4 ms·

> Does it make sense to give every family 0.75 acres of grass, 400 sqft of driveway and a 2 car garage A standard suburban house doesn't sit on 0.75 acres. 0.

> Does it make sense to give every family 0.75 acres of grass, 400 sqft of driveway and a 2 car garage A standard suburban house doesn't sit on 0.75 acres. 0.2 is typical. Though you're probably low on the driveway and garage :). I'd like to see a better argument for why we shouldn't live this way. There are relatively large metros (e.g. Portland) that are predominantly suburban single family homes, and so far it seems to work fine. Sure, we could compress Portland into a 10 mile by 10 mile square, but why? Would it actually make our lives better? By what metric?

tenacious_tuna 5y ago
I'm hopping on a plane in a minute, but I'll do my best to at least start an example :) The real question is "what do you mean by 'it works fine'?" To me, the effects of suburban living are such that we don't treat people as people unless they're shrouded in a big rolling box of metal. Of course it'll vary from person to person and family to family. I think urban environments offer children much more freedom than corresponding suburban environments, while being safer. There's much more mobility and access to things outside of the house, which I'd argue significantly enriches childhood experience and leads to more adaptable adults. As an adult, I'm overjoyed by the ease with which I can get to things around my city. I never have to deal with traffic, I can walk to three different grocery stores in under fifteen minutes. I have dozens of restaurants in similar distance, and I never worry about having too much to drink to safely drive home. I don't have to deal with traffic, and when friends come to visit (or when I visit them) I can take the train and enjoy a book instead of navigating roads. I feel far healthier and happier with the amount of light physical activity that's been baked into my life just by going about my normal routine. Before we moved to the city, I lived a pretty typical office worker sedentary life: I'd get up, shower, drive (sitting) to work, work (sitting, sometimes standing), then drive home. Now I walk to work and feel invigorated as I come through the door 15 minutes after I left, without the annoyance of rush hour or traffic or bad drivers. (A co-worker of mine lives out in the suburbs of our city, which are denser than most, and takes the light rail into work; half an hour on the train, 5 minute walk from the station. If he took a car, we'd need parking for him and everyone else that had one, and roads for it [see again, induced demand in my post above], and I wouldn't be able to walk to work myself). A twenty minute walk puts me at museums or bars or train stations or work or the store or like 5 friends' houses or the lake shore or a thousand other places. No parking, no navigating traffic, no having to move the car or worry about not wandering far from the car or figuring out how to navigate unfamiliar roads. Honestly the most stressful part of any of my journeys is wondering if drivers are paying attention as I go through the crosswalk, or if they're going to cut the corner to try to make their left turn. As a citizen, my city's limited resources don't have to go to maintaining roads that the richer segments of the population get proportionally more benefit from. We can invest in more public services since we're not committed endlessly to maintaining the cost-sink of asphalt plains. [1] Public transit is an amazing economic equalizer as well: In a suburban environment, you must have a reliable car to make it to work. If you're too poor (or just starting out) to afford a car, or if it's unreliable, that's going to severely curtail your available job pool. (There's a common saying that "we don't all have the same time" when it comes to discussing class differences; my highschool girlfriend spent two hours on the bus, one way, to work, because her family only had one car, and her mother needed it for her job. That's four hours a day she can't use to cook, or study [she could try, but a bus is far from an ideal study environment], or sleep. If our town had better transit, or if our town wasn't so dense that it took two hours to travel from house to shopping district, it'd be a very different story.) This is to say nothing of the actual health impact of cars: accidents, death, pollution, or just the amount of money we're 'required' to spend on them so we can participate in wider society. I feel like putting these at the end really undercuts their significance, but we never seem to talk about these facts. Car accidents are the eighth-leading cause of death in the US [2]. Imagine the economic savings, and the amount of medical resources, we could free up by reducing that. Imagine the value our citizens would get out of not paying $20k (at the _very low end_) every five or eight years for their cars, not to mention the maintenance. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfsCniN7Nsc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfsCniN7Nsc [2]: https://www.cdc.gov/injury/features/global-road-safety/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/injury/features/global-road-safety/index...
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  > The real question is "what do you mean by 'it works fine'?" To me, the effects of suburban living are such that we don't treat people as people unless they're shrouded in a big rolling box of metal. This is just unhelpful, tired rhetoric. Everyone has the same rights whether they're in a car or not. Moreover, public transit literally depends on much larger "metal boxes". It sounds like you live in a magical city. In Chicago, it's much faster to get around by car than it is to take the train or bus. In general, if you're taking the bus or train anywhere, it's almost always a 45 minute trip one-way and it can easily be double that if you have a transfer. I like that I can walk to a few grocery stores and restaurants, but if I want to go to a specialty shop or visit a restaurant in a different neighborhood or even just make a big trip in inclimate weather I can do so much more quickly/easily with a car than without. Of course, rideshare is a thing, but a round trip to another neighborhood can easily run anywhere from $60-120 and even then you have to wait for drivers and even then they might blow you off (maybe I'm just unlucky here, but it seems like 5-10% of drivers blow me off, especially if I ordered a ride just before a price surge). > I never worry about having too much to drink to safely drive home This isn't much of a problem for me--if I want more than a couple of drinks (rare), I just make arrangements in advance (DD or walking or rideshare or public transit). If I don't make arrangements, I don't drink. I don't know what could be more convenient than this (I see the logic in doing the inconvenient-but-safe thing all the time, but it means missing out on a lot of convenience unnecessarily). > I don't have to deal with traffic, and when friends come to visit (or when I visit them) I can take the train and enjoy a book instead of navigating roads. Traffic is tedious, but I mostly just avoid traveling during rush hour (not usually a big deal since I can leave later and still get there at the same time as I would if I took the train during rush hour). It wouldn't be a problem at all if I didn't live in a city. Anyway, I don't know what your city's public transit system is like, but in Chicago it's uncommon to get a seat on a train (if you get one, there will usually be someone who needs it more), and the etiquette is to hold your bag rather than wearing it on your back (so we can squeeze an extra 1/4 of a person into the train car). Since your other hand is holding a strap or railing, there's no free hand to hold the book and anyway it's too distracting to me with the pan handlers trying to get my attention or the guys who blast their portable speakers or are trying to start shit with other riders (or straight up smoking weed/cigarettes). Buses are a little nicer, but they are subject to traffic just like cars. Instead, I just drive and listen to a podcast or audiobook; navigation has been a solved problem for a decade thanks to pervasive GPS. > I feel far healthier and happier with the amount of light physical activity that's been baked into my life just by going about my normal routine. Before we moved to the city, I lived a pretty typical office worker sedentary life: I'd get up, shower, drive (sitting) to work, work (sitting, sometimes standing), then drive home. Now I walk to work and feel invigorated as I come through the door 15 minutes after I left, without the annoyance of rush hour or traffic or bad drivers. I liked walking to work when the weather was nice, but that's pretty rare in Chicago and anyway there are only so many different routes you can take after which it gets dull. I'm really glad I got a remote gig. I have a ton of time left over, and my wife and I will load up the dog and go to a park or even rent a lake house for a week outside of the city for a nature fix. If we didn't have cars, we would probably stay in our neighborhood rather than spend the extra $100/day on a car rental, but since we have a car anyway the difference is marginal. And the car is convenient for other things too--we can take our dog to the vet or to friends' houses without having to pay an exorbitant rideshare cost, for example. Parking is really only inconvenient downtown during the work week and a few other places (e.g., around the zoo during summer weekends, etc). Otherwise it's like $5-10 for a few hours. > A twenty minute walk puts me at museums or bars or train stations or work or the store or like 5 friends' houses or the lake shore or a thousand other places. No parking, no navigating traffic, no having to move the car or worry about not wandering far from the car or figuring out how to navigate unfamiliar roads Seems a little silly that you're willing to walk 20 minutes but not "wander far from the car". :) > Honestly the most stressful part of any of my journeys is wondering if drivers are paying attention as I go through the crosswalk, or if they're going to cut the corner to try to make their left turn. Yeah, this is definitely one of the more stressful aspects of walking around Chicago. > As a citizen, my city's limited resources don't have to go to maintaining roads that the richer segments of the population get proportionally more benefit from. In Chicago, the nicer neighborhoods not only have better roads but also much better public transit options. It turns out the same forces that operate on streets operate on public transit. > There's a common saying that "we don't all have the same time" when it comes to discussing class differences This favors cars, which waste less time than public transit in the general case. > This is to say nothing of the actual health impact of cars: accidents, death, pollution, or just the amount of money we're 'required' to spend on them so we can participate in wider society. Accidents are the best argument against cars, IMO. I think we can sharply curtail this with better city planning and more safety features (especially with advancements in self-driving technology). Regarding pollution and maintainability, EVs emit less per person than a diesel city bus (this will continue to improve over time as our energy grid becomes cleaner) and they're also inherently more maintainable (no transmission, engine, exhaust system, etc). Once the high end of the market is saturated, we'll start to see more, simpler models on the low-end, and these will eventually hit the used car market. Fuel will also be cheaper because electricity is cheaper than gasoline. > Imagine the value our citizens would get out of not paying $20k (at the _very low end_) every five or eight years for their cars, not to mention the maintenance. I'm not sure what that $20k figure is meant to represent. You can get a reliable car for $10k these days, drive it for 5-10 years and turn around and sell it for $2-4k. Of course, you'll have to insure it and pay for gas and maintenance, but that's probably quite a lot less than most couples spend on public transit, rideshare, and car rentals.
titzer 5y ago
It's not the first-order (i.e. direct) effects of suburban life. In fact, TBH, suburban life can be downright cozy--you got your own decent-sized home, a little patch of grass, maybe a patio, barbecue, deck, maybe even a garden. That's not the issue. It's the externalities, the downstream effects, of trying to scale up suburban living to huge numbers of people. At a small scale, a little town of a few hundred or couple thousand people, things remain walkable. There could be a corner grocery store, one gas station, a few stores clustered together in the town square, courthouse, playground, park, school, church....all nice and wonderful. But all that disappears when you scale suburbs up to tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, then millions of people. The amount of land area gets enormous. Traffic gets enormous. It scales like O(n^2). You get bigger and bigger streets. Bigger and bigger courthouses. Bigger and bigger stores, parking lots, huge shopping malls, and everything keeps getting pushed out by the pressure of it all. It sprawls. The city tries to transform itself into something medium density, as housing prices go up. Office and commercial real estate go up. People want white collar, nice, high-paying jobs. They don't want to be plumbers and electricians and house painters, but executives and managers and have their own businesses. But suburban sprawl really doesn't support those things very well. People get pushed miles and miles from their jobs. Traffic becomes a nightmare. The prices go off the charts. Tradespeople get pushed out. Culture takes a dive. No more walking or biking when those freeways go up. Bad examples of sprawl are places like Houston and Los Angeles, even the Bay Area now. I spent 4 years in LA, 5 in the Bay Area. LA is truly mind-blowing. The entire basin is just one big grid of endless permutations of the same concrete jungle, here or there less dense or more dense, a few bright spots, but OMG and endless labyrinth of Stapleses, Starbuckses, McD's and strip malls... But LA in the 1930s wasn't that. It was just a few towns here and there and some downtown. It was literally a few spots in the desert where people had little nuclei of the small-town living. It just grew without real direction and was completely powered by oil and cars.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  I don't like American suburbs for me personally, but the US has tons of space and I don't understand how traffic would be better if we pushed more people into less space (with fewer streets and so on). Indeed, most big cities are famous for their congestion. With respect to prices, these are self-regulating. If prices go up, things either get denser and/or people move elsewhere. > Culture takes a dive. Again, suburbs aren't my thing, but it seems really offensive/chauvinistic to imply that suburban culture is lesser than urban culture. I'm sure I'm misunderstanding, and in the spirit of charity I want to give you the opportunity to set the record straight. > No more walking or biking when those freeways go up. Is this intrinsic to suburbs, or is it an artifact of how suburbs were planned at the time that suburbs exploded in popularity? Can suburbs be designed to be more walkable/bikeable (I would actually be surprised if they aren't already)?

tenacious_tuna 5y ago

I'm hopping on a plane in a minute, but I'll do my best to at least start an example :) The real question is "what do you mean by 'it works fine'?" To me, the effects of suburban living are such that we don't treat people as people unless they're shrouded in a big rolling box of metal. Of course it'll vary from person to person and family to family. I think urban environments offer children much more freedom than corresponding suburban environments, while being safer. There's much more mobility and access to things outside of the house, which I'd argue significantly enriches childhood experience and leads to more adaptable adults. As an adult, I'm overjoyed by the ease with which I can get to things around my city. I never have to deal with traffic, I can walk to three different grocery stores in under fifteen minutes. I have dozens of restaurants in similar distance, and I never worry about having too much to drink to safely drive home. I don't have to deal with traffic, and when friends come to visit (or when I visit them) I can take the train and enjoy a book instead of navigating roads. I feel far healthier and happier with the amount of light physical activity that's been baked into my life just by going about my normal routine. Before we moved to the city, I lived a pretty typical office worker sedentary life: I'd get up, shower, drive (sitting) to work, work (sitting, sometimes standing), then drive home. Now I walk to work and feel invigorated as I come through the door 15 minutes after I left, without the annoyance of rush hour or traffic or bad drivers. (A co-worker of mine lives out in the suburbs of our city, which are denser than most, and takes the light rail into work; half an hour on the train, 5 minute walk from the station. If he took a car, we'd need parking for him and everyone else that had one, and roads for it [see again, induced demand in my post above], and I wouldn't be able to walk to work myself). A twenty minute walk puts me at museums or bars or train stations or work or the store or like 5 friends' houses or the lake shore or a thousand other places. No parking, no navigating traffic, no having to move the car or worry about not wandering far from the car or figuring out how to navigate unfamiliar roads. Honestly the most stressful part of any of my journeys is wondering if drivers are paying attention as I go through the crosswalk, or if they're going to cut the corner to try to make their left turn. As a citizen, my city's limited resources don't have to go to maintaining roads that the richer segments of the population get proportionally more benefit from. We can invest in more public services since we're not committed endlessly to maintaining the cost-sink of asphalt plains. [1] Public transit is an amazing economic equalizer as well: In a suburban environment, you must have a reliable car to make it to work. If you're too poor (or just starting out) to afford a car, or if it's unreliable, that's going to severely curtail your available job pool. (There's a common saying that "we don't all have the same time" when it comes to discussing class differences; my highschool girlfriend spent two hours on the bus, one way, to work, because her family only had one car, and her mother needed it for her job. That's four hours a day she can't use to cook, or study [she could try, but a bus is far from an ideal study environment], or sleep. If our town had better transit, or if our town wasn't so dense that it took two hours to travel from house to shopping district, it'd be a very different story.) This is to say nothing of the actual health impact of cars: accidents, death, pollution, or just the amount of money we're 'required' to spend on them so we can participate in wider society. I feel like putting these at the end really undercuts their significance, but we never seem to talk about these facts. Car accidents are the eighth-leading cause of death in the US [2]. Imagine the economic savings, and the amount of medical resources, we could free up by reducing that. Imagine the value our citizens would get out of not paying $20k (at the _very low end_) every five or eight years for their cars, not to mention the maintenance. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfsCniN7Nsc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfsCniN7Nsc [2]: https://www.cdc.gov/injury/features/global-road-safety/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/injury/features/global-road-safety/index...

throwaway894345 5y ago
> The real question is "what do you mean by 'it works fine'?" To me, the effects of suburban living are such that we don't treat people as people unless they're shrouded in a big rolling box of metal. This is just unhelpful, tired rhetoric. Everyone has the same rights whether they're in a car or not. Moreover, public transit literally depends on much larger "metal boxes". It sounds like you live in a magical city. In Chicago, it's much faster to get around by car than it is to take the train or bus. In general, if you're taking the bus or train anywhere, it's almost always a 45 minute trip one-way and it can easily be double that if you have a transfer. I like that I can walk to a few grocery stores and restaurants, but if I want to go to a specialty shop or visit a restaurant in a different neighborhood or even just make a big trip in inclimate weather I can do so much more quickly/easily with a car than without. Of course, rideshare is a thing, but a round trip to another neighborhood can easily run anywhere from $60-120 and even then you have to wait for drivers and even then they might blow you off (maybe I'm just unlucky here, but it seems like 5-10% of drivers blow me off, especially if I ordered a ride just before a price surge). > I never worry about having too much to drink to safely drive home This isn't much of a problem for me--if I want more than a couple of drinks (rare), I just make arrangements in advance (DD or walking or rideshare or public transit). If I don't make arrangements, I don't drink. I don't know what could be more convenient than this (I see the logic in doing the inconvenient-but-safe thing all the time, but it means missing out on a lot of convenience unnecessarily). > I don't have to deal with traffic, and when friends come to visit (or when I visit them) I can take the train and enjoy a book instead of navigating roads. Traffic is tedious, but I mostly just avoid traveling during rush hour (not usually a big deal since I can leave later and still get there at the same time as I would if I took the train during rush hour). It wouldn't be a problem at all if I didn't live in a city. Anyway, I don't know what your city's public transit system is like, but in Chicago it's uncommon to get a seat on a train (if you get one, there will usually be someone who needs it more), and the etiquette is to hold your bag rather than wearing it on your back (so we can squeeze an extra 1/4 of a person into the train car). Since your other hand is holding a strap or railing, there's no free hand to hold the book and anyway it's too distracting to me with the pan handlers trying to get my attention or the guys who blast their portable speakers or are trying to start shit with other riders (or straight up smoking weed/cigarettes). Buses are a little nicer, but they are subject to traffic just like cars. Instead, I just drive and listen to a podcast or audiobook; navigation has been a solved problem for a decade thanks to pervasive GPS. > I feel far healthier and happier with the amount of light physical activity that's been baked into my life just by going about my normal routine. Before we moved to the city, I lived a pretty typical office worker sedentary life: I'd get up, shower, drive (sitting) to work, work (sitting, sometimes standing), then drive home. Now I walk to work and feel invigorated as I come through the door 15 minutes after I left, without the annoyance of rush hour or traffic or bad drivers. I liked walking to work when the weather was nice, but that's pretty rare in Chicago and anyway there are only so many different routes you can take after which it gets dull. I'm really glad I got a remote gig. I have a ton of time left over, and my wife and I will load up the dog and go to a park or even rent a lake house for a week outside of the city for a nature fix. If we didn't have cars, we would probably stay in our neighborhood rather than spend the extra $100/day on a car rental, but since we have a car anyway the difference is marginal. And the car is convenient for other things too--we can take our dog to the vet or to friends' houses without having to pay an exorbitant rideshare cost, for example. Parking is really only inconvenient downtown during the work week and a few other places (e.g., around the zoo during summer weekends, etc). Otherwise it's like $5-10 for a few hours. > A twenty minute walk puts me at museums or bars or train stations or work or the store or like 5 friends' houses or the lake shore or a thousand other places. No parking, no navigating traffic, no having to move the car or worry about not wandering far from the car or figuring out how to navigate unfamiliar roads Seems a little silly that you're willing to walk 20 minutes but not "wander far from the car". :) > Honestly the most stressful part of any of my journeys is wondering if drivers are paying attention as I go through the crosswalk, or if they're going to cut the corner to try to make their left turn. Yeah, this is definitely one of the more stressful aspects of walking around Chicago. > As a citizen, my city's limited resources don't have to go to maintaining roads that the richer segments of the population get proportionally more benefit from. In Chicago, the nicer neighborhoods not only have better roads but also much better public transit options. It turns out the same forces that operate on streets operate on public transit. > There's a common saying that "we don't all have the same time" when it comes to discussing class differences This favors cars, which waste less time than public transit in the general case. > This is to say nothing of the actual health impact of cars: accidents, death, pollution, or just the amount of money we're 'required' to spend on them so we can participate in wider society. Accidents are the best argument against cars, IMO. I think we can sharply curtail this with better city planning and more safety features (especially with advancements in self-driving technology). Regarding pollution and maintainability, EVs emit less per person than a diesel city bus (this will continue to improve over time as our energy grid becomes cleaner) and they're also inherently more maintainable (no transmission, engine, exhaust system, etc). Once the high end of the market is saturated, we'll start to see more, simpler models on the low-end, and these will eventually hit the used car market. Fuel will also be cheaper because electricity is cheaper than gasoline. > Imagine the value our citizens would get out of not paying $20k (at the _very low end_) every five or eight years for their cars, not to mention the maintenance. I'm not sure what that $20k figure is meant to represent. You can get a reliable car for $10k these days, drive it for 5-10 years and turn around and sell it for $2-4k. Of course, you'll have to insure it and pay for gas and maintenance, but that's probably quite a lot less than most couples spend on public transit, rideshare, and car rentals.

titzer 5y ago

It's not the first-order (i.e. direct) effects of suburban life. In fact, TBH, suburban life can be downright cozy--you got your own decent-sized home, a little patch of grass, maybe a patio, barbecue, deck, maybe even a garden. That's not the issue. It's the externalities, the downstream effects, of trying to scale up suburban living to huge numbers of people. At a small scale, a little town of a few hundred or couple thousand people, things remain walkable. There could be a corner grocery store, one gas station, a few stores clustered together in the town square, courthouse, playground, park, school, church....all nice and wonderful. But all that disappears when you scale suburbs up to tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, then millions of people. The amount of land area gets enormous. Traffic gets enormous. It scales like O(n^2). You get bigger and bigger streets. Bigger and bigger courthouses. Bigger and bigger stores, parking lots, huge shopping malls, and everything keeps getting pushed out by the pressure of it all. It sprawls. The city tries to transform itself into something medium density, as housing prices go up. Office and commercial real estate go up. People want white collar, nice, high-paying jobs. They don't want to be plumbers and electricians and house painters, but executives and managers and have their own businesses. But suburban sprawl really doesn't support those things very well. People get pushed miles and miles from their jobs. Traffic becomes a nightmare. The prices go off the charts. Tradespeople get pushed out. Culture takes a dive. No more walking or biking when those freeways go up. Bad examples of sprawl are places like Houston and Los Angeles, even the Bay Area now. I spent 4 years in LA, 5 in the Bay Area. LA is truly mind-blowing. The entire basin is just one big grid of endless permutations of the same concrete jungle, here or there less dense or more dense, a few bright spots, but OMG and endless labyrinth of Stapleses, Starbuckses, McD's and strip malls... But LA in the 1930s wasn't that. It was just a few towns here and there and some downtown. It was literally a few spots in the desert where people had little nuclei of the small-town living. It just grew without real direction and was completely powered by oil and cars.

throwaway894345 5y ago
I don't like American suburbs for me personally, but the US has tons of space and I don't understand how traffic would be better if we pushed more people into less space (with fewer streets and so on). Indeed, most big cities are famous for their congestion. With respect to prices, these are self-regulating. If prices go up, things either get denser and/or people move elsewhere. > Culture takes a dive. Again, suburbs aren't my thing, but it seems really offensive/chauvinistic to imply that suburban culture is lesser than urban culture. I'm sure I'm misunderstanding, and in the spirit of charity I want to give you the opportunity to set the record straight. > No more walking or biking when those freeways go up. Is this intrinsic to suburbs, or is it an artifact of how suburbs were planned at the time that suburbs exploded in popularity? Can suburbs be designed to be more walkable/bikeable (I would actually be surprised if they aren't already)?