then you should do the same here in the USA. London's american equivalent is NYC. You will not need a car here either.
  - oblio 8y ago
    Arguable. For every London in Europe, there’s 10 cities that grew 3-5-10x since 1945. After all, the postwar boom happened on both sides of the Atlantic. London, Paris, etc. are outliers. It was just policy decisions in many cases.
  - wool_gather 8y ago
    I don't understand this argument. The automobile is much younger than the country. Cars became broadly used about a century ago, the 1910s-20s. How many U.S. cities do you imagine there are that were created after that? Or even that, due to cars, dramatically changed their size relative to the overall population?
- TheCoelacanth 8y ago
  Talking about modes of transportation that work well based on countrywide population density is silly. The US's population density is massively skewed by Alaska and everything from Kansas to California being almost completely empty. Most east coast cities have actually decreased their population density considerably since 1930.
randlet 8y ago
It's infuriating to me living in North America (I'm in Canada but it's as bad or worse in the US) watching cities develop this way. Mention this to almost anyone here and you will be met with blank stares. There are countless places that contain many stores that share parking lots that we so huge you still have to drive between them.
- jvagner 8y ago
  Reno is an awesome example of this, and this is true even of the latest developments. It's like developers in Reno have never seen pictures of other cities, even here in America. This problem has been solved time and again... and Reno builds large and small shopping malls and then they're empty and under-utilized, so they build another new one and the results are the same. Having lived overseas a few times in my life, I really am looking forward to leaving NorCal/NV and heading somewhere more sanely organized.
erikpukinskis 8y ago
This is how we have had such economic growth. We use our own population as a testbed where we disintermediate all of our own cultural support systems so that everything must be hired out. Food, transport, entertainment, self concept, family, all of it has been reformed in the U.S. over the last 100 years to replace community labor with commercial relations. This means we get first dibs on these new industries (Software As A Service, Family Mental Health As A Service, Guiltlessness As A Service, etc) as they catch on globally. Sometimes naturally because we discover some actual value. More often just by finding a practice which is addicting and then just dumping product until a population is addicted. Great recipe for success, much wealth has been stockpiled. It’s possible we sold out some cultural knowledge in the process, but the U.S. is a young country so most of our culture was pretty raw in the 19th century. The bulk of our old growth culture we just slaughtered on arrival.
- halbritt 8y ago
  Too real.
- narrator 8y ago
  The reason that everything is so not integrated is because of the American culture of containment. You have very very different kinds of people living in close physical proximity who often want nothing to do with each other. Think East Palo Alto and Palo Alto for example, especially in the 90s when East Palo Alto had the highest murder rate per capita in the U.S. Nowadays, physical proximity means less and less. Relationships are even becoming less integrated. Yes you can interact with other people, but only as coworkers and paid professionals. Don't cross any weird lines. Even asking someone to engage in friend activities is getting more rare as most people prefer online friends, since they have more in common with them. The throughly modern American asks "Why would you need to be in physical proximity to someone anyway unless it was necessary for work? That's so creepy!". Lately, Tinder and friends have really stripped the last actual need for non-work physical proximity with any indivuals who have not been pre-screened via the algorithm.
  - extradego 8y ago
cmurf 8y ago
A family member describes to me the love affair of the automobile ~65 years ago did this. It became so ingrained in the culture, intentionally designing cities around the car so that you could drive more. Americans loved showing off cars, they loved driving them. Teenage boys' psyche used it as a way to get out of the house, away from their parents (this is city life in middle America during and post-WWII) in particular as men came home from the war, and women weren't doing as much factory work. Kids wanted out of the house all day long. Cars were many things to people but it was the hyped technology of that era and making everything bigger, including all the available infrastructure was a "good thing". You'd see gas stations on every corner. Another family member of that same era to this day says "rip out the trees, rip out the bike lanes, put in more lanes to deal with this god awful traffic!" Driving is a right. It is not a privilege. Again, it's that ingrained in the culture, and the belief system. One of those family members gets that cars are on the way out and other things need to replace it for the sake of the planet and human sanity. As much as it was induced sanity in the beginning, it's now a source of individual and public planning stress. The other family member has zero interest in accommodating anything but more cars. This still manifests in how Americans get driver's licenses: states issue them, and the testing is pretty much a disqualification test not a qualification test; by that I mean it's not so much up to you to prove you're a safe driver but for the test to prove you're not. And boom you get a license. Literally no experience required, no driver's education required. Your uncle can teach you how to drive. It might be 2018 but it's the wild west and cowboys still exist here!
- dsnuh 8y ago
  I'm not familiar with licensing requirements in other countries, are they more rigorous?
  - jdietrich 8y ago
    Here in the UK, you need to take a multiple-choice theory test and a practical driving test. The practical test takes about 40 minutes and is conducted on public roads. The pass rate for both the theory and practical test is about 50%. It's not uncommon for learners to fail the practical test several times. You're not required to have professional instruction but the vast majority of people do, because it's extremely difficult to pass the driving test without it. Most instructors recommend 30 to 40 hours of tuition before attempting the test. Learners who are driving on a provisional license prior to passing their test must be accompanied by someone who has held a full license for at least three years. They must display an L-plate on the front and rear of the vehicle and cannot use motorways (freeways) unless they are accompanied by a licensed instructor. It is my understanding that the British process is relatively straightforward by European standards. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driving_licence_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driving_licence_in_the_United_... https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/720308/drt-statistics-jan-to-mar-2018.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
kartan 8y ago
Yes. I had the same experience. Visiting Mountain View, I was surprised at how walk hostile is. It took me 10 minutes to just pass one of the buildings surrounded by a huge parking lot and move to the next. To go from Intel offices to the Computer History Museum takes a really long walk cross kilometres of parking space. The Computer History Museum is situated in the middle of "no-where". But it has a highway 2 minutes away. To go from the close houses walking you need to walk close to the highway, with no trees or shadows. https://goo.gl/maps/P6d977i44SA2 https://goo.gl/maps/P6d977i44SA2 Some friends had a story about this. They were in LA and asked directions to a comic shop. "It is 10 minutes from here in that direction". After 20 minutes walking they asked again. It was "10 minutes" by car, the guy that give them directions did not think that they will go walking. I always have lived in places where is better to take public transportation or to walk than to use your private car. And one of the reasons is that the parking space is expensive. Buildings with parking space, that is also mandatory for new buildings, will place the space underground. This keeps residential buildings, shopping centres and offices close together.
- dominotw 8y ago
  You can use an electric unicycle to get around easily.
Derived 8y ago
America has plenty of cities that are just like cities everywhere else...we're a big country, we hardly have need to pack everyone in like sardines. I live in a major city, downtown. And I'm starting to hate it. No personal space, no yard, shared (or no) garage, and I'm a car enthusiast by the way, which I'm sure is practically a dirty word around most city-dwellers now. I'm seriously considering moving out to the suburbs even if it means a longer commute to the office. I like driving, and I have no problem driving places to get things done...after all, I can only carry so much shopping with me anyway.
- wild_preference 8y ago
  I don’t think so. American cities just aren’t dense enough to please compact-city lovers looking for a walkable experience like Prague. Even where I live in Guadalajara is better than every city I’ve lived in the States because of all the tiny shops near me. In the States I may have a 7/11 near me which doesn’t even carry coffee grounds or fruit/veg. It’s kind if a sad place to live.
  - ghaff 8y ago
    Significant sections of a number of US cities are quite walkable: New York, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, parts of Denver, Chicago. As well as smaller cities like Boulder. It's certainly true that newer US cities tend to be more spread out but if city walkability is a priority for you, examples exist.
    - ryanwaggoner 8y ago
      Very, very few cities in America are walkable enough to enable the average household to not own a car without it being a hardship [1]. You can probably count them on one hand. So yes, Denver has a few walkable areas that are nice. But if you can only walk 80% of the time and still have to own a car for the other 20%, which has to sit in a parking spot somewhere all the time, then we're back to the subject of this article. 1. I'm not saying it can't be done, but if you have kids, or aren't able-bodied, or don't want to spend 3x - 5x more time on public transit than you would in a car, or live in an area with extreme weather conditions, or don't want to be weird-sweaty-bike-person all the time, etc, then you need a car in most of America.
Tiktaalik 8y ago
I've heard this referred to as the "cycle of autodependency". This graphic describes it well. https://imgur.com/Kuu4j8m https://imgur.com/Kuu4j8m Once you've created an auto dependent city it's really difficult to undo it. Surrey, the biggest suburb of Vancouver, is trying to shift from being a car centric suburb to building its own compact downtown. It will take decades to change development patterns. They're trying to jump start it by creating their own LRT system, but of course due to auto dependency there is push back because LRT will "get in the way of the cars..."
jhabdas 8y ago
The Bay is the garbage dumb of modern America. I'm sorry that it left av memory. Next time head to Chitown or NYC and absorb some culture.
lazyjones 8y ago
But wasn't this because first people decided they wanted to purchase larger amounts of goods per trip, so they needed a car to transport that? In Europe's old cities, people often go shopping every day even if they're single. It's annoying to me, as the infrastructure is mostly built for lugging around as much as you can carry home on your feet and even all the packaged foods come in very small sizes (2 servings). US stores, like malls, seem much more convenient for families. What I don't understand is the number of restaurants built in a similar way, i.e. far away from residential areas and with huge parking lots. But I guess that's more family-friendly as well, especially with 2 or more kids.
- wool_gather 8y ago
  > What I don't understand is the number of restaurants built [...] far away from residential areas This is probably zoning; in many non-urban places mixed zoning is considered to lower the quality of residential living. So you end up with subdivision mazes without so much as a convenience store in walking range. > wasn't this because first people decided they wanted to purchase larger amounts of goods per trip My impression is that it's the other way around: because trips take so long, you maximize the amount you fetch on each.
- UncleEntity 8y ago
  > What I don't understand is the number of restaurants built in a similar way, i.e. far away from residential areas and with huge parking lots. Ironically, where I live (one of the oldest neighborhoods in Phoenix), they're taking the exact opposite approach -- building restaurants with absolutely zero consideration for parking and it's having a negative impact. They had to put up "resident only parking with permit" signs on my street because it got so bad. The apartments across the street went so far as to designate parking spots on the street -- totally illegal but it seems to work. The ones next door to them leave their trashcans out 24/7 for the same effect.
  - wool_gather 8y ago
    Out of curiosity, do you have a sense for whether the restaurant's patrons are driving from other parts of the city, or from the suburbs?
isoskeles 8y ago
Have you been to many other regions in the US? I live in the Bay Area and one of the few things I love about it is that it's way more "walkable" than other places I've lived in the states, especially the suburbs. Or, maybe a better question: what part of the Bay Area?
walshemj 8y ago
America has a lot of land and in the developed world you wont get planning permission for residential property with out of street parking
stcredzero 8y ago
I visited the US (particularly the bay area) for the first time recently, and I was baffled by the sparsity of buildings. Suburbs and shopping areas are so far away that you need a car to go anywhere When I lived in Cincinnati just north of the University in the cool little Gaslight neighborhood, I would come home from my job in an office park in the suburbs, then walk to the grocery, cool shops, the cafe, the library, the bank, friends houses. That wasn't typical, but it still existed.
csomar 8y ago
That's because it is cheaper to acquire land than build underground parking. I live in a city that has gone through that transformation. Big parking were converted into malls/supermarkets with multi-floor parking. Parking areas were also built with underground parking buildings. But that's only because land become scare and so it was expensive to have a non-underground parking.
badrabbit 8y ago
This is why we have more flooding too. More parking space means less ground to absorb rain water.
8bitsrule 8y ago
Here in the US, some city developers are building apartment buildings - with dozens of units - which provide NO parking for the tenants ... let alone any potential guests. To me this is equally puzzling. Reasoning leadership is a necessary part of city ecology. Rewarding complainers (hello Pavlov) is not a reasoned solution.
- smileysteve 8y ago
  The lack of parking may be an effort to solve a chicken and the egg problem. While some zoning restrictions call for parking per unit, some high traffic areas are calling for less parking per unit. If everybody is expected to have a car then pedestrians never develop, local businesses don't thrive, class mobility is it's highest. By limiting parking, or at least making it ala carte, residents and businesses consider their location proximity to eachother.

smallnamespace 8y ago

This is just an example of 'path dependency', i.e. 'history matters'. It's not baffling if you consider that sparse, car-driven infrastructure makes a lot of sense in a country with low population density, and population density has tripled in the US since 1930 [1]. At that time, Germany's population density was about 6x the US's. However, changing transportation infrastructure is a chicken and egg problem. People get upset if you take away their parking spaces and build densely when efficient public transport doesn't exist yet and they still need to own a car. Yet building efficient public transport is at least a decade-long endeavor and requires either buying out or leveraging eminent domain to carve out space for the necessary infrastructure. Local and state officials aren't going to stick their heads out to support this unless voters will politically reward them for starting a project, but probably not being around to see it finished. If you want a regime that can efficiently bulldoze its way to the public transit and cheaply, then one way is to copy China, give power to governments to 'strongly encourage' the sale of any rights of way needed, don't open it up to public review and leave it completely in the hands of more-or-less capable technocrats. Is that a price you're willing to pay? [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/183475/united-states-population-density/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/183475/united-states-pop...

zkms 8y ago
> don't open it up to public review and leave it completely in the hands of more-or-less capable technocrats. Is that a price you're willing to pay? Given that in US, "public review" for any kind of infrastructure (regardless if it's an apartment building, a cell base station, a railway, a power plant) means soliciting input from the most meddlesome moralistic NIMBY normies who have as little respect for other people's property rights as they have appreciation for the societal benefits of public infrastructure works -- and then giving them the authority to use their concern trolling to obstruct/delay/kill whatever project is considered. It actually turns out you don't need to go full-on PRC to build cities with apartments and dense single-family houses with modern, high-capacity railways (all of which help reduce both the need and impact of parking spaces) if you're willing to tell these people to pound sand, and remove the land-use laws that they use to enforce their capriciousness.
- firstplacelast 8y ago
  This is absolutely correct. NIMBYism has adversely affected more Americans than Russia. Since it follows that NIMBYs are more anti-American than Russia, we MUST put sanctions on their ability to affect their fellow Americans.
  - dang 8y ago
    Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?
ProfessorLayton 8y ago
Exactly. Furthermore, the US is a comparatively young country. A lot of cities with great public transport either already existed before cars were around, or had the necessary population density to support mass transit. I recently came back from a visit to London, and did not once need a car (I did take an Uber because I wanted to see what it was like to drive from the left side!). It was fantastic being able to take the Underground anywhere I needed to be, but it was very clear that it was only possible because the city was already there and densely populated before the arrival of cars.
- Sharlin 8y ago
  To a large extent it’s about path dependency as well. You simply aren’t going to fit car infrastructure in a dense urban area whose streets were originally made for horses and pedestrians. It’s not like several European cities didn’t try though, in the heyday of car-oriented urban planning from the 50s to the 70s. Insofar as those attempts succeeded they are now being undone in favor of transit and walkability.
- felipemnoa 8y ago
  >>I recently came back from a visit to London, and did not once need a car Well, to be fair, if you are talking about a specific city in Europe then you should do the same here in the USA. London's american equivalent is NYC. You will not need a car here either.
- oblio 8y ago
  Arguable. For every London in Europe, there’s 10 cities that grew 3-5-10x since 1945. After all, the postwar boom happened on both sides of the Atlantic. London, Paris, etc. are outliers. It was just policy decisions in many cases.
- wool_gather 8y ago
  I don't understand this argument. The automobile is much younger than the country. Cars became broadly used about a century ago, the 1910s-20s. How many U.S. cities do you imagine there are that were created after that? Or even that, due to cars, dramatically changed their size relative to the overall population?
TheCoelacanth 8y ago
Talking about modes of transportation that work well based on countrywide population density is silly. The US's population density is massively skewed by Alaska and everything from Kansas to California being almost completely empty. Most east coast cities have actually decreased their population density considerably since 1930.

randlet 8y ago

It's infuriating to me living in North America (I'm in Canada but it's as bad or worse in the US) watching cities develop this way. Mention this to almost anyone here and you will be met with blank stares. There are countless places that contain many stores that share parking lots that we so huge you still have to drive between them.

jvagner 8y ago
Reno is an awesome example of this, and this is true even of the latest developments. It's like developers in Reno have never seen pictures of other cities, even here in America. This problem has been solved time and again... and Reno builds large and small shopping malls and then they're empty and under-utilized, so they build another new one and the results are the same. Having lived overseas a few times in my life, I really am looking forward to leaving NorCal/NV and heading somewhere more sanely organized.

erikpukinskis 8y ago

This is how we have had such economic growth. We use our own population as a testbed where we disintermediate all of our own cultural support systems so that everything must be hired out. Food, transport, entertainment, self concept, family, all of it has been reformed in the U.S. over the last 100 years to replace community labor with commercial relations. This means we get first dibs on these new industries (Software As A Service, Family Mental Health As A Service, Guiltlessness As A Service, etc) as they catch on globally. Sometimes naturally because we discover some actual value. More often just by finding a practice which is addicting and then just dumping product until a population is addicted. Great recipe for success, much wealth has been stockpiled. It’s possible we sold out some cultural knowledge in the process, but the U.S. is a young country so most of our culture was pretty raw in the 19th century. The bulk of our old growth culture we just slaughtered on arrival.

halbritt 8y ago
Too real.
narrator 8y ago
The reason that everything is so not integrated is because of the American culture of containment. You have very very different kinds of people living in close physical proximity who often want nothing to do with each other. Think East Palo Alto and Palo Alto for example, especially in the 90s when East Palo Alto had the highest murder rate per capita in the U.S. Nowadays, physical proximity means less and less. Relationships are even becoming less integrated. Yes you can interact with other people, but only as coworkers and paid professionals. Don't cross any weird lines. Even asking someone to engage in friend activities is getting more rare as most people prefer online friends, since they have more in common with them. The throughly modern American asks "Why would you need to be in physical proximity to someone anyway unless it was necessary for work? That's so creepy!". Lately, Tinder and friends have really stripped the last actual need for non-work physical proximity with any indivuals who have not been pre-screened via the algorithm.
- extradego 8y ago

cmurf 8y ago

A family member describes to me the love affair of the automobile ~65 years ago did this. It became so ingrained in the culture, intentionally designing cities around the car so that you could drive more. Americans loved showing off cars, they loved driving them. Teenage boys' psyche used it as a way to get out of the house, away from their parents (this is city life in middle America during and post-WWII) in particular as men came home from the war, and women weren't doing as much factory work. Kids wanted out of the house all day long. Cars were many things to people but it was the hyped technology of that era and making everything bigger, including all the available infrastructure was a "good thing". You'd see gas stations on every corner. Another family member of that same era to this day says "rip out the trees, rip out the bike lanes, put in more lanes to deal with this god awful traffic!" Driving is a right. It is not a privilege. Again, it's that ingrained in the culture, and the belief system. One of those family members gets that cars are on the way out and other things need to replace it for the sake of the planet and human sanity. As much as it was induced sanity in the beginning, it's now a source of individual and public planning stress. The other family member has zero interest in accommodating anything but more cars. This still manifests in how Americans get driver's licenses: states issue them, and the testing is pretty much a disqualification test not a qualification test; by that I mean it's not so much up to you to prove you're a safe driver but for the test to prove you're not. And boom you get a license. Literally no experience required, no driver's education required. Your uncle can teach you how to drive. It might be 2018 but it's the wild west and cowboys still exist here!

dsnuh 8y ago
I'm not familiar with licensing requirements in other countries, are they more rigorous?
- jdietrich 8y ago
  Here in the UK, you need to take a multiple-choice theory test and a practical driving test. The practical test takes about 40 minutes and is conducted on public roads. The pass rate for both the theory and practical test is about 50%. It's not uncommon for learners to fail the practical test several times. You're not required to have professional instruction but the vast majority of people do, because it's extremely difficult to pass the driving test without it. Most instructors recommend 30 to 40 hours of tuition before attempting the test. Learners who are driving on a provisional license prior to passing their test must be accompanied by someone who has held a full license for at least three years. They must display an L-plate on the front and rear of the vehicle and cannot use motorways (freeways) unless they are accompanied by a licensed instructor. It is my understanding that the British process is relatively straightforward by European standards. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driving_licence_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driving_licence_in_the_United_... https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/720308/drt-statistics-jan-to-mar-2018.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

kartan 8y ago

Yes. I had the same experience. Visiting Mountain View, I was surprised at how walk hostile is. It took me 10 minutes to just pass one of the buildings surrounded by a huge parking lot and move to the next. To go from Intel offices to the Computer History Museum takes a really long walk cross kilometres of parking space. The Computer History Museum is situated in the middle of "no-where". But it has a highway 2 minutes away. To go from the close houses walking you need to walk close to the highway, with no trees or shadows. https://goo.gl/maps/P6d977i44SA2 https://goo.gl/maps/P6d977i44SA2 Some friends had a story about this. They were in LA and asked directions to a comic shop. "It is 10 minutes from here in that direction". After 20 minutes walking they asked again. It was "10 minutes" by car, the guy that give them directions did not think that they will go walking. I always have lived in places where is better to take public transportation or to walk than to use your private car. And one of the reasons is that the parking space is expensive. Buildings with parking space, that is also mandatory for new buildings, will place the space underground. This keeps residential buildings, shopping centres and offices close together.

dominotw 8y ago
You can use an electric unicycle to get around easily.

Derived 8y ago

America has plenty of cities that are just like cities everywhere else...we're a big country, we hardly have need to pack everyone in like sardines. I live in a major city, downtown. And I'm starting to hate it. No personal space, no yard, shared (or no) garage, and I'm a car enthusiast by the way, which I'm sure is practically a dirty word around most city-dwellers now. I'm seriously considering moving out to the suburbs even if it means a longer commute to the office. I like driving, and I have no problem driving places to get things done...after all, I can only carry so much shopping with me anyway.

wild_preference 8y ago
I don’t think so. American cities just aren’t dense enough to please compact-city lovers looking for a walkable experience like Prague. Even where I live in Guadalajara is better than every city I’ve lived in the States because of all the tiny shops near me. In the States I may have a 7/11 near me which doesn’t even carry coffee grounds or fruit/veg. It’s kind if a sad place to live.
- ghaff 8y ago
  Significant sections of a number of US cities are quite walkable: New York, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, parts of Denver, Chicago. As well as smaller cities like Boulder. It's certainly true that newer US cities tend to be more spread out but if city walkability is a priority for you, examples exist.
  - ryanwaggoner 8y ago
    Very, very few cities in America are walkable enough to enable the average household to not own a car without it being a hardship [1]. You can probably count them on one hand. So yes, Denver has a few walkable areas that are nice. But if you can only walk 80% of the time and still have to own a car for the other 20%, which has to sit in a parking spot somewhere all the time, then we're back to the subject of this article. 1. I'm not saying it can't be done, but if you have kids, or aren't able-bodied, or don't want to spend 3x - 5x more time on public transit than you would in a car, or live in an area with extreme weather conditions, or don't want to be weird-sweaty-bike-person all the time, etc, then you need a car in most of America.

Tiktaalik 8y ago

I've heard this referred to as the "cycle of autodependency". This graphic describes it well. https://imgur.com/Kuu4j8m https://imgur.com/Kuu4j8m Once you've created an auto dependent city it's really difficult to undo it. Surrey, the biggest suburb of Vancouver, is trying to shift from being a car centric suburb to building its own compact downtown. It will take decades to change development patterns. They're trying to jump start it by creating their own LRT system, but of course due to auto dependency there is push back because LRT will "get in the way of the cars..."

jhabdas 8y ago

The Bay is the garbage dumb of modern America. I'm sorry that it left av memory. Next time head to Chitown or NYC and absorb some culture.

lazyjones 8y ago

But wasn't this because first people decided they wanted to purchase larger amounts of goods per trip, so they needed a car to transport that? In Europe's old cities, people often go shopping every day even if they're single. It's annoying to me, as the infrastructure is mostly built for lugging around as much as you can carry home on your feet and even all the packaged foods come in very small sizes (2 servings). US stores, like malls, seem much more convenient for families. What I don't understand is the number of restaurants built in a similar way, i.e. far away from residential areas and with huge parking lots. But I guess that's more family-friendly as well, especially with 2 or more kids.

wool_gather 8y ago
> What I don't understand is the number of restaurants built [...] far away from residential areas This is probably zoning; in many non-urban places mixed zoning is considered to lower the quality of residential living. So you end up with subdivision mazes without so much as a convenience store in walking range. > wasn't this because first people decided they wanted to purchase larger amounts of goods per trip My impression is that it's the other way around: because trips take so long, you maximize the amount you fetch on each.
UncleEntity 8y ago
> What I don't understand is the number of restaurants built in a similar way, i.e. far away from residential areas and with huge parking lots. Ironically, where I live (one of the oldest neighborhoods in Phoenix), they're taking the exact opposite approach -- building restaurants with absolutely zero consideration for parking and it's having a negative impact. They had to put up "resident only parking with permit" signs on my street because it got so bad. The apartments across the street went so far as to designate parking spots on the street -- totally illegal but it seems to work. The ones next door to them leave their trashcans out 24/7 for the same effect.
- wool_gather 8y ago
  Out of curiosity, do you have a sense for whether the restaurant's patrons are driving from other parts of the city, or from the suburbs?

isoskeles 8y ago

Have you been to many other regions in the US? I live in the Bay Area and one of the few things I love about it is that it's way more "walkable" than other places I've lived in the states, especially the suburbs. Or, maybe a better question: what part of the Bay Area?

walshemj 8y ago

America has a lot of land and in the developed world you wont get planning permission for residential property with out of street parking

stcredzero 8y ago

I visited the US (particularly the bay area) for the first time recently, and I was baffled by the sparsity of buildings. Suburbs and shopping areas are so far away that you need a car to go anywhere When I lived in Cincinnati just north of the University in the cool little Gaslight neighborhood, I would come home from my job in an office park in the suburbs, then walk to the grocery, cool shops, the cafe, the library, the bank, friends houses. That wasn't typical, but it still existed.

csomar 8y ago

That's because it is cheaper to acquire land than build underground parking. I live in a city that has gone through that transformation. Big parking were converted into malls/supermarkets with multi-floor parking. Parking areas were also built with underground parking buildings. But that's only because land become scare and so it was expensive to have a non-underground parking.

badrabbit 8y ago

This is why we have more flooding too. More parking space means less ground to absorb rain water.

8bitsrule 8y ago

Here in the US, some city developers are building apartment buildings - with dozens of units - which provide NO parking for the tenants ... let alone any potential guests. To me this is equally puzzling. Reasoning leadership is a necessary part of city ecology. Rewarding complainers (hello Pavlov) is not a reasoned solution.

smileysteve 8y ago
The lack of parking may be an effort to solve a chicken and the egg problem. While some zoning restrictions call for parking per unit, some high traffic areas are calling for less parking per unit. If everybody is expected to have a car then pedestrians never develop, local businesses don't thrive, class mobility is it's highest. By limiting parking, or at least making it ala carte, residents and businesses consider their location proximity to eachother.