9 ms·

> There's only so far you can bus, train, drive, bike, walk, seaplane, helicopter, hyperloop, or transporter in to go to work. Canadian cities are, just like ci

> There's only so far you can bus, train, drive, bike, walk, seaplane, helicopter, hyperloop, or transporter in to go to work. Canadian cities are, just like cities in the US, hitting this limit rather aggressively. Canada's largest urban area is 5.6 million people. London, Paris and Seoul are around double that, NYC is 19 million and Tokyo is 37 million. Why are Canadian cities hitting this limit at such a comparatively low population compared to other cities in the world? Why are all the major cities in the western world seemingly hitting this limit at the same time, even though they all have different populations? It seems to me that we've just become less aggressive at building the infrastructure necessary to support population growth.

ashtonkem 5y ago
> Why are all the major cities in the western world seemingly hitting this limit at the same time, even though they all have different populations? I can’t speak for Canada, but in America the answer is always cars. Car based transit is wildly land inefficient, and the main reason why all car based cities hit their limit at the same time. In particular there are two huge shortcomings with cars in urban design: 1. Parking eats up a huge amount of space. Either you let that drive density way down (which means commutes get longer) or you build underground parking at exorbitant prices driving up rents. Even in the latter case the roads around housing ends up becoming an issue, limiting density far below what you’d expect in say, Paris on Chicago. 2. Car transit to a shared destination is almost comically inefficient, which is really noticeable when people try and commute via car to job centers. This wouldn’t be as bad if we restricted cars to what they’re good at, such as driving away from the city, but most American cities have the unique psychosis of demanding that transit into the city center be via car. This does not scale, and is why places with wildly different zoning laws can have equally hellish commutes. The issue is not that we can’t build, we’re really good at adding more highway lanes, it’s more that we are monomaniacally focused on building the wrong things.
- exfascist 5y ago
  So I hate driving and actually moved to DC for work and also partly for the transit. Here's what I found: 1) Taking the metro many places (for example, from my apartment in an urban "luxury" apartment building a couple blocks from the initial station to my boat near the waterfront in downtown DC) doubled the time it took to get there. It was actually faster to drive there even during rush hour where you'll sit motionless on the 395 bridge. Yes I can redeem a lot of that time with my above average personal mobile computing set up but a: most people have a pretty mediocre personal mobile computing setup and b: now I can't use that time for anything other than programming projects. 2) I couldn't get rid of the car entirely because I still needed it to move bulky things that I really can't take on transit. It's bad enough not having a truck but losing the car entirely would create some serious logistical problems on a regular basis. So while I saved some money I couldn't save as much as I wanted. 3) Most wealthy people (many of my friends) start families^ and people who can afford it buy detached housing for that. You're not going to be taking transit to these places. It might not ever be economical. Like it or not transit will probably always lower property values in the US too. For whatever reason the more violent people here tend to take it and anywhere it goes becomes more violent so building it into suburbs like these is always going to be unpopular. 4) Bringing me to the fact that I've been accosted multiple times on transit by people who were high, drunk, or just belligerent. I have an extremely high tolerance for this sort of thing (I've wandered around some of the more violent cities early in the morning just to see what the fuss is about) but I can absolutely see why most people here would give up after that happening once at a maximum. I'm a huge fan of transit but pretending it isn't a large sacrifice to give up a car is just going to get people to ignore you, because it is and for most people it isn't worth it. (^ and for those that don't start families, many have lots of intense DIY projects that don't fit in apartment buildings and actually need either detached housing or industrial space with similar density.)
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    > Taking the metro many places (for example, from my apartment in an urban "luxury" apartment building to my boat near the waterfront in downtown DC) doubled the time it took to get there. It was actually faster to drive there even during rush hour where you'll sit motionless on the 395 bridge. Depends a lot on where you live and work. My experience was the exact opposite in Chicago. Heck, for some of my jobs I could outrun car commuters on my bike pretty trivially. One of the clear downsides to transit oriented cities is that you do need to pay attention to transit access when renting. A unit being “luxury” is no guarantee that it’s in a convenient place for transit, nor that the trip will be short. > Yes I can redeem a lot of that time with my above average personal mobile computing set up I find the need to make commute time productive quite an odd but common impulse. How about just making your commute suck less? Reading a book is better than driving in traffic. > I couldn't get rid of the car entirely because I still needed it to move bulky things that I really can't take on transit. Again, experience varies. For a lot of people it would be cheaper to abandon the car and pay for deliveries when necessary. Regardless, do not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. If you relegate your car trips to just when you need bulk goods, that is far more efficient than the current habit of using a car fo every single trip. > Most wealthy people (many of my friends) start families and people who can afford it buy detached housing for that. You're not going to be taking transit to these places. We could, but we’ve built our infrastructure with the opposite assumption in mind. Most other rich countries use a mix of regional rail, bus, and cars to solve this problem. The issue of “mass transit doesn’t go to the burbs, therefore I must use a car everywhere for everything” is an entirely self inflicted wound. > Bringing me to the fact that I've been accosted multiple times on transit by people who were high, drunk, or just belligerent Maybe we could solve that problem instead? Because that seems like a rather silly rationale for designing a transit system around. Also, it’s not like all car drivers are sober. In fact, a drunk driver is almost certainly a far bigger risk to your safety than a belligerent drunk on the train. > I'm a huge fan of transit but pretending it isn't a large sacrifice to give up a car is just going to get people to ignore you, because it is and for most people it isn't worth it. It’s almost like I’m arguing that we should make public transit more convenient than using a car for urban transit or something.
- Melatonic 5y ago
  Isn't this more a limit of dense (taller) housing? If we had much more housing in tall buildings near where people worked then they either would not need a car or would at least not need to drive their car to work. You still of course need to provide parking but tall parking garages can solve that as well (or underground). Seems like tons of cars are the symptom of the problem here not the cause
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    It’s symbiotic. We can’t build denser housing because we need space for car storage and roads. We can’t encourage people to reduce/eliminate their car usage because our infrastructure makes that miserable.
- chaostheory 5y ago
  A lot of people don’t like public transit for several major reasons: 1. It takes a lot longer to get to your destination even accounting for traffic. 2. The potential for harassment based on your gender or race. 3. The potential for sexual assault. 4. The potential for violence. Unfortunately, Western society at large is not collective and conformist like the one in Japan, which would heavily mitigate 2 out of the 4 problems stated above. Even then, Japan has a huge problem with harassment and sexual assault when it comes to female passengers.
voisin 5y ago
Car culture. It is insanely inefficient at moving people and at land use.
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  It’s amazing how many downvotes pointing this out gets. People have quite the kneejerk reaction when the downsides of car transit are pointed out to them.
  - bradleyjg 5y ago
    It’s a lazy slogan that gets us nowhere. I live in NYC and we’ve built three brand new subway stations in the last fifty years. It’s not just a matter of people’s preferences for cars, it’s not possible to build a non car city anymore due to pathologies that have nothing to do with “car culture”. The number one issue is that we’ve allowed too many people and interest groups to effectively bring any major project to a halt. This is not some inherent feature of democracy either, you can have a democracy where the majority gets to do things. We just don’t have one of those in the US, or Canada it sounds like.
    - ashtonkem 5y ago
      > It’s a lazy slogan that gets us nowhere. “Cars are land inefficient” isn’t a slogan, it’s literal fact. > I live in NYC and we’ve built three brand new subway stations in the last fifty years Ah, the stereotype of New Yorkers not paying attention to other cities strikes again! Yes, New York has its own problems, but for the vast majority of other cities GP’s comment is true. New York is one of the very few exception cases in the US. > The number one issue is that we’ve allowed too many people and interest groups to effectively bring any major project to a halt. This is not some inherent feature of democracy either, you can have a democracy where the majority gets to do things. We just don’t have one of those in the US, or Canada it sounds like. What if I told you that for a lot of transit activists, undemocratic processes that prioritize the needs of drivers over the rest of society is car culture?
      - 5y ago
heavyset_go 5y ago
I'd argue that NYC is not such shining example when it comes to commutes or sprawl, either. That particular corridor has some of the most traffic and longest commute durations in the country.
- cameronh90 5y ago
  Sure but it got to almost 20 million before it hit that point, unlike Canadian cities. There's also only been one subway line opened this century. We seemed to do better at facilitating growth last century, particular in the first half. Since then we've struggled, mostly for political reasons.
  - heavyset_go 5y ago
    It hit that point long before it reached a population of 20 million.
jedberg 5y ago
The population isn't the main factor, it's the density and percent who commute by car that matter most.
- cameronh90 5y ago
  Indeed, that's what I was alluding to. Given the right infrastructure, we can probably scale cities up to incredible populations. Instead, we stopped building that infrastructure, and everyone started commuting by car. Then we wonder why cities are struggling to expand and usefully located housing has become so expensive. We're trying to watch 4K YouTube over 28.8k dialup, and wondering why it's buffering all the time.
citrusybread 5y ago
Extreme car dependency. Toronto is suffering from the same problem Dubai has. It suddenly became relevant when sovereignists gained power in Quebec and the business class were worried about Montreal being a liability. So they packed up and went down the 401 to Toronto. It has the infrastructure for a much much smaller city, and one in the North American car-driven style (massive highways, occasional regional rail that is artificially slowed down by regulation, little to no metro service in most areas, etc) Combine with NIMBYs blocking every form of intensification, and here we are: https://www.google.com/maps/@43.6783092,-79.352227,3a,90y,68.54h,87.97t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sumgtFKIdKLPbd1RyR2pGsw!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3DumgtFKIdKLPbd1RyR2pGsw%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D1.8010482%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i16384!8i8192 https://www.google.com/maps/@43.6783092,-79.352227,3a,90y,68... A metro station close to the downtown core. In Tokyo this is the kind of development you find on the far side of Saitama, bounded by mountains or poor soil. In Toronto, this is an area that has suffered population decline, as the locals went from having a nuclear family to being 2 or even 1 empty nesters, being replaced by DINKs. It gets much, much worse the further out you go. A lot of the city has a blanket ban on anything more dense than a single family detached home. Just look at the city's size in sqkm. It will never scale like this, things need to change and density needs to be improved. All other Ontario cities suffer the same paste-eating mentality, especially Ottawa and cities in the GTHA.
- lhorie 5y ago
  Personally, I think the problem is more a question of the sort of business development that happens downtown vs the surrounding areas. If you look, for example, at development on highway 7 over the decades, there's definitely densification going on, e.g. this area[0] used to be farmlands back in the day, but now those red lanes are public transit lines and there are condo buildings sprouting up along that corridor. All in all, though, it's still much sparser than Toronto's downtown core. If you look around the area, other than campuses like IBM's and CGI's, a very significant percentage of the business development in the area is still big box B2C (walmart/home depot/etc) or small-ish businesses. That's in stark contrast to areas like the financial district where the vast majority of workers are white collar office people. Which is to say, Markham/Vaughan could still stand to become much more metropolitan with the presence of more B2B big corps. My pet theory is that concentration of white collar work is what drives up home prices. Exhibit A: places like Palo Alto and Mountain View in the San Francisco Bay Area (vs, say, Pacifica or Half Moon Bay) are clearly propped up by the presence of FAANG campuses. I'd bet that if a Google setup a campus in Ajax, you'd see an appreciable increase in demand for housing in surrounding areas even if they are traditionally considered too far from downtown TO (e.g. Whitby) [0] https://www.google.com/maps/@43.842627,-79.3906732,3a,75y,208.9h,107.2t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1swvjQmwINN7InMfj-0ecpoQ!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3DwvjQmwINN7InMfj-0ecpoQ%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D225.33191%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i16384!8i8192 https://www.google.com/maps/@43.842627,-79.3906732,3a,75y,20...
bobthepanda 5y ago
They’re talking about physical size. North American metropolises are a lot less dense than their peers. The solution is to enable density. Zoning in the US and Canada is done at the local level and zoning codes look like a list of things you can’t do. (You can have a house, but you can’t live with more than X unmarried people, you can have a home office but you can’t do hairdressing out of your home, etc.) Zoning codes in Japan are a lot more relaxed, in that there are only about a dozen types defined by “maximum nuisance level.” Every additional level of zoning permits all the uses from the previous level as well. Which generally increases building capacity and density and lowers prices by staying ahead of demand.
throwaway2037 5y ago
It is interesting that you did not mention Los Angeles (and Orange County) and the special hell of car traffic in that region. The places that you picked have world-class mass transport that provide viable alternatives to driving.
monkeywork 5y ago
Don't look at the population look at the land area - and also look at the available public transit options. Toronto has a laughable subway / train network given the urban sprawl and distance that people are commuting. If I pay to take one of the most expensive toll highways in the world I can get from my home to the office in just under an hour.
michael1999 5y ago
That's an interesting question, but it skips some steps. The reason is that these are all post-war constructions. London and Paris (I don't know Seoul) already had dense, walkable cores that predate not just the modern highway, but even the automobile. Inner London was 5 million people in 1911, and the rise of the car drove that population down! And things didn't really get going until the highway boom. The interstate system (and similar projects in Canada) didn't start until the 50s, and didn't finish until the 80s. So this whole project is fairly recent. Highways enabled a whole new kind of development - the suburban project. And now the boom is over, and it's time for the hangover. And you'll note that it hasn't been all at the same time. LA famously hit these limits in the 80s. While Atlanta only hit them in the last couple of decades. What you're seeing is the end of a long process.

ashtonkem 5y ago

> Why are all the major cities in the western world seemingly hitting this limit at the same time, even though they all have different populations? I can’t speak for Canada, but in America the answer is always cars. Car based transit is wildly land inefficient, and the main reason why all car based cities hit their limit at the same time. In particular there are two huge shortcomings with cars in urban design: 1. Parking eats up a huge amount of space. Either you let that drive density way down (which means commutes get longer) or you build underground parking at exorbitant prices driving up rents. Even in the latter case the roads around housing ends up becoming an issue, limiting density far below what you’d expect in say, Paris on Chicago. 2. Car transit to a shared destination is almost comically inefficient, which is really noticeable when people try and commute via car to job centers. This wouldn’t be as bad if we restricted cars to what they’re good at, such as driving away from the city, but most American cities have the unique psychosis of demanding that transit into the city center be via car. This does not scale, and is why places with wildly different zoning laws can have equally hellish commutes. The issue is not that we can’t build, we’re really good at adding more highway lanes, it’s more that we are monomaniacally focused on building the wrong things.

exfascist 5y ago
So I hate driving and actually moved to DC for work and also partly for the transit. Here's what I found: 1) Taking the metro many places (for example, from my apartment in an urban "luxury" apartment building a couple blocks from the initial station to my boat near the waterfront in downtown DC) doubled the time it took to get there. It was actually faster to drive there even during rush hour where you'll sit motionless on the 395 bridge. Yes I can redeem a lot of that time with my above average personal mobile computing set up but a: most people have a pretty mediocre personal mobile computing setup and b: now I can't use that time for anything other than programming projects. 2) I couldn't get rid of the car entirely because I still needed it to move bulky things that I really can't take on transit. It's bad enough not having a truck but losing the car entirely would create some serious logistical problems on a regular basis. So while I saved some money I couldn't save as much as I wanted. 3) Most wealthy people (many of my friends) start families^ and people who can afford it buy detached housing for that. You're not going to be taking transit to these places. It might not ever be economical. Like it or not transit will probably always lower property values in the US too. For whatever reason the more violent people here tend to take it and anywhere it goes becomes more violent so building it into suburbs like these is always going to be unpopular. 4) Bringing me to the fact that I've been accosted multiple times on transit by people who were high, drunk, or just belligerent. I have an extremely high tolerance for this sort of thing (I've wandered around some of the more violent cities early in the morning just to see what the fuss is about) but I can absolutely see why most people here would give up after that happening once at a maximum. I'm a huge fan of transit but pretending it isn't a large sacrifice to give up a car is just going to get people to ignore you, because it is and for most people it isn't worth it. (^ and for those that don't start families, many have lots of intense DIY projects that don't fit in apartment buildings and actually need either detached housing or industrial space with similar density.)
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  > Taking the metro many places (for example, from my apartment in an urban "luxury" apartment building to my boat near the waterfront in downtown DC) doubled the time it took to get there. It was actually faster to drive there even during rush hour where you'll sit motionless on the 395 bridge. Depends a lot on where you live and work. My experience was the exact opposite in Chicago. Heck, for some of my jobs I could outrun car commuters on my bike pretty trivially. One of the clear downsides to transit oriented cities is that you do need to pay attention to transit access when renting. A unit being “luxury” is no guarantee that it’s in a convenient place for transit, nor that the trip will be short. > Yes I can redeem a lot of that time with my above average personal mobile computing set up I find the need to make commute time productive quite an odd but common impulse. How about just making your commute suck less? Reading a book is better than driving in traffic. > I couldn't get rid of the car entirely because I still needed it to move bulky things that I really can't take on transit. Again, experience varies. For a lot of people it would be cheaper to abandon the car and pay for deliveries when necessary. Regardless, do not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. If you relegate your car trips to just when you need bulk goods, that is far more efficient than the current habit of using a car fo every single trip. > Most wealthy people (many of my friends) start families and people who can afford it buy detached housing for that. You're not going to be taking transit to these places. We could, but we’ve built our infrastructure with the opposite assumption in mind. Most other rich countries use a mix of regional rail, bus, and cars to solve this problem. The issue of “mass transit doesn’t go to the burbs, therefore I must use a car everywhere for everything” is an entirely self inflicted wound. > Bringing me to the fact that I've been accosted multiple times on transit by people who were high, drunk, or just belligerent Maybe we could solve that problem instead? Because that seems like a rather silly rationale for designing a transit system around. Also, it’s not like all car drivers are sober. In fact, a drunk driver is almost certainly a far bigger risk to your safety than a belligerent drunk on the train. > I'm a huge fan of transit but pretending it isn't a large sacrifice to give up a car is just going to get people to ignore you, because it is and for most people it isn't worth it. It’s almost like I’m arguing that we should make public transit more convenient than using a car for urban transit or something.
Melatonic 5y ago
Isn't this more a limit of dense (taller) housing? If we had much more housing in tall buildings near where people worked then they either would not need a car or would at least not need to drive their car to work. You still of course need to provide parking but tall parking garages can solve that as well (or underground). Seems like tons of cars are the symptom of the problem here not the cause
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  It’s symbiotic. We can’t build denser housing because we need space for car storage and roads. We can’t encourage people to reduce/eliminate their car usage because our infrastructure makes that miserable.
chaostheory 5y ago
A lot of people don’t like public transit for several major reasons: 1. It takes a lot longer to get to your destination even accounting for traffic. 2. The potential for harassment based on your gender or race. 3. The potential for sexual assault. 4. The potential for violence. Unfortunately, Western society at large is not collective and conformist like the one in Japan, which would heavily mitigate 2 out of the 4 problems stated above. Even then, Japan has a huge problem with harassment and sexual assault when it comes to female passengers.

voisin 5y ago

Car culture. It is insanely inefficient at moving people and at land use.

ashtonkem 5y ago
It’s amazing how many downvotes pointing this out gets. People have quite the kneejerk reaction when the downsides of car transit are pointed out to them.
- bradleyjg 5y ago
  It’s a lazy slogan that gets us nowhere. I live in NYC and we’ve built three brand new subway stations in the last fifty years. It’s not just a matter of people’s preferences for cars, it’s not possible to build a non car city anymore due to pathologies that have nothing to do with “car culture”. The number one issue is that we’ve allowed too many people and interest groups to effectively bring any major project to a halt. This is not some inherent feature of democracy either, you can have a democracy where the majority gets to do things. We just don’t have one of those in the US, or Canada it sounds like.
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    > It’s a lazy slogan that gets us nowhere. “Cars are land inefficient” isn’t a slogan, it’s literal fact. > I live in NYC and we’ve built three brand new subway stations in the last fifty years Ah, the stereotype of New Yorkers not paying attention to other cities strikes again! Yes, New York has its own problems, but for the vast majority of other cities GP’s comment is true. New York is one of the very few exception cases in the US. > The number one issue is that we’ve allowed too many people and interest groups to effectively bring any major project to a halt. This is not some inherent feature of democracy either, you can have a democracy where the majority gets to do things. We just don’t have one of those in the US, or Canada it sounds like. What if I told you that for a lot of transit activists, undemocratic processes that prioritize the needs of drivers over the rest of society is car culture?
    - 5y ago

heavyset_go 5y ago

I'd argue that NYC is not such shining example when it comes to commutes or sprawl, either. That particular corridor has some of the most traffic and longest commute durations in the country.

cameronh90 5y ago
Sure but it got to almost 20 million before it hit that point, unlike Canadian cities. There's also only been one subway line opened this century. We seemed to do better at facilitating growth last century, particular in the first half. Since then we've struggled, mostly for political reasons.
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  It hit that point long before it reached a population of 20 million.

jedberg 5y ago

The population isn't the main factor, it's the density and percent who commute by car that matter most.

cameronh90 5y ago
Indeed, that's what I was alluding to. Given the right infrastructure, we can probably scale cities up to incredible populations. Instead, we stopped building that infrastructure, and everyone started commuting by car. Then we wonder why cities are struggling to expand and usefully located housing has become so expensive. We're trying to watch 4K YouTube over 28.8k dialup, and wondering why it's buffering all the time.

citrusybread 5y ago

Extreme car dependency. Toronto is suffering from the same problem Dubai has. It suddenly became relevant when sovereignists gained power in Quebec and the business class were worried about Montreal being a liability. So they packed up and went down the 401 to Toronto. It has the infrastructure for a much much smaller city, and one in the North American car-driven style (massive highways, occasional regional rail that is artificially slowed down by regulation, little to no metro service in most areas, etc) Combine with NIMBYs blocking every form of intensification, and here we are: https://www.google.com/maps/@43.6783092,-79.352227,3a,90y,68.54h,87.97t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sumgtFKIdKLPbd1RyR2pGsw!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3DumgtFKIdKLPbd1RyR2pGsw%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D1.8010482%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i16384!8i8192 https://www.google.com/maps/@43.6783092,-79.352227,3a,90y,68... A metro station close to the downtown core. In Tokyo this is the kind of development you find on the far side of Saitama, bounded by mountains or poor soil. In Toronto, this is an area that has suffered population decline, as the locals went from having a nuclear family to being 2 or even 1 empty nesters, being replaced by DINKs. It gets much, much worse the further out you go. A lot of the city has a blanket ban on anything more dense than a single family detached home. Just look at the city's size in sqkm. It will never scale like this, things need to change and density needs to be improved. All other Ontario cities suffer the same paste-eating mentality, especially Ottawa and cities in the GTHA.

lhorie 5y ago
Personally, I think the problem is more a question of the sort of business development that happens downtown vs the surrounding areas. If you look, for example, at development on highway 7 over the decades, there's definitely densification going on, e.g. this area[0] used to be farmlands back in the day, but now those red lanes are public transit lines and there are condo buildings sprouting up along that corridor. All in all, though, it's still much sparser than Toronto's downtown core. If you look around the area, other than campuses like IBM's and CGI's, a very significant percentage of the business development in the area is still big box B2C (walmart/home depot/etc) or small-ish businesses. That's in stark contrast to areas like the financial district where the vast majority of workers are white collar office people. Which is to say, Markham/Vaughan could still stand to become much more metropolitan with the presence of more B2B big corps. My pet theory is that concentration of white collar work is what drives up home prices. Exhibit A: places like Palo Alto and Mountain View in the San Francisco Bay Area (vs, say, Pacifica or Half Moon Bay) are clearly propped up by the presence of FAANG campuses. I'd bet that if a Google setup a campus in Ajax, you'd see an appreciable increase in demand for housing in surrounding areas even if they are traditionally considered too far from downtown TO (e.g. Whitby) [0] https://www.google.com/maps/@43.842627,-79.3906732,3a,75y,208.9h,107.2t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1swvjQmwINN7InMfj-0ecpoQ!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3DwvjQmwINN7InMfj-0ecpoQ%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D225.33191%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i16384!8i8192 https://www.google.com/maps/@43.842627,-79.3906732,3a,75y,20...

bobthepanda 5y ago

They’re talking about physical size. North American metropolises are a lot less dense than their peers. The solution is to enable density. Zoning in the US and Canada is done at the local level and zoning codes look like a list of things you can’t do. (You can have a house, but you can’t live with more than X unmarried people, you can have a home office but you can’t do hairdressing out of your home, etc.) Zoning codes in Japan are a lot more relaxed, in that there are only about a dozen types defined by “maximum nuisance level.” Every additional level of zoning permits all the uses from the previous level as well. Which generally increases building capacity and density and lowers prices by staying ahead of demand.

throwaway2037 5y ago

It is interesting that you did not mention Los Angeles (and Orange County) and the special hell of car traffic in that region. The places that you picked have world-class mass transport that provide viable alternatives to driving.

monkeywork 5y ago

Don't look at the population look at the land area - and also look at the available public transit options. Toronto has a laughable subway / train network given the urban sprawl and distance that people are commuting. If I pay to take one of the most expensive toll highways in the world I can get from my home to the office in just under an hour.

michael1999 5y ago

That's an interesting question, but it skips some steps. The reason is that these are all post-war constructions. London and Paris (I don't know Seoul) already had dense, walkable cores that predate not just the modern highway, but even the automobile. Inner London was 5 million people in 1911, and the rise of the car drove that population down! And things didn't really get going until the highway boom. The interstate system (and similar projects in Canada) didn't start until the 50s, and didn't finish until the 80s. So this whole project is fairly recent. Highways enabled a whole new kind of development - the suburban project. And now the boom is over, and it's time for the hangover. And you'll note that it hasn't been all at the same time. LA famously hit these limits in the 80s. While Atlanta only hit them in the last couple of decades. What you're seeing is the end of a long process.