8 ms·

Sprawl is just a subsidy for cars. Remove the sprawl subsidies and find out just how quickly your 40-mile commuters move to a home closer to the office (or fin

Sprawl is just a subsidy for cars. Remove the sprawl subsidies and find out just how quickly your 40-mile commuters move to a home closer to the office (or find another job that isn't out in BFE.)

ars 13y ago
So you have to find two places of work, shopping, school (potentially several different schools), worship, and recreation all within say 2 miles of your home? Good luck with that.
- thrownaway2424 13y ago
  Huh? EDIT: Ah I guess you are saying two places of work, one for each adult in a household? Well have you heard of these things called buses and trains? They're awesome. You don't need everything to be in walking distance, as long as both ends are walking distance from transport. Also the nice thing about not being a superstitious throwback is I don't have to find any place to worship, walking distance or otherwise.
  - eddieroger 13y ago
    Just because you don't live ars' life doesn't mean the world should be your way and not his/hers. The term "superstitious throwback" is a really assholic way of dismissing an argument because you don't agree with it.
  - sliverstorm 13y ago
    You don't need everything to be in walking distance, as long as both ends are walking distance from transport. ... and that would be the problem, in much of the USA.
  - atgm 13y ago
    > Well have you heard of these things called buses and trains? They're awesome. They ARE awesome, but often come at the expense of time. I live in Tokyo, which has an amazing public transportation network. Including walking to/from stations and bus stops, taking the bus/train costs me around 80 minutes of my day each way -- that's over 2 1/2 hours of my day. If I take a taxi directly from my apartment to work, it takes about 15-20 minutes to get directly to work. Let's call it 40 minutes of my day. I can get back two hours of my life every single day with point-to-point transport. That's two hours I could be catching up with friends, reading a book, cooking, exercising, etc. It matters so often to me that I end up paying the 4000 yen or so it costs to take a taxi twice a day a horrifying number of times. This is to say nothing of the fact that I can sit in the taxi and read a book or something rather than being crammed and crushed in public transport.
    - saraid216 13y ago
      > I live in Tokyo, which has an amazing public transportation network. > Including walking to/from stations and bus stops, taking the bus/train costs me around 80 minutes of my day each way That's not actually how we define "amazing public transportation network". My experience of public transit in Seattle is "about 5 minutes away from a bus stop, anywhere, and about 30 minutes to anywhere I care to go in the city, and maybe an hour if I go across the lake to Bellevue or Redmond". The fact that it takes you longer for traveling within the city than it does for me to change cities suggests to me that Tokyo's public transit is either ridiculously bad or you have an extremely unusual case.
      - atgm 13y ago
        > That's not actually how we define "amazing public transportation network". It's pretty comparatively amazing to me. I grew up in rural Pennsylvania in a town with no buses or taxis. The closest train/bus station was about 50 minutes away by car. My apartment has a bus stop right outside its door, but I have to travel the entire bus line to get to where I want to go, and that's 15 minutes from work. There's a train station five minutes from work and two others within ten minutes from work, but none of them go directly to the station closest to my apartment.
- DerpDerpDerp 13y ago
  That's trivially easy in most cities, on foot or bike, because we're talking about 12 square miles of city. Add in reasonable public transportation between places, and we're talking more like within 5-10 miles. I simply don't believe that there's an area anywhere around an urban center where you can't find all of that within ~75-300 square miles, as most urban areas simply aren't that big.
  - ars 13y ago
    Most cities already have plenty of public transportation. I thought we were talking about expanding it to sub-urban areas too, and in those places finding all those things within distance is much much harder.
    - jeffasinger 13y ago
      Suburbs as anything other than streetcar suburbs are basically only a thing due to the subsidization of the automobile infrastructure.
      - burntsushi 13y ago
        Then you're just arguing for one way of life over another. I like living in the suburbs. I don't want to feel like a sardine packed into a can. You (or whoever is arguing for it) would rather not live in a world that has tainted nature with roads and automobiles. Why does it have to be one way or another? In the present, there are plenty of places to go and see nature that hasn't been tainted by cars and roads. Many of the people in this thread write as if cars are manifestly obviously bad, and that we should go to great lengths to remove or drastically reduce them from society. I guess I didn't get the memo.
        wtallis 13y ago
        Living in the suburbs doesn't mean you avoid the sardines feeling: https://maps.google.com/?ll=35.833819,-78.909173&spn=0.026373,0.033603&t=h&z=15 https://maps.google.com/?ll=35.833819,-78.909173&spn=0.02637... Cars aren't manifestly bad, but that kind of neighborhood is.
matwood 13y ago
My job is in the city, and I'd love to live within walking distance. The problem is I would have pay ~2x for a place to live, and still end up in a noisy high crime area.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  You wouldn't have to pay ~2x if nobody could drive cars. You would dream of paying only ~2x.
- paddy_m 13y ago
  When you eliminate zoning laws and allow greater density, housing supply increase and housing prices decrease (relative to what they would do if there was less housing stock available). With greater density, public transit makes a lot more sense.
declan 13y ago
Another way to look at "sprawl" is: Enough space to have privacy, enough space to pursue your own interests, enough space to have the kids enjoy the backyard as opposed to a 4'x3' balcony on the 20th floor of an apartment building. Enough space to design your own home or addition, perhaps, if you have the inclination. And enough space to have a car that gives you more independence (when you want it) than being at the mercy of public transportation schedules concocted by central planners. You also might enjoy sports cars, as I do, and enjoy owning a very well-designed vehicle that does 0-60 in under four seconds and is a joy to drive on the windy roads near my house -- though it would be nice to add a self-driving car to the garage too. (HN trivia: I had lunch with Steve Jobs in 1989, and he drove up in a black Porsche 911. Larry Page bought a Tesla roadster. I recall Cypress Semiconductor CEO TJ Rodgers telling me about his Mercedes; you can probably track down the interview if you're interested.) Also: I don't live in a downtown area. Nor do I live in suburban sprawl. But "sprawl is just a subsidy for cars" is a weak argument that gets the facts wrong: car commuters are subsidizing public transportation via gas and other taxes, not the other way around. Here's Randal O'Toole on single-family homes in the SF Bay area: http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/do-single-family-homes-threaten-planet http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/do-single-family... "The vast majority of population growth continues to be in low-density suburbs. Surveys of millennials show that more than three out of four aspire to live in a single-family home with a yard. The data also show that crowding people together isn’t really effective at reducing greenhouse-gas emissions or addressing other urban concerns. Population densities in the San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose urban areas have already grown by nearly 60 percent since 1990, yet per-capita driving still has increased." I do apologize in advance for injecting facts into a religious argument about that loathsome invention known as the automobile. :)
- mikeash 13y ago
  > car commuters are subsidizing public transportation via gas and other taxes, not the other way around. Do you have numbers for this? Last I checked, gas taxes didn't cover the costs for road construction and maintenance, let alone have enough left over to subsidize public transportation.
  - 13y ago

Sprawl is just a subsidy for cars. Remove the sprawl subsidies and find out just how quickly your 40-mile commuters move to a home closer to the office (or find another job that isn't out in BFE.)

ars 13y ago

So you have to find two places of work, shopping, school (potentially several different schools), worship, and recreation all within say 2 miles of your home? Good luck with that.

thrownaway2424 13y ago
Huh? EDIT: Ah I guess you are saying two places of work, one for each adult in a household? Well have you heard of these things called buses and trains? They're awesome. You don't need everything to be in walking distance, as long as both ends are walking distance from transport. Also the nice thing about not being a superstitious throwback is I don't have to find any place to worship, walking distance or otherwise.
- eddieroger 13y ago
  Just because you don't live ars' life doesn't mean the world should be your way and not his/hers. The term "superstitious throwback" is a really assholic way of dismissing an argument because you don't agree with it.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  You don't need everything to be in walking distance, as long as both ends are walking distance from transport. ... and that would be the problem, in much of the USA.
- atgm 13y ago
  > Well have you heard of these things called buses and trains? They're awesome. They ARE awesome, but often come at the expense of time. I live in Tokyo, which has an amazing public transportation network. Including walking to/from stations and bus stops, taking the bus/train costs me around 80 minutes of my day each way -- that's over 2 1/2 hours of my day. If I take a taxi directly from my apartment to work, it takes about 15-20 minutes to get directly to work. Let's call it 40 minutes of my day. I can get back two hours of my life every single day with point-to-point transport. That's two hours I could be catching up with friends, reading a book, cooking, exercising, etc. It matters so often to me that I end up paying the 4000 yen or so it costs to take a taxi twice a day a horrifying number of times. This is to say nothing of the fact that I can sit in the taxi and read a book or something rather than being crammed and crushed in public transport.
  - saraid216 13y ago
    > I live in Tokyo, which has an amazing public transportation network. > Including walking to/from stations and bus stops, taking the bus/train costs me around 80 minutes of my day each way That's not actually how we define "amazing public transportation network". My experience of public transit in Seattle is "about 5 minutes away from a bus stop, anywhere, and about 30 minutes to anywhere I care to go in the city, and maybe an hour if I go across the lake to Bellevue or Redmond". The fact that it takes you longer for traveling within the city than it does for me to change cities suggests to me that Tokyo's public transit is either ridiculously bad or you have an extremely unusual case.
    - atgm 13y ago
      > That's not actually how we define "amazing public transportation network". It's pretty comparatively amazing to me. I grew up in rural Pennsylvania in a town with no buses or taxis. The closest train/bus station was about 50 minutes away by car. My apartment has a bus stop right outside its door, but I have to travel the entire bus line to get to where I want to go, and that's 15 minutes from work. There's a train station five minutes from work and two others within ten minutes from work, but none of them go directly to the station closest to my apartment.
DerpDerpDerp 13y ago
That's trivially easy in most cities, on foot or bike, because we're talking about 12 square miles of city. Add in reasonable public transportation between places, and we're talking more like within 5-10 miles. I simply don't believe that there's an area anywhere around an urban center where you can't find all of that within ~75-300 square miles, as most urban areas simply aren't that big.
- ars 13y ago
  Most cities already have plenty of public transportation. I thought we were talking about expanding it to sub-urban areas too, and in those places finding all those things within distance is much much harder.
  - jeffasinger 13y ago
    Suburbs as anything other than streetcar suburbs are basically only a thing due to the subsidization of the automobile infrastructure.
    - burntsushi 13y ago
      Then you're just arguing for one way of life over another. I like living in the suburbs. I don't want to feel like a sardine packed into a can. You (or whoever is arguing for it) would rather not live in a world that has tainted nature with roads and automobiles. Why does it have to be one way or another? In the present, there are plenty of places to go and see nature that hasn't been tainted by cars and roads. Many of the people in this thread write as if cars are manifestly obviously bad, and that we should go to great lengths to remove or drastically reduce them from society. I guess I didn't get the memo.
      - wtallis 13y ago
        Living in the suburbs doesn't mean you avoid the sardines feeling: https://maps.google.com/?ll=35.833819,-78.909173&spn=0.026373,0.033603&t=h&z=15 https://maps.google.com/?ll=35.833819,-78.909173&spn=0.02637... Cars aren't manifestly bad, but that kind of neighborhood is.

matwood 13y ago

My job is in the city, and I'd love to live within walking distance. The problem is I would have pay ~2x for a place to live, and still end up in a noisy high crime area.

sliverstorm 13y ago
You wouldn't have to pay ~2x if nobody could drive cars. You would dream of paying only ~2x.
paddy_m 13y ago
When you eliminate zoning laws and allow greater density, housing supply increase and housing prices decrease (relative to what they would do if there was less housing stock available). With greater density, public transit makes a lot more sense.

declan 13y ago

Another way to look at "sprawl" is: Enough space to have privacy, enough space to pursue your own interests, enough space to have the kids enjoy the backyard as opposed to a 4'x3' balcony on the 20th floor of an apartment building. Enough space to design your own home or addition, perhaps, if you have the inclination. And enough space to have a car that gives you more independence (when you want it) than being at the mercy of public transportation schedules concocted by central planners. You also might enjoy sports cars, as I do, and enjoy owning a very well-designed vehicle that does 0-60 in under four seconds and is a joy to drive on the windy roads near my house -- though it would be nice to add a self-driving car to the garage too. (HN trivia: I had lunch with Steve Jobs in 1989, and he drove up in a black Porsche 911. Larry Page bought a Tesla roadster. I recall Cypress Semiconductor CEO TJ Rodgers telling me about his Mercedes; you can probably track down the interview if you're interested.) Also: I don't live in a downtown area. Nor do I live in suburban sprawl. But "sprawl is just a subsidy for cars" is a weak argument that gets the facts wrong: car commuters are subsidizing public transportation via gas and other taxes, not the other way around. Here's Randal O'Toole on single-family homes in the SF Bay area: http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/do-single-family-homes-threaten-planet http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/do-single-family... "The vast majority of population growth continues to be in low-density suburbs. Surveys of millennials show that more than three out of four aspire to live in a single-family home with a yard. The data also show that crowding people together isn’t really effective at reducing greenhouse-gas emissions or addressing other urban concerns. Population densities in the San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose urban areas have already grown by nearly 60 percent since 1990, yet per-capita driving still has increased." I do apologize in advance for injecting facts into a religious argument about that loathsome invention known as the automobile. :)

mikeash 13y ago
> car commuters are subsidizing public transportation via gas and other taxes, not the other way around. Do you have numbers for this? Last I checked, gas taxes didn't cover the costs for road construction and maintenance, let alone have enough left over to subsidize public transportation.
- 13y ago