13 ms·

>So what do we achieve by building new highways and speeding up travel? We don't actually shorten people's trips; we just enable them to live and work farther a

• esotericn 7y ago
  Right. Some people want to live on top of each other in dense urban areas. That's fine and this should be an allowed pattern of development. "Enable them to live and work farther away from each other" is, simplified, pretty much the entire reason I wake up in the morning. I opt out of dense urban living. If the towns want to opt out of having people like me working there, so be it.
  • cmurphycode 7y ago
    Well, right. But, I think that a lot of people are frustrated because living in dense urban areas is NOT an allowed pattern of development in most cities, especially the Bay Area.
    • esotericn 7y ago
      Right. It doesn't work for anyone. I'd love to see a city that had like, a super dense core, then a ring road with endless car parks around it or something like that. You drive in, from your country home, get the subway for 10 mins from the ring road to the CBD or your urban dwelling friends' place, sorted. Zone the ring road to kill sprawl. Ban cars inside the ring road other than trucks for deliveries, workmen etc. Best of both worlds. It's not gonna happen in a pre-existing city though, the winners will block it (and rightly so).
      • hnal943 7y ago
        I think I remember Doug Crockford talk in which he laid out the original design of EPCOT. It was very similar to what you described. Found it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvoCIPKWobs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvoCIPKWobs
      • RandallBrown 7y ago
        Manhattan is basically this taken to the extreme. With different levels of commuter rings. First level is the subway from New Jersey or Brooklyn/Queens. Next level is a commuter line like NJ Transit or Metro North. You can live as far as 90 miles away and have a somewhat reasonable commute, while living in a fairly rural area. I personally would much rather live in the dense urban core and have easy access to the outskirts, but commuting to Manhattan works for some people.
        • Spooky23 7y ago
          Totally. There are actual people who take Amtrak from Albany at 5AM every day to Manhattan as a commute. Not many, but they exist!
          • kiliantics 7y ago
            It's amazing/depressing what patterns of living these megarich metropolises end up creating. There are people who live in Ireland and commute by boat and train to London for half the week in order to work.
          • sokoloff 7y ago
            The seat of state government is Albany and the seat of commerce/finance is in Manhattan. A couple where one worked in each place would naturally have something like that arise (and I'd think it wouldn't even be particularly rare). I suspect for the majority of those couples, living in/near Albany would be vastly preferable to NYC, even before you consider the after-hours of political work is probably benefited more by locality.
        • Stronico 7y ago
    • someguydave 7y ago
      I think both groups of people would benefit from less regulation in land use. Get rid of zoning and let the free market decide land use issues.
  • kemiller 7y ago
    I'm all for letting people live how they want, but suburban planning tends not to account for the true lifetime cost of that mode of living. If we can fix that, then knock yourself out.
    • esotericn 7y ago
      Suburban living is essentially what I'm describing here as being the 'bad' middle state that causes the issues. You have congestion because there are just houses dotted everywhere clustered around the city, making the 'last few miles' hellish. Later, those suburbs become 'urbs'. I'm saying have urban and rural with a sharp divide. Inside the 'event horizon' of where you'd normally have suburbs, have car parks and dump people on to urban transport that uses space more effectively like trains/buses/etc.
      • AnthonyMouse 7y ago
        > I'm saying have urban and rural with a sharp divide. Inside the 'event horizon' of where you'd normally have suburbs, have car parks and dump people on to urban transport that uses space more effectively like trains/buses/etc. The problem with this design is that cities commonly grow over time. If you have a core which is full of 30 story buildings, it makes much more sense to allow the radius of the core to expand from 10 miles to 20 by bulldozing some car parks and replacing them with more 20 and 30 story buildings than to have to bulldoze the existing 30 story buildings and replace them all with 95 story ones. The sharp divide is what we already have and is one half of the causes of the existing problem. You have a core which is zoned for higher density surrounded by suburbs that aren't, which prevents the dense core from expanding outward as necessary. The other half is that even the core doesn't allow very high densities, so you generally don't get 50+ story buildings even there, you just get outrageously high rents instead because it can neither expand upwards nor outwards. You're essentially suggesting that it expand only upwards, but that's still a lot more expensive than expanding in both directions, and there comes a point that it becomes impractical. We don't really have a lot of experience constructing large numbers of 200 story buildings and even if we could figure it out it probably wouldn't be cost effective and result in affordable rents. Meanwhile there is a threshold density above which you can have things like effective mass transit, at which point expanding outward at the same density allows you to maintain those advantages over a larger area without paying the high cost of constructing buildings at the limits of our engineering talents (and also paying to destroy existing tall buildings in order to do it). Which is basically what naturally happens without zoning density restrictions. In theory someone could then build a 30 story building in the middle of the suburbs, but that doesn't make a lot of sense when it's more profitable to put that building closer to the core, until the core is already full of those, and then the most profitable place for that building is right next to the core. Which is how the core expands as needed. You don't really need to prohibit people from building at inappropriate densities when appropriateness is already closely aligned with profitability.
• wozniacki 7y ago
  Yeah, having a corner grocery might be good, but without mobility, the grocers are going to realize that you don't really have much choice about buying from them, and maybe start charging higher prices, or not stocking as much variety, or higher fewer people and having less service. This is precisely what happens in cities. You'd think city centers would typically have a larger selection of things available at competitive prices but thats hardly the case and price gouging is frequent at these neighborhood stores whether youre shopping for some house fixtures or even a six pack.
  • cheez 7y ago
    Just live within walking distance of Chinatown.
    • rayiner 7y ago
      In many cities, like DC, there are no Chinese left in Chinatown. They've been replaced with white yuppies. If you want the good deals from the asian or latin market, you go out to the suburbs where the asian and latin populations live. Which is one of the deeply ironic things about urbanism as a movement. We have made our cities hostile and overly expensive to families. So people of color--who disproportionately are the folks still having kids--are decamping to the suburbs in large numbers: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2015/07/31/black-flight-to-the-suburbs-on-the-rise; https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2015/07/31/black-f... https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/0504_census_ethnicity_frey.pdf https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/0504_ce... (p. 10). From 1990-2010, the percentage of african americans living in the suburbs increased from under 40% to over 50%. For Hispanics it increased from around 45% to 60%. For whites, by contrast, the percentage living in the suburbs was relatively flat. My Bangladeshi immigrant family members moved to Queens in the 1990s, and as soon as they got their feet under them economically they moved to Long Island. That’s the story of big cities like NYC: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/18/upshot/how-much-slower-would-the-us-grow-without-immigration-in-many-places-a-lot.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/18/upshot/how-much-slower-wo.... Large urban counties would be shrinking if it wasn’t for a continuous stream of international migration. (But of course eventually the immigrants become part of the stream of domestic migrants leaving the city.)
• peterwwillis 7y ago
  This applies if you're well-off, but the less wealthy don't get a choice in mobility. If you don't have money, a secure job, housing, car, etc, mobility is quite limited, costly, and time-consuming (if it exists at all). Others' increased mobility can even hurt the less well off (see: white flight). That hurt then becomes a burden on everyone, as it manifests as poverty, crime, unemployment, over-reliance on public services, and so on. But increased accessibility reduces those problems, because it becomes less difficult to do things people need to do, regardless of socioeconomic status. You have the option of being mobile, but you don't have to be. Now, getting more specific to the OP: traffic congestion is due to inefficiency. Adding lanes/roads doesn't address the source of the issue: cars are inefficient mass transportation mechanisms. Traffic jams only occur when large masses of people are transporting themselves. You can either A) add more mass transit, or B) bring the services closer to the people, so they travel less. The latter helps the traffic jams, but it also helps people who don't even have an option to be in the traffic jam. Mobility helps the well-off, accessibility helps everybody. (downvote away, you know i'm right)
  • rayiner 7y ago
    Almost everyone has access to a car in the US, including 80% of people under the poverty line. That means that as a practical matter a Wal-Mart in an exurb can do a lot more to serve poor people than anything in a city (where prices are going to be inflated by the high cost of rent and labor in our urban areas).
• forrestthewoods 7y ago
  Exactly. Giving more people more access to economic opportunity is, imho, a moral imperative. Congestion will never be "solved". Because the commute time people are willing to tolerate is, as the article demonstrates, roughly constant. Adding lanes doesn't decrease congestion. But it doesn't increase throughput. Which means more people have more access to good jobs.
• CalRobert 7y ago
  But the high speed of travel is effected by making virtually everything pavement. You're just traveling through nothing (well, asphalt). Thanks to parking minimums the actual buildings you want to go to are _dwarfed_ by their parking lots. https://usa.streetsblog.org/2014/06/13/the-whole-city-of-florence-could-fit-inside-an-atlanta-interchange/ https://usa.streetsblog.org/2014/06/13/the-whole-city-of-flo... Also, forcing everything to be so far apart makes it nearly impossible to traverse on foot, serve with public transport, ride a bike to, etc.
  • hnal943 7y ago
    Dense urban living also requires most of your surroundings to be pavement.
    • jcranmer 7y ago
      Compare a picture of Kansas City to one of Manhattan. In Kansas City, there are entire city blocks in the middle of downtown solely dedicated to parking, and more blocks that are given to massive highways to move people downtown. In Manhattan, there is virtually no given space given to such endeavors.
      • hnal943 7y ago
        Manhattan's landscape is concrete and (steel and glass). It's hardly pastoral.
        • crooked-v 7y ago
          Sure, but literally everyone in Manhattan is only a short subway ride away from Central Park.
          • seanmcdirmid 7y ago
            NYC has a surprising number of parks.
• oliwarner 7y ago
  > One of the reasons why the Bay Area is so expensive But the reason the Bay area is so expensive is because Apple, Google, Facebook and 246 other Nasdaq-traded companies all call it home. It's ridiculous, if only for disaster planning. One natural disaster away from wiping out $3tn. Sitting on a fault line, no less. So, yes, you could spend hundreds of billions hacking out better infrastructure links into this mess, or raise the speed limit, and that will increase "mobility". But that quickly translates into higher house prices even further out, and crappy new stock as developers get greedy. It's a vicious cycle that we've been over again and again and again, in many major cities. Hotspots are toxic national planning mistakes that should have been smothered and forced out before they reached critical mass. Instead local pride (and land ownership) fosters them. Instead of fixing the problem, we're just trying to find new ways to make better returns on real estate investments. It's not sustainable.
• BeetleB 7y ago
  You and the article seem to be in agreement: It won't solve congestion.
• graeme 7y ago
  >Yeah, having a corner grocery might be good, but without mobility, the grocers are going to realize that you don't really have much choice about buying from them, and maybe start charging higher prices, or not stocking as much variety, or higher fewer people and having less service. Have you never lived or shopped in a dense city? In most you'll have 2-3 grocers within a 5-7 min walk, with many more within a 15 min walk, including discount grocers and specialty grocers.
  • rayiner 7y ago
    I’ve lived in several. There was no grocer within walking distance of my apartment in Baltimore. (Near Penn Station.) There was one overpriced Safeway where I lived in DC. Next nearest was a Giant 15 minutes away. No grocery store within walking distance of the apartment we looked at in Philadelphia. Many places in Manhattan don’t have a grocery store 5-7 minutes walk away (though most will have one within 15). Have you ever lived in a dense city in the US?
    • alephnan 7y ago
      > Many places in Manhattan don’t have a grocery store 5-7 minutes walk away (though most will have one within 15). This is not true, unless you’re including Harlem and FiDi. Manhattan stores are pricy, I permit that, but that’s not for a lack of competition. Have you ever lived in Manhattan?
      • rayiner 7y ago
        You just names two large sections of Manhattan, where a lot of the cheaper apartments are. Add to that parts of the UES and Hells Kitchen. I lived at 89th and broadway. We had a grocery store nearby, but there are definitely parts of Manhattan that don’t have a real grocery store within a 5 minute walk.
        • alephnan 7y ago
          Fair enough.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• cylinder 7y ago
  If these highways were actually user-pays, nobody would be able to afford to commute on them. Spending billions building rail or huge highways to outer towns with very low density who would never allow high density development makes no sense and other taxpayers should not have to subsidize their lifestyle choice.
• cryptonector 7y ago
  It's either spread out or build up. This is a choice communities need to make.