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You really can't add little things to existing infrastructure because you can't smoosh buildings closer. People want 3000 sq ft homes on an acre of land on a qu

You really can't add little things to existing infrastructure because you can't smoosh buildings closer. People want 3000 sq ft homes on an acre of land on a quiet street and to drive to their shopping and to drive to their walmart, and no bus service can service a neighborhood like this because either the stops are so far apart it's a 5 minute walk to each one, or it stops so frequently that it takes an hour to get across town, or a compromise of both, leading situations where driving is nicer than taking the bus. And even then, a bus service is not going to reach everywhere you want to go, because house-to-house travel is the absolute longest possible. Even on a decent feeder system, going from the suburbs to a normal part of the city takes forty-five minutes to get into the metro because of all the parking lots, for all the cars, that people own, because the bus service takes too long to get anywhere. The only way to start is to build a dense neighborhood where people can live and work within it, as a new neighborhood, with collective parking and minimal concessions to car traffic. It has to work as a system, or it doesn't work at all.

DoreenMichele 6y ago
Before life got in the way, I wanted to be an urban planner. There are always relatively small projects you can do to improve walkability, encourage use of bicycles, etc. The reality is "planned neighborhoods" of the sort you are talking about typically fail. That's not how good neighborhoods come into being. Good neighborhoods grow organically out of good policies that foster such neighborhoods and they evolve over time. Jane Jacobs said something about the big developments that get all built in one go along the lines of "It was always dead, but no one noticed until the body began to smell." Yes, it has to work as a system. No, it doesn't need to get "born" all at once, like a human child or something. The book "How buildings learn" brilliantly documents that wonderful old buildings are typically wonderful precisely because they are old and that means they've had time to adapt and evolve. They weren't usually brilliantly designed from the get go. They had a lot of wonderful touches added to them over time in most cases. This tends to also be true at the larger scale of neighborhoods and cities.

DoreenMichele 6y ago

Before life got in the way, I wanted to be an urban planner. There are always relatively small projects you can do to improve walkability, encourage use of bicycles, etc. The reality is "planned neighborhoods" of the sort you are talking about typically fail. That's not how good neighborhoods come into being. Good neighborhoods grow organically out of good policies that foster such neighborhoods and they evolve over time. Jane Jacobs said something about the big developments that get all built in one go along the lines of "It was always dead, but no one noticed until the body began to smell." Yes, it has to work as a system. No, it doesn't need to get "born" all at once, like a human child or something. The book "How buildings learn" brilliantly documents that wonderful old buildings are typically wonderful precisely because they are old and that means they've had time to adapt and evolve. They weren't usually brilliantly designed from the get go. They had a lot of wonderful touches added to them over time in most cases. This tends to also be true at the larger scale of neighborhoods and cities.