4 ms·

I think the argument is that space is better used by designing for people, not for cars. Sometimes that means population density, but sometimes it means open pl

• totalZero 6y ago
  This is the part that got a few nanometers underneath my skin: Hendrix pulled this eye-opening comparison from a report compiled by the U.K.’s Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission, which sternly suggests that housing 30,000 Italians is less wasteful and more sustainable than using the same amount of acreage to simply move cars around. There’s truth to that, of course [...] There's no truth to that, of course. Houston is a gigantic port city and population center, in a region of the USA where automobiles are almost essential to life because everything is spread out and public transportation is sparse. Even if you only focus on designing for people, there are people commuting in those automobiles and their quality of life goes up when their daily commute doesn't include a series of congested off-ramps and on-ramps in bumper-to-bumper traffic. In Houston, the user drives. Just because Tuscany is nice doesn't mean there is any reason why space in places where the use case is different should be judged with Tuscany in mind as an ideal. To take it to the extreme, this article is akin to a comparison between the ISS and a soccer field. The author decided that the soccer field is a better use of space because it accommodates multiple times as many participants as the ISS.