11 ms·

The Future Is Not Retro

88 points by luu 7y ago

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
jeltz 7y ago
Is this group really any significant amount of people? In my experience most people realize that progress and change are inevitable, the question is only how. "One faction of urbanists that I’ve sometimes found myself clashing with is people who assume that a greener, less auto-centric future will look something like the traditional small towns of the past."
- alexhutcheson 7y ago
  Strong Towns has gained a decent following, and their core arguments[1] are pretty compelling, although their founder has the tendency to express half-baked theories about monetary policy that I think undermine his credibility somewhat. [1] https://www.strongtowns.org/newcomers https://www.strongtowns.org/newcomers
  - Gunax 7y ago
    What are the monetary theories?
TOGoS 7y ago
I was following up until "They’d have uniform missing middle built form in most of the US and UK", at which point I threw an ERR_CANNOT_PARSE.
- icebraining 7y ago
  I believe it's uniform(missing-middle(built form)) built form: function, shape and configuration of buildings as well as their relationship to streets and open spaces. missing middle: built forms between high-rise buildings and single detached homes which promote walkable urban living and fit into the character of many residential neighbourhoods, which "have gone ‘missing’ from many of our cities in the last 60 to 70 years."
cjf4 7y ago
As it relates to the US, this post had interesting ideas regarding urban development, and no grasp at all of suburban development. While urban lifestyles are becoming more fashionable in the US, growth is higher in the suburbs[1]. Whether this is because suburbs are the only option for people moving to new cities (as urban cores become "full"), or because Americans (including millennials) are much more comfortable with suburban lifestyles than they are given credit for is up for debate. But to speak as if a sharp turn towards public transit based cityscapes is America's fait accompli betrays a serious lack of understanding of the country and it's people as they currently are. [1]https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2019/05/24/big-city-growth-stalls-further-as-the-suburbs-make-a-comeback/ https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2019/05/24/big-cit...
- ghaff 7y ago
  Certain groups/bubbles look at their friends who, like themselves, tend to be college-educated, relatively well paid, young, childless, etc. and conclude that everyone is (or at least wants to) move into urban cores. In fact, there is a general migration out of areas like the rust belt and many very rural towns to places where there are more jobs. But the migration into urban cores is mostly fairly specific demographic groups into a relatively small number of elite cities. Which is a notable change from the net outflow as recently as 20 years ago. But it's still a relatively modest shift in the scheme of things.
  - xxpor 7y ago
    Mostly because we've made it such that they're the only people who can afford to move into city cores any more.
    - ghaff 7y ago
      There are still a lot of people who could afford to live in an urban core but choose not to.
  - Mountain_Skies 7y ago
    Wonder if Starlink and other LEO internet services will make rural living accessible to high salary remote workers. While the rural lifestyle isn't for everyone, it's the extreme that would also open the door to exurban and small town living. Add in online shopping and ever evolving streaming entertainment options, it wouldn't be surprising if many small towns and rural areas saw new migration into them.
ThalesX 7y ago
I don't feel this article has a very strong point or that it offers strong arguments towards why this non-retro future is unavoidable and / or better. > "The status anxieties of Basil Fawlty types who either can’t or won’t adapt to a world that has little use for their prejudices are not a serious public concern." This is exactly what Urban Planning is concerned with. If Urban Planning ignores a subset of people as they are not a serious public concern (hint: they are), is it really building a future for people? Or a future designed to optimize moving cargo (people?) around...
- bsenftner 7y ago
  I felt it was quite weak too.
- oftenwrong 7y ago
  Furthermore, it seems like a "strawman" argument. Where exactly are people arguing that the future of urban settlement must be exactly the same as it was pre-auto?
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  "We're planning for a future for all the people who fit our plan" is not a recipe for a successful (or workable) plan.
Nursie 7y ago
> Already, people lead full lives in big global cities like New York and London without any of the trappings of what passed for normality in the middle of the 20th century, like a detached house with a yard and no racial minorities or working-class people within sight. The rest will adapt to this reality, just as early 20th century urbanites adapted to the reality of suburbanization a generation later. What patronising guff. Some people love city living, a lot can't stand it. You may be happy to live without a back yard and without your own space, that doesn't mean that we all will, nor does it mean that many of those already in cities aren't already compromising. Yes, let's build train networks. No, let's not pretend that means everyone will be happy to live in a box ten floors up, or that this is somehow inevitable.
- cafard 7y ago
  Not really an accurate picture of the big global cities in the middle of the 20th Century, either. If anything, the working-class density has declined in core areas of New York and London, hasn't it?
  - ghaff 7y ago
    Well, by and large, people in the US at least who could afford to were leaving city cores in the latter half of the 20th century. And, even before that, densities were down from their peaks as cities moved away from tenement housing etc.
- L_Rahman 7y ago
  Your life right now has unpriced externalities among them: deaths from vehicle miles driven, sedentary car bound lifestyles, parking lot deserts, reduced childhood autonomy, pollution, highway driving commute times, class segregation by neighborhood). You are welcome of course to continue living that way, but I wish you luck affording it once society chooses to price those externalities in.
  - Nursie 7y ago
    > our life right now has unpriced externalities among them: deaths from vehicle miles driven, sedentary car bound lifestyles, parking lot deserts, reduced childhood autonomy, pollution, highway driving commute times, class segregation by neighborhood). I commute into a city by train a couple of times a week, working remotely otherwise, and don't drive all that much at other times, so your stereotypical assumptions here don't really count for much.
johngalt 7y ago
Solving population problems with density + transit isn't exactly non-retro. Building trains and subways has been a thing for longer than interstate highway connected suburbs. It's historically rare for people to accept a reduction in convenience, or quality of life. Even then it's only a reduction as a trade off for other improvements. If we are talking about future mass transit, I'd expect it to look more like a larger version of Uber pool. Where a destination is entered into a smartphone, and transit mode selection is handled in the background. Something along the lines of smart buses combined with micro mobility. The future of transit appears to be headed towards the smartphones and e-bikes, not the train station.
- the_af 7y ago
  For mass transit, a myriad of smartphones, e-bikes and smart buses seems like hell. Don't forget the "mass" part...
  - icebraining 7y ago
    Can you elaborate? Why would that be hell?
    - the_af 7y ago
      It seems to me many (semi)individual vehicles are not a solution to mass transport, like trains are. Plus of course the traffic congestion potential of many vehicles.
- bluGill 7y ago
  That future cannot work. In dense areas there are too many people trying to get around and it leads to congestion just like individual cars do. Only mass transit can solve the problem. In less dense areas the wait for the car is too long as so you may as well have your own.
  - icebraining 7y ago
    How are buses not mass transit?
mwcampbell 7y ago
I hope the future is more distributed teams and therefore more remote jobs, so people can get good jobs wi5thout having to move to a big city or its suburbs.
jcadam 7y ago
We recently moved to a large-ish (but not huge) city and since I would be working downtown we looked at becoming urbanites (easy commute, can get rid of one of our cars, proximity to restaurants, shopping, things to do, etc.). Then we discovered that urban accommodations for a family of 5 do not exist at any price (and small 3bdr apartments can be had but are hard to find and extremely expensive). So, into the suburbs we went. The only people that seem to live in/around downtown here are either young singles (with good jobs, given the costs) or homeless. Maybe when the kids move out and I'm close to retirement, but then I'd rather live in a shack on/near a beach somewhere, so nah...
- dfxm12 7y ago
  Then we discovered that urban accommodations for a family of 5 do not exist at any price I grew up in a large city and had a ton of friends in families of 5+. Their houses still stand today. I live in the same city today and have neighbors with 3 kids. Maybe this is true of the unnamed city you're speaking of, but this is a bad generalization.
  - that_jojo 7y ago
    > Their houses still stand today Was this some intensely sprawl-based city like Dallas? Because the only way this seems realistic to me is if by 'house' you mean actual single-family detached housing. And there aren't many highly populated cities that have a lot of that within their municipal borders.
    - lazyasciiart 7y ago
      Seattle has tons.
    - Qwertystop 7y ago
      I'm in Cambridge (Massachusetts) and my apartment is a 4-bedroom. Building used to be owner-occupied, now converted to two addresses with two apartments in each plus a shared basement with a single-room fifth apartment, price is astoundingly low for the area because the landlord is just the senior who grew up there, I think the other apartments are all 1-2 bedroom or studio. It might be a bit cramped, but you could rent the entire big apartment and fit four to six kids plus two parents.
wUabkSG6L5Bfa5 7y ago
Having lived and worked in several highrises, I'll say that density advocates (which includes me, mostly) almost always glaze over vertical commute time and annoyance. Elevators and steps are a huge pain in the ass any time you're carrying anything more than a messenger bag/handbag and a travel mug. And there always seem to be way more doorways involved, somehow, with doors that don't really want to be opened or stay open long enough to allow real-world transit.
- nradov 7y ago
  Now try it with a stroller and multiple crying children.
  - wUabkSG6L5Bfa5 7y ago
    Yes, I can only imagine!
vearwhershuh 7y ago
The title of the article should be "I do not want the future to be retro" or, more honestly: "I do not want the future to be traditional." Given the authors biography, frequent relocation amongst expensive, elite international cities, this is not surprising. The fact that the author ended up settling in Paris, however, is very funny.
gok 7y ago
The trouble with Alon is that he starts with the conviction that we should build more fancy trains, and then works backwards comes up with policy arguments so that makes sense.
skybrian 7y ago
National parks becoming less crowded seems especially unlikely. It's not that hard to rent a car. Hopefully electric cars will become more easily available?
L_Rahman 7y ago
Alon’s continued insistence on super spiky housing with a focus on towers remains something I can’t get behind. The East Village is mostly 3-5 story mixed use apartment buildings. It has a population density of 82000 people per square mile. If we could get Queens and Brooklyn up to that, we could literally double the population of the city. We know what happens when NY gets big tower housing - it turns into the Upper West Side, Midtown West or FiDi all of which are miserable places to walk through. It’s not just NY. I spent a few months living in São Paulo (Pinheiros and Jardin’s) which does exactly what Alon suggests - big towers near subway stations that are spaced far apart often with awkward tiny buildings next to them and fall off in density a kilometer or so away. Also miserable. What the spiky housing near trains theory fails to address is that ultimately housing is for people to have lives. And there is a scale at which life is comfortable - it’s like the East Village, like Miraflores in Lima, like Ximending in Taipei. If we reduce the problem to people per square meter and transit carrying capacity problem we can theoretically make space for people but I’m not so sure they’ll want to live in them. It is really hard for me to believe that it would be better to push past the 5-7 story mark instead of just trying to spread the 5-7 story housing zoning wider. If I haven’t convinced you yet, consider this - if you brought the greater NY area to the density of the East Village it could fit over 370 million people or roughly the entire population of the United States. So yeah, no towers please.
- dr_dshiv 7y ago
  Why can't we simply say, "what are the greatest places to live densely" and just copy-paste design elements? The Netherlands is one of the most dense regions in the world. But it doesn't feel like it -- at all. It is human-scale. We don't have to sacrifice our humanity or quality of life. There is plenty of room.
  - rhacker 7y ago
    Are people in the Netherlands similar to people in the United States? In the US you will primarily get a neighbor that is watching football, shouting swear words and always accompanied with the smell of budweiser as you pass them in the halls. You will always know when they are home... And if you don't get that guy it will be the screaming couple.
turk73 7y ago
Every time the light rail reaches out to some new location here, the crime rate along there goes way up.
coldtea 7y ago
>The theme of the future is that, just as the Industrial Revolution involved urbanization and rural depopulation, urban development patterns this century involve growth in the big metro areas and decline elsewhere and in traditional small towns. This is fine. The status anxieties of Basil Fawlty types who either can’t or won’t adapt to a world that has little use for their prejudices are not a serious public concern. The world will go in a trajectory based on its current dynamics and the factors at play, not the author's ideologies. And it can develop new prejudices, compared to which Basil Fawlty types might seem inoccent and quaint if not preferable (much like the current era, with Trump et al, seems more frightening to the starry eyed days 90s). In fact, if climate issues worsen, and the trade wars and splintering get worse, the future might do away with the whole "urbanization" concepts as peddled by the author. So I wouldn't so so smug as to think some provincial echo-bubbly thinking is on right side of history...
dajohnson89 7y ago
How do we feel about places like brooklyn and queens -- which are essentially urban in nature, but technically auxillary/suburban cities?
notJim 7y ago
Given the huge spike in interest in outdoor recreation [1,2] we've seen in the US, I have a hard time believing that the future of tourism is urban. Even as someone who thinks decarbonizing should focus more on public transit than electric cars, outdoor recreation is one area where I think electric cars make sense. I also think it's not a crazy idea to build public transit to popular outdoor areas. Ski areas in Colorado and popular national parks have huge high-season traffic jams that would be helped immensely by having public transit. Rail is nice if the traffic warrants it, but busses are great too. [1]: https://www.nps.gov/aboutus/visitation-numbers.htm https://www.nps.gov/aboutus/visitation-numbers.htm . [2]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/191240/participants-in-hiking-in-the-us-since-2006/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/191240/participants-in-h...
- tlb 7y ago
  Passenger rail is barely economical for routes that are used year-round. Like it barely works in the NY-DC corridor, and not at all for SF-LA. It seems unlikely that it'd make sense for something as seasonal as a ski area.
  - randomsearch 7y ago
    Does public transportation have to make a profit?
  - barry-cotter 7y ago
    Do the interstates make a profit? Municipal roads in New York? The economic reason to improve transportation is that reduced travel time leads to greater communication and commerce which increases growth. This applies as well to subsidizing rail as to subsidizing automobile use and rail is vastly safer per passenger mile.
    - tlb 7y ago
      Neither interstates nor rail make profits. But they are funded for with some consideration of ROI. The government shouldn't (and mostly doesn't) build interstates that are used only a few weeks a year. If the government has money to spend on rail, it should put it where it'll serve the most passenger-miles/year.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

88 points by luu 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

Is this group really any significant amount of people? In my experience most people realize that progress and change are inevitable, the question is only how. "One faction of urbanists that I’ve sometimes found myself clashing with is people who assume that a greener, less auto-centric future will look something like the traditional small towns of the past."

alexhutcheson 7y ago
Strong Towns has gained a decent following, and their core arguments[1] are pretty compelling, although their founder has the tendency to express half-baked theories about monetary policy that I think undermine his credibility somewhat. [1] https://www.strongtowns.org/newcomers https://www.strongtowns.org/newcomers
- Gunax 7y ago
  What are the monetary theories?

TOGoS 7y ago

I was following up until "They’d have uniform missing middle built form in most of the US and UK", at which point I threw an ERR_CANNOT_PARSE.

icebraining 7y ago
I believe it's uniform(missing-middle(built form)) built form: function, shape and configuration of buildings as well as their relationship to streets and open spaces. missing middle: built forms between high-rise buildings and single detached homes which promote walkable urban living and fit into the character of many residential neighbourhoods, which "have gone ‘missing’ from many of our cities in the last 60 to 70 years."

cjf4 7y ago

As it relates to the US, this post had interesting ideas regarding urban development, and no grasp at all of suburban development. While urban lifestyles are becoming more fashionable in the US, growth is higher in the suburbs[1]. Whether this is because suburbs are the only option for people moving to new cities (as urban cores become "full"), or because Americans (including millennials) are much more comfortable with suburban lifestyles than they are given credit for is up for debate. But to speak as if a sharp turn towards public transit based cityscapes is America's fait accompli betrays a serious lack of understanding of the country and it's people as they currently are. [1]https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2019/05/24/big-city-growth-stalls-further-as-the-suburbs-make-a-comeback/ https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2019/05/24/big-cit...

ghaff 7y ago
Certain groups/bubbles look at their friends who, like themselves, tend to be college-educated, relatively well paid, young, childless, etc. and conclude that everyone is (or at least wants to) move into urban cores. In fact, there is a general migration out of areas like the rust belt and many very rural towns to places where there are more jobs. But the migration into urban cores is mostly fairly specific demographic groups into a relatively small number of elite cities. Which is a notable change from the net outflow as recently as 20 years ago. But it's still a relatively modest shift in the scheme of things.
- xxpor 7y ago
  Mostly because we've made it such that they're the only people who can afford to move into city cores any more.
  - ghaff 7y ago
    There are still a lot of people who could afford to live in an urban core but choose not to.
- Mountain_Skies 7y ago
  Wonder if Starlink and other LEO internet services will make rural living accessible to high salary remote workers. While the rural lifestyle isn't for everyone, it's the extreme that would also open the door to exurban and small town living. Add in online shopping and ever evolving streaming entertainment options, it wouldn't be surprising if many small towns and rural areas saw new migration into them.

ThalesX 7y ago

I don't feel this article has a very strong point or that it offers strong arguments towards why this non-retro future is unavoidable and / or better. > "The status anxieties of Basil Fawlty types who either can’t or won’t adapt to a world that has little use for their prejudices are not a serious public concern." This is exactly what Urban Planning is concerned with. If Urban Planning ignores a subset of people as they are not a serious public concern (hint: they are), is it really building a future for people? Or a future designed to optimize moving cargo (people?) around...

bsenftner 7y ago
I felt it was quite weak too.
oftenwrong 7y ago
Furthermore, it seems like a "strawman" argument. Where exactly are people arguing that the future of urban settlement must be exactly the same as it was pre-auto?
AnimalMuppet 7y ago
"We're planning for a future for all the people who fit our plan" is not a recipe for a successful (or workable) plan.

Nursie 7y ago

> Already, people lead full lives in big global cities like New York and London without any of the trappings of what passed for normality in the middle of the 20th century, like a detached house with a yard and no racial minorities or working-class people within sight. The rest will adapt to this reality, just as early 20th century urbanites adapted to the reality of suburbanization a generation later. What patronising guff. Some people love city living, a lot can't stand it. You may be happy to live without a back yard and without your own space, that doesn't mean that we all will, nor does it mean that many of those already in cities aren't already compromising. Yes, let's build train networks. No, let's not pretend that means everyone will be happy to live in a box ten floors up, or that this is somehow inevitable.

cafard 7y ago
Not really an accurate picture of the big global cities in the middle of the 20th Century, either. If anything, the working-class density has declined in core areas of New York and London, hasn't it?
- ghaff 7y ago
  Well, by and large, people in the US at least who could afford to were leaving city cores in the latter half of the 20th century. And, even before that, densities were down from their peaks as cities moved away from tenement housing etc.
L_Rahman 7y ago
Your life right now has unpriced externalities among them: deaths from vehicle miles driven, sedentary car bound lifestyles, parking lot deserts, reduced childhood autonomy, pollution, highway driving commute times, class segregation by neighborhood). You are welcome of course to continue living that way, but I wish you luck affording it once society chooses to price those externalities in.
- Nursie 7y ago
  > our life right now has unpriced externalities among them: deaths from vehicle miles driven, sedentary car bound lifestyles, parking lot deserts, reduced childhood autonomy, pollution, highway driving commute times, class segregation by neighborhood). I commute into a city by train a couple of times a week, working remotely otherwise, and don't drive all that much at other times, so your stereotypical assumptions here don't really count for much.

johngalt 7y ago

Solving population problems with density + transit isn't exactly non-retro. Building trains and subways has been a thing for longer than interstate highway connected suburbs. It's historically rare for people to accept a reduction in convenience, or quality of life. Even then it's only a reduction as a trade off for other improvements. If we are talking about future mass transit, I'd expect it to look more like a larger version of Uber pool. Where a destination is entered into a smartphone, and transit mode selection is handled in the background. Something along the lines of smart buses combined with micro mobility. The future of transit appears to be headed towards the smartphones and e-bikes, not the train station.

the_af 7y ago
For mass transit, a myriad of smartphones, e-bikes and smart buses seems like hell. Don't forget the "mass" part...
- icebraining 7y ago
  Can you elaborate? Why would that be hell?
  - the_af 7y ago
    It seems to me many (semi)individual vehicles are not a solution to mass transport, like trains are. Plus of course the traffic congestion potential of many vehicles.
bluGill 7y ago
That future cannot work. In dense areas there are too many people trying to get around and it leads to congestion just like individual cars do. Only mass transit can solve the problem. In less dense areas the wait for the car is too long as so you may as well have your own.
- icebraining 7y ago
  How are buses not mass transit?

mwcampbell 7y ago

I hope the future is more distributed teams and therefore more remote jobs, so people can get good jobs wi5thout having to move to a big city or its suburbs.

jcadam 7y ago

We recently moved to a large-ish (but not huge) city and since I would be working downtown we looked at becoming urbanites (easy commute, can get rid of one of our cars, proximity to restaurants, shopping, things to do, etc.). Then we discovered that urban accommodations for a family of 5 do not exist at any price (and small 3bdr apartments can be had but are hard to find and extremely expensive). So, into the suburbs we went. The only people that seem to live in/around downtown here are either young singles (with good jobs, given the costs) or homeless. Maybe when the kids move out and I'm close to retirement, but then I'd rather live in a shack on/near a beach somewhere, so nah...

dfxm12 7y ago
Then we discovered that urban accommodations for a family of 5 do not exist at any price I grew up in a large city and had a ton of friends in families of 5+. Their houses still stand today. I live in the same city today and have neighbors with 3 kids. Maybe this is true of the unnamed city you're speaking of, but this is a bad generalization.
- that_jojo 7y ago
  > Their houses still stand today Was this some intensely sprawl-based city like Dallas? Because the only way this seems realistic to me is if by 'house' you mean actual single-family detached housing. And there aren't many highly populated cities that have a lot of that within their municipal borders.
  - lazyasciiart 7y ago
    Seattle has tons.
  - Qwertystop 7y ago
    I'm in Cambridge (Massachusetts) and my apartment is a 4-bedroom. Building used to be owner-occupied, now converted to two addresses with two apartments in each plus a shared basement with a single-room fifth apartment, price is astoundingly low for the area because the landlord is just the senior who grew up there, I think the other apartments are all 1-2 bedroom or studio. It might be a bit cramped, but you could rent the entire big apartment and fit four to six kids plus two parents.

wUabkSG6L5Bfa5 7y ago

Having lived and worked in several highrises, I'll say that density advocates (which includes me, mostly) almost always glaze over vertical commute time and annoyance. Elevators and steps are a huge pain in the ass any time you're carrying anything more than a messenger bag/handbag and a travel mug. And there always seem to be way more doorways involved, somehow, with doors that don't really want to be opened or stay open long enough to allow real-world transit.

nradov 7y ago
Now try it with a stroller and multiple crying children.
- wUabkSG6L5Bfa5 7y ago
  Yes, I can only imagine!

vearwhershuh 7y ago

The title of the article should be "I do not want the future to be retro" or, more honestly: "I do not want the future to be traditional." Given the authors biography, frequent relocation amongst expensive, elite international cities, this is not surprising. The fact that the author ended up settling in Paris, however, is very funny.

gok 7y ago

The trouble with Alon is that he starts with the conviction that we should build more fancy trains, and then works backwards comes up with policy arguments so that makes sense.

skybrian 7y ago

National parks becoming less crowded seems especially unlikely. It's not that hard to rent a car. Hopefully electric cars will become more easily available?

L_Rahman 7y ago

Alon’s continued insistence on super spiky housing with a focus on towers remains something I can’t get behind. The East Village is mostly 3-5 story mixed use apartment buildings. It has a population density of 82000 people per square mile. If we could get Queens and Brooklyn up to that, we could literally double the population of the city. We know what happens when NY gets big tower housing - it turns into the Upper West Side, Midtown West or FiDi all of which are miserable places to walk through. It’s not just NY. I spent a few months living in São Paulo (Pinheiros and Jardin’s) which does exactly what Alon suggests - big towers near subway stations that are spaced far apart often with awkward tiny buildings next to them and fall off in density a kilometer or so away. Also miserable. What the spiky housing near trains theory fails to address is that ultimately housing is for people to have lives. And there is a scale at which life is comfortable - it’s like the East Village, like Miraflores in Lima, like Ximending in Taipei. If we reduce the problem to people per square meter and transit carrying capacity problem we can theoretically make space for people but I’m not so sure they’ll want to live in them. It is really hard for me to believe that it would be better to push past the 5-7 story mark instead of just trying to spread the 5-7 story housing zoning wider. If I haven’t convinced you yet, consider this - if you brought the greater NY area to the density of the East Village it could fit over 370 million people or roughly the entire population of the United States. So yeah, no towers please.

dr_dshiv 7y ago
Why can't we simply say, "what are the greatest places to live densely" and just copy-paste design elements? The Netherlands is one of the most dense regions in the world. But it doesn't feel like it -- at all. It is human-scale. We don't have to sacrifice our humanity or quality of life. There is plenty of room.
- rhacker 7y ago
  Are people in the Netherlands similar to people in the United States? In the US you will primarily get a neighbor that is watching football, shouting swear words and always accompanied with the smell of budweiser as you pass them in the halls. You will always know when they are home... And if you don't get that guy it will be the screaming couple.

turk73 7y ago

Every time the light rail reaches out to some new location here, the crime rate along there goes way up.

coldtea 7y ago

>The theme of the future is that, just as the Industrial Revolution involved urbanization and rural depopulation, urban development patterns this century involve growth in the big metro areas and decline elsewhere and in traditional small towns. This is fine. The status anxieties of Basil Fawlty types who either can’t or won’t adapt to a world that has little use for their prejudices are not a serious public concern. The world will go in a trajectory based on its current dynamics and the factors at play, not the author's ideologies. And it can develop new prejudices, compared to which Basil Fawlty types might seem inoccent and quaint if not preferable (much like the current era, with Trump et al, seems more frightening to the starry eyed days 90s). In fact, if climate issues worsen, and the trade wars and splintering get worse, the future might do away with the whole "urbanization" concepts as peddled by the author. So I wouldn't so so smug as to think some provincial echo-bubbly thinking is on right side of history...

dajohnson89 7y ago

How do we feel about places like brooklyn and queens -- which are essentially urban in nature, but technically auxillary/suburban cities?

notJim 7y ago

Given the huge spike in interest in outdoor recreation [1,2] we've seen in the US, I have a hard time believing that the future of tourism is urban. Even as someone who thinks decarbonizing should focus more on public transit than electric cars, outdoor recreation is one area where I think electric cars make sense. I also think it's not a crazy idea to build public transit to popular outdoor areas. Ski areas in Colorado and popular national parks have huge high-season traffic jams that would be helped immensely by having public transit. Rail is nice if the traffic warrants it, but busses are great too. [1]: https://www.nps.gov/aboutus/visitation-numbers.htm https://www.nps.gov/aboutus/visitation-numbers.htm . [2]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/191240/participants-in-hiking-in-the-us-since-2006/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/191240/participants-in-h...

tlb 7y ago
Passenger rail is barely economical for routes that are used year-round. Like it barely works in the NY-DC corridor, and not at all for SF-LA. It seems unlikely that it'd make sense for something as seasonal as a ski area.
- randomsearch 7y ago
  Does public transportation have to make a profit?
- barry-cotter 7y ago
  Do the interstates make a profit? Municipal roads in New York? The economic reason to improve transportation is that reduced travel time leads to greater communication and commerce which increases growth. This applies as well to subsidizing rail as to subsidizing automobile use and rail is vastly safer per passenger mile.
  - tlb 7y ago
    Neither interstates nor rail make profits. But they are funded for with some consideration of ROI. The government shouldn't (and mostly doesn't) build interstates that are used only a few weeks a year. If the government has money to spend on rail, it should put it where it'll serve the most passenger-miles/year.

deleted 7y ago

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