4 ms·

Some people actually like cars/driving, some people dont want random people walking in front of their house, and not everyone wants their city to turn into NYC

Some people actually like cars/driving, some people dont want random people walking in front of their house, and not everyone wants their city to turn into NYC Sometimes it feels like the people on this site have only lived in SFBA/LA/NYC and nowhere else in the United States. Cars/suburbia work pretty well in most places

freeone3000 6y ago
Suburbia straight doesn't work. Requiring a car for transit means kids have to continually be chauffeured by adults to anywhere meaningful. Lack of local business means there's limited economic potential for the city - it's all in one tax district and redistributed around. Sprawl increases the cost of providing services like fire and police. You're taking on some significant burdens in exchange for not having your neighbors walk past your house.
- bbarnett 6y ago
  Canadian cities have suburbia, and public transit. Many have buses on main streets, which are typically a 2 or 3 block walk from side streets. Suburbia doesn't mean "have to have a car", it is just many like having cars. This sort of speaks to the prior poster, stating that many here are from big cities. Suburbia isn't low-density. It's only low-density compared to 'downtown'. Try living in actual, real rural areas. Where I live, houses are a mile apart! Yet bizarrely, we have fire stations, police, high speed gigabit internet, and more. And it isn't super expensive either.
  - freeone3000 6y ago
    I grew up in a Texas town of 100,000, and it didn't have a single bus route until I was 14. The closest shop was a small bakery six blocks away, which was a godsend since that was the only shop within five miles. When half the usable space is parking, it's low-density. When you have houses plopped in the middle of a hundred-foot-to-a-side rectangle, it's low-density. I acknowledge that it is, indeed, a gradient. But lots of points on that gradient are huge negatives to the people living there.
    - bbarnett 6y ago
      I think what you're describing is a lack of public transit, not the impossibility of it. And I'm not 100% sure why 1/2 the space would be parking, this seems like a fairly large exaggeration. More likely lots of the space, was lawn? Space between houses? I've lived in lots of cities where minimum lot size was an acre, which is 200x200ft. Public transit all around, grocery stores all in walking distance (few blocks at most), with loads of corner stores, etc. I think that as I mentioned in another comment, zoning laws are important. Too much? Too little? It becomes broken. But for example, large-scale developers typically can't build here, without dedicating some space to park, to retail, without making an actual community out of the place. And people in most rural areas I've lived, typically aren't bad off for it. This may be a cultural thing, or a historical thing such as, how cities were build, and therefore, how they are now. edit: An added thought here.... when I visited the US, I noticed that a lot of grocery stores were often larger. I've seen some where it's literally a few minutes to walk end to end, when inside. Maybe this is the difference? Most of the grocery stores here are smaller. Maybe we just have smaller grocery stores, but more of them?
      - freeone3000 6y ago
        Yes, that's precisely the issue with American towns, and detailed in the article. Half parking is not an exaggeration - Walmart in my hometown is a three-acre store with 600 parking places. This is not unusual - the Home Depot is similar. burger king is similar - more parking than space inside. The houses bring down the average. Lawns are in addition to this. It's hard to overstate exactly how sprawled the median American town newer than 1950 is, where you do have entire subdivisions without a single store. Sometimes multiple subdivisions in a row. No thought is given to community. The article is calling for the exact type of mixed zoning you're familiar with - occassional shops mixed in with the houses. It's not like that, but it should be.
sparsely 6y ago
Mixed use zoning isn't about becoming like NYC, it's about being able to walk to the cornershop at the end of the road to buy a pint of milk. Maybe there's a cafe and a accountant's office there too.
- Ericson2314 6y ago
  Or dense towns and more countryside and parkland.
modo_mario 6y ago
>Some people actually like cars/driving I live in a small town but in a very spread out relatively densely populated country. Still with the closing of the old bakery and little grocery store due to the people who ran it retiring I have to go to a nearby city or supermarkets on the outskirts for stuff. I'm not saying this out of spite or annoyance because of that. It's not that far. Hell i'm even moving soon. But I do see it for what it was. A good thing to have around. It made for local economic activity, it had locals meeting up and having talks there, not driving all the way out if they were missing something minor and very local events were advertised there. There's no reason, 0, nada to do spatial planning to purposefully have people driving more and longer. It's not good for the environment, it's not good for the people, economically, what have you. If you love driving you can do so without a reason. And no by advocating for having spatial planning that allows for local small stores people aren't pushing for everyone to live in a big city either.
- mikeshank 6y ago
  >If you love driving you can do so without a reason. At least for the time being.
- jhatemyjob 6y ago
  Yeah I wouldn't like driving to another city to do my errands either. I think the OP meant having a grocery store literally right next door to you
  - pastage 6y ago
    I think you have to be a lot more specific, perhaps make a map with distances for walk/bicycle/car and a list of concrete things you find yourself doing in every day life. For me I always find the these too long/another city can mean so many different things.
    - jhatemyjob 6y ago
      Yeah gp. When I said "another city", I meant more than 20 min away by car

freeone3000 6y ago

Suburbia straight doesn't work. Requiring a car for transit means kids have to continually be chauffeured by adults to anywhere meaningful. Lack of local business means there's limited economic potential for the city - it's all in one tax district and redistributed around. Sprawl increases the cost of providing services like fire and police. You're taking on some significant burdens in exchange for not having your neighbors walk past your house.

bbarnett 6y ago
Canadian cities have suburbia, and public transit. Many have buses on main streets, which are typically a 2 or 3 block walk from side streets. Suburbia doesn't mean "have to have a car", it is just many like having cars. This sort of speaks to the prior poster, stating that many here are from big cities. Suburbia isn't low-density. It's only low-density compared to 'downtown'. Try living in actual, real rural areas. Where I live, houses are a mile apart! Yet bizarrely, we have fire stations, police, high speed gigabit internet, and more. And it isn't super expensive either.
- freeone3000 6y ago
  I grew up in a Texas town of 100,000, and it didn't have a single bus route until I was 14. The closest shop was a small bakery six blocks away, which was a godsend since that was the only shop within five miles. When half the usable space is parking, it's low-density. When you have houses plopped in the middle of a hundred-foot-to-a-side rectangle, it's low-density. I acknowledge that it is, indeed, a gradient. But lots of points on that gradient are huge negatives to the people living there.
  - bbarnett 6y ago
    I think what you're describing is a lack of public transit, not the impossibility of it. And I'm not 100% sure why 1/2 the space would be parking, this seems like a fairly large exaggeration. More likely lots of the space, was lawn? Space between houses? I've lived in lots of cities where minimum lot size was an acre, which is 200x200ft. Public transit all around, grocery stores all in walking distance (few blocks at most), with loads of corner stores, etc. I think that as I mentioned in another comment, zoning laws are important. Too much? Too little? It becomes broken. But for example, large-scale developers typically can't build here, without dedicating some space to park, to retail, without making an actual community out of the place. And people in most rural areas I've lived, typically aren't bad off for it. This may be a cultural thing, or a historical thing such as, how cities were build, and therefore, how they are now. edit: An added thought here.... when I visited the US, I noticed that a lot of grocery stores were often larger. I've seen some where it's literally a few minutes to walk end to end, when inside. Maybe this is the difference? Most of the grocery stores here are smaller. Maybe we just have smaller grocery stores, but more of them?
    - freeone3000 6y ago
      Yes, that's precisely the issue with American towns, and detailed in the article. Half parking is not an exaggeration - Walmart in my hometown is a three-acre store with 600 parking places. This is not unusual - the Home Depot is similar. burger king is similar - more parking than space inside. The houses bring down the average. Lawns are in addition to this. It's hard to overstate exactly how sprawled the median American town newer than 1950 is, where you do have entire subdivisions without a single store. Sometimes multiple subdivisions in a row. No thought is given to community. The article is calling for the exact type of mixed zoning you're familiar with - occassional shops mixed in with the houses. It's not like that, but it should be.

sparsely 6y ago

Mixed use zoning isn't about becoming like NYC, it's about being able to walk to the cornershop at the end of the road to buy a pint of milk. Maybe there's a cafe and a accountant's office there too.

Ericson2314 6y ago
Or dense towns and more countryside and parkland.

modo_mario 6y ago

>Some people actually like cars/driving I live in a small town but in a very spread out relatively densely populated country. Still with the closing of the old bakery and little grocery store due to the people who ran it retiring I have to go to a nearby city or supermarkets on the outskirts for stuff. I'm not saying this out of spite or annoyance because of that. It's not that far. Hell i'm even moving soon. But I do see it for what it was. A good thing to have around. It made for local economic activity, it had locals meeting up and having talks there, not driving all the way out if they were missing something minor and very local events were advertised there. There's no reason, 0, nada to do spatial planning to purposefully have people driving more and longer. It's not good for the environment, it's not good for the people, economically, what have you. If you love driving you can do so without a reason. And no by advocating for having spatial planning that allows for local small stores people aren't pushing for everyone to live in a big city either.

mikeshank 6y ago
>If you love driving you can do so without a reason. At least for the time being.
jhatemyjob 6y ago
Yeah I wouldn't like driving to another city to do my errands either. I think the OP meant having a grocery store literally right next door to you
- pastage 6y ago
  I think you have to be a lot more specific, perhaps make a map with distances for walk/bicycle/car and a list of concrete things you find yourself doing in every day life. For me I always find the these too long/another city can mean so many different things.
  - jhatemyjob 6y ago
    Yeah gp. When I said "another city", I meant more than 20 min away by car