7 ms·

Interesting article but not realistic IMO. It's just that roads/streets capital investment is incredibly complicated and so much thought/systems/law has built u

Interesting article but not realistic IMO. It's just that roads/streets capital investment is incredibly complicated and so much thought/systems/law has built up around their concept and creation. The entirety of the problem is literally just cars. Cars are the problem. We've created a society that needs them but we're butting up against our need to move fast but we forget we're human and stupid. I think either a new novel way to travel or self driving cars that actually work are the only answers that can solve this.

cyberax 3y ago
[flagged]
- Lvl999Noob 3y ago
  Isn't that what people mean when they say that cars are the problem? With a personal vehicle, all you need is a road and you can start from any point on the road and stop at any point. That means people and shops can be as spread out as they want. This leads to sprawl which perpetuates the problem as cars (or other motor vehicles) become necessary for any meaningful distance. Edit: when people advocate to remove cars, I take it as removing cars as a viable option of transport and then designing the roads, public transport, facility placement, etc to make that a reality.
  - cyberax 3y ago
    What's wrong with sprawl? It allows people to live in spacious houses. The overwhelming majority of people want that (more than 80%). Take a look at your assumptions. There are some problems with cars: gasoline use and general unsafety due to human drivers. EVs are solving the first one, and self-driving will solve the second one.
    - stanleykm 3y ago
      Cant wait to sit in traffic for 3 hours every day as i commute 7 miles from megaburb 8 to megaburb 6
    - Dalewyn 3y ago
      >What's wrong with sprawl? It gives the commons the freedom of movement, it's hard to control them when they live and work where they please. Controlling the commons becomes much easier when they are densely packed into singular locations. That was sarcasm, if it wasn't obvious; though I'm fairly sure a number of the people with anti-car agendas actually believe this.
      - orwin 3y ago
        Nah, the issue with sprawl appears when everybody finally left the city center: the infrastructure becomes too expensive to maintain without the city center to subsidize suburb roads and water management, and the city either stop fixing it or indebt itself too much. If you're living in an exurb that's becoming suburbia, and the city propose you to close your septic tank and attach yourself to the suburb water management, only do it if you really, really trust your local politicians. And I mean, really.
        cyberax 3y ago
        > the city center to subsidize suburb roads and water management Wow. Toxic propaganda is really successful. If you read ACTUAL analyses, the dense cities are not really that more efficient: https://www.mdpi.com/2413-8851/5/3/69 https://www.mdpi.com/2413-8851/5/3/69 In particular, water and sewer costs don't go down a lot. An anecdote: I live in Seattle which is fairly dense, yet my sewer+water costs 5 _times_ more than in sprawling Boise, ID.
        orwin 3y ago
        I guess I'm just anti-sprawl. My mother used to live in a small village near a small city, an exurb. Now, it's becoming suburbia, but not the good kind, the 'full detached home' kind (not joking, there isn't even a single semi-detached home here). I see how it changed everything, in the wrong direction. It killed the local bar/dinner in exchange for a monstrosity old people cannot access. It killed the community, the traffic tripled, you had to attach yourself to waste management (and now they have issues). My mother had to add a wall/fence to break the sound of the road, when trees and plants were sufficient, and during rush hour you still feel like you live in a city, without the city access advantages. I would typically call most of Seattle suburbia. It does not seems as sprawly than Stockton (that I actually visited unlike Seattle), but it doesn't look good. Also, high rise is as bad as suburbia in my opinion, I hate it with less passion because I only had to live in high rise building temporarily. But the cost each time you rise 3 meters is exponential for everything (except electricity), so if your city is 10% high rise, 80% detached/semi-detached homes, no shit it'll be expensive. Is Boise, ID a suburban sprawl? Or is it a fairly dense city without a shit ton of high-rise units?
    - CorrectHorseBat 3y ago
      It takes up space (maybe not an issue in the US), it requires a lot more energy, and it makes using healthier transportation like walking and cycling a lot more difficult. But yes, living spacious with a private garden and not to close to your neighbors is very nice. I would love to have both.
      - cyberax 3y ago
        > It takes up space And? > it requires a lot more energy This is the _only_ problem, and it's being solved by switching to EVs. They are more effective than buses and are competitive with rail. And the household energy use can be offset by solar energy (individual houses are great for it!). > and it makes using healthier transportation like walking and cycling a lot more difficult. I can get my 10k a day steps in a nice sprawl with shady tree lanes much easier than in Manhattan.
        Lvl999Noob 3y ago
        > I can get my 10k a day steps in a nice sprawl with shady tree lanes much easier than in Manhattan. Are you allowed to have shady trees on road sides? I would think that they would be disallowed since they block visibility and force drivers to slow down.
        cyberax 3y ago
        Since when ALL roads are high-speed roads?
    - dmwilcox 3y ago
      If new neighborhoods had to pay for their own pipes, roads, electrical hookups and couldn't put that on existing tax payers it'd help municipal finances a lot. Sprawl is expensive from an infrastructure perspective. And the spending to benefit a few at the expense of many is not unlike some sweet heart tax deal "bringing in good jobs" at the cost of several million dollars a pop
      - cyberax 3y ago
        Sigh. Sprawl is _CHEAPER_ than dense cities for most infrastructure. To give you a perspective, one mile of NYC subway now costs about as much as 1000 miles of 6-lane freeway. One mile of new light rail in Seattle will be enough to maintain all roads in Washington state for half a year. The same story for water, sewer, and electricity. Dense cities are _incredibly_ expensive to maintain because projects become extremely complicated, with lots of project management overhead (more people-hours). And people are EXPENSIVE, compared to raw materials.
        woodruffw 3y ago
        This isn’t a true cost analysis: NYC subway lines can simultaneously be more expensive in absolute terms and cheaper per commuter-mile-year. The amortized cost of a commuter journey on the subway is a tiny fraction of the cost of and on roads, for all parties. (This is true even when the subway is obscenely expensive to construct, as the 2nd Avenue line is. But treating deep-tunnel construction under some of the densest and most expensive real estate in the US as the norm is essentially dishonest.)
        cyberax 3y ago
        > This isn’t a true cost analysis: NYC subway lines can simultaneously be more expensive in absolute terms and cheaper per commuter-mile-year. It's not. > The amortized cost of a commuter journey on the subway is a tiny fraction of the cost of and on roads, for all parties. Nope. Roads in sparse cities are cheaper on per-commute and the building cost. > But treating deep-tunnel construction under some of the densest and most expensive real estate in the US as the norm is essentially dishonest. Why? Ever-rising costs is the inevitable result of densification.
    - FearOfTheDuck 3y ago
      > What's wrong with sprawl? Think about children! They are stripped of the independence of move, because they can not drive a car. And everything is so far away (school, after-school activities, friends places) so it takes forever to go there by foot/public transit. And self-driving cars seem nowhere near the production-ready deployment. It's very strange to rely on a solution which may be probably somewhere in the future. Why don't you mention a teleport then?
      - cyberax 3y ago
        > They are stripped of the independence of move, because they can not drive a car Self-driving cars will solve that with this decade.
        Lvl999Noob 3y ago
        We have something similar to self driving cars. Taxis and other public transport! Sprawl means that a taxi just waiting around the corner isn't gonna make money. That leaves uber and similar apps which are expensive. Reducing sprawl makes it possible to find a taxi a short walk away from your home. I was able to commute to school myself using public transport because those roads were busy enough that I had to wait just 5 mins in front of my house for one to come. That wouldn't have been possible if I lived in a suburbia.
        cyberax 3y ago
        > We have something similar to self driving cars. Taxis and other public transport! No we don't. Taxis are not a solution because they are INCREDIBLY dirty. You might as well be riding on train-cars worth of coal. And public transit is worse, because it's inevitably slow and inflexible. Edit: taxis are expensive not because they are cars, but because they need dedicated drivers. And here in the US even taxi drivers earn a somewhat liveable salary, and as a result they have a huge carbon footprint. But if you're OK with semi-slave labor, then it can work, agreed.
        Lvl999Noob 3y ago
    - woodruffw 3y ago
      Induced demand is a funny thing: most people want more space (I want more space!), but suburban sprawl in the US reveals how little that space actually gets used: guest bedrooms that aren’t opened for years, furnished basements with untouched pool tables, a single common room that everybody actually uses, &c. Put another way: car-driven development induces desire for sprawl, but living patterns reveal actual preferences here.
    - Lvl999Noob 3y ago
      > What's wrong with sprawl? It allows people to live in spacious houses. The overwhelming majority of people want that That's true. I would rather live in a house that's more spacious than not. But more than that, I would rather live in a house that allows me to buy an ice cream if I have 5 minutes of free time than in one that makes that ice cream buying an hour long trip filled with smoke and noise. You can have spacious houses without having to live all alone. > There are some problems with cars: gasoline use and general unsafety due to human drivers. You missed another problem with cars: they are space inefficient. I don't have the exact numbers but you can fit way more people in a bus than you can a car. And of course, you can fit even more people on the street if they are walking on their own feet. > EVs are solving the first one They may solve the gasoline problem but they aren't solving the space one. > self-driving will solve the second one I am not gonna hold my breath. There is another way that could solve both of those problems, you know. Make cities more compact. With compact cities, you don't need to drive that much. And if all your destinations are close by, there is no need to allow cars to go to 100 KMpH. In fact, limiting intra-city driving to be under 60 (or lower) KMpH would be safer, fuel efficient, and less noisy (I think). You could even make the roads thinner then since everyone is moving at a slow speed, which opens up more space inside the city.
      - jacobolus 3y ago
        60 km/h is an insanely unsafe driving speed when there are pedestrians or cyclists anywhere nearby: that's how we end up with heaps of dead children in the streets. Driving on ordinary streets in populated areas should be more like 30 km/h (20 miles/h), and roads should be designed so that cars naturally go that speed even without significant enforcement by traffic cops.
        Lvl999Noob 3y ago
        That's why I also added a (or lower). I do not know what a safe driving speed would be. I just know its way less than the 100 KMpH that roads are usually designed for. Driving speed should be about equal to a leisurely human-powered bicycle speed. Or maybe lower since they have more mass, but no one's gonna agree to that. (Maybe that's a good thing?)
    - justworkout 3y ago
      > What's wrong with sprawl? It allows people to live in spacious houses. That's fine in an ideal world when you have a low population density and consistent or declining population. The reality is sprawl in the US coincides with population growth or migration quite often. Person 1 moves to a place where they can be far from people, have a nice forest behind their home, and have open roads. While the distance from their home to their destination is long, the roads are empty so it's stress free driving. Persons 2 through 300000 think that sounds great, so they move there as well. They all want to be far from people and have empty roads, so they abandon their 30 minute train commute for free living in the city. The forest behind Person 1's home gets chopped down and replaced by a packed suburb. The main road Person 1 took is now packed with traffic from the other people that moved there dreaming of his lifestyle. His 25 minute smooth commute is now 80 minutes. Construction is constantly ongoing to widen the roads to handle more traffic, instead of reduce the source of the traffic, and this makes traffic worse due to lanes being shut down. Roads quickly become full after construction ends, resulting in more traffic. This is the story of basically any city in America since the 1950s. People want more space and the freedom to drive to work, and end up in a packed neighborhood and whining about traffic when everyone else follows them. Someone who gets their first taste of it thinks "wow, this is great!" But it's becoming a nightmare for people who moved there 10 years prior. And it'll transition into a nightmare 10 years later for those who are loving it now. The nice nature gets knocked down and you're back to living in a space with too many people, but with none of the benefits of a proper city. You can't walk 2 minutes to a dozen different restaurants, relax by the river, or sit down on transport and read a book while going somewhere. You're stuck in traffic while every tree around you is being chopped down. And because HN is mostly programmers, most people here probably love the sprawl because they work from home and don't need to wake up at 6 AM to sit in traffic and huff car exhaust from 7 AM to 8:25 AM and arrive at the office at 8:30. But millions in the US are trapped in that loop.
- Krutonium 3y ago
  > European transit-oriented model. In what universe has it failed? Certainly not this one.
  - cyberax 3y ago
    Have you looked at the average commute times for the US and European cities? Go and do that.
    - debesyla 3y ago
      Commute vs driving?
      - cyberax 3y ago
        Commutes, all modes average.
        lozenge 3y ago
        Is this just work commuting or other things as well? I can pick up some groceries on my way home, in the US even this activity adds more mileage to your car.
        cyberax 3y ago
        Sure. It's even worse for that. Cars save even more time for errands, because transit is typically optimized for hub-to-spokes transportation to downtowns. > even this activity adds more mileage to your car. Why should you care about that?
        piva00 3y ago
        What about all the other trips a family/individual makes that isn't work-commute related? Things like: going grocery shopping, going to sports/hobbies activities, entertainment, going out to restaurants and bars, meeting friends at parks, etc.

cyberax 3y ago

[flagged]

Lvl999Noob 3y ago
Isn't that what people mean when they say that cars are the problem? With a personal vehicle, all you need is a road and you can start from any point on the road and stop at any point. That means people and shops can be as spread out as they want. This leads to sprawl which perpetuates the problem as cars (or other motor vehicles) become necessary for any meaningful distance. Edit: when people advocate to remove cars, I take it as removing cars as a viable option of transport and then designing the roads, public transport, facility placement, etc to make that a reality.
- cyberax 3y ago
  What's wrong with sprawl? It allows people to live in spacious houses. The overwhelming majority of people want that (more than 80%). Take a look at your assumptions. There are some problems with cars: gasoline use and general unsafety due to human drivers. EVs are solving the first one, and self-driving will solve the second one.
  - stanleykm 3y ago
    Cant wait to sit in traffic for 3 hours every day as i commute 7 miles from megaburb 8 to megaburb 6
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    >What's wrong with sprawl? It gives the commons the freedom of movement, it's hard to control them when they live and work where they please. Controlling the commons becomes much easier when they are densely packed into singular locations. That was sarcasm, if it wasn't obvious; though I'm fairly sure a number of the people with anti-car agendas actually believe this.
    - orwin 3y ago
      Nah, the issue with sprawl appears when everybody finally left the city center: the infrastructure becomes too expensive to maintain without the city center to subsidize suburb roads and water management, and the city either stop fixing it or indebt itself too much. If you're living in an exurb that's becoming suburbia, and the city propose you to close your septic tank and attach yourself to the suburb water management, only do it if you really, really trust your local politicians. And I mean, really.
      - cyberax 3y ago
        > the city center to subsidize suburb roads and water management Wow. Toxic propaganda is really successful. If you read ACTUAL analyses, the dense cities are not really that more efficient: https://www.mdpi.com/2413-8851/5/3/69 https://www.mdpi.com/2413-8851/5/3/69 In particular, water and sewer costs don't go down a lot. An anecdote: I live in Seattle which is fairly dense, yet my sewer+water costs 5 _times_ more than in sprawling Boise, ID.
        orwin 3y ago
        I guess I'm just anti-sprawl. My mother used to live in a small village near a small city, an exurb. Now, it's becoming suburbia, but not the good kind, the 'full detached home' kind (not joking, there isn't even a single semi-detached home here). I see how it changed everything, in the wrong direction. It killed the local bar/dinner in exchange for a monstrosity old people cannot access. It killed the community, the traffic tripled, you had to attach yourself to waste management (and now they have issues). My mother had to add a wall/fence to break the sound of the road, when trees and plants were sufficient, and during rush hour you still feel like you live in a city, without the city access advantages. I would typically call most of Seattle suburbia. It does not seems as sprawly than Stockton (that I actually visited unlike Seattle), but it doesn't look good. Also, high rise is as bad as suburbia in my opinion, I hate it with less passion because I only had to live in high rise building temporarily. But the cost each time you rise 3 meters is exponential for everything (except electricity), so if your city is 10% high rise, 80% detached/semi-detached homes, no shit it'll be expensive. Is Boise, ID a suburban sprawl? Or is it a fairly dense city without a shit ton of high-rise units?
  - CorrectHorseBat 3y ago
    It takes up space (maybe not an issue in the US), it requires a lot more energy, and it makes using healthier transportation like walking and cycling a lot more difficult. But yes, living spacious with a private garden and not to close to your neighbors is very nice. I would love to have both.
    - cyberax 3y ago
      > It takes up space And? > it requires a lot more energy This is the _only_ problem, and it's being solved by switching to EVs. They are more effective than buses and are competitive with rail. And the household energy use can be offset by solar energy (individual houses are great for it!). > and it makes using healthier transportation like walking and cycling a lot more difficult. I can get my 10k a day steps in a nice sprawl with shady tree lanes much easier than in Manhattan.
      - Lvl999Noob 3y ago
        > I can get my 10k a day steps in a nice sprawl with shady tree lanes much easier than in Manhattan. Are you allowed to have shady trees on road sides? I would think that they would be disallowed since they block visibility and force drivers to slow down.
        cyberax 3y ago
        Since when ALL roads are high-speed roads?
  - dmwilcox 3y ago
    If new neighborhoods had to pay for their own pipes, roads, electrical hookups and couldn't put that on existing tax payers it'd help municipal finances a lot. Sprawl is expensive from an infrastructure perspective. And the spending to benefit a few at the expense of many is not unlike some sweet heart tax deal "bringing in good jobs" at the cost of several million dollars a pop
    - cyberax 3y ago
      Sigh. Sprawl is _CHEAPER_ than dense cities for most infrastructure. To give you a perspective, one mile of NYC subway now costs about as much as 1000 miles of 6-lane freeway. One mile of new light rail in Seattle will be enough to maintain all roads in Washington state for half a year. The same story for water, sewer, and electricity. Dense cities are _incredibly_ expensive to maintain because projects become extremely complicated, with lots of project management overhead (more people-hours). And people are EXPENSIVE, compared to raw materials.
      - woodruffw 3y ago
        This isn’t a true cost analysis: NYC subway lines can simultaneously be more expensive in absolute terms and cheaper per commuter-mile-year. The amortized cost of a commuter journey on the subway is a tiny fraction of the cost of and on roads, for all parties. (This is true even when the subway is obscenely expensive to construct, as the 2nd Avenue line is. But treating deep-tunnel construction under some of the densest and most expensive real estate in the US as the norm is essentially dishonest.)
        cyberax 3y ago
        > This isn’t a true cost analysis: NYC subway lines can simultaneously be more expensive in absolute terms and cheaper per commuter-mile-year. It's not. > The amortized cost of a commuter journey on the subway is a tiny fraction of the cost of and on roads, for all parties. Nope. Roads in sparse cities are cheaper on per-commute and the building cost. > But treating deep-tunnel construction under some of the densest and most expensive real estate in the US as the norm is essentially dishonest. Why? Ever-rising costs is the inevitable result of densification.
  - FearOfTheDuck 3y ago
    > What's wrong with sprawl? Think about children! They are stripped of the independence of move, because they can not drive a car. And everything is so far away (school, after-school activities, friends places) so it takes forever to go there by foot/public transit. And self-driving cars seem nowhere near the production-ready deployment. It's very strange to rely on a solution which may be probably somewhere in the future. Why don't you mention a teleport then?
    - cyberax 3y ago
      > They are stripped of the independence of move, because they can not drive a car Self-driving cars will solve that with this decade.
      - Lvl999Noob 3y ago
        We have something similar to self driving cars. Taxis and other public transport! Sprawl means that a taxi just waiting around the corner isn't gonna make money. That leaves uber and similar apps which are expensive. Reducing sprawl makes it possible to find a taxi a short walk away from your home. I was able to commute to school myself using public transport because those roads were busy enough that I had to wait just 5 mins in front of my house for one to come. That wouldn't have been possible if I lived in a suburbia.
        cyberax 3y ago
        > We have something similar to self driving cars. Taxis and other public transport! No we don't. Taxis are not a solution because they are INCREDIBLY dirty. You might as well be riding on train-cars worth of coal. And public transit is worse, because it's inevitably slow and inflexible. Edit: taxis are expensive not because they are cars, but because they need dedicated drivers. And here in the US even taxi drivers earn a somewhat liveable salary, and as a result they have a huge carbon footprint. But if you're OK with semi-slave labor, then it can work, agreed.
        Lvl999Noob 3y ago
  - woodruffw 3y ago
    Induced demand is a funny thing: most people want more space (I want more space!), but suburban sprawl in the US reveals how little that space actually gets used: guest bedrooms that aren’t opened for years, furnished basements with untouched pool tables, a single common room that everybody actually uses, &c. Put another way: car-driven development induces desire for sprawl, but living patterns reveal actual preferences here.
  - Lvl999Noob 3y ago
    > What's wrong with sprawl? It allows people to live in spacious houses. The overwhelming majority of people want that That's true. I would rather live in a house that's more spacious than not. But more than that, I would rather live in a house that allows me to buy an ice cream if I have 5 minutes of free time than in one that makes that ice cream buying an hour long trip filled with smoke and noise. You can have spacious houses without having to live all alone. > There are some problems with cars: gasoline use and general unsafety due to human drivers. You missed another problem with cars: they are space inefficient. I don't have the exact numbers but you can fit way more people in a bus than you can a car. And of course, you can fit even more people on the street if they are walking on their own feet. > EVs are solving the first one They may solve the gasoline problem but they aren't solving the space one. > self-driving will solve the second one I am not gonna hold my breath. There is another way that could solve both of those problems, you know. Make cities more compact. With compact cities, you don't need to drive that much. And if all your destinations are close by, there is no need to allow cars to go to 100 KMpH. In fact, limiting intra-city driving to be under 60 (or lower) KMpH would be safer, fuel efficient, and less noisy (I think). You could even make the roads thinner then since everyone is moving at a slow speed, which opens up more space inside the city.
    - jacobolus 3y ago
      60 km/h is an insanely unsafe driving speed when there are pedestrians or cyclists anywhere nearby: that's how we end up with heaps of dead children in the streets. Driving on ordinary streets in populated areas should be more like 30 km/h (20 miles/h), and roads should be designed so that cars naturally go that speed even without significant enforcement by traffic cops.
      - Lvl999Noob 3y ago
        That's why I also added a (or lower). I do not know what a safe driving speed would be. I just know its way less than the 100 KMpH that roads are usually designed for. Driving speed should be about equal to a leisurely human-powered bicycle speed. Or maybe lower since they have more mass, but no one's gonna agree to that. (Maybe that's a good thing?)
  - justworkout 3y ago
    > What's wrong with sprawl? It allows people to live in spacious houses. That's fine in an ideal world when you have a low population density and consistent or declining population. The reality is sprawl in the US coincides with population growth or migration quite often. Person 1 moves to a place where they can be far from people, have a nice forest behind their home, and have open roads. While the distance from their home to their destination is long, the roads are empty so it's stress free driving. Persons 2 through 300000 think that sounds great, so they move there as well. They all want to be far from people and have empty roads, so they abandon their 30 minute train commute for free living in the city. The forest behind Person 1's home gets chopped down and replaced by a packed suburb. The main road Person 1 took is now packed with traffic from the other people that moved there dreaming of his lifestyle. His 25 minute smooth commute is now 80 minutes. Construction is constantly ongoing to widen the roads to handle more traffic, instead of reduce the source of the traffic, and this makes traffic worse due to lanes being shut down. Roads quickly become full after construction ends, resulting in more traffic. This is the story of basically any city in America since the 1950s. People want more space and the freedom to drive to work, and end up in a packed neighborhood and whining about traffic when everyone else follows them. Someone who gets their first taste of it thinks "wow, this is great!" But it's becoming a nightmare for people who moved there 10 years prior. And it'll transition into a nightmare 10 years later for those who are loving it now. The nice nature gets knocked down and you're back to living in a space with too many people, but with none of the benefits of a proper city. You can't walk 2 minutes to a dozen different restaurants, relax by the river, or sit down on transport and read a book while going somewhere. You're stuck in traffic while every tree around you is being chopped down. And because HN is mostly programmers, most people here probably love the sprawl because they work from home and don't need to wake up at 6 AM to sit in traffic and huff car exhaust from 7 AM to 8:25 AM and arrive at the office at 8:30. But millions in the US are trapped in that loop.
Krutonium 3y ago
> European transit-oriented model. In what universe has it failed? Certainly not this one.
- cyberax 3y ago
  Have you looked at the average commute times for the US and European cities? Go and do that.
  - debesyla 3y ago
    Commute vs driving?
    - cyberax 3y ago
      Commutes, all modes average.
      - lozenge 3y ago
        Is this just work commuting or other things as well? I can pick up some groceries on my way home, in the US even this activity adds more mileage to your car.
        cyberax 3y ago
        Sure. It's even worse for that. Cars save even more time for errands, because transit is typically optimized for hub-to-spokes transportation to downtowns. > even this activity adds more mileage to your car. Why should you care about that?
      - piva00 3y ago
        What about all the other trips a family/individual makes that isn't work-commute related? Things like: going grocery shopping, going to sports/hobbies activities, entertainment, going out to restaurants and bars, meeting friends at parks, etc.