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> If only we were hellbent on building communities where you don't need to get in a car every time you leave your house. Not everyone lives in dense cities, no

> If only we were hellbent on building communities where you don't need to get in a car every time you leave your house. Not everyone lives in dense cities, nor does everyone want to. >There's a better way to design cities and towns. What makes them better? I love Tokyo, for example, but would hate to live there - as it's too crowded for my sanity. But I'm not going to hate on others for wanting that. I'd rather the government focus on fostering choice and options, rather than picking what they deem is "best" for everyone. >...every NIMBY fighting tooth and nail against allowing people to live close to jobs, amenities, public transport, and bike infra is responsible for accelerating our present crisis. I think you're misreading the argument from many NIMBY's: they aren't fighting against those things, but rather fighting against growth in population _in general._ YIMBY's take population growth and density in an area as a given assumption, and then solve from there. NIMBY's on the other hand would argue that there's plenty of space to spread out elsewhere.

kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
You can have suburbanism with walkable towns. This is how suburbs were built before 1945.
- bombcar 4y ago
  And those still exist! And any “small town” is walkable almost by definition-but people move away from them to the outskirts of the cities.
  - SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
    I don't think that's true. My grandparents live near a town of 4k people or so that's not walkable in the slightest, spread out over miles of highway with massive city-sized streets criscrossing everything. Most of the houses are 2+ miles away from the grocery store.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      I'm sure they exist, but what is around the grocery store that there's no houses within 2 miles? Often the "new developments" near these towns are out of town a bit, but even two miles isn't an insane walk. I'll grant that many of them don't have much in the way of sidewalks, but you can often find them.
      - SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
        It has some unbuildable hills on one side, the county hospital on another, and then parking lots plus a giant highway interchange filling out the rest of the space.
  - p0pcult 4y ago
    Go visit Chadron, Nebraska sometime. On foot. You'll see the error in your generalization.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      Arial reconnaissance seems to show it similar to the town I'm in; it could use a bit more sidewalks but the old downtown is certainly walkable and even Walmart shows obvious paths where people are walking across the grass/ground.
cbsmith 4y ago
>> If only we were hellbent on building communities where you don't need to get in a car every time you leave your house. > Not everyone lives in dense cities, nor does everyone want to. I may have missed the part there were the original post said otherwise. We could check the history books on this, but I'm pretty sure before cars everyone did not live in "dense cities". ;-)
- Gibbon1 4y ago
  One thing I noticed looking for a house is front side lot lines got a lot longer between 1900 and 1950. 1900 front lot lines are around 25 feet. 1950 you see 50-75 foot lot lines. Streets got wider too and setbacks were added. 1900 street is 35 feet no setbacks. 1950 with setback it's 100 feet. Ignoring density that means people would have to walk 2-3 times farther to get to businesses. Except car centric zoning increased the distance between houses and businesses 3-10 times farther.
  - cbsmith 4y ago
    Very true. (Though innovations like bicycles mean you can still get to places pretty fast.) But per the OP's comment, if you're not in a densely populated city, your distances to other businesses and people is not primarily driven by how long it takes you to get to the end of your lot or how wide the streets are.
0_____0 4y ago
Most people can't even live in a walkable city if they wanted to. We haven't built enough capacity. The Bay Area basically stopped building housing after the 70s and is about a half million units short overall IIRC. Tokyo density isn't necessary. I now live in a East Coast city that's denser than San Francisco and has very very few buildings over 4 stories -- there's a sort of low-scale density that pervades the city's entire surface area, as opposed to the California model, which is SFHs with big yards and massive setbacks over 90% of the urban landscape, 10% massive high-rises.
avar 4y ago
The government is massively subsidizing private car ownership with zoning, minimum parking requirements etc. It should be a personal choice, but until someone using a road needs to pay a toll that's high enough to outbid other uses of that land it's not, it's central planning.
stephencanon 4y ago
>> If only we were hellbent on building communities where you don't need to get in a car every time you leave your house. > Not everyone lives in dense cities, nor does everyone want to. Fortunately, you don't need to in order to not be car-bound. I live in a small college town (10k people), and ride a bike for almost all trips April-November. It's easy, because there's no suburban mess of six+-lane roads or 40+mph traffic to cross. We went to a party at a friend's house on Sunday on the other side of town; my five-year-old daughter road her bike, and I carried our two-year-old on mine. We are hours away from the closest "dense city", and biking is easy and safe. My parents live in another ~10k person New England town. My 82-year-old mom drives her car once a week to get groceries, and walks for the rest of her trips. This myth that you can only be car-free (or mostly car-free) in big cities has got to die.
- aeternum 4y ago
  The stats are telling though, you put your family at 250% risk of death by choosing the bike over the car. That is a major problem that needs to be addressed with infrastructure. Unless your city has separated bike lanes, it's hard to say that this is a safe choice compared to a car. In the UK the stats are even worse, with something like 16x risk of death and 78x risk of injury. https://kennettpeterson.com/2016/08/26/riding-your-bike-is-78-times-more-dangerous-than-driving-your-car/ https://kennettpeterson.com/2016/08/26/riding-your-bike-is-7...
  - stephencanon 4y ago
    I feel pretty comfortable that riding a bike here is safer than driving a car in the suburbs. Drivers generally pay attention, and speeds are much lower. More infrastructure would make it better, but we have a real protected lane for the part of our commute that actually has significant traffic.
mullingitover 4y ago
> Not everyone lives in dense cities, nor does everyone want to. That's great for them, but let's price things realistically. As it stands right now, the exurbs are economic dead weight. Their infrastructure isn't supported by their tax base and it never will be. I think we might find that people not wanting to live in dense cities might feel differently if they are actually required to pay for the infrastructure that the dense cities are currently purchasing for them.
- dsfyu404ed 4y ago
  >As it stands right now, the exurbs are economic dead weight >I think we might find that people not wanting to live in dense cities might feel differently if they are actually required to pay for the infrastructure that the dense cities are currently purchasing for them. You mean like some monstrosity of a 6-lane intersection that got spec'd out that way in order to quality for some state grant? Pretty much all local development is "how do we qualify for someone else's money" driven. These municipalities could go it on their own. But if you turn off the money tap you also lose the ability to complain and threaten to take something from them if they don't do what you like and that is a compromise nobody seems willing to make.
  - mullingitover 4y ago
    > These municipalities could go it on their own. But if you turn off the money tap you also lose the ability to complain and threaten to take something from them if they don't do what you like and that is a compromise nobody seems willing to make. Yes, these municipalities could pay drastically higher taxes to keep their infrastructure functioning without subsidies. That doesn't refute my point, which was that they might feel differently about the arrangement if those things were realistically priced in.
- gameman144 4y ago
  I hear this argument a lot, but it has never made a ton of sense to me: different area are specialized for different things, and they have a spillover effect of that specialization into neighboring areas. Dense urban areas specialize in economic output: that economic output spills over into neighboring areas (urban areas produce more economic output than urban areas consume) Suburban and exurban areas specialize in providing labor: that labor will spill over into neighboring areas (suburbs have more workers than people working in suburbs) Rural areas specialize in production and extraction: those goods will spill over into neighboring areas (rural areas produce more raw materials than they consume.) This means that suburbs will consume more than their "fair share" of economic output, just like urban areas will consume more than their "fair share" of labor and goods.
enragedcacti 4y ago
> What makes them better? I love Tokyo, for example, but would hate to live there - as it's too crowded for my sanity. But I'm not going to hate on others for wanting that. I'd rather the government focus on fostering choice and options, rather than picking what they deem is "best" for everyone. I don't mean to single you out, but I find comments like this really perplexing. Do you really believe the GP meant "everyone should live somewhere like Tokyo"? Most urbanists in the US are talking about fostering choice and options. Right now in the US you have effectively two options - rural or suburban car-centric living where owning a car is the only efficient option - or living in extremely dense environments that still cater to cars but its at least possible to live without one. You can look at a number of different countries in Europe to see how even small towns can still be built with a natural density curve to allow choice rather than the car-centric sprawl that we have here.
- seneca 4y ago
  > You can look at a number of different countries in Europe to see how even small towns can still be built with a natural density curve to allow choice rather than the car-centric sprawl that we have here. I think this is the model American urbanists need to take. Move to small towns where they can have more influence, and they don't have to try to force their preferences on existing large communities. Get involved with development of a small town, guide it into these mixed use styles and attract like minded people. It would be significantly less of an uphill battle, and wouldn't anger all of the people who like the ways things already are in their large cities.
  - enragedcacti 4y ago
    > and they don't have to try to force their preferences on existing large communities. Or they can advocate for their ideology until existing large communities share their preferences. I didn't really talk about climate above but that is a huge influence as well. I think advocates feel that time pressure and don't see any other option but to push for sweeping changes quickly and at a large scale.
sampo 4y ago
> Not everyone lives in dense cities, nor does everyone want to. More people would like to live in dense cities, that what there currently are apartments available in dense cities. We need to build more dense, to answer to the demand with supply. Of course not everyone likes dense, walkable areas. But dense areas, by definition, don't need much land area. So the rest of the land area remains available for sparse communities. Everyone should be happy, then.
gubernation 4y ago
Your "choice and options" opinion is a vapid opinion that's somehow weaseled its way into most degenerate right-wing/internet libertarian talking points, and "don't hate" is just wokeness adapted for the same purpose. Free market capitalism does not have to apply to every single policy discussion. If you feel like you're being hated on, that's the price of having an opinion, in this case a bad one that leads to worse infrastructure and more pollution for nearly everyone else.
palata 4y ago
Coming from Europe, I was very surprised in Vegas when I needed to spend 10min crossing a road with a taxi, because it was hell to do those few hundred metres by foot. I think that there is a lot of work that can be done for public transportation (and pedestrians) in the US. At least in dense cities.
thomaslangston 4y ago
> I'd rather the government focus on fostering choice and options, rather than picking what they deem is "best" for everyone. This is not a reasonable interpretation of reality. One, the government effectively limits choice today via single family zoning and car centric city planning. Claiming NIMBYS are for more choice is disingenuous. Two, there are some valid definitions of better, if not best. Dense, walkable, bike friendly, public transit oriented city planning leads to more active lifestyles, fewer transit deaths, less air pollution, lower carbon footprints, and better city financials. Spreading out as worse isn't an assumption. It is a multi faceted and we'll documented reality.
CalRobert 4y ago
"Not everyone lives in dense cities, nor does everyone want to." I very specifically mentioned towns as well. Somewhere like San Luis Obispo comes to mind. It's about having places where you can walk, bike, or take transit for most of your daily needs. It doesn't need to be a city.

kevin_thibedeau 4y ago

You can have suburbanism with walkable towns. This is how suburbs were built before 1945.

bombcar 4y ago
And those still exist! And any “small town” is walkable almost by definition-but people move away from them to the outskirts of the cities.
- SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
  I don't think that's true. My grandparents live near a town of 4k people or so that's not walkable in the slightest, spread out over miles of highway with massive city-sized streets criscrossing everything. Most of the houses are 2+ miles away from the grocery store.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    I'm sure they exist, but what is around the grocery store that there's no houses within 2 miles? Often the "new developments" near these towns are out of town a bit, but even two miles isn't an insane walk. I'll grant that many of them don't have much in the way of sidewalks, but you can often find them.
    - SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
      It has some unbuildable hills on one side, the county hospital on another, and then parking lots plus a giant highway interchange filling out the rest of the space.
- p0pcult 4y ago
  Go visit Chadron, Nebraska sometime. On foot. You'll see the error in your generalization.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Arial reconnaissance seems to show it similar to the town I'm in; it could use a bit more sidewalks but the old downtown is certainly walkable and even Walmart shows obvious paths where people are walking across the grass/ground.

cbsmith 4y ago

>> If only we were hellbent on building communities where you don't need to get in a car every time you leave your house. > Not everyone lives in dense cities, nor does everyone want to. I may have missed the part there were the original post said otherwise. We could check the history books on this, but I'm pretty sure before cars everyone did not live in "dense cities". ;-)

Gibbon1 4y ago
One thing I noticed looking for a house is front side lot lines got a lot longer between 1900 and 1950. 1900 front lot lines are around 25 feet. 1950 you see 50-75 foot lot lines. Streets got wider too and setbacks were added. 1900 street is 35 feet no setbacks. 1950 with setback it's 100 feet. Ignoring density that means people would have to walk 2-3 times farther to get to businesses. Except car centric zoning increased the distance between houses and businesses 3-10 times farther.
- cbsmith 4y ago
  Very true. (Though innovations like bicycles mean you can still get to places pretty fast.) But per the OP's comment, if you're not in a densely populated city, your distances to other businesses and people is not primarily driven by how long it takes you to get to the end of your lot or how wide the streets are.

0_____0 4y ago

Most people can't even live in a walkable city if they wanted to. We haven't built enough capacity. The Bay Area basically stopped building housing after the 70s and is about a half million units short overall IIRC. Tokyo density isn't necessary. I now live in a East Coast city that's denser than San Francisco and has very very few buildings over 4 stories -- there's a sort of low-scale density that pervades the city's entire surface area, as opposed to the California model, which is SFHs with big yards and massive setbacks over 90% of the urban landscape, 10% massive high-rises.

avar 4y ago

The government is massively subsidizing private car ownership with zoning, minimum parking requirements etc. It should be a personal choice, but until someone using a road needs to pay a toll that's high enough to outbid other uses of that land it's not, it's central planning.

stephencanon 4y ago

>> If only we were hellbent on building communities where you don't need to get in a car every time you leave your house. > Not everyone lives in dense cities, nor does everyone want to. Fortunately, you don't need to in order to not be car-bound. I live in a small college town (10k people), and ride a bike for almost all trips April-November. It's easy, because there's no suburban mess of six+-lane roads or 40+mph traffic to cross. We went to a party at a friend's house on Sunday on the other side of town; my five-year-old daughter road her bike, and I carried our two-year-old on mine. We are hours away from the closest "dense city", and biking is easy and safe. My parents live in another ~10k person New England town. My 82-year-old mom drives her car once a week to get groceries, and walks for the rest of her trips. This myth that you can only be car-free (or mostly car-free) in big cities has got to die.

aeternum 4y ago
The stats are telling though, you put your family at 250% risk of death by choosing the bike over the car. That is a major problem that needs to be addressed with infrastructure. Unless your city has separated bike lanes, it's hard to say that this is a safe choice compared to a car. In the UK the stats are even worse, with something like 16x risk of death and 78x risk of injury. https://kennettpeterson.com/2016/08/26/riding-your-bike-is-78-times-more-dangerous-than-driving-your-car/ https://kennettpeterson.com/2016/08/26/riding-your-bike-is-7...
- stephencanon 4y ago
  I feel pretty comfortable that riding a bike here is safer than driving a car in the suburbs. Drivers generally pay attention, and speeds are much lower. More infrastructure would make it better, but we have a real protected lane for the part of our commute that actually has significant traffic.

mullingitover 4y ago

> Not everyone lives in dense cities, nor does everyone want to. That's great for them, but let's price things realistically. As it stands right now, the exurbs are economic dead weight. Their infrastructure isn't supported by their tax base and it never will be. I think we might find that people not wanting to live in dense cities might feel differently if they are actually required to pay for the infrastructure that the dense cities are currently purchasing for them.

dsfyu404ed 4y ago
>As it stands right now, the exurbs are economic dead weight >I think we might find that people not wanting to live in dense cities might feel differently if they are actually required to pay for the infrastructure that the dense cities are currently purchasing for them. You mean like some monstrosity of a 6-lane intersection that got spec'd out that way in order to quality for some state grant? Pretty much all local development is "how do we qualify for someone else's money" driven. These municipalities could go it on their own. But if you turn off the money tap you also lose the ability to complain and threaten to take something from them if they don't do what you like and that is a compromise nobody seems willing to make.
- mullingitover 4y ago
  > These municipalities could go it on their own. But if you turn off the money tap you also lose the ability to complain and threaten to take something from them if they don't do what you like and that is a compromise nobody seems willing to make. Yes, these municipalities could pay drastically higher taxes to keep their infrastructure functioning without subsidies. That doesn't refute my point, which was that they might feel differently about the arrangement if those things were realistically priced in.
gameman144 4y ago
I hear this argument a lot, but it has never made a ton of sense to me: different area are specialized for different things, and they have a spillover effect of that specialization into neighboring areas. Dense urban areas specialize in economic output: that economic output spills over into neighboring areas (urban areas produce more economic output than urban areas consume) Suburban and exurban areas specialize in providing labor: that labor will spill over into neighboring areas (suburbs have more workers than people working in suburbs) Rural areas specialize in production and extraction: those goods will spill over into neighboring areas (rural areas produce more raw materials than they consume.) This means that suburbs will consume more than their "fair share" of economic output, just like urban areas will consume more than their "fair share" of labor and goods.

enragedcacti 4y ago

> What makes them better? I love Tokyo, for example, but would hate to live there - as it's too crowded for my sanity. But I'm not going to hate on others for wanting that. I'd rather the government focus on fostering choice and options, rather than picking what they deem is "best" for everyone. I don't mean to single you out, but I find comments like this really perplexing. Do you really believe the GP meant "everyone should live somewhere like Tokyo"? Most urbanists in the US are talking about fostering choice and options. Right now in the US you have effectively two options - rural or suburban car-centric living where owning a car is the only efficient option - or living in extremely dense environments that still cater to cars but its at least possible to live without one. You can look at a number of different countries in Europe to see how even small towns can still be built with a natural density curve to allow choice rather than the car-centric sprawl that we have here.

seneca 4y ago
> You can look at a number of different countries in Europe to see how even small towns can still be built with a natural density curve to allow choice rather than the car-centric sprawl that we have here. I think this is the model American urbanists need to take. Move to small towns where they can have more influence, and they don't have to try to force their preferences on existing large communities. Get involved with development of a small town, guide it into these mixed use styles and attract like minded people. It would be significantly less of an uphill battle, and wouldn't anger all of the people who like the ways things already are in their large cities.
- enragedcacti 4y ago
  > and they don't have to try to force their preferences on existing large communities. Or they can advocate for their ideology until existing large communities share their preferences. I didn't really talk about climate above but that is a huge influence as well. I think advocates feel that time pressure and don't see any other option but to push for sweeping changes quickly and at a large scale.

sampo 4y ago

> Not everyone lives in dense cities, nor does everyone want to. More people would like to live in dense cities, that what there currently are apartments available in dense cities. We need to build more dense, to answer to the demand with supply. Of course not everyone likes dense, walkable areas. But dense areas, by definition, don't need much land area. So the rest of the land area remains available for sparse communities. Everyone should be happy, then.

gubernation 4y ago

Your "choice and options" opinion is a vapid opinion that's somehow weaseled its way into most degenerate right-wing/internet libertarian talking points, and "don't hate" is just wokeness adapted for the same purpose. Free market capitalism does not have to apply to every single policy discussion. If you feel like you're being hated on, that's the price of having an opinion, in this case a bad one that leads to worse infrastructure and more pollution for nearly everyone else.

palata 4y ago

Coming from Europe, I was very surprised in Vegas when I needed to spend 10min crossing a road with a taxi, because it was hell to do those few hundred metres by foot. I think that there is a lot of work that can be done for public transportation (and pedestrians) in the US. At least in dense cities.

thomaslangston 4y ago

> I'd rather the government focus on fostering choice and options, rather than picking what they deem is "best" for everyone. This is not a reasonable interpretation of reality. One, the government effectively limits choice today via single family zoning and car centric city planning. Claiming NIMBYS are for more choice is disingenuous. Two, there are some valid definitions of better, if not best. Dense, walkable, bike friendly, public transit oriented city planning leads to more active lifestyles, fewer transit deaths, less air pollution, lower carbon footprints, and better city financials. Spreading out as worse isn't an assumption. It is a multi faceted and we'll documented reality.

CalRobert 4y ago

"Not everyone lives in dense cities, nor does everyone want to." I very specifically mentioned towns as well. Somewhere like San Luis Obispo comes to mind. It's about having places where you can walk, bike, or take transit for most of your daily needs. It doesn't need to be a city.