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It's your personal choice only if you don't expect to have (non-congested) public roads and parking spaces for your car. Space in cities is shared and finite, s
by pornel 7y ago
It's your personal choice only if you don't expect to have (non-congested) public roads and parking spaces for your car. Space in cities is shared and finite, so something has to give.
When I visit U.S. I'm shocked how much of city space is sacrificed to seas of asphalt and mountains of dull concrete. Multiple very wide lanes cutting cities into inaccessible islands, making everything spaced further apart. Where I'd expect to have a 5-minute stroll by a park to a local cafe, it turns out to be a dangerous 30-minute walk through viaducts and parking lots to a mall.
- jcranmer 7y agoIt depends a lot on where you go to. The cities of the NEC (Boston-Washington axis), along with Chicago and (to a lesser degree) San Francisco are generally pretty hostile to cars and have dense and compact cores. There's a tranche of cities that are trying to develop more towards that transit-heavy/car-lite scenario, which includes Seattle and Portland (and surprisingly, Los Angeles, but they have a long way to go). Then there's the cities that embraced the automobile and have blocks of nothing but parking in their downtown--Kansas City is one of the worst offenders here. And of course the suburbs tend to lean heavily into the space-wasting, automobile-centric design. It's quite striking just how compact things are in the first set of cities compared to the automobile-centered places elsewhere in the US. Apple's spaceship campus is about the size of downtown Providence. Or, if you impose it on Midtown Manhattan, it would cover the entire area between Penn Station, Grand Central, Broadway, and the Empire State Building (which incidentally houses more employees by itself than Apple's campus does).