15 ms·
> build taller As someone who lives in an area with plenty of high-density residential buildings, I can attest that this is a perfect recipe for creating conge
by rTX5CMRXIfFG 3y ago
> build taller
As someone who lives in an area with plenty of high-density residential buildings, I can attest that this is a perfect recipe for creating congested cities with such intense light and noise pollution.
- rsynnott 3y agoIt can certainly cause light issues, but I'm not sure why it would cause _congestion_?
- dv_dt 3y agoIt causes congestion if the city refuses to invest in public transportation - which is more a problem in US cities - though some European cities could be behind on keeping up with changes to different degrees
- rsynnott 3y agoOh, right, I see, yeah. Would not generally be an issue in Paris, I would've thought, at least not towards the centre.
- vladvasiliu 3y agoYou'd be mistaken. Public transit is extremely crowded in the centre during rush hour. For example, two regional lines (RER B and D) need to share a tunnel in the middle of the city. They've been investigating digging another one for a long time, but, AFAIK. they haven't found an economical way of doing so. The solution is to try to move people to other lines, but those are already very crowded and I'm not aware of any project to build a new line inside of the city limits.
- rayiner 3y agoCongestion is a problem even in cities with excellent public transportation. Have you ever been on the Tokyo subway at 8:30 am?
- dv_dt 3y agoYes, it always a balance of factors in the system, but what you're talking about is a higher threshold of capacity already. They've built up to higher rise density in Tokyo and are already managing much higher people movement in core higher density areas than the edges of Paris.
- bragr 3y agoUltimately you have more people coming and going from each building, which means more people on the streets, and more demand for all utilities and public services. Building up doesn't build out those other things. That's why you have things like Air Rights in NYC to limit building.
- rcpt 3y agoPeople aren't very noisy. Cars are
- kcorbitt 3y agoI don't know... I lived in Barcelona for two years recently and had pretty bad luck. In addition to one-off incidents, some consistent noise issues we had: - The Pakistani restaurant below our apartment would regularly host receptions/weddings until 2-3am. The sendoff typically involved groups of 20-30 people banging large drums loudly and singing as the happy couple walked out and were driven away. - We had a neighborhood drunk who frequently (multiple times a week) would wander down the street singing Flamenco-style ballads about his unfortunate love life. My assumption was that the ex he was singing to lived on the street? Anyway, he had quite a voice and was great at projecting. - The building behind us was shorter than ours and our rear balcony faced their rooftop. In the summer one of the apartments there would semi-regularly hold parties until 1am. Cars were an occasional issue too, but people were a much bigger problem in that particular neighborhood. That said, I've also lived in dense neighborhoods with none of those problems, so maybe better norms/regulations are the answer... but existing noise ordinances in the US are rarely enforced. Beyond the noise issues though I did enjoy the convenience/amenities that a dense neighborhood provides!
- hackeraccount 3y agorecently moved half a mile further out from city center and can attest to all of this. Hookah bar in my case was blaring music at 1AM. People in various states of inebriation shouting to each other outside my bedroom window. There's less car traffic too but that was such a background noise that I hardly noticed it. Though truthfully the first week or so at the new place I was conscious of it's absence.
- bluefirebrand 3y agoMore people in a smaller area? Congestion doesn't just refer to car traffic Edit: think about crowded grocery stores and restaurants. Think community spaces like parks and libraries being packed all the time. Think about never being able to stop and get a coffee without waiting in a long line. Congestion
- underlipton 3y agoI would imagine that the answer would be to open more shops. Obviously, to avoid a NYC-like situation, you would have to bust the CRE cartels that keep retail square-footage absurdly expensive. Parks and libraries are harder... though building taller does tend to allow for more open land space.
- globular-toast 3y agoI guess one person's congestion is another person's lively and bustling city?
- stefs 3y agoparis proper is already one of the densest areas in the world (and definitely in europe). when i lived there i wouldn't have noticed any problems with crowded grocery stores or community spaces compared to the comparatively low-density city i currently live in. there definitely were a lot more people in the streets, other cities feel deserted in comparison.
- lostlogin 3y ago> i wouldn't have noticed any problems with crowded grocery stores or community spaces There are so many of them. Every block seemed to have grocers and a small park. Where I am it’s a massive supermarket every 5km, not a small one every 200m. You can shop different when it’s less hassle to go.
- bombcar 3y agoDelivery also lets you have more smaller stores carrying the 80% you need regularly, and the 20% that is less common can come via delivery in a day or two.
- hollerith 3y agoThe higher the density, the more vehicles get in each others way. If your reply is that the vehicles are not needed because everyone can just walk: it takes more energy and more carbon emissions to walk a mile than it takes to drive a vehicle a mile -- and that's before we get to transporting things other than people. (Growing food is very energy intensive; walking burns food.)
- simonw 3y ago"it takes more energy and more carbon emissions to walk a mile than it takes to drive a vehicle a mile" I've never heard that before, can you expand on that?
- everforward 3y agoI wouldnt be completely surprised if it were true, though I lack the background and willpower to try to get an actual answer lol. My thought process is that food also implies some level of driving (delivering pesticides/fertilizer, driving crops away), the fertilizers are fossil-fuel derived, and if you count the sun it takes to grow crops to eat (or worse, as feed for meat). The whole chain is pretty inefficient, too. Crops are pretty good at converting sunlight to stored energy, but animals and us are bad at retrieving that stored energy. The losses compound if we're eating meat. Walking isn't a particularly efficient method of movement either, to my understanding. The energy gets a bit spurious though. One could argue that if we're going to count sunlight going into the crops, we should do the same for the sunlight that raised the dinos so they could become oil. I also would wager that starts and stops would impact this heavily. The human weighs a lot less so they can accelerate/decelerate much cheaper. The car would have a better edge on a long, straight mile with no stops.
- OkayPhysicist 3y agoA human walking is absurdly efficient, as anyone who's ever tried to outrun a bad diet can tell you. Running or walking a mile burns ~100 extra calories relative to sitting on your couch. Unless you're putting active effort into not doing so, most diets fluctuate by far more than that.
- digging 3y agoLight pollution is relatively easily solved, there's just not much will to do so. Noise pollution is best solved by reducing car-dependency which is a non-starter in most North American cities; I can't speak for Europe but I understand Paris to have undertaken a serious revolution in purging cars within the past decade.
- andrepd 3y agoBoth the fight against car dependency and the housing policy in TFA have been spearheaded by the current mayor, Anne Hidalgo
- verisimi 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bedobi 3y agoyeah, make sure you move out of the city and go run hiding in the countryside somewhere if you stay in the city, the globalists WILL come for you, they WILL put you in 15 minute cities where everything you need is easily available within walking, bicycling or high quality transit distance (oh no!)
- verisimi 3y agoLol. I'm not worried. I just it's funny think it's funny how people live to line up on the side of the unelected global governance system and think that voting matters and believe everything they were taught in school/on TV etc. "I'm choosing to give up my car, and you will choose that too!"
- bedobi 3y agoyeah, the default mode of human transportation is to drive a single occupancy private automobile, for every trip, everywhere, including in dense urban environments, and anyone who thinks otherwise is brainwashed by the globalists if you prefer walking, riding a bike or transit you're so brainwashed! wake up and listen to the truth the automobile and fossil fuel industries are trying to get out there!
- jauntywundrkind 3y agoThankfully Paris was also super super super smart & has rapidly developed dedicated bike infrastructure that is incredibly popular & nice to use. It rapidly reduces the need for cars for many many people. They also are restricting the use of cars in their city center, which will help force de-car'ing for casual use & make people take efficient less demanding forms of transit. This should help keep congestion & din from being aggravating!
- dionidium 3y ago> As someone who lives in an area with plenty of high-density residential buildings And yet you live there, which means, presumably, that it's your best option relative to the alternatives. People should be allowed to choose living arrangements that meet their most critical needs, even if they also find reasons to complain about aspects of those arrangements that are self-evidently less important to them.
- s_dev 3y agoFrance already has some of the most densely populated cities in the world, Paris is #32. French cities feel less congested than the likes of US cities because it has better cycling infrastructure and public transport options. High population density is not a cure for the bias car infrastructure imposes on a city. So your recipe will need to take more in to account than just density. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_population_density https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_popul...
- OkGoDoIt 3y agoHow does that linked Wikipedia page not contain any cities in China, which in my experience are more dense than just about anywhere else in the world?
- bobthepanda 3y agoone is that Chinese "city" boundaries also generally include a lot of rural land, mountains, etc. Chongqing is the size of Austria. The other is that while the buildings are certainly tall, China also does a lot of "tower-in-the-park" style development where the plazas and landscaping in between tall buildings decrease overall density.
- maattdd 3y agoWhat is your experience ? China cities are noticeably less dense than other cities in Asia (Manilla, Delhi..) or even Paris
- resolutebat 3y agoMost of Manila is an endless sprawl low-rise housing and single-story slums, with a few areas of high-rise buildings (Makati, BGC, etc). In the average large Chinese city, more or less all the housing is high-rise.
- bobthepanda 3y agohow much of that housing is occupied vs investment, and how large are the apartments? slums get quite packed.
- gxs 3y agoThis is a huge problem with housing in general that is mostly ignored. Let people build 4 units where today it's zone for 1, and if you disagree, you're an out of touch racist/classist/luddite who is just not a visionary and can't embrace the future. Surely nothing bad is going to happen when you take a subdivision with 30 homes and take just 10 of those and turn them into quadplexes. 30 homes might approximate something like 60 cars and 60 children. Now instead of 30 homes, you have 20 + 10*4 = 60 homes. You're now asking infrastructure that hasn't been touched since the 60s to accommodate nearly twice as many people. And I get that not every new unit will also have 2 children, but some will and it no doubt leads to a net increase. Where as before the road leading out your development had to accommodate 50 cars in the morning commute, now it has to handle more than 100. And this is just a minor inconvenience. The real issues arise when you've doubled the amount of school children, but the number of teachers hires or classrooms built hasn't increased, and let's not even talk about teacher salaries. Then there are utilities and other public services (first responders, etc.) This was just one small subdivision with 30 homes, now imagine this happening across multiple parts of town at once and you can see the problem. All that is to say, I've never been against building more housing (omg build up! it's so easy!), what I'm against is building more housing without proportional investments everywhere else. It's a hard problem to solve, I admit it, but that's my whole point. It's hard, you can't just build more housing and call it a day.
- martythemaniak 3y agoMaybe the reason people accuse you of being "racist/classist/luddite" is because you're fearmongering, and they suspect these talking points are just a cover for looking out for your financial interest (keep increasing property prices), or keeping your community free from "others" or something. Why is this fearmongering? Because your figures are wildly, wildly out of touch with reality. If you legalize quadplexes by right, you're not going to magically see a doubling of housing, there just aren't that many people! That is completely made up bullshit. Fast growing place have growth rates in the low single digits, like 2%/a, not 50%. Growth projections for fast growing regions like the Toronto area have 50% growth projections on the scale of decades. But "If we legalize quadplexes, our 100 home with turn into 102 home next years and there'll be one extra car" just doesn't have the same zing and it's hard to keep the housing crisis going with realistic complaints.
- ketralnis 3y agoAs someone who lives in an area with plenty of high-density residential buildings, I can attest that I love it and I wish there were more American cities that were an option for my lifestyle.
- ipaddr 3y agoAmerica is filled with high rises. Where are you from?
- harimau777 3y agoWhat do you mean? In my experience outside of the few major cities (New York, LA, etc.) there are only high rises in the very downtown of large cities.
- em-bee 3y agoi don't remember any high rises outside of downtown in LA either. and most of those downtown high rises in most cities are office buildings. New York is really the exception.
- ipaddr 3y agoHighrises are just apartments. Very large like Columbus Ohio? https://borror.com/high-rise-apartments-columbus-ohio/ https://borror.com/high-rise-apartments-columbus-ohio/ Waterkloof, Maine https://www.booking.com/hotel/za/menlyn-maine-high-rise-1-bedroom-luxury-apartment.en-gb.html https://www.booking.com/hotel/za/menlyn-maine-high-rise-1-be... Pikeville, Ky http://hapky.org/myers-towers.html http://hapky.org/myers-towers.html
- harimau777 3y agoI guess I tend to think of "high-rise" as a synonym for skyscraper. Something in the neighborhood of 10+ stories. I'm fairly certain that Columbus at least doesn't have many residential buildings that high outside of its downtown. However, if we are counting 3 or so story apartments then there are definitely high-rises all over the place like you say.
- jorvi 3y agoCool cool, except the situation is dire and people need a roof over their head. Other priorities can wait.
- wolverine876 3y ago> congested cities with such intense light and noise pollution I'm not sure how you mean that. Obviously you know that many people love cities with lots of tall buildings, NYC being the obvious US example. Clearly you don't like them, but are you saying the busy-ness is inherently bad? If you don't like it, can you leave? Usually, that's an expensive place to live.
- carabiner 3y agoPart of the draw of a city is bustling night life. You don't move to Manhattan for dark skies.
- int_19h 3y agoCan we at least acknowledge that it is not universally a draw, and many people actually hate it?
- CalRobert 3y agoWhat is making the noise?
- justinator 3y agoIt's literally been dubbed the City of Light and the highest density cities in France already. It's not even close.
- enaaem 3y agoCities aren’t loud. Cars are.
- mlrtime 3y agoCars are very loud, Cities are still loud with 0 cars. Source: Manhattan, NYC