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You can easily get housing affordability crises even without single family homes, as is plainly evident right now in non-North-American cities. It's a bit of a

You can easily get housing affordability crises even without single family homes, as is plainly evident right now in non-North-American cities. It's a bit of a red herring. You end up sitting in traffic for an hour instead of standing on a bus or train for an hour for your commute, and other knock-on differences like that, which can be debated for various other reasons like ecological impact, but you still end up running into the same issues around ability to do new, denser constrution, desire of new, denser construction, and political issues and resistance to change regardless of if your urban area is full of SFH or 5-story buildings. Is "make today's cities larger and denser forever" really the solution? Or can we figure out ways to disperse and decentralize things instead of just feeding more money back into the hands of those who own and control the current cities?

novok 3y ago
You don't sit on the train for an hour. In properly designed large cities the metro beats the car by a huge time margin unless they made cars so expensive by policy that nobody has a car and there is no traffic at that city as a result. Americans often think the shitty experience they have in their country applies universally. Ex: The bus & light rail is bad and slow, so therefore it will always be bad everywhere. Americans haven't lived or even travelled to places in europe and asia with functional transit systems and do not realize what they are missing. Another common american assumption is: apartments are only for the poor, so they will always be made shitty with bad soundproofing when you can make them with good soundproofing as a standard and a good amount of square feet. Or metros are always dirty, dangerous and the gross homeless live there, while that is also a pure policy choice of america. I grew up in north america, lived in places with good metros and good apartments, and then moved to America. America doesn't know how bad they have it.
- majormajor 3y ago
  > You don't sit on the train for an hour. In properly designed large cities the metro beats the car by a huge time margin unless they made cars so expensive by policy that nobody has a car and there is no traffic at that city as a result. You should meet some of my old coworkers in large cities in Asia... (you don't SIT on the train at all in rush hour!) In a smaller city it can work great! But in a small NA city, everything is a 5-to-10-minute drive from everything and everyone's also happy about that. That's easy mode. But London, NY, Paris, Beijing, etc - those are the cases that are somewhat broken everywhere, affordability-wise and commute-wise.
  - novok 3y ago
    In China right? You know they are the equivalent of people in LA who live so far away from their job and have 2 hour car commutes right?
    - majormajor 3y ago
      Not just in China. China is maybe the most interesting point of comparison with big cities in the US, though, since its cities are both much denser than most AND more sprawling than most. And I don't follow your second question. If the trains OR freeways are full of people who can't afford to live closer to their jobs and have hours-long commutes, isn't that bad? And if it can happen even with extensive public transit, what does that tell us about fundamental assumptions about "city should grow forever, number must always go up!"?
      - oceanplexian 3y ago
        China isn't even remotely comparable to the USA. The urban mega cities are a prop that the CCP puts on display for the world. There's a reason that China's GDP-per-capita lands somewhere between Kazakhstan and Cuba.I would know because I've been there. If you go to a random exurban part of China you're going to find people living in makeshift tin structures, a lack of running water, oxcarts used as serious transportation, and a society that is functionally in the 1930s. The CCP are masters of propaganda though, and flood Youtube and social media with influencers riding around on maglev trains and showing off new airports and architecture. Even on American Social Media, if you look for videos of "The Real China", or "Chinese Poverty" you'll get carefully curated propaganda that does not line up with what I saw first hand.
        nradov 3y ago
        The SerpentZA YouTube channel is somewhat sensationalist, but it has good firsthand videos showing the real China from someone who lived there for years and is fluent in Mandarin. The reality is a lot darker than what most Westerners see. https://www.youtube.com/@serpentza https://www.youtube.com/@serpentza
- looofooo0 3y ago
  With mixed zone neighbourhoods with 30.000+people/km² you get everything for daily needs in Walking distance and close by metro. There is also a 120 years old concept for such neighbourhoods. https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockrandbebauung https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockrandbebauung Also can be done in today s time: https://youtu.be/XfonhlM6I7w?si=ZcnbH6lmNWuQ6oE9 https://youtu.be/XfonhlM6I7w?si=ZcnbH6lmNWuQ6oE9
- chgs 3y ago
  Is singapore properly designed? About 10 years ago I had a project and stayed in an apartment in haugong, a residential area about 6 miles from my office. Uber was the only realistic commute - about 15-20 minutes. Public transport was about an hour to do the journey.
- lo_zamoyski 3y ago
  > America doesn't know how bad they have it. This may be changing. You see a growing awareness of the shabbiness of certain American norms in parts of so-called "populist" circles (left and right).
- rayiner 3y ago
  > In properly designed large cities the metro beats the car by a huge time margin unless they made cars so expensive by policy that nobody has a car and there is no traffic at that city as a result. What’s a properly designed city? Even in Tokyo a car usually beats the train unless it’s an inter-regional trip. Im a huge Japan nerd and love their train system. But I just got back from carting three kids around Tokyo and daily life is just far easier in my American exurb. Do Americans have it bad? The median Parisian spends 69 minutes per day commuting: https://www.mynewsdesk.com/eurofound/news/budapest-paris-and-amsterdam-report-longest-commuting-times-among-eu-capitals-394279 https://www.mynewsdesk.com/eurofound/news/budapest-paris-and.... The median commute time in Dallas is under an hour round trip: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/B080ACS048113 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/B080ACS048113 (28 minutes one way). And the folks in Dallas live in huge houses compared to those in Paris.
  - lapetitejort 3y ago
    I would rather sit in a train for 69 minutes than sit in a car for 45 minutes. In a car if my attention slips for a second I can kill myself and others. In a train if I fall asleep I may have to take another train.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - lotsoweiners 3y ago
      Cool! You do you. I’d personally rather spend an hour in the car comfortably vs 20 minutes on public transportation where I’ve got a stranger sitting next to me, no privacy, and potentially no seat during rush hour commute times.
      - iamacyborg 3y ago
        Having to stand for 20 minutes is not such a bad deal if you’re in decent health. Hell it’s probably good for you if you spend most of your day sat at a desk.
- bluGill 3y ago
  Metro systems even in the best examples don't give easy anywhere to anywhere access. There are places you cannot access because there is no direct route and unlike a car there are no 'shortcuts' around going where the train goes.
  - drekk 3y ago
    So you walk the last mile? Not accessible to everyone. Neither is accelerating a two ton slab of metal to move one person around from exactly point A to exactly point B (and now you need parking at both points, which adds to the sprawl issue)
- cameldrv 3y ago
  Metros are pretty slow. 20mph/30kph is about par, less if the stops are spaced closely, more if they're further apart. If you factor in time to walk to and from the metro, and time waiting for your train, you can almost always beat them with a bike. Here's a chart of a few systems [1]. Where the larger European cities do better is the density -- what you mostly care about in a city is how many people you can reach in a reasonable amount of time, say 30-60 minutes. In the Bay Area, I can, with my car, reach about 3 million people in 60 minutes, about the same as I could using transit in Berlin, which has an excellent metro system, and Berlin doesn't have to deal with the geographic barriers that the Bay Area does. I think that shared ride self driving cars have a lot of potential in both types of cities. They give you a lot of what's good about private cars (door to door, good average speed, comfort, some privacy), and a lot of what's good about metros (higher density on the road than private cars due to sharing and less need for parking) [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/transit/comments/113n0ee/average_speed_of_various_metro_lines_around_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/transit/comments/113n0ee/average_sp...
  - bobthepanda 3y ago
    I don't know that "less need for parking" has ever actually panned out. If the car is not parked somewhere, it is milling around waiting for a ride, which might actually be worse in terms of congestion.
    - cameldrv 3y ago
      Yes, you don't want empty AVs roaming around the streets. There probably needs to be some sort of government intervention to discourage this behavior. Here's what's possible though: 1. Shared ride AVs can deliver multiple people per trip to their jobs, and they can also make multiple trips in the morning, and multiple trips in the evening. Private cars generally take one person, have to sit in a parking spot all day, and then go home. 2. AVs can park relatively far from their destination. After they drop off their passenger, they can go somewhere else to park. 3. AVs, if they can coordinate or be remotely controlled by a parking lot, can park way more densely than normal cars. In a normal parking lot, maybe half of the space is aisles for cars to drive to and from the parking space. If cars could dynamically get out of the way, you would only need a small portion of the space empty. A very simple strategy would be for there to be only room for one aisle for a big parking lot, and all of the cars would just move forward or back to make the single aisle appear wherever it was needed. In all, this probably reduces the need for parking by maybe 6x relative to human driven cars.
- CivBase 3y ago
  > Americans often think the shitty experience they have in their country applies universally. Whether this is true or not, what matters to me - a person living in the US - is that public transit in the US is a relatively poor experience compared with driving. Until that changes, I will keep driving and I will resist efforts that would force me to use public transit. I don't care if it's better elsewhere because I don't live there nor do I want to move there. I want our public transit to be good, but that simply isn't the case right now. Walkable cities with quality public transit and good community infrastructure sound great, but until they are a reality here I will have no interest in living in a dense urban location.
- mortify 3y ago
  I used to live in a major city in the US. My commute by public transit was 45 minutes and I lived close to a major hub. I now live outside of that city. I can drive into that same job in 60 minutes. Public transit from here is over 2 hours. Outside of Boston and NYC (well, maybe not NYC right now), I hear of no one happy with public transit in the US. We need to stop pretending that if we just move into cities, the problems will address themselves. Make public transit attractive and more people will want to live there.
  - c0nfused 3y ago
    This is the fundamental problem. One an individual basis moving to a 8k square foot house in the suburbs is the thing to do. For the aggregate this means the mass transit gets worse, the traffic gets worse the emissions get worse, the tax base gets smaller. The solution is policy. Use public money to make that 2 hour transit shorter and everyone wins, not just those of us with cash
nico_h 3y ago
Uninhabited land is empty of people for a reason: - it’s protected - it’s undesirable (too hot/ dry/wet/far/steep/close to a pollution source) - it’s agricultural land If it’s not any of these it’s owned and thus controlled by someone.
- pojzon 3y ago
  Its owned and controlled by ppl who have millions of square meters for themselves. ^this is the real issue. But we dont want to tackle the real issue of few ppl wanting to own the whole world :) If we cut out that cancer ppl everyone on Earth could have a lot better living standards than we do now. Yes the issue are ultra rich and yes they will propaganda everything to hide it keep it safe.
- falserum 3y ago
  Some of those reason might be change by government policy.
- J_Shelby_J 3y ago
  > Uninhabited land is empty of people for a reason: - it’s protected Almost the entirety of coastal California (and Oregon and WA as well.) It's insane. It's the best climate on the planet and the most protected from climate change.
scoofy 3y ago
>You can easily get housing affordability crises even without single family homes, as is plainly evident right now in non-North-American cities. Yes, you can get an affordability crisis anywhere you make it illegal to build housing. Nobody is arguing that. The point is that you also get an affordability crisis simply by pushing the transportation infrastructure to the point of failure, and then reject density. >Is "make today's cities larger and denser forever" really the solution? Or can we figure out ways to disperse and decentralize things instead of just feeding more money back into the hands of those who own and control the current cities? This is literally what's happening in every tech satellite city, the point is that many-if-not-most of our urban centers are already at their transportation capacities, simply because that is the suburban development model: it's extremely cheap until suddenly it's no longer functional. The suburban model has no equilibrium, it's a cascade, once the planned automobile infrastructure reaches capacity, you cannot increase it at a rate that is sustainable. Thus, once that capacity is gone, suddenly the real estate in the core becomes extremely valuable -> which incentivizes density -> which further strains peak infrastructure -> which increases the value of core real estate -> which further incentivizes density -> etc. -> etc. -> etc. We can't wish this away, beyond wishing other people just didn't exist. It's like wishing that other people would take the bus, but not wanting to take it yourself. Nobody in the bay area wants to move to affordable Red Bluff, CA, without a reason, much less the CEO of a major corporation moving their entire company there out of the kindness of his heart we he or she already has a house and friends in Atherton.
NewJazz 3y ago
You end up sitting in traffic for an hour instead of standing on a bus or train for an hour for your commute Why are you acting like driving a vehicle and being a passenger in a vehicle are the same experience? One is clearly more demanding and inhibiting than the other. On a train you can work, read, listen to a podcast, sometimes eat... Lots of things you can't do while in a car. Unless your job is driving. Which, if you commute for work, it kinda is.
- rayiner 3y ago
  You can do those things if you get a seat, which you generally cannot during commuting hours in any city where public transit is good enough to be popular. I commuted for awhile between Baltimore and DC on Amtrak and apart from being hellaciously unreliable it was great for working. But my commute from the upper west side to east midtown when I lived in NYC was completely different—being crammed into the 1/2/3 and then fighting through the masses to take the S across town.
  - NewJazz 3y ago
    You can listen to music or a podcast while standing. I just plugged in upper west side and midtown Manhattan into google maps... It said 18 minutes via transit. Maybe your commute had more complications, last mile and so on.
    - GauntletWizard 3y ago
      You can listen to music or a podcast while driving. You can even hear it over the din of your car engine, which is much less loud than being shoved into a box with a hundred other people.
  - sofixa 3y ago
    > You can do those things if you get a seat, which you generally cannot during commuting hours in any city where public transit is good enough to be popular. I see lots of people watching movies/series or reading books (physical or ebooks) while standing up in various Paris transit during rush hour.
II2II 3y ago
> Is "make today's cities larger and denser forever" really the solution? Or can we figure out ways to disperse and decentralize things instead of just feeding more money back into the hands of those who own and control the current cities? We should be aiming for some degree of density. I would hazard a guess that size is largely dependent upon what a person wants out of life. Infrastructure is very expensive to build and maintain, and everyone demands it in multiple forms (roads, water, sewage, and power at a minimum). Containing the costs by reducing either extent or capacity would allow us to allocate those resources to other things, things that could improve the collective quality of life. As for decentralization, it depends upon how it is done. I've lived in or visited towns with a few thousand people. Nearly everything one needed was within walking distance, though people often left town for things they wanted. I've also lived in similarly sized urban communities where virtually nothing one needed was within a reasonable walking distance. Suburban communities often take the latter to the extreme. What was the difference? Everything in the small town was centralized, yet businesses and services in those urban communities were effectively decentralized. Let's say you build a bunch of small towns to decentralize the population and get away from feeding money back into the hands of those who own and control cities. You now have another major consideration: are people going to live most of their daily lives in those towns, or are they going to live in one town and work in another? A big part of the reason why people spend so much of their life commuting, whether it is by car or train, is because opportunities (may it be home ownership or careers) don't necessarily fall in the same place.
nonameiguess 3y ago
All I can say is thanks, but yes, every thread of this variety gets a bit tiresome hearing the same things over and over that tend to be some variation of "my peeve local issue with the US is the reason the US experiences a problem experienced by hundreds of other countries with wildly different policies." Not to say, in a vacuum, multi-family housing won't provide more housing units per unit of land area than single-family. Clearly, it will. But unless you build every city from scratch to house 20 million people, whether you started with single-family or multi-family, the most desirable cities will end up in a future state whereby more people want to live there than housing exists for, and even if regulations and zoning allow you to build higher and denser than is currently done, to do it where people want to live, you'll have to tear down existing buildings, including existing housing, and many of the owners and occupants of that housing won't want that. You'll also need to run more utility lines, build new pipes, run them under existing roads, which means shutting down those roads, and even if they're perfect utopian European roads that have zero cars on them and only have pedestrians and bicycles, the user of those roads are still going to get annoyed and inconvenienced, and it's going to cost more to do this than building new housing where nobody currently lives, pretty much no matter what.
bobthepanda 3y ago
The solution to dispersal, and density, is to simply allow that type of building everywhere, and then they just kind of randomly pop up whenever/wherever works out. Unless forced to due to scarcity, dense development does not really clump up together all at once for good reason, since clumping up will drive up costs in a hyper local area. Tokyo for example, has a lot of detached housing, even in the central wards. The density there is more pockmarked and random, and notably never really concentrates all that highly; there is not a single Japanese building in the top 100 skyscrapers, because skyscraper concentration is an artifact of how we force dense developments only in certain places.
mulmen 3y ago
> Is "make today's cities larger and denser forever" really the solution? Tokyo Metro handles 6m+ riders a day with a population of 40m. So, yes, at least until you surpass 40m people. > Or can we figure out ways to disperse and decentralize things instead of just feeding more money back into the hands of those who own and control the current cities? “Disperse and decentralize” is exactly how every city I have ever been to is built.
closeparen 3y ago
We are decentralizing things. That's what the housing crisis is: people being forced to accept less central locations than they would like. It turns that being the one who gets decentralized sucks, people it happens to generally resent it, and others are willing to make serious tradeoffs to their household budgets or else the dignity of their living conditions, in order to remain central.
lizknope 3y ago
People are attacking single family homes and commuter culture. Okay, but my solution is different. The pandemic showed that millions of us can work from home. My office was closed for about 2 years. Our stock price shot way up. There were lots of stories about the environmental benefits. Air pollution in big cities decreased dramatically. Wildlife started returning in places. We keep building commercial real estate and most people I know have little desire to commute to the office and sit in a cubicle disturbed by other people constantly. I would severely limit commercial real estate building permits, encourage companies to have employees work at home via tax breaks or whatever. This will help with the housing issues, greenhouse gas emissions, decrease the need for new roads because of less traffic. Everyone wins except dumb control freak managers and restaurants that do lunch in the business areas.
- decafninja 3y ago
  The dumb control freak managers are often the same people holding the levers of power to make these decisions.
  - lizknope 3y ago
    Of course, that is why there needs to be some incentive to get them to change their minds. Biden Calls for Federal Workers to Return to the Office August 2023 https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/news/employee-relations/biden-calls-federal-workers-to-return-to-office https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/news/employee-relations/bi... The government wants people in the office because it helps boost the economy. I suggest the exact opposite. Are we serious about climate change? Which is a more effective strategy? Encourage people to switch to electric cars or just have them drive their existing gas car less? My monthly gasoline bills dropped from $250 to $70 during the pandemic. How much are we spending on health care? How many people don't have the time to exercise? I had an extra 60 minutes a day to take a walk instead of commuting.
- gottorf 3y ago
  > Our stock price shot way up. This would imply that a company's stock price is directly influenced by its productive output; in reality, it's only very tangentially so. Especially for low-profit, high-growth tech companies, I'd wager the federal funds rate's effect on the stock price is way higher.
JoeJonathan 3y ago
I spend a lot of time in São Paulo, and no matter how you slice it, housing is cheaper there. Adjunct professors and freelancers can afford houses there. Maids can afford houses, albeit far from the center. Everyone complains about the city’s endless verticalização (verticalizication) because they like the idea of old houses, but I say keep it coming.

novok 3y ago

You don't sit on the train for an hour. In properly designed large cities the metro beats the car by a huge time margin unless they made cars so expensive by policy that nobody has a car and there is no traffic at that city as a result. Americans often think the shitty experience they have in their country applies universally. Ex: The bus & light rail is bad and slow, so therefore it will always be bad everywhere. Americans haven't lived or even travelled to places in europe and asia with functional transit systems and do not realize what they are missing. Another common american assumption is: apartments are only for the poor, so they will always be made shitty with bad soundproofing when you can make them with good soundproofing as a standard and a good amount of square feet. Or metros are always dirty, dangerous and the gross homeless live there, while that is also a pure policy choice of america. I grew up in north america, lived in places with good metros and good apartments, and then moved to America. America doesn't know how bad they have it.

majormajor 3y ago
> You don't sit on the train for an hour. In properly designed large cities the metro beats the car by a huge time margin unless they made cars so expensive by policy that nobody has a car and there is no traffic at that city as a result. You should meet some of my old coworkers in large cities in Asia... (you don't SIT on the train at all in rush hour!) In a smaller city it can work great! But in a small NA city, everything is a 5-to-10-minute drive from everything and everyone's also happy about that. That's easy mode. But London, NY, Paris, Beijing, etc - those are the cases that are somewhat broken everywhere, affordability-wise and commute-wise.
- novok 3y ago
  In China right? You know they are the equivalent of people in LA who live so far away from their job and have 2 hour car commutes right?
  - majormajor 3y ago
    Not just in China. China is maybe the most interesting point of comparison with big cities in the US, though, since its cities are both much denser than most AND more sprawling than most. And I don't follow your second question. If the trains OR freeways are full of people who can't afford to live closer to their jobs and have hours-long commutes, isn't that bad? And if it can happen even with extensive public transit, what does that tell us about fundamental assumptions about "city should grow forever, number must always go up!"?
    - oceanplexian 3y ago
      China isn't even remotely comparable to the USA. The urban mega cities are a prop that the CCP puts on display for the world. There's a reason that China's GDP-per-capita lands somewhere between Kazakhstan and Cuba.I would know because I've been there. If you go to a random exurban part of China you're going to find people living in makeshift tin structures, a lack of running water, oxcarts used as serious transportation, and a society that is functionally in the 1930s. The CCP are masters of propaganda though, and flood Youtube and social media with influencers riding around on maglev trains and showing off new airports and architecture. Even on American Social Media, if you look for videos of "The Real China", or "Chinese Poverty" you'll get carefully curated propaganda that does not line up with what I saw first hand.
      - nradov 3y ago
        The SerpentZA YouTube channel is somewhat sensationalist, but it has good firsthand videos showing the real China from someone who lived there for years and is fluent in Mandarin. The reality is a lot darker than what most Westerners see. https://www.youtube.com/@serpentza https://www.youtube.com/@serpentza
looofooo0 3y ago
With mixed zone neighbourhoods with 30.000+people/km² you get everything for daily needs in Walking distance and close by metro. There is also a 120 years old concept for such neighbourhoods. https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockrandbebauung https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockrandbebauung Also can be done in today s time: https://youtu.be/XfonhlM6I7w?si=ZcnbH6lmNWuQ6oE9 https://youtu.be/XfonhlM6I7w?si=ZcnbH6lmNWuQ6oE9
chgs 3y ago
Is singapore properly designed? About 10 years ago I had a project and stayed in an apartment in haugong, a residential area about 6 miles from my office. Uber was the only realistic commute - about 15-20 minutes. Public transport was about an hour to do the journey.
lo_zamoyski 3y ago
> America doesn't know how bad they have it. This may be changing. You see a growing awareness of the shabbiness of certain American norms in parts of so-called "populist" circles (left and right).
rayiner 3y ago
> In properly designed large cities the metro beats the car by a huge time margin unless they made cars so expensive by policy that nobody has a car and there is no traffic at that city as a result. What’s a properly designed city? Even in Tokyo a car usually beats the train unless it’s an inter-regional trip. Im a huge Japan nerd and love their train system. But I just got back from carting three kids around Tokyo and daily life is just far easier in my American exurb. Do Americans have it bad? The median Parisian spends 69 minutes per day commuting: https://www.mynewsdesk.com/eurofound/news/budapest-paris-and-amsterdam-report-longest-commuting-times-among-eu-capitals-394279 https://www.mynewsdesk.com/eurofound/news/budapest-paris-and.... The median commute time in Dallas is under an hour round trip: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/B080ACS048113 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/B080ACS048113 (28 minutes one way). And the folks in Dallas live in huge houses compared to those in Paris.
- lapetitejort 3y ago
  I would rather sit in a train for 69 minutes than sit in a car for 45 minutes. In a car if my attention slips for a second I can kill myself and others. In a train if I fall asleep I may have to take another train.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - lotsoweiners 3y ago
    Cool! You do you. I’d personally rather spend an hour in the car comfortably vs 20 minutes on public transportation where I’ve got a stranger sitting next to me, no privacy, and potentially no seat during rush hour commute times.
    - iamacyborg 3y ago
      Having to stand for 20 minutes is not such a bad deal if you’re in decent health. Hell it’s probably good for you if you spend most of your day sat at a desk.
bluGill 3y ago
Metro systems even in the best examples don't give easy anywhere to anywhere access. There are places you cannot access because there is no direct route and unlike a car there are no 'shortcuts' around going where the train goes.
- drekk 3y ago
  So you walk the last mile? Not accessible to everyone. Neither is accelerating a two ton slab of metal to move one person around from exactly point A to exactly point B (and now you need parking at both points, which adds to the sprawl issue)
cameldrv 3y ago
Metros are pretty slow. 20mph/30kph is about par, less if the stops are spaced closely, more if they're further apart. If you factor in time to walk to and from the metro, and time waiting for your train, you can almost always beat them with a bike. Here's a chart of a few systems [1]. Where the larger European cities do better is the density -- what you mostly care about in a city is how many people you can reach in a reasonable amount of time, say 30-60 minutes. In the Bay Area, I can, with my car, reach about 3 million people in 60 minutes, about the same as I could using transit in Berlin, which has an excellent metro system, and Berlin doesn't have to deal with the geographic barriers that the Bay Area does. I think that shared ride self driving cars have a lot of potential in both types of cities. They give you a lot of what's good about private cars (door to door, good average speed, comfort, some privacy), and a lot of what's good about metros (higher density on the road than private cars due to sharing and less need for parking) [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/transit/comments/113n0ee/average_speed_of_various_metro_lines_around_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/transit/comments/113n0ee/average_sp...
- bobthepanda 3y ago
  I don't know that "less need for parking" has ever actually panned out. If the car is not parked somewhere, it is milling around waiting for a ride, which might actually be worse in terms of congestion.
  - cameldrv 3y ago
    Yes, you don't want empty AVs roaming around the streets. There probably needs to be some sort of government intervention to discourage this behavior. Here's what's possible though: 1. Shared ride AVs can deliver multiple people per trip to their jobs, and they can also make multiple trips in the morning, and multiple trips in the evening. Private cars generally take one person, have to sit in a parking spot all day, and then go home. 2. AVs can park relatively far from their destination. After they drop off their passenger, they can go somewhere else to park. 3. AVs, if they can coordinate or be remotely controlled by a parking lot, can park way more densely than normal cars. In a normal parking lot, maybe half of the space is aisles for cars to drive to and from the parking space. If cars could dynamically get out of the way, you would only need a small portion of the space empty. A very simple strategy would be for there to be only room for one aisle for a big parking lot, and all of the cars would just move forward or back to make the single aisle appear wherever it was needed. In all, this probably reduces the need for parking by maybe 6x relative to human driven cars.
CivBase 3y ago
> Americans often think the shitty experience they have in their country applies universally. Whether this is true or not, what matters to me - a person living in the US - is that public transit in the US is a relatively poor experience compared with driving. Until that changes, I will keep driving and I will resist efforts that would force me to use public transit. I don't care if it's better elsewhere because I don't live there nor do I want to move there. I want our public transit to be good, but that simply isn't the case right now. Walkable cities with quality public transit and good community infrastructure sound great, but until they are a reality here I will have no interest in living in a dense urban location.
mortify 3y ago
I used to live in a major city in the US. My commute by public transit was 45 minutes and I lived close to a major hub. I now live outside of that city. I can drive into that same job in 60 minutes. Public transit from here is over 2 hours. Outside of Boston and NYC (well, maybe not NYC right now), I hear of no one happy with public transit in the US. We need to stop pretending that if we just move into cities, the problems will address themselves. Make public transit attractive and more people will want to live there.
- c0nfused 3y ago
  This is the fundamental problem. One an individual basis moving to a 8k square foot house in the suburbs is the thing to do. For the aggregate this means the mass transit gets worse, the traffic gets worse the emissions get worse, the tax base gets smaller. The solution is policy. Use public money to make that 2 hour transit shorter and everyone wins, not just those of us with cash

nico_h 3y ago

Uninhabited land is empty of people for a reason: - it’s protected - it’s undesirable (too hot/ dry/wet/far/steep/close to a pollution source) - it’s agricultural land If it’s not any of these it’s owned and thus controlled by someone.

pojzon 3y ago
Its owned and controlled by ppl who have millions of square meters for themselves. ^this is the real issue. But we dont want to tackle the real issue of few ppl wanting to own the whole world :) If we cut out that cancer ppl everyone on Earth could have a lot better living standards than we do now. Yes the issue are ultra rich and yes they will propaganda everything to hide it keep it safe.
falserum 3y ago
Some of those reason might be change by government policy.
J_Shelby_J 3y ago
> Uninhabited land is empty of people for a reason: - it’s protected Almost the entirety of coastal California (and Oregon and WA as well.) It's insane. It's the best climate on the planet and the most protected from climate change.

scoofy 3y ago

>You can easily get housing affordability crises even without single family homes, as is plainly evident right now in non-North-American cities. Yes, you can get an affordability crisis anywhere you make it illegal to build housing. Nobody is arguing that. The point is that you also get an affordability crisis simply by pushing the transportation infrastructure to the point of failure, and then reject density. >Is "make today's cities larger and denser forever" really the solution? Or can we figure out ways to disperse and decentralize things instead of just feeding more money back into the hands of those who own and control the current cities? This is literally what's happening in every tech satellite city, the point is that many-if-not-most of our urban centers are already at their transportation capacities, simply because that is the suburban development model: it's extremely cheap until suddenly it's no longer functional. The suburban model has no equilibrium, it's a cascade, once the planned automobile infrastructure reaches capacity, you cannot increase it at a rate that is sustainable. Thus, once that capacity is gone, suddenly the real estate in the core becomes extremely valuable -> which incentivizes density -> which further strains peak infrastructure -> which increases the value of core real estate -> which further incentivizes density -> etc. -> etc. -> etc. We can't wish this away, beyond wishing other people just didn't exist. It's like wishing that other people would take the bus, but not wanting to take it yourself. Nobody in the bay area wants to move to affordable Red Bluff, CA, without a reason, much less the CEO of a major corporation moving their entire company there out of the kindness of his heart we he or she already has a house and friends in Atherton.

NewJazz 3y ago

You end up sitting in traffic for an hour instead of standing on a bus or train for an hour for your commute Why are you acting like driving a vehicle and being a passenger in a vehicle are the same experience? One is clearly more demanding and inhibiting than the other. On a train you can work, read, listen to a podcast, sometimes eat... Lots of things you can't do while in a car. Unless your job is driving. Which, if you commute for work, it kinda is.

rayiner 3y ago
You can do those things if you get a seat, which you generally cannot during commuting hours in any city where public transit is good enough to be popular. I commuted for awhile between Baltimore and DC on Amtrak and apart from being hellaciously unreliable it was great for working. But my commute from the upper west side to east midtown when I lived in NYC was completely different—being crammed into the 1/2/3 and then fighting through the masses to take the S across town.
- NewJazz 3y ago
  You can listen to music or a podcast while standing. I just plugged in upper west side and midtown Manhattan into google maps... It said 18 minutes via transit. Maybe your commute had more complications, last mile and so on.
  - GauntletWizard 3y ago
    You can listen to music or a podcast while driving. You can even hear it over the din of your car engine, which is much less loud than being shoved into a box with a hundred other people.
- sofixa 3y ago
  > You can do those things if you get a seat, which you generally cannot during commuting hours in any city where public transit is good enough to be popular. I see lots of people watching movies/series or reading books (physical or ebooks) while standing up in various Paris transit during rush hour.

II2II 3y ago

> Is "make today's cities larger and denser forever" really the solution? Or can we figure out ways to disperse and decentralize things instead of just feeding more money back into the hands of those who own and control the current cities? We should be aiming for some degree of density. I would hazard a guess that size is largely dependent upon what a person wants out of life. Infrastructure is very expensive to build and maintain, and everyone demands it in multiple forms (roads, water, sewage, and power at a minimum). Containing the costs by reducing either extent or capacity would allow us to allocate those resources to other things, things that could improve the collective quality of life. As for decentralization, it depends upon how it is done. I've lived in or visited towns with a few thousand people. Nearly everything one needed was within walking distance, though people often left town for things they wanted. I've also lived in similarly sized urban communities where virtually nothing one needed was within a reasonable walking distance. Suburban communities often take the latter to the extreme. What was the difference? Everything in the small town was centralized, yet businesses and services in those urban communities were effectively decentralized. Let's say you build a bunch of small towns to decentralize the population and get away from feeding money back into the hands of those who own and control cities. You now have another major consideration: are people going to live most of their daily lives in those towns, or are they going to live in one town and work in another? A big part of the reason why people spend so much of their life commuting, whether it is by car or train, is because opportunities (may it be home ownership or careers) don't necessarily fall in the same place.

nonameiguess 3y ago

All I can say is thanks, but yes, every thread of this variety gets a bit tiresome hearing the same things over and over that tend to be some variation of "my peeve local issue with the US is the reason the US experiences a problem experienced by hundreds of other countries with wildly different policies." Not to say, in a vacuum, multi-family housing won't provide more housing units per unit of land area than single-family. Clearly, it will. But unless you build every city from scratch to house 20 million people, whether you started with single-family or multi-family, the most desirable cities will end up in a future state whereby more people want to live there than housing exists for, and even if regulations and zoning allow you to build higher and denser than is currently done, to do it where people want to live, you'll have to tear down existing buildings, including existing housing, and many of the owners and occupants of that housing won't want that. You'll also need to run more utility lines, build new pipes, run them under existing roads, which means shutting down those roads, and even if they're perfect utopian European roads that have zero cars on them and only have pedestrians and bicycles, the user of those roads are still going to get annoyed and inconvenienced, and it's going to cost more to do this than building new housing where nobody currently lives, pretty much no matter what.

bobthepanda 3y ago

The solution to dispersal, and density, is to simply allow that type of building everywhere, and then they just kind of randomly pop up whenever/wherever works out. Unless forced to due to scarcity, dense development does not really clump up together all at once for good reason, since clumping up will drive up costs in a hyper local area. Tokyo for example, has a lot of detached housing, even in the central wards. The density there is more pockmarked and random, and notably never really concentrates all that highly; there is not a single Japanese building in the top 100 skyscrapers, because skyscraper concentration is an artifact of how we force dense developments only in certain places.

mulmen 3y ago

> Is "make today's cities larger and denser forever" really the solution? Tokyo Metro handles 6m+ riders a day with a population of 40m. So, yes, at least until you surpass 40m people. > Or can we figure out ways to disperse and decentralize things instead of just feeding more money back into the hands of those who own and control the current cities? “Disperse and decentralize” is exactly how every city I have ever been to is built.

closeparen 3y ago

We are decentralizing things. That's what the housing crisis is: people being forced to accept less central locations than they would like. It turns that being the one who gets decentralized sucks, people it happens to generally resent it, and others are willing to make serious tradeoffs to their household budgets or else the dignity of their living conditions, in order to remain central.

lizknope 3y ago

People are attacking single family homes and commuter culture. Okay, but my solution is different. The pandemic showed that millions of us can work from home. My office was closed for about 2 years. Our stock price shot way up. There were lots of stories about the environmental benefits. Air pollution in big cities decreased dramatically. Wildlife started returning in places. We keep building commercial real estate and most people I know have little desire to commute to the office and sit in a cubicle disturbed by other people constantly. I would severely limit commercial real estate building permits, encourage companies to have employees work at home via tax breaks or whatever. This will help with the housing issues, greenhouse gas emissions, decrease the need for new roads because of less traffic. Everyone wins except dumb control freak managers and restaurants that do lunch in the business areas.

decafninja 3y ago
The dumb control freak managers are often the same people holding the levers of power to make these decisions.
- lizknope 3y ago
  Of course, that is why there needs to be some incentive to get them to change their minds. Biden Calls for Federal Workers to Return to the Office August 2023 https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/news/employee-relations/biden-calls-federal-workers-to-return-to-office https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/news/employee-relations/bi... The government wants people in the office because it helps boost the economy. I suggest the exact opposite. Are we serious about climate change? Which is a more effective strategy? Encourage people to switch to electric cars or just have them drive their existing gas car less? My monthly gasoline bills dropped from $250 to $70 during the pandemic. How much are we spending on health care? How many people don't have the time to exercise? I had an extra 60 minutes a day to take a walk instead of commuting.
gottorf 3y ago
> Our stock price shot way up. This would imply that a company's stock price is directly influenced by its productive output; in reality, it's only very tangentially so. Especially for low-profit, high-growth tech companies, I'd wager the federal funds rate's effect on the stock price is way higher.

JoeJonathan 3y ago

I spend a lot of time in São Paulo, and no matter how you slice it, housing is cheaper there. Adjunct professors and freelancers can afford houses there. Maids can afford houses, albeit far from the center. Everyone complains about the city’s endless verticalização (verticalizication) because they like the idea of old houses, but I say keep it coming.