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> However, I also hope that we ask the question, how can we make our society better such that we have to drive less and use less energy? Because what would be e

by oblio 3y ago

> However, I also hope that we ask the question, how can we make our society better such that we have to drive less and use less energy? Because what would be even more friendly than a lithium-sulphur battery is no battery at all. Depending on where you live, forces such as fear, uncertainty, misanthropy have lead to the exact opposite. We live in insane times where in parts of settlements at peace you can't even WALK to where you need.

vouaobrasil 3y ago
Yes, that is true. Suburbia and cars make it cheaper for people to live in the short-term, but it then leads to even more dependence on mass industry that they are slaving away to keep afloat, while their hard-earned money is taken away in part by taxes to provide subsidies to hide the true unsustainability of it all.
- bilsbie 3y ago
  Suburbia done well can be great. Not everyone wants to be crowded into cities with noise and crime and no access to nature. Suburbia can still have mixed use areas. We had a shopping center in our development for all the basic needs. We had parks and nature preserves and even areas with condos for cheaper housing.
  - moffkalast 3y ago
    As much as the implementation usually leaves much to be desired, soviet-style microdistricts with a few apartment blocks, a park and playground, and a handful of local shops is a pretty decent option. Put a few of these around a primary school and a shopping mall and you have a really decent suburban area where everything you might need is in a 10 min walking distance, and kids can be left alone in that microcosm until they leave for high school. Western individualism doesn't really play with that collectivist setup though, everyone needs their own private building, their own private micro park, etc.
    - JKCalhoun 3y ago
      See Japan also, the mamachari....
    - bashmelek 3y ago
      I don’t want to point any fingers at western culture on the whole, and the idea of individualism. At this point it feels more like fragmentation. Community pools were really popular in the States some decades ago, and then when segregation ended you start seeing a lot of pools in backyards, and white flight to the suburbs. Even in today’s less racist society we just plain hate our neighbors. Their decorations, messy lawn, or loud baby. It is almost as if we forgot how to live with others.
    - Turing_Machine 3y ago
      > soviet-style microdistricts with a few apartment blocks, a park and playground, and a handful of local shops is a pretty decent option. Why stop there? Build communal cafeterias and dormitories that you can hot-bunk 3 shifts per day. Quality of life is totally a thing, mang. Weirdly, for a "decent option" these only seem to exist as the norm in areas where people are forced into them by totalitarian governments. In the United States the few setups like this that have existed were called "The Projects". To put it mildly, they were not widely considered to be desirable places to live.
      - Turing_Machine 3y ago
        Y'all do understand that people move to the suburbs voluntarily, right? That they aren't forced to move there at gunpoint or something like that? Have you ever considered that your "collective anthill" housing ideas might actually, you know, suck ass? And that the basic idea has wound up sucking ass every single time it's been put into practice? Whether it's called "The Projects" or "Housing Estates" or "Collective Worker Housing Blocks", it just plain sucks, Essentially no one (very likely not even you, if it came down to it) would, or ever has, moved into one of these human zoos voluntarily.
        oblio 3y ago
  - dukeyukey 3y ago
    > Not everyone wants to be crowded into cities with noise and crime and no access to nature. Good Christ, I lived for years in small towns in the most rural area of the UK without a car! Your towns aren't built for walkers and public transport and that sucks, but there's no need to project that to everywhere else!
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - eropple 3y ago
      It's not even true in the United States. In the Boston area, there are still plenty of those "strong towns" the bloggists go on about. I live in one. My car gets used to go to Home Depot, to drive to visit my parents four hours away, and if I need to go to my doctor who's just a little too far off the beaten path to drive to. The rest of the time, I walk, and I'm within a mile of a commuter rail station to get to Boston proper. Of course, we have not here decided that Government Is The Problem, so we tend to wield it a little better. A number of my neighbors want to change that, being as afraid as they are of "Transit-Oriented Development" (you can guess what that means), but hey--democracy isn't free, we need to push that nonsense back.
    - tw04 3y ago
      >Your towns aren't built for walkers and public transport and that sucks, but there's no need to project that to everywhere else! And I'd say you're grossly mischaracterizing the US. Every small town I've lived in has ample sidewalks, crosswalks, and is easily walkable. Where my children go to school I can walk from one end of town to the other without ever having to risk life and limb. Heck a few of the sidewalks extend a mile out into the country just in anticipation of the city eventually growing. The town I grew up in was the same. The entire US isn't small-town Texas.
      - dukeyukey 3y ago
        I wasn't characterising the US at all, I have no idea where the parent commentor lives.
    - 3y ago
  - prmoustache 3y ago
    > Suburbia done well can be great. Not everyone wants to be crowded into cities with noise and crime and no access to nature. Which you can answer that cities done well can also be great. Noise, crime and no access to nature is not a common denominator of cities. While my city is noisy, mostly due to the overuse of vehicles, I am 15 minutes by foot / 5 minutes by bicycle from the nature[1] and crime is not a something of concern here. If you want an example of a city that does well in all 3 areas I think Utrecht is a good example. > Suburbia can still have mixed use areas. We had a shopping center in our development for all the basic needs. We had parks and nature preserves and even areas with condos for cheaper housing. Also, isn't that getting close to the definition of a small town...which is itself kind of a small city? [1] And I don't mean a park.
    - _ea1k 3y ago
      > Also, isn't that getting close to the definition of a small town...which is itself kind of a small city? Kind of? A large master-planned community might have thousands of homes and its own commercial district. They've always reminded me a bit of historic small towns.
      - panick21_ 3y ago
        Having 1000 single family homes and a small commercial area is not at all how historic small towns actually operated.
        _ea1k 3y ago
        Care to enlighten us? :rofl
        panick21_ 3y ago
        Pretty much ever town started the same way. A main street, quite often leading to a train station. http://www.crowwinghistory.org/brainerd_street_views.html http://www.crowwinghistory.org/brainerd_street_views.html Along that main street you had mix buildings where people lived and did their business out of. There was no separation between living and commercial. Farmers lived further out, not directly connected to the city. From there cities cities grow incrementally up and incrementally out. At some point they stop. Brainerd now has the same amount of people as they did 70 years ago. Other cities, like New York sustained that phase much longer.
  - panick21_ 3y ago
    > Suburbia done well can be great. Not everyone wants to be crowded into cities with noise and crime and no access to nature. That such a hilarious understanding of 'nature' and 'cities'. I live in a city and I can be in nature very quickly. In fact, the sprawling nature of suberbia is what destroys the most amount of nature and makes it harder for everybody to access nature. > Suburbia can still have mixed use areas. The term 'Suberbia' talkes specifically about US style subburbs and just based on facts, 99% of it simple doesn't allow commercial usage. Sometimes you have commercial zones next to the R1 zones, but usually the ratio is very small and the distance to the commercial zone is very far for the majority of people. Thus commercial areas are often reached mostly by car. Mixed use zoning is almost nowhere to be found in most of the US. The term 'Suberbia' refers to that. > We had parks and nature preserves and even areas with condos for cheaper housing. Then it isn't really what is called 'subberbia' at all. Subburbs can be done well, but not subberbia. And in most places in the US where there is a massive lack of alternative housing options with a vanishingly small part of the total land area allowing anything but low-density residential zoning. So yes, subburbs can be done well, but if its done well its not called 'subburbia' anymore. And the amount of places where it was done well is incredibly small.
    - jjav 3y ago
      > That such a hilarious understanding of 'nature' and 'cities'. I live in a city and I can be in nature very quickly. Which city? It's always helpful to look at google maps to see if people are using terms in a different way. A city by definition is surrounded by suburb (sub-urbe) and neither is forest, so if you live in the city you need to get to the suburbs and the cross the suburbs before you can get to a forest (or desert/etc). I'm sure there's some city somewhere where the highrise apartment building transition immediately to forest, but I'm not sure where. Not common, for sure. > So yes, subburbs can be done well, but if its done well its not called 'subburbia' anymore. This is a circular claim. So if a suburb works well it's not a suburb?
      - panick21_ 3y ago
        Its just a very American views. I know its crazy to think but not every city in the world is surrounded by endless suburban sprawl. And if you have a good train connection, you can go out of a city very fast an efficiently. Zürich, you have forest 1.6km from the downtown train station. Or 9min with public transport to an even larger forest. To small? Ok, lets look at Berlin. From main train-station, you have a gigantic park only a few minutes away. If that isn't nature enough for you, its a 7.5km distance to a forest outside of the city. Amsterdam, less then 5km to be in the surrounding country side. Vienna, 4km to country side, 7km to a nature reserve. I have not been in any European city where going into to country side isn't trivially easy. Even my 80+ year old grandmother who lived in the cities former industrial area would go for daywalks in nature. > This is a circular claim. So if a suburb works well it's not a suburb? No its not 'suberbia'. 'Suberbia' has a particular definition. This video gives some perspective of what I am talking about:$ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztpcWUqVpIg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztpcWUqVpIg
- dgfitz 3y ago
  This is such an ignorant take. Not everyone is going to live in a city. Not everyone wants to live in a city. Cars aren’t going away, ever. This narrative needs to go away. Don’t worry though, your virtue has been signaled.
- AlgorithmicTime 3y ago
  [dead]
- panick21_ 3y ago
  Suburbia is not cheap at all, not even in the short run. The reality is that it is very expensive and heavily, heavily subsidized. US style Suberbia is a result of the US government massive policies in encouraging suburbia style housing and highway building during the New Deal and then in the Post-WW2 boom, plus of course the Red-Lining and destruction of city centers. These places never ever pay for themselves. You can look at the data gathered by 'Strong Towns' and 'Urban3'. In fact the poorer parts of the city/state and of course the town center are subsidizing the richer suberbia. Its a fucking travisty of epic proportion. Suberbia is expensive to set up initially, needs massive infrastructure backing to be viable and is horrible energy inefficient.
  - jjav 3y ago
    > Suburbia is not cheap at all, not even in the short run. Cheap for who, though? As an individual I can't change society but I can choose where to live. So if rent in the city is 4K for 1 bedroom and in the suburb it's 2K for 3 bedrooms, suburb is cheaper.
    - panick21_ 3y ago
      We are talking about the system not the cost for the individual. The whole point is that hidden subsidies (and explicit rules) distort the system.
cyberlurker 3y ago
I enjoy my car but I think the same way we have the ADA for public buildings, there should be some level of walkable areas nearly everywhere. I’m currently frustrated in my new location that there are random sidewalks that aren’t connected to each other and I have to walk on the street with traffic for a few hundred meters at a time.
i80and 3y ago
I live in the most densely populated state in the US. The car mandate is INSANE. I'll drive somewhere, then figure "the next place I need to go is a five minute walk. I'll walk!" Then the sidewalk disappears and I'm trudging across lawn next to 60mph traffic. Another time I wanted to walk to a shop right on the other side of the road. It would have taken 45 minutes. The cultural hostility towards pedestrians is wild.
- swayvil 3y ago
  It's dominance by business that's to blame. Business says "put money in the hole. Deliver money to hole with fast wheeled box." Everything else is disposable, sacrificial.
- marliechiller 3y ago
  Thanks for this anecdote. It really made me realise I take a lot of infrastructure for pedestrians for granted here in the UK
  - kwhitefoot 3y ago
    Not just the UK. The US really is an outlier. Pedestrian infrastructure is better almost everywhere else. Certainly in every country I have visited from Canada to China and a dozen others in between.
    - alephnerd 3y ago
      In my experience, Canada is similar. We couldn't afford a car when I was younger so we had to subsist on Translink and Skytrain, and those systems were roughly on par with Muni and VTA. Outside of the Vancouver core, pedestrian infrastructure was weak to nonexistent in suburbs like Richmond, Surrey, South Vancouver, etc or towns/cities like Nanaimo or Abbotsford. Calgary and Edmonton were worse.
- ponector 3y ago
  Why not to use a bicycle? I've spent a summer in Fairbanks, AK and it was totally fine to navigate anywhere around the city and suburbs by bike. Almost no bike lanes there, of course.

by oblio 3y ago

vouaobrasil 3y ago

Yes, that is true. Suburbia and cars make it cheaper for people to live in the short-term, but it then leads to even more dependence on mass industry that they are slaving away to keep afloat, while their hard-earned money is taken away in part by taxes to provide subsidies to hide the true unsustainability of it all.

bilsbie 3y ago
Suburbia done well can be great. Not everyone wants to be crowded into cities with noise and crime and no access to nature. Suburbia can still have mixed use areas. We had a shopping center in our development for all the basic needs. We had parks and nature preserves and even areas with condos for cheaper housing.
- moffkalast 3y ago
  As much as the implementation usually leaves much to be desired, soviet-style microdistricts with a few apartment blocks, a park and playground, and a handful of local shops is a pretty decent option. Put a few of these around a primary school and a shopping mall and you have a really decent suburban area where everything you might need is in a 10 min walking distance, and kids can be left alone in that microcosm until they leave for high school. Western individualism doesn't really play with that collectivist setup though, everyone needs their own private building, their own private micro park, etc.
  - JKCalhoun 3y ago
    See Japan also, the mamachari....
  - bashmelek 3y ago
    I don’t want to point any fingers at western culture on the whole, and the idea of individualism. At this point it feels more like fragmentation. Community pools were really popular in the States some decades ago, and then when segregation ended you start seeing a lot of pools in backyards, and white flight to the suburbs. Even in today’s less racist society we just plain hate our neighbors. Their decorations, messy lawn, or loud baby. It is almost as if we forgot how to live with others.
  - Turing_Machine 3y ago
    > soviet-style microdistricts with a few apartment blocks, a park and playground, and a handful of local shops is a pretty decent option. Why stop there? Build communal cafeterias and dormitories that you can hot-bunk 3 shifts per day. Quality of life is totally a thing, mang. Weirdly, for a "decent option" these only seem to exist as the norm in areas where people are forced into them by totalitarian governments. In the United States the few setups like this that have existed were called "The Projects". To put it mildly, they were not widely considered to be desirable places to live.
    - Turing_Machine 3y ago
      Y'all do understand that people move to the suburbs voluntarily, right? That they aren't forced to move there at gunpoint or something like that? Have you ever considered that your "collective anthill" housing ideas might actually, you know, suck ass? And that the basic idea has wound up sucking ass every single time it's been put into practice? Whether it's called "The Projects" or "Housing Estates" or "Collective Worker Housing Blocks", it just plain sucks, Essentially no one (very likely not even you, if it came down to it) would, or ever has, moved into one of these human zoos voluntarily.
      - oblio 3y ago
- dukeyukey 3y ago
  > Not everyone wants to be crowded into cities with noise and crime and no access to nature. Good Christ, I lived for years in small towns in the most rural area of the UK without a car! Your towns aren't built for walkers and public transport and that sucks, but there's no need to project that to everywhere else!
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - eropple 3y ago
    It's not even true in the United States. In the Boston area, there are still plenty of those "strong towns" the bloggists go on about. I live in one. My car gets used to go to Home Depot, to drive to visit my parents four hours away, and if I need to go to my doctor who's just a little too far off the beaten path to drive to. The rest of the time, I walk, and I'm within a mile of a commuter rail station to get to Boston proper. Of course, we have not here decided that Government Is The Problem, so we tend to wield it a little better. A number of my neighbors want to change that, being as afraid as they are of "Transit-Oriented Development" (you can guess what that means), but hey--democracy isn't free, we need to push that nonsense back.
  - tw04 3y ago
    >Your towns aren't built for walkers and public transport and that sucks, but there's no need to project that to everywhere else! And I'd say you're grossly mischaracterizing the US. Every small town I've lived in has ample sidewalks, crosswalks, and is easily walkable. Where my children go to school I can walk from one end of town to the other without ever having to risk life and limb. Heck a few of the sidewalks extend a mile out into the country just in anticipation of the city eventually growing. The town I grew up in was the same. The entire US isn't small-town Texas.
    - dukeyukey 3y ago
      I wasn't characterising the US at all, I have no idea where the parent commentor lives.
  - 3y ago
- prmoustache 3y ago
  > Suburbia done well can be great. Not everyone wants to be crowded into cities with noise and crime and no access to nature. Which you can answer that cities done well can also be great. Noise, crime and no access to nature is not a common denominator of cities. While my city is noisy, mostly due to the overuse of vehicles, I am 15 minutes by foot / 5 minutes by bicycle from the nature[1] and crime is not a something of concern here. If you want an example of a city that does well in all 3 areas I think Utrecht is a good example. > Suburbia can still have mixed use areas. We had a shopping center in our development for all the basic needs. We had parks and nature preserves and even areas with condos for cheaper housing. Also, isn't that getting close to the definition of a small town...which is itself kind of a small city? [1] And I don't mean a park.
  - _ea1k 3y ago
    > Also, isn't that getting close to the definition of a small town...which is itself kind of a small city? Kind of? A large master-planned community might have thousands of homes and its own commercial district. They've always reminded me a bit of historic small towns.
    - panick21_ 3y ago
      Having 1000 single family homes and a small commercial area is not at all how historic small towns actually operated.
      - _ea1k 3y ago
        Care to enlighten us? :rofl
        panick21_ 3y ago
        Pretty much ever town started the same way. A main street, quite often leading to a train station. http://www.crowwinghistory.org/brainerd_street_views.html http://www.crowwinghistory.org/brainerd_street_views.html Along that main street you had mix buildings where people lived and did their business out of. There was no separation between living and commercial. Farmers lived further out, not directly connected to the city. From there cities cities grow incrementally up and incrementally out. At some point they stop. Brainerd now has the same amount of people as they did 70 years ago. Other cities, like New York sustained that phase much longer.
- panick21_ 3y ago
  > Suburbia done well can be great. Not everyone wants to be crowded into cities with noise and crime and no access to nature. That such a hilarious understanding of 'nature' and 'cities'. I live in a city and I can be in nature very quickly. In fact, the sprawling nature of suberbia is what destroys the most amount of nature and makes it harder for everybody to access nature. > Suburbia can still have mixed use areas. The term 'Suberbia' talkes specifically about US style subburbs and just based on facts, 99% of it simple doesn't allow commercial usage. Sometimes you have commercial zones next to the R1 zones, but usually the ratio is very small and the distance to the commercial zone is very far for the majority of people. Thus commercial areas are often reached mostly by car. Mixed use zoning is almost nowhere to be found in most of the US. The term 'Suberbia' refers to that. > We had parks and nature preserves and even areas with condos for cheaper housing. Then it isn't really what is called 'subberbia' at all. Subburbs can be done well, but not subberbia. And in most places in the US where there is a massive lack of alternative housing options with a vanishingly small part of the total land area allowing anything but low-density residential zoning. So yes, subburbs can be done well, but if its done well its not called 'subburbia' anymore. And the amount of places where it was done well is incredibly small.
  - jjav 3y ago
    > That such a hilarious understanding of 'nature' and 'cities'. I live in a city and I can be in nature very quickly. Which city? It's always helpful to look at google maps to see if people are using terms in a different way. A city by definition is surrounded by suburb (sub-urbe) and neither is forest, so if you live in the city you need to get to the suburbs and the cross the suburbs before you can get to a forest (or desert/etc). I'm sure there's some city somewhere where the highrise apartment building transition immediately to forest, but I'm not sure where. Not common, for sure. > So yes, subburbs can be done well, but if its done well its not called 'subburbia' anymore. This is a circular claim. So if a suburb works well it's not a suburb?
    - panick21_ 3y ago
      Its just a very American views. I know its crazy to think but not every city in the world is surrounded by endless suburban sprawl. And if you have a good train connection, you can go out of a city very fast an efficiently. Zürich, you have forest 1.6km from the downtown train station. Or 9min with public transport to an even larger forest. To small? Ok, lets look at Berlin. From main train-station, you have a gigantic park only a few minutes away. If that isn't nature enough for you, its a 7.5km distance to a forest outside of the city. Amsterdam, less then 5km to be in the surrounding country side. Vienna, 4km to country side, 7km to a nature reserve. I have not been in any European city where going into to country side isn't trivially easy. Even my 80+ year old grandmother who lived in the cities former industrial area would go for daywalks in nature. > This is a circular claim. So if a suburb works well it's not a suburb? No its not 'suberbia'. 'Suberbia' has a particular definition. This video gives some perspective of what I am talking about:$ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztpcWUqVpIg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztpcWUqVpIg
dgfitz 3y ago
This is such an ignorant take. Not everyone is going to live in a city. Not everyone wants to live in a city. Cars aren’t going away, ever. This narrative needs to go away. Don’t worry though, your virtue has been signaled.
AlgorithmicTime 3y ago
[dead]
panick21_ 3y ago
Suburbia is not cheap at all, not even in the short run. The reality is that it is very expensive and heavily, heavily subsidized. US style Suberbia is a result of the US government massive policies in encouraging suburbia style housing and highway building during the New Deal and then in the Post-WW2 boom, plus of course the Red-Lining and destruction of city centers. These places never ever pay for themselves. You can look at the data gathered by 'Strong Towns' and 'Urban3'. In fact the poorer parts of the city/state and of course the town center are subsidizing the richer suberbia. Its a fucking travisty of epic proportion. Suberbia is expensive to set up initially, needs massive infrastructure backing to be viable and is horrible energy inefficient.
- jjav 3y ago
  > Suburbia is not cheap at all, not even in the short run. Cheap for who, though? As an individual I can't change society but I can choose where to live. So if rent in the city is 4K for 1 bedroom and in the suburb it's 2K for 3 bedrooms, suburb is cheaper.
  - panick21_ 3y ago
    We are talking about the system not the cost for the individual. The whole point is that hidden subsidies (and explicit rules) distort the system.

cyberlurker 3y ago

I enjoy my car but I think the same way we have the ADA for public buildings, there should be some level of walkable areas nearly everywhere. I’m currently frustrated in my new location that there are random sidewalks that aren’t connected to each other and I have to walk on the street with traffic for a few hundred meters at a time.

i80and 3y ago

I live in the most densely populated state in the US. The car mandate is INSANE. I'll drive somewhere, then figure "the next place I need to go is a five minute walk. I'll walk!" Then the sidewalk disappears and I'm trudging across lawn next to 60mph traffic. Another time I wanted to walk to a shop right on the other side of the road. It would have taken 45 minutes. The cultural hostility towards pedestrians is wild.

swayvil 3y ago
It's dominance by business that's to blame. Business says "put money in the hole. Deliver money to hole with fast wheeled box." Everything else is disposable, sacrificial.
marliechiller 3y ago
Thanks for this anecdote. It really made me realise I take a lot of infrastructure for pedestrians for granted here in the UK
- kwhitefoot 3y ago
  Not just the UK. The US really is an outlier. Pedestrian infrastructure is better almost everywhere else. Certainly in every country I have visited from Canada to China and a dozen others in between.
  - alephnerd 3y ago
    In my experience, Canada is similar. We couldn't afford a car when I was younger so we had to subsist on Translink and Skytrain, and those systems were roughly on par with Muni and VTA. Outside of the Vancouver core, pedestrian infrastructure was weak to nonexistent in suburbs like Richmond, Surrey, South Vancouver, etc or towns/cities like Nanaimo or Abbotsford. Calgary and Edmonton were worse.
ponector 3y ago
Why not to use a bicycle? I've spent a summer in Fairbanks, AK and it was totally fine to navigate anywhere around the city and suburbs by bike. Almost no bike lanes there, of course.