5 ms·

These posts always feel like people are fetishizing some "utopia" where everyone should want to live in an imaginary fully walkable, meticulously maintained, pr

These posts always feel like people are fetishizing some "utopia" where everyone should want to live in an imaginary fully walkable, meticulously maintained, pristine city. The comparisons of like a 2 square mile section of the nicest parts of a European city to areas of the rural US that have land areas larger than many European countries feels... at best, idealism run afoul.

mbs159 2y ago
Curious to know, have you ever lived in a walkable European city, like Amsterdam? If not, then on what are you basing your assumptions on?
oblio 2y ago
The examples in the article are from the Minneapolis metro area... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopkins,_Minnesota https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopkins,_Minnesota https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northfield,_Minnesota https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northfield,_Minnesota None of those are rural, they're suburban. And frankly, even your rural non-homestead areas could use some redesigning. Now you make it unsafe walk in what are basically villages, the quintessential walkable settlements that we've invented back in prehistory.
- its_ethan 2y ago
  I'm quite familiar with Minneapolis, and you're right it is fairly suburban - but suburbs are a phenomenon of the world after the invention of the car. Car ownership rates in suburbs are incredibly high, like 90%+ in most suburban areas (https://newgeography.com/files/job-access_03.png https://newgeography.com/files/job-access_03.png). Minneapolis has a ~98% rate of car ownership, and places like Hopkins and Northfield were designed knowing that most of their citizens live far enough away from places like schools/grocery stores/movie theaters/offices/etc that they will need a car anyway. And this isn't like a chicken or egg thing where people aren't walking because it's not nice to walk. The car came first, and then the suburb (as we know them) came second. These places were designed for cars. We're talking about 20-30+ min walks each way to get from most homes to the nearest "commercial area". Even if it was the walkable utopian dream of tree lined sidewalks and pedestrian-centric intersections, it won't change the fact that the vast majority of people would not choose to walk, and so it makes sense that these places are optimized for the way people actually get around.
  - hibikir 2y ago
    There are many parts of the world where suburbs are shapes very differently, and while they support cars, they don't need them. The 0.3 acre plot, the street with no commercial activity... those aren't requirements for suburbs. Madrid has many a suburb that is far denser, grows upwards, and is centered around a train station.
    - its_ethan 2y ago
      And that's great for those places. But why do people feel compelled to make relatively new US suburbs more similar to old suburbs in Madrid? No one is trying to make suburbs in Madrid more like suburbs in Iowa - I'm voicing frustration that the reciprocal is not true. This is part of a larger frustration where it feels like a very common thing that people in cities want to enforce their expectations and cultures onto rural places that already have their own way of being.
      - pchristensen 2y ago
        Forcing places to be a certain way by law is like writing an essay without the letters 'D' and 'O'. Possible, but it's really tying your hands behind your back.
      - oblio 2y ago
        "Their own of being" = putting a fist in everyone's mouth by <<forcing>> housing to be exactly the same type (single family detached house) and <<banning>> any other type of activity, even compatible ones like light commercial. A sign of confidence, you know, the typical American fashion, would be to allow mixed zoning for compatible uses and see what happens, "invisible hand" and all.
  - dixie_land 2y ago
    I'm a car person but 20/30 mins of walk to get some coffee with my dogs sounds very pleasant (iff the pedestrian crossings are safer as the article proposed) Just because the majority are fat doesn't mean it's healthy
- rsync 2y ago
  Northfield is not, by any definition, a Minneapolis suburb. Further, much of Northfield is very rural, big corn fields, etc. Could there be improvements in transit and workability? Certainly… especially between the historic downtown and the two colleges… … but Northfield is actually a good example of a town where car (truck ?) oriented transit and stroads, etc., are well suited.
amw-zero 2y ago
I also don't understand the obsession
- bradboimler 2y ago
  Personally, I only appreciated the value of a walkable neighborhood after I moved to one. Now I _never_ want to go back. Cars and driving are awful
hibikir 2y ago
Should we look at rural areas in Europe? I spent 3 weeks this summer in a small town in Spain. I could smell manure if the wind came from the right direction. And yet, I didn't need to get into a car, because the town center of this rural town, population 5 thousand, lives next to each other. The farmers go to the fields further away by car if they need to, but the kids walk 5 minutes to the high school. The total land area is also irrelevant: Spain has a pretty low total population density, but that's because most of it is empty. The people live close to each other anyway. You can have a house 20 minutes by car anyway, and thus live 20 minutes away from the hospital instead of 3 minutes if you really like yards that much, but barely anyone does, because the car life is expensive and a hassle
- silvestrov 2y ago
  Example of small town from "flyover state" in Denmark: i.e. area with very few jobs, very low house prices, everybody moving away, houses on the market forever. We call this for "the rotten banana" as the area is shaped as a banana and the economy is rotten. Still very walkable and nice for kids. Price for these houses is ca. $100_000 (some little over, some little less). http://maps.google.com/maps?q=&layer=c&cbll=55.7224384,8.533369&cbp= http://maps.google.com/maps?q=&layer=c&cbll=55.7224384,8.533...
- marcusverus 2y ago
  Is this a matter of preference or necessity? Median household net income in Spain is ~17K[0] and is probably much lower in rural areas. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_capita_income#Median_household_net_income_(Eurostat) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...
  - buildfocus 2y ago
    Barcelona is also a very walkable city (across the entire area of 2 million people, not just the very center) and is definitely the upper end of Spanish income. A big part of this is long term cultural: medieval towns (and even much older) were all clustered very tightly into blocks with city walls against attacks, those slowly evolved into the vast majority of the towns & villages in Spain today, and have left a culture where flats and dense city centers are the expected norm and the primary model, even for towns surrounded by empty space. You can easily find small towns of apartment blocks and tight wall to wall houses in windy city centers, of just 1000 people, surrounded by fields for miles. The Spanish would argue that surburanism is generally less enjoyable (walkability, community, socialability) and less secure (houses are easier to rob than non-ground floor flats) while dense apartment/etc living is better value (less land cost, shared maintainence in apartment blocks) and provides better airflow/heat management & opportunity for balcony views (attic flats etc).
TomK32 2y ago
Don't overdo with by adding "meticulously maintained, pristine city", I mean okay this might be a side-effect once people start walking more and have the time to look at their environment close up and maybe even thrown their single-use coffee cup into a bin instead of out the car window. European cities were in most of their cores built before the car or didn't allow highways to cut them up, followed by more demolishment for parking space. Add zoning laws that only allow single homes with no business in their center and you get suburbian where you can only escape with a car.
- rangestransform 2y ago
  > I mean okay this might be a side-effect once people start walking more and have the time to look at their environment close up and maybe even thrown their single-use coffee cup into a bin instead of out the car window. Definitely not in NYC, everywhere you see the disdain with which NYCers treat their communal environment
_xnmw 2y ago
Curious, have you ever lived for an extensive amount of time in a walkable European city? As a person who was born and raised in suburban East Coast car-hell and then moved to Europe, I would never want to go back. I still want a luxury car for rare drives to the countryside, but I hate it every time I have to go back to North American car-dependent cities, except for the nicer walkable downtowns.
- betaby 2y ago
  Are you living alone or with wife/kids? That changes a lot. Larger apartments are getting pricy very quickly.
- its_ethan 2y ago
  I've given up on "arguing" with people on this thread, but FWIW, I have lived in Berlin and Frankfurt both for extended periods of time (2.5years total). I'll leave it up to you to decide if those are walkable cities or not. I also currently live in NYC, which is, if not walkable, anti-car.
- acuozzo 2y ago
  How is the soundproofing where you live? My boys (one with ASD and the other with ADHD) are often extremely loud. When they are, you can hear them clearly from a surprising distance away from my suburban USA home even when they're still in the house.
alkonaut 2y ago
The US is not large and not sparse compared to the rest of the world in general or compared to Europe in particular. This argument pops up every time but it just has no basis in reality. There are sparse (rural) and dense (city) areas everywhere. The ratio between this type of area is different in Finland compared to the UK, just as it differs between Alaska and New Jersey. The density of the US is roughly the same as Europe. (Around 100/sq km) But walkable cities can be both 1M population or 10k population. What applies to a footpath in a city of 1M applies to a footpath in a city of 10k too. Truly rural areas usually aren’t the topic of these discussions nor sites like strongtowns. For obvious reasons.
- keybored 2y ago
  > The density of the US is roughly the same as Europe. (Around 100/sq km) The population density of America is 33.6/square km according to Wikipedia. For comparison: Sweden up to the north is 25/square km. There is a large difference in this regard. EDIT: I added the part I was replying to out of concern of the downvoter’s who didn’t manage to catch that.
  - alkonaut 2y ago
    Oh sorry Google fooled me, when asking for US pop density it answered per sq. mi (96) and for EU it answered per sq km (106). The numbers are less similar with the same units then…. Some sparse countries like Ukraine aren’t counted in EU however. But I think the point you make about Sweden also applies to anywhere. How much land a country has that isn’t a city isn’t very relevant to how its cities look. If the US had 10 more alaskas or the EU had 10 more Swedens wouldn’t matter for how cities are built. In the debate about Covid there was a trope about Sweden being so sparsely populated that no lessons could be drawn from there. Yet looking more closely it’s obvious that this is merely because most areas of Sweden have almost no people, and it’s rather Urbanized. I.e it’s actually locally dense but mostly empty. “Mean distance between humans” is a much better measure of population density, both for city design and epedemics. Australia is a prime example where on average, 3ppl per square kilometer live. A figure that says nothing about actual population density.
jltsiren 2y ago
It's not about everyone. It's just about building enough nice walkable cities for people who want to live in them. It's not a utopia. It's about prioritizing people over traffic. Prioritizing the experience of being in the city over the convenience of getting there or driving through. And it doesn't even have to be a city. The same idea also applies to suburbs. You can have good transit connections to the city, apartment buildings and local services in the core, single-family homes a bit further away, and large parks and forests within walking distance. Suburbs like this are typically more sparsely built but more densely populated than American suburbs. They also tend to be nicer once you leave your home.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  *For people who can afford to live in them. I imagine most people (like me) aren't out in the boonies due to claustrophobia. We could use more walk able cities, but those we do have in the US tend to be the most expensive neighborhoods.
betaby 2y ago
I want to live in an imaginary fully walkable city. Now I live in Montreal, for the context see video https://youtu.be/_yDtLv-7xZ4 https://youtu.be/_yDtLv-7xZ4 It's very good overview of what is wrong with the best* city in North America. Not covered in this video: high rent/cost of owning compared to the local relatively low salaries (most of Montrealers agree) and in general low quality of hosing (many Montrealers got very irritated if I bring that). So yeah, I understand your argument.
mitthrowaway2 2y ago
There's no reason that small towns and rural areas can't have bicycle paths, shade trees, and safe crosswalks. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztpcWUqVpIg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztpcWUqVpIg
abeppu 2y ago
... but what are "these posts"? Because this post compares good and bad examples within the Minneapolis-St Paul metro area. This isn't a comparison of some cherry-picked European city with the rural US. It's a comparison of good and bad points within a mid-sized US city. Further, a bunch of these examples seem like cases where the resources for the better design would not have been out of reach. The case where there are only crosswalks on 3 sides of an intersection so pedestrians need to walk the long way around (and wait for the light to change multiple times) would be straight-forward to have done right. The example in the "convenience" section where the path forces pedestrians to take a longer path, would have taken only a modest amount of additional concrete to address. Examples where there's too little demarcation between the sidewalk and street often have a green strip on the other side of the sidewalk. The same amount of space could have been used with the sidewalk shifted over and a green strip with trees placed between the street and sidewalk. None of these are "idealism run afoul".
Tade0 2y ago
As an outsider (as in: not American) I notice that a lot of the details, especially downsides, are left out. I grew up in a commie block in a region of Europe where cities are fairly sparsely populated (approximately half the density of Amsterdam and close to 1/8th that of Paris proper). I see it as a good middle ground that while still walkable, doesn't have the aforementioned downsides of dense city living, like: -Noise, or actually the contortions you have to go through to keep it at acceptable levels. The inverse square law really does a number on people who live in a densely populated area with a night life or renovations going on (there's always renovations going on). -Garbage disposal. I remember spending a mostly sleepless night in Bilbao because guess when is the only time a garbage truck can actually pass and collect refuse in a timely manner? Modern humans produce way more garbage than their 19th century counterparts. -General tidyness. I want to see Tokyo one day because it appears to be the only large, densely populated area in the world which isn't filthy. I'm not even talking about trash. It's the puddles of animal (and human) urine scattered here and there. -Lack of green spaces. Land is precious in densely populated cities, so you can't have this sort of stuff. Meanwhile when a dog has to go, they have to go, hence the previously mentioned puddles. -Cost. Did I mention land is precious? The other day my friend showed me the sort of palace he can buy by selling his two bedroom in a commie block. Especially in recent years cost alone has pushed many people out of cities. -Cost (of living). My car-oriented hellhole of a suburban mall where I sometimes do shopping has more stuff and at prices 30% lower than all those neat corner shops. The reason is that everything, from rent to logistics is expensive in a densely-populated area. I could go on, but this is the gist. You couldn't pay me to live in a place with more than 5000 inhabitants per square kilometre.
- plewd 2y ago
  I agree with most of the points, but I'm surprised about the "lack of green spaces" you mentioned. From my experience, Europe has far more and better urban parks than what I have seen in the US. The general atmosphere of European parks is something that I will forever miss while living in the US.
consteval 2y ago
I hear these complaints all the time about any conversation that involves making a change for the better. At the end of the day, there's a lot of people that are fundamentally anti-progress. If it makes things better, they don't want it. Doesn't matter what it is past that. Their solutions to our problems are either that the problems don't exist, or if they do, we should do nothing and they'll solve themselves. Look, nobody is looking for a utopia. Nobody expects that. But making small steps in a better direction is a good thing. Look around you at your cities. Is this the best it could possibly get? Do you truly believe this is the apex of human society? I know you don't. Why, then, do you (and others) feel so ideologically opposed to making some amount of change? I just don't get it.
- its_ethan 2y ago
  That's a fairly bold claim to say that I oppose making any change for the better lol... anyway.. Having grown up in both rural and urban areas, and having seen many articles like this one, they tend to (more often then not) read like this: "I know what's best for everyone, and if only these rural hicks would just let us do what's best for them everything would be perfect". That's mostly where my frustration lies - not with weather or not some town has a sidewalk or not. > Look around you at your cities. Is this the best it could possibly get? As someone who has spent significant time in parts of Minnesota very near to Northfield... yes. I genuinely think these places are as close to the "best it could possibly get" as is realistic to achieve. This is based on my experiences and my preferences having lived in these places. Your opinion seems to differ from that, which is why you seem to think that these places are in need of being changed - but do you even live in a place like the one in question? > Why, then, do you (and others) feel so ideologically opposed to making some amount of change? Because it is not at all obvious that these are actually improvements for the people who actually live there. As I tried (and maybe failed) to convey, places like Northfield, MN were designed for cars - nearly everyone (~98%) who lives in Minneapolis has a car [1] and would use their car to get to the Allina clinic in question. Even if this was an excessively pedestrian friendly intersection, it would still be true that an overwhelming majority of people going to this clinic would drive. Look around on google maps at this clinic and intersection [2] - there aren't even many residential places within walking distance in the first place. So in this case the suggested "improvement" would only even be relevant to a small number of people. And I'm not against making changes that only benefit a few people, but there needs to be a real case for people needing (or even wanting) it. And that needs to be to stand up against... The fact that there are tradeoffs to rebuilding infrastructure to be more walkable. If there was some magic wand that just made this intersection walkable with absolutely zero tradeoff, then sure, wave your wand. But the truth is that there are real factors that matter: cost (both up front and mantainence), restricted access (during construction), and the not insignificant cost of having people idle in their cars at this intersection (which crosses a pretty significant thoroughfare for people in the Northfield to get to commercial areas from their homes - which are not a walkable distance away) to name a few. Again, my frustration here is not that people are trying to make "progress". My frustration is that this "progress" is often defined by people who don't have to deal with the consequences, and that articles like this do not ever seem to actually account for the actual experience of the people who live in these places. I would turn the question around to you: Why, then, do you (and others) feel so ideologically compelled to push changes onto others and expect them to share your definition of "progress" even when they tell you otherwise? [1] http://www.newgeography.com/files/job-access_03.png http://www.newgeography.com/files/job-access_03.png [2] https://www.mapdevelopers.com/draw-circle-tool.php?circles=%5B%5B804.67%2C44.8668858%2C-93.3286603%2C%22%23AAAAAA%22%2C%22%23000000%22%2C0.4%5D%5D https://www.mapdevelopers.com/draw-circle-tool.php?circles=%...

mbs159 2y ago

Curious to know, have you ever lived in a walkable European city, like Amsterdam? If not, then on what are you basing your assumptions on?

oblio 2y ago

The examples in the article are from the Minneapolis metro area... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopkins,_Minnesota https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopkins,_Minnesota https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northfield,_Minnesota https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northfield,_Minnesota None of those are rural, they're suburban. And frankly, even your rural non-homestead areas could use some redesigning. Now you make it unsafe walk in what are basically villages, the quintessential walkable settlements that we've invented back in prehistory.

its_ethan 2y ago
I'm quite familiar with Minneapolis, and you're right it is fairly suburban - but suburbs are a phenomenon of the world after the invention of the car. Car ownership rates in suburbs are incredibly high, like 90%+ in most suburban areas (https://newgeography.com/files/job-access_03.png https://newgeography.com/files/job-access_03.png). Minneapolis has a ~98% rate of car ownership, and places like Hopkins and Northfield were designed knowing that most of their citizens live far enough away from places like schools/grocery stores/movie theaters/offices/etc that they will need a car anyway. And this isn't like a chicken or egg thing where people aren't walking because it's not nice to walk. The car came first, and then the suburb (as we know them) came second. These places were designed for cars. We're talking about 20-30+ min walks each way to get from most homes to the nearest "commercial area". Even if it was the walkable utopian dream of tree lined sidewalks and pedestrian-centric intersections, it won't change the fact that the vast majority of people would not choose to walk, and so it makes sense that these places are optimized for the way people actually get around.
- hibikir 2y ago
  There are many parts of the world where suburbs are shapes very differently, and while they support cars, they don't need them. The 0.3 acre plot, the street with no commercial activity... those aren't requirements for suburbs. Madrid has many a suburb that is far denser, grows upwards, and is centered around a train station.
  - its_ethan 2y ago
    And that's great for those places. But why do people feel compelled to make relatively new US suburbs more similar to old suburbs in Madrid? No one is trying to make suburbs in Madrid more like suburbs in Iowa - I'm voicing frustration that the reciprocal is not true. This is part of a larger frustration where it feels like a very common thing that people in cities want to enforce their expectations and cultures onto rural places that already have their own way of being.
    - pchristensen 2y ago
      Forcing places to be a certain way by law is like writing an essay without the letters 'D' and 'O'. Possible, but it's really tying your hands behind your back.
    - oblio 2y ago
      "Their own of being" = putting a fist in everyone's mouth by <<forcing>> housing to be exactly the same type (single family detached house) and <<banning>> any other type of activity, even compatible ones like light commercial. A sign of confidence, you know, the typical American fashion, would be to allow mixed zoning for compatible uses and see what happens, "invisible hand" and all.
- dixie_land 2y ago
  I'm a car person but 20/30 mins of walk to get some coffee with my dogs sounds very pleasant (iff the pedestrian crossings are safer as the article proposed) Just because the majority are fat doesn't mean it's healthy
rsync 2y ago
Northfield is not, by any definition, a Minneapolis suburb. Further, much of Northfield is very rural, big corn fields, etc. Could there be improvements in transit and workability? Certainly… especially between the historic downtown and the two colleges… … but Northfield is actually a good example of a town where car (truck ?) oriented transit and stroads, etc., are well suited.

amw-zero 2y ago

I also don't understand the obsession

bradboimler 2y ago
Personally, I only appreciated the value of a walkable neighborhood after I moved to one. Now I _never_ want to go back. Cars and driving are awful

hibikir 2y ago

Should we look at rural areas in Europe? I spent 3 weeks this summer in a small town in Spain. I could smell manure if the wind came from the right direction. And yet, I didn't need to get into a car, because the town center of this rural town, population 5 thousand, lives next to each other. The farmers go to the fields further away by car if they need to, but the kids walk 5 minutes to the high school. The total land area is also irrelevant: Spain has a pretty low total population density, but that's because most of it is empty. The people live close to each other anyway. You can have a house 20 minutes by car anyway, and thus live 20 minutes away from the hospital instead of 3 minutes if you really like yards that much, but barely anyone does, because the car life is expensive and a hassle

silvestrov 2y ago
Example of small town from "flyover state" in Denmark: i.e. area with very few jobs, very low house prices, everybody moving away, houses on the market forever. We call this for "the rotten banana" as the area is shaped as a banana and the economy is rotten. Still very walkable and nice for kids. Price for these houses is ca. $100_000 (some little over, some little less). http://maps.google.com/maps?q=&layer=c&cbll=55.7224384,8.533369&cbp= http://maps.google.com/maps?q=&layer=c&cbll=55.7224384,8.533...
marcusverus 2y ago
Is this a matter of preference or necessity? Median household net income in Spain is ~17K[0] and is probably much lower in rural areas. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_capita_income#Median_household_net_income_(Eurostat) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...
- buildfocus 2y ago
  Barcelona is also a very walkable city (across the entire area of 2 million people, not just the very center) and is definitely the upper end of Spanish income. A big part of this is long term cultural: medieval towns (and even much older) were all clustered very tightly into blocks with city walls against attacks, those slowly evolved into the vast majority of the towns & villages in Spain today, and have left a culture where flats and dense city centers are the expected norm and the primary model, even for towns surrounded by empty space. You can easily find small towns of apartment blocks and tight wall to wall houses in windy city centers, of just 1000 people, surrounded by fields for miles. The Spanish would argue that surburanism is generally less enjoyable (walkability, community, socialability) and less secure (houses are easier to rob than non-ground floor flats) while dense apartment/etc living is better value (less land cost, shared maintainence in apartment blocks) and provides better airflow/heat management & opportunity for balcony views (attic flats etc).

TomK32 2y ago

Don't overdo with by adding "meticulously maintained, pristine city", I mean okay this might be a side-effect once people start walking more and have the time to look at their environment close up and maybe even thrown their single-use coffee cup into a bin instead of out the car window. European cities were in most of their cores built before the car or didn't allow highways to cut them up, followed by more demolishment for parking space. Add zoning laws that only allow single homes with no business in their center and you get suburbian where you can only escape with a car.

rangestransform 2y ago
> I mean okay this might be a side-effect once people start walking more and have the time to look at their environment close up and maybe even thrown their single-use coffee cup into a bin instead of out the car window. Definitely not in NYC, everywhere you see the disdain with which NYCers treat their communal environment

_xnmw 2y ago

Curious, have you ever lived for an extensive amount of time in a walkable European city? As a person who was born and raised in suburban East Coast car-hell and then moved to Europe, I would never want to go back. I still want a luxury car for rare drives to the countryside, but I hate it every time I have to go back to North American car-dependent cities, except for the nicer walkable downtowns.

betaby 2y ago
Are you living alone or with wife/kids? That changes a lot. Larger apartments are getting pricy very quickly.
its_ethan 2y ago
I've given up on "arguing" with people on this thread, but FWIW, I have lived in Berlin and Frankfurt both for extended periods of time (2.5years total). I'll leave it up to you to decide if those are walkable cities or not. I also currently live in NYC, which is, if not walkable, anti-car.
acuozzo 2y ago
How is the soundproofing where you live? My boys (one with ASD and the other with ADHD) are often extremely loud. When they are, you can hear them clearly from a surprising distance away from my suburban USA home even when they're still in the house.

alkonaut 2y ago

The US is not large and not sparse compared to the rest of the world in general or compared to Europe in particular. This argument pops up every time but it just has no basis in reality. There are sparse (rural) and dense (city) areas everywhere. The ratio between this type of area is different in Finland compared to the UK, just as it differs between Alaska and New Jersey. The density of the US is roughly the same as Europe. (Around 100/sq km) But walkable cities can be both 1M population or 10k population. What applies to a footpath in a city of 1M applies to a footpath in a city of 10k too. Truly rural areas usually aren’t the topic of these discussions nor sites like strongtowns. For obvious reasons.

keybored 2y ago
> The density of the US is roughly the same as Europe. (Around 100/sq km) The population density of America is 33.6/square km according to Wikipedia. For comparison: Sweden up to the north is 25/square km. There is a large difference in this regard. EDIT: I added the part I was replying to out of concern of the downvoter’s who didn’t manage to catch that.
- alkonaut 2y ago
  Oh sorry Google fooled me, when asking for US pop density it answered per sq. mi (96) and for EU it answered per sq km (106). The numbers are less similar with the same units then…. Some sparse countries like Ukraine aren’t counted in EU however. But I think the point you make about Sweden also applies to anywhere. How much land a country has that isn’t a city isn’t very relevant to how its cities look. If the US had 10 more alaskas or the EU had 10 more Swedens wouldn’t matter for how cities are built. In the debate about Covid there was a trope about Sweden being so sparsely populated that no lessons could be drawn from there. Yet looking more closely it’s obvious that this is merely because most areas of Sweden have almost no people, and it’s rather Urbanized. I.e it’s actually locally dense but mostly empty. “Mean distance between humans” is a much better measure of population density, both for city design and epedemics. Australia is a prime example where on average, 3ppl per square kilometer live. A figure that says nothing about actual population density.

jltsiren 2y ago

It's not about everyone. It's just about building enough nice walkable cities for people who want to live in them. It's not a utopia. It's about prioritizing people over traffic. Prioritizing the experience of being in the city over the convenience of getting there or driving through. And it doesn't even have to be a city. The same idea also applies to suburbs. You can have good transit connections to the city, apartment buildings and local services in the core, single-family homes a bit further away, and large parks and forests within walking distance. Suburbs like this are typically more sparsely built but more densely populated than American suburbs. They also tend to be nicer once you leave your home.

johnnyanmac 2y ago
*For people who can afford to live in them. I imagine most people (like me) aren't out in the boonies due to claustrophobia. We could use more walk able cities, but those we do have in the US tend to be the most expensive neighborhoods.

betaby 2y ago

I want to live in an imaginary fully walkable city. Now I live in Montreal, for the context see video https://youtu.be/_yDtLv-7xZ4 https://youtu.be/_yDtLv-7xZ4 It's very good overview of what is wrong with the best* city in North America. Not covered in this video: high rent/cost of owning compared to the local relatively low salaries (most of Montrealers agree) and in general low quality of hosing (many Montrealers got very irritated if I bring that). So yeah, I understand your argument.

mitthrowaway2 2y ago

There's no reason that small towns and rural areas can't have bicycle paths, shade trees, and safe crosswalks. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztpcWUqVpIg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztpcWUqVpIg

abeppu 2y ago

... but what are "these posts"? Because this post compares good and bad examples within the Minneapolis-St Paul metro area. This isn't a comparison of some cherry-picked European city with the rural US. It's a comparison of good and bad points within a mid-sized US city. Further, a bunch of these examples seem like cases where the resources for the better design would not have been out of reach. The case where there are only crosswalks on 3 sides of an intersection so pedestrians need to walk the long way around (and wait for the light to change multiple times) would be straight-forward to have done right. The example in the "convenience" section where the path forces pedestrians to take a longer path, would have taken only a modest amount of additional concrete to address. Examples where there's too little demarcation between the sidewalk and street often have a green strip on the other side of the sidewalk. The same amount of space could have been used with the sidewalk shifted over and a green strip with trees placed between the street and sidewalk. None of these are "idealism run afoul".

Tade0 2y ago

As an outsider (as in: not American) I notice that a lot of the details, especially downsides, are left out. I grew up in a commie block in a region of Europe where cities are fairly sparsely populated (approximately half the density of Amsterdam and close to 1/8th that of Paris proper). I see it as a good middle ground that while still walkable, doesn't have the aforementioned downsides of dense city living, like: -Noise, or actually the contortions you have to go through to keep it at acceptable levels. The inverse square law really does a number on people who live in a densely populated area with a night life or renovations going on (there's always renovations going on). -Garbage disposal. I remember spending a mostly sleepless night in Bilbao because guess when is the only time a garbage truck can actually pass and collect refuse in a timely manner? Modern humans produce way more garbage than their 19th century counterparts. -General tidyness. I want to see Tokyo one day because it appears to be the only large, densely populated area in the world which isn't filthy. I'm not even talking about trash. It's the puddles of animal (and human) urine scattered here and there. -Lack of green spaces. Land is precious in densely populated cities, so you can't have this sort of stuff. Meanwhile when a dog has to go, they have to go, hence the previously mentioned puddles. -Cost. Did I mention land is precious? The other day my friend showed me the sort of palace he can buy by selling his two bedroom in a commie block. Especially in recent years cost alone has pushed many people out of cities. -Cost (of living). My car-oriented hellhole of a suburban mall where I sometimes do shopping has more stuff and at prices 30% lower than all those neat corner shops. The reason is that everything, from rent to logistics is expensive in a densely-populated area. I could go on, but this is the gist. You couldn't pay me to live in a place with more than 5000 inhabitants per square kilometre.

plewd 2y ago
I agree with most of the points, but I'm surprised about the "lack of green spaces" you mentioned. From my experience, Europe has far more and better urban parks than what I have seen in the US. The general atmosphere of European parks is something that I will forever miss while living in the US.

consteval 2y ago

I hear these complaints all the time about any conversation that involves making a change for the better. At the end of the day, there's a lot of people that are fundamentally anti-progress. If it makes things better, they don't want it. Doesn't matter what it is past that. Their solutions to our problems are either that the problems don't exist, or if they do, we should do nothing and they'll solve themselves. Look, nobody is looking for a utopia. Nobody expects that. But making small steps in a better direction is a good thing. Look around you at your cities. Is this the best it could possibly get? Do you truly believe this is the apex of human society? I know you don't. Why, then, do you (and others) feel so ideologically opposed to making some amount of change? I just don't get it.

its_ethan 2y ago
That's a fairly bold claim to say that I oppose making any change for the better lol... anyway.. Having grown up in both rural and urban areas, and having seen many articles like this one, they tend to (more often then not) read like this: "I know what's best for everyone, and if only these rural hicks would just let us do what's best for them everything would be perfect". That's mostly where my frustration lies - not with weather or not some town has a sidewalk or not. > Look around you at your cities. Is this the best it could possibly get? As someone who has spent significant time in parts of Minnesota very near to Northfield... yes. I genuinely think these places are as close to the "best it could possibly get" as is realistic to achieve. This is based on my experiences and my preferences having lived in these places. Your opinion seems to differ from that, which is why you seem to think that these places are in need of being changed - but do you even live in a place like the one in question? > Why, then, do you (and others) feel so ideologically opposed to making some amount of change? Because it is not at all obvious that these are actually improvements for the people who actually live there. As I tried (and maybe failed) to convey, places like Northfield, MN were designed for cars - nearly everyone (~98%) who lives in Minneapolis has a car [1] and would use their car to get to the Allina clinic in question. Even if this was an excessively pedestrian friendly intersection, it would still be true that an overwhelming majority of people going to this clinic would drive. Look around on google maps at this clinic and intersection [2] - there aren't even many residential places within walking distance in the first place. So in this case the suggested "improvement" would only even be relevant to a small number of people. And I'm not against making changes that only benefit a few people, but there needs to be a real case for people needing (or even wanting) it. And that needs to be to stand up against... The fact that there are tradeoffs to rebuilding infrastructure to be more walkable. If there was some magic wand that just made this intersection walkable with absolutely zero tradeoff, then sure, wave your wand. But the truth is that there are real factors that matter: cost (both up front and mantainence), restricted access (during construction), and the not insignificant cost of having people idle in their cars at this intersection (which crosses a pretty significant thoroughfare for people in the Northfield to get to commercial areas from their homes - which are not a walkable distance away) to name a few. Again, my frustration here is not that people are trying to make "progress". My frustration is that this "progress" is often defined by people who don't have to deal with the consequences, and that articles like this do not ever seem to actually account for the actual experience of the people who live in these places. I would turn the question around to you: Why, then, do you (and others) feel so ideologically compelled to push changes onto others and expect them to share your definition of "progress" even when they tell you otherwise? [1] http://www.newgeography.com/files/job-access_03.png http://www.newgeography.com/files/job-access_03.png [2] https://www.mapdevelopers.com/draw-circle-tool.php?circles=%5B%5B804.67%2C44.8668858%2C-93.3286603%2C%22%23AAAAAA%22%2C%22%23000000%22%2C0.4%5D%5D https://www.mapdevelopers.com/draw-circle-tool.php?circles=%...