4 ms·
I've lived in highly walkable, pro-transit areas. It does have benefits, don't get me wrong. The flip side of the coin is that those areas usually have high pop
by umvi 4y ago
I've lived in highly walkable, pro-transit areas. It does have benefits, don't get me wrong. The flip side of the coin is that those areas usually have high population density. That comes with a lot of its own cons - noise pollution, air pollution, annoying neighbors you can hear and smell through your walls, etc. To avoid these cons, a lot of Americans want their own house on their own property and doing that means moving to a lower population density area which means less walkability, less transit, more cars.
- kiba 4y agoNoise and air pollution are in part caused by cars. Meanwhile in the suburb, you have lawn mowers and leaf blowers, which I absolutely hate with a passion. I don't know about annoying neighbors and smells. That seems to be a design and engineering issue.
- umvi 4y ago> I don't know about annoying neighbors and smells. If you live in a lower income area, get used to your condo/townhouse occasionally smelling like marijuana and/or tobacco whenever the neighbors decide to hotbox. Also get used to arguments and loud music late at night on weekends. > That seems to be a design and engineering issue. I'm sure you could build hermetically and acoustically sealed condos that keep out all unwanted noises and smells, but those sound like "rich people" condos that are not very economical.
- blackoil 4y agoThe cost of decent insulation is a low percentage of overall cost. Also don't know if low income family can afford a nice/safe house in suburb, multiple cars etc.
- dont__panic 4y agoSounds like issues that an HOA (if you're into that) or the police/311 ought to address in a city. I assume that's why these services exist -- to resolve conflicts between people who live in dense environments where there is no option but to resolve the conflict. If those issues go unresolved, that's a dereliction of city government and apartment administration duty.
- ceeplusplus 4y agoIf I have a kid who is learning music, your plan screws over any opportunity they have to practice at home. I've lived in newly built apartments and even those are not sound proof. Not to mention public transit is dirty and unsafe in any major city in the US because there is way too much tolerance for disorderly and disruptive people.
- mjevans 4y agoSounds like Minimum Code (building) isn't good enough.
- odiroot 4y ago> Noise and air pollution are in part caused by cars Having lived in a Berlin Altbau flat, in a dense central neighbourhood, I can say that's not the biggest problem. At least not when at home. Crappy neighbours are. For both noise and smells. Techno blasting behind the wall. Arguing families and shrieking children, through the wide open windows. Passionate cigarette and weed smokers (plenty of them in Berlin). Smoke from cooking wafting through the Hof. This is even a bigger problem if you are unlucky to have to live in a commie block (pretty much anywhere in Central Europe). Even more neighbours, even denser.
- dangus 4y agoAir pollution: Caused by what? Probably cars. Noise pollution: Caused by what? Probably cars. (Sure, some sirens here and there, but rural and suburban living doesn't make you immune to the sounds of train crossings, highways, jake brakes, motorcycles, etc). Annoying neighbors, smell/hearing through walls: 1. Easily mitigated through smart building design and practices, enforced by building code. 2. You can have completely detached single family homes and still build walkable transit-oriented suburbs just by sticking to some simple development practices: - Banning subdevelopments that disconnect form the city street grid, requiring residential neighborhoods to fit into a holistic city plan rather than farm parcels being sold where the city greenlights residential development projects without an ounce of thought to how it integrates with the town/city. - Prohibiting neighborhood designs that increase walking distance, like winding roads and cul-de-sacs. - Building traffic-separated, safe, pleasant cycling and walking infrastructure that offer a workable alternative to driving - Building roads with traffic calming measures in mind. For example, unnecessarily wide suburban neighborhood streets encourage speeding. - Properly funding transit service and removing social stigma against transit usage ("I won't take the bus that's for poor people" - we literally need government ad campaigns to help change minds on the issue just like those used to promote seatbelts. - Prohibiting parking lots against streets, like in big box store developments. Parking should be required to exist in the back of the lot wherever possible. - Removing mandatory parking minimums. Believe it or not, real estate developers don't naturally want to build parking lots that can't make a return on investment. They're often required to by the city to make them in order to...you guessed it...help ease traffic! - Prohibiting excessive dead space/green space/setbacks in developments. Overall, I don't agree that there are downsides to walkable areas that have to exist.
- mjevans 4y agoI've seen that stores against the road thing in a Food Truck cooking competition TV show. Did a good job of tricking some contestants for a bit until they realized the scale of the area was still large parking lot sized and the street was just the no consumer doors (or very infrequently used 'side' doors) face of strip malls with parking lots. Density can't be faked by flipping the lot into the middle of the block. It can be made real at a city level by design and engineered accommodation interfaces. Public owned mega parking venues at the edges that interface between the city core and external regions. A utility layer and isolated areas for vehicles to deliver or traverse the city.