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What you're describing is not really a suburb, though. Suburbs are built around a city, it's in the name, sub-urban. Commuting downtown for your job is the core
by sudosysgen 5y ago
What you're describing is not really a suburb, though. Suburbs are built around a city, it's in the name, sub-urban. Commuting downtown for your job is the core to the idea of the suburb.
You're describing a nice, low density, urban place.
You don't need to commute to downtown by bike. Really, you just need to commute to a metro station, somehow, either by bike, by bus, or by your own two feet.
When I was a kid, I had the chance of being able to go to school alone. That is the real solution for families - we need to make an environment where it is possible for kids to move themselves safely. Nowadays, even in my fairly walkable and nice city of Montréal, this isn't really possible anymore.
Anyways, I think you really underestimate what is possible using public transport. It takes around 40 minutes for me to commute from a low density borough of Montreal, Ville Saint Laurent, which is full of SFH, to an office downtown, without using a bike at all. That compares very well to 30 minutes in a car. And this can still be improved considerably. Thankfully, I don't work downtown, and instead it takes me around 25 minutes to get there without a car.
Before that, my family of 6 lived in a duplex, from which you could bike downtown in 30 minutes flat.
You can definitely build spaces where families can live and still get to work and to school in around half an hour. The key is to make it possible for children to get where they have to go by themselves, safely, as fast as possible, and to have enough public transit and bike accommodations for older people to get downtown - which is the worst case - in 30 minutes more or less.
Around 2 million people live in Montreal. Our public transit system is not great at all. 55% of people in the island commute to work every day. I know people that commute from the suburb of Laval all the way downtown in less than an hour using only public transit, and that's a family of five. We can do much better still. There are ways for people to live comfortably as a family without going to the North American suburb, while still having cities with more than a million people.
Also, simply building offices in the suburbs as they exist right now isn't going to be helpful - try commuting even within a normal suburb by bike for 30 minutes and you're going to see why. It's damn near suicidal.
- bookofsand 5y agoIf we define 'suburb' as a 'low density urban place without the jobs' then I suspect we are in agreement. Urbanistically speaking, the top 2 needs of the inhabitants are 'low density urban place' to live and jobs. We happen to have both, alas in geographically different places. Let's shift the locus of the solution from vindictive disfunctional 'the cars are the problem [...] we need to make driving cars worse', to constructive and hopefully workable 'bring the jobs to the suburbs', which will have the byeffect we all seek: reducing the need for cars.
- sudosysgen 5y agoThe issue is that this just can't be done. The structure of suburbs is actively hostile to public transport of any kind and to everything that's not a car. If this wasn't the case, we could just plop down a high-speed rail station directly into the middle of the town and then everyone could bike or take the bus there. Try it, take your bike and do a 10km-straight-line-distance trip in an average north American suburb. It's either going to take a horrifying amount of time or be legitimately dangerous. It's not true that we need low density housing. We need a mix of high density and medium density housing. I grew up in medium density housing in a family of 6, literally the only issue is that cars make it unsafe for kids to walk to school and parks alone. I wish that it was possible to just convert suburban neighborhoods into nice small urban communities. They're just not designed for that. For those that can be converted, a train station going 150km/h straight into the city is a perfectly serviceable solution. But the basics is that what you're describing is just making suburbs into cities, and for the suburbs we're talking about that's almost impossible. But beyond that I really don't understand the obsession for very low density housing. A duplex is a perfectly fine place to raise a large family.
- bookofsand 5y agoGranted, American suburbs are in poor shape. Question is, what is a viable vision for the future? Hong Kong (17.3k people / sqmile) or s'Hertogenbosch (3.6k people / sqmile)? Packing millions of jobs in a handful of downtown sq miles, and then expecting that all the millions of commuters and their dependents live in a circle with 30 minutes access to downtown by bike cannot be physically satisfied by duplexes. Only a high density setup akin to Hong Kong may work. I know of no one, especially no one with kids, who would rather live in Hong Kong than a low density urban environment like s'Hertogenbosch. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_in_Hong_Kong#/media/File:Hong_Kong_Harbour_Night_2019-06-11.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_in_H...
- sudosysgen 5y agoAnswer : neither. Montréal has a density of 11.7k people per square mile. The vast majority of Montréal is duplexes. It works. Duplexes have a high density. Perhaps now that you know that duplexes are closer in density to Hong Kong than to SFH, you can understand how most people live 30 mins away by bike from downtown. Not all jobs are or have to be downtown either, it's just that a lot are.