12 ms·
Meh, depends what your priorities are. While the opportunities for insane white collar income are much fewer cities in the Midwest are pretty great for quality
by throwaway0a5e 6y ago
Meh, depends what your priorities are. While the opportunities for insane white collar income are much fewer cities in the Midwest are pretty great for quality of life.
- Retric 6y agoHaving commuted by car, rail, walking, and working from home, I personally think a quick walk to work is by far the best option. You generally give that up in car centric cities and it’s a huge loss.
- danlugo92 6y ago20 minutes walk from office, never going back to 1~2 hour commutes.
- mohaine 6y agoIn the Midwest a 1-2 hour commute is normally 70 - 120 miles.
- tomjakubowski 6y agoYou (and the other commenter) need to be a lot more specific than "The Midwest", a large and diverse part of this country. That figure isn't close to true in Chicagoland at least, unless you're commuting suburbs to the boonies (and even then, you'd need to be lucky and have a tollway route). A 30 mile commute into the city, with traffic, takes like 50-70 minutes, a large reason why Metra commuter rail is so popular.
- Touche 6y agoChicago isn't a car centric city, probably the only in the Midwest.
- Retric 6y agoThat really depends on where you’re drawing the borders of Chicago. The Chicago metropolitan area is car centric, but looking at Chicago as a city unto it’s self and things look very different.
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- 1123581321 6y ago5-20 minute commutes are more normal. If this sounds surprising to you, take a look at the Census Bureau's commute data. Keep in mind that this data includes commutes that cannot be walked that are in areas of low unemployment and high income relative to cost of living. https://project.wnyc.org/commute-times-us/data/commute_times_us_zipcode_2011.csv https://project.wnyc.org/commute-times-us/data/commute_times...
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- wankeler 6y ago3 minute walk to ferry pier 5 minute ferry ride across Sydney harbour to circular quay 6 minute walk to office Excellent 4g so able to hold video conference all the way That was my favourite commute.
- bigger_cheese 6y agoSydney depends a lot on where you are commuting from/to. Trying to get to Circular Quay from western suburbs for instance is not all that nice.
- dls2016 6y agoLived in Renens and had three or four options for getting to my office depending on the weather. Could walk the whole way, walk two different ways to the light rail, or if raining hop on the bus next to my apartment. Good times.
- irrational 6y agoI used to ride my bike to work. I really miss that ever since the pandemic started.
- wolco2 6y agoYou give up the walk in bigger cities unless you pay top dollar for a downtown condo so you end up on transit (bus/subway), bike or even uber commuting
- Retric 6y agoIt’s a function of the relative amounts of housing and jobs in the inner city. People talk about building more houses as the solution to high prices, however escalating demand and long commutes are driven by increasing office space.
- graeme 6y agoWhat makes you think building a subway system lowers quality of life? Plenty of low cost of living cities worldwide have them. In the US only high COL cities do so this makes it seem like a subway raises real estate costs. But there’s no logical connection.
- mikem170 6y agoAren't buses better then subways for most places, given their lower costs and greater flexibility? Isn't this true for most of Europe, also? Or does the typical mid-sized city in Europe have subways like London, Paris, and NYC?
- xxpor 6y ago>greater flexibility This is actually a negative. Build a train, and it's really hard to move. This actually spurs investment. A bus line can be taken away with the stroke of a pen.
- kube-system 6y agoTrain lines can be discontinued quite easily as well. And it's more wasteful when it happens.
- howlgarnish 6y agoAbandoning subway lines is virtually unheard of, which is why this article exists in the first place.
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- kube-system 6y agoMany light rail systems discontinue or change portions of their system. It doesn't happen often in underground sections because those are usually built only in the densest portions of a city which would tend to have high ridership. I think it's more the tunnel that makes these lines less likely to be discontinued, rather than the train. Tunnels are just expensive to move whether they're for trains or for busses. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Defunct_New_York_City_Subway_lines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Defunct_New_York_City...
- mikem170 6y agoI grew up in a midwest rust-belt city, and traffic wasn't crazy, and still isn't, even in the suburbs. Probably because the population is still rebounding. I'm in Florida now, and most of Florida is horrible. Sprawl on top of swamp. Everything is so spread out, the roads have so much traffic, and there's too many people driving agressively or not paying attention. Every hour on the road is a roll of the dice in my $30,000 vehicle versus some asshole swerving through traffic because he was raised on Fast and Furious or something. Houston is the same, just so many cars and everything so spread out. Atlanta leaves that impression, also. And much of Charlotte. Two-thirds of Austin is jam packed with traffic and nowhere to park. These places were all mostly built in an era of car-centric urban planning. My impression of Indianapolis, and some of it's suburbs, a booming midwest city, is that they are on their way to the same situation - Driving miles back and forth from housing developments to box stores for every need with only hundreds of cars for company. It's inhumane. Yuck. This is a fail for so many people. I have working poor friends and it sucks that they have to spend several hundreds of dollars per month each for a non-shit car, insurance, and gas. It keeps them in the hole. I blame zoning and selfish property owners who won't allow more density.
- godzillabrennus 6y agoThe costs of living in a high density city probably eat up more Capital than the costs of transit in one of these suburban cities.
- jeromegv 6y agoYes, but it's a failure of zoning. It's totally absurd that anyone that wants a job in a low density city NEEDS to spend thousands of dollar just to get to their job. This is poverty trap. Tons of places don't have that issue.
- astrange 6y agoTokyo is cheap, because they build enough housing. This happens even though Japanese landlords are discriminatory and abusive (eg requiring you pay them an extra month's rent as "key money" when you move in for no apparent reason.)
- irrational 6y agoWhat do you mean by quality of life? For me a big part of that is the environment. No beaches/coast? No mountains, forests, waterfalls, etc? That doesn’t sound like a great quality of life to me.
- bumby 6y ago>No beaches/coast? No mountains, forests, waterfalls I think maybe you make too many assumptions. Michigan, for example, has any of these within driving distance (albeit their definition of ‘mountain’ is a bit different than out West)
- zdragnar 6y agoLakes, rivers, waterfalls and forest are pretty ubiquitous in my part of the midwest. There are some places with mountains, though not nearby. It isn't all corn and wheat out here.
- skrowl 6y agoCost of living in the midwest is amongst the lowest in the country
- dyeje 6y agoThe quality of life would be better with the public transit is the point of the quote though, not that you have to live somewhere else for good quality of life.