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This is a "dangerous" summary. Not in the sense that I think it may cause significant harm to anyone, but that I consider it misleading for everyone reading you

by anyfoo 5y ago

This is a "dangerous" summary. Not in the sense that I think it may cause significant harm to anyone, but that I consider it misleading for everyone reading your comment, thinking that it sums the article up accurately, and then ignoring to read it. I'm not Polish, but I'm another European living in the Bay Area as well, and I don't think your comment reproduces what the author is trying to say, most likely through no intention of your own. I won't repeat the same mistake by giving my own summary, but I understand too well the weirdness and isolation that suburbs and zoning laws give compared to European cities. It's totally weird, but I live in San Francisco, a dense city, and the zoning laws and "built for cars" layout[1], as well as spreading the population over California style suburbs, still make me feel more like I'm living in some backwater village. After close to a decade of living here now. [1] I think European cities are just "lucky" that they've mostly been built when cars weren't a thing yet, and also organically grew over much longer timespans.

deleted 5y ago
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robomartin 5y ago
> I think European cities are just "lucky" that they've mostly been built when cars weren't a thing yet, and also organically grew over much longer timespans. Yes. That's it. This is what a lot of people critical of the design (or execution) of US cities don't seem to understand. This also applies to the many failed attempts to make mass public transportation --and the reduction of automobile-based transportation-- a thing. Cities evolve. And these cities are no exception. By the time they reached scale it became pretty much impossible to re-engineer them to fit a new vision of how things should be. The best example I have is the absolutely failed California high speed train. We are about a hundred billion dollars into it and have nothing usable in place. I believe they built about ten miles of low speed track that you can't even use yet. To make things even more interesting, it was supposed to cost ten billion (that's how it was sold to voters). This high speed train goes through so many towns and counties, each with it's own rules and issues, that the probability of it ever approximating something like the TGV or the Eurail ICE I usually take from Amsterdam to Munich during my visits is kind of laughable at best. We'll see what happens at a trillion dollars, I guess.
- anyfoo 5y ago
  Munich is where I grew up, by the way, so I'm all too familiar. And yeah, I have no idea of the history here, but it would not surprise me if a lot of what happened in the Bay Area (and maybe other places in the US, though admittedly I don't really know them) was not intentional. Where I'm pretty critical however is zoning laws. That just seems unnecessary to me. The fact that even in a city I have to travel a large distance just to go to the nearest supermarket, to get a haircut, or to even just sit down in a café, is a bit maddening. This means I literally have to take my car just to go to Safeway here--which is weird at least to me. As for the cafés, I'm not even sure whether zoning laws would prevent them from popping up in residential areas, but I suspect even if they were allowed, they would be sparse because of the overall effect of zoning. Residential areas mostly only consist of homes, and you are pretty much either in your specific home of that large zone, or out in another zone anyway. So there would probably be little incentive.
- dougmwne 5y ago
  What's interesting here is that the author grew up in Warsaw, which has about half the population of the bay area in one third the space (and the more than half of warsowians living in the center live in 1/36 of the land area compared to the bay). The city was rebuilt after WW2 from almost nothing and was given a very car friendly layout. It's also a very dense city with lots of medium and high density apartment blocks and has excellent public transit that can zip you across the city in 15 minutes. While car vs. walking friendly are often at odds, it's possible to do them both reasonably well and Warsaw is an example of a new city that often gets it right. Score one for socialist city planning? A counterpoint to the California high speed rail situation is that Poland has been building new expressways to connect its major cities. This has been an enormous undertaking with enormous success. Huge swaths of farms, forests and villages are being bulldozed to make way. The needs of the many...
matttproud 5y ago
> think European cities are just "lucky" that they've mostly been built when cars weren't a thing yet, and also organically grew over much longer timespans. You should give Howard Kunstler‘s The Geography of Nowhere and Duany, et al.‘s Suburban Nation a read. (There are other good ones, too). They’d readily dispel the timing notion you suggest. Rather this bland outcome is clearly from adopting civil engineering and planning codes intentionally.
- anyfoo 5y ago
  Thanks. I haven't looked myself in how this situation came to be, and I totally accept that this can have come by intentionally. But whatever the causes, the outcome is not very good.

by anyfoo 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

robomartin 5y ago

> I think European cities are just "lucky" that they've mostly been built when cars weren't a thing yet, and also organically grew over much longer timespans. Yes. That's it. This is what a lot of people critical of the design (or execution) of US cities don't seem to understand. This also applies to the many failed attempts to make mass public transportation --and the reduction of automobile-based transportation-- a thing. Cities evolve. And these cities are no exception. By the time they reached scale it became pretty much impossible to re-engineer them to fit a new vision of how things should be. The best example I have is the absolutely failed California high speed train. We are about a hundred billion dollars into it and have nothing usable in place. I believe they built about ten miles of low speed track that you can't even use yet. To make things even more interesting, it was supposed to cost ten billion (that's how it was sold to voters). This high speed train goes through so many towns and counties, each with it's own rules and issues, that the probability of it ever approximating something like the TGV or the Eurail ICE I usually take from Amsterdam to Munich during my visits is kind of laughable at best. We'll see what happens at a trillion dollars, I guess.

anyfoo 5y ago
Munich is where I grew up, by the way, so I'm all too familiar. And yeah, I have no idea of the history here, but it would not surprise me if a lot of what happened in the Bay Area (and maybe other places in the US, though admittedly I don't really know them) was not intentional. Where I'm pretty critical however is zoning laws. That just seems unnecessary to me. The fact that even in a city I have to travel a large distance just to go to the nearest supermarket, to get a haircut, or to even just sit down in a café, is a bit maddening. This means I literally have to take my car just to go to Safeway here--which is weird at least to me. As for the cafés, I'm not even sure whether zoning laws would prevent them from popping up in residential areas, but I suspect even if they were allowed, they would be sparse because of the overall effect of zoning. Residential areas mostly only consist of homes, and you are pretty much either in your specific home of that large zone, or out in another zone anyway. So there would probably be little incentive.
dougmwne 5y ago
What's interesting here is that the author grew up in Warsaw, which has about half the population of the bay area in one third the space (and the more than half of warsowians living in the center live in 1/36 of the land area compared to the bay). The city was rebuilt after WW2 from almost nothing and was given a very car friendly layout. It's also a very dense city with lots of medium and high density apartment blocks and has excellent public transit that can zip you across the city in 15 minutes. While car vs. walking friendly are often at odds, it's possible to do them both reasonably well and Warsaw is an example of a new city that often gets it right. Score one for socialist city planning? A counterpoint to the California high speed rail situation is that Poland has been building new expressways to connect its major cities. This has been an enormous undertaking with enormous success. Huge swaths of farms, forests and villages are being bulldozed to make way. The needs of the many...

matttproud 5y ago

> think European cities are just "lucky" that they've mostly been built when cars weren't a thing yet, and also organically grew over much longer timespans. You should give Howard Kunstler‘s The Geography of Nowhere and Duany, et al.‘s Suburban Nation a read. (There are other good ones, too). They’d readily dispel the timing notion you suggest. Rather this bland outcome is clearly from adopting civil engineering and planning codes intentionally.

anyfoo 5y ago
Thanks. I haven't looked myself in how this situation came to be, and I totally accept that this can have come by intentionally. But whatever the causes, the outcome is not very good.