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"...American experiment with car oriented cities..." America is almost 3,000 miles from coast to coast. 1500 miles or more top to bottom. When the auto became

"...American experiment with car oriented cities..." America is almost 3,000 miles from coast to coast. 1500 miles or more top to bottom. When the auto became popular, most people lived on farms. What part of that was an experiment? Perhaps you just meant that in a poetic sense, if so, apologies. But it bears pointing out, especially to a younger HN audience that might have spent most of their lives on an education or corporate campus, living in easy reach of mass transit -- the way things are now are the result of necessity and efficiency. While I'm discounting the role of urban planning, for the most part it's not like there's somebody somewhere pushing buttons on a huge SimCity. Once again, apologies if I overreacted to your phraseology.

bane 13y ago
No apology necessary. I grew up pretty rural and the automobile was the lifeline to education, goods and jobs. It took a half hour to an hour to get anywhere at all, but it was definitely necessary. What I'm specifically referring to is that once you're in an urban center, is it more like a European or even an older American (pre-car) city where you can walk locally, public transit outside of that and then drive, or is it like Houston, LA or Dallas? Where the difference between living in the "city" and living in the country is that it shaves half the time off your drive to get anywhere and you have to drive to accomplish even basic daily tasks like grocery shopping? LA is the quintessential example where urban planners decided to build around the car and invested heavily in freeway infrastructure instead of robust public transport (and the urban development model that implies). Building cities around vehicles and not around people (as has been done for millenia) is the experiment I'm talking about, and I think it's proven to not be the better model. I think it can swing wrong the other way as well. Building only on the scale for people to walk around causes friction with entering or leaving the urban "zone". If you want to go visit a city, you have no place to put your car, this hurts the economy of the city. And if you want to leave the city, maybe for a trip, or to pick up a bulk good you can't hand carry, you may not have a car to do so (this is partially addressed by services like zipcar and similar).
akgerber 13y ago
America was >50% urbanized by 1920, when the automobile age began: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_Stat... And while most American suburbanization[0] wasn't explicitly centrally planned, it was very much the intentional result of federal policies such as FHA loans that were initially only for single-family homes (and FHA redlining of many urban neighborhoods), the mortgage-interest tax deduction, and the federally-funded construction of urban freeways. [0] many early suburbs were, in fact, built by the Federal government, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greendale,_Wisconsin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greendale,_Wisconsin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roosevelt,_New_Jersey http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roosevelt,_New_Jersey

bane 13y ago

No apology necessary. I grew up pretty rural and the automobile was the lifeline to education, goods and jobs. It took a half hour to an hour to get anywhere at all, but it was definitely necessary. What I'm specifically referring to is that once you're in an urban center, is it more like a European or even an older American (pre-car) city where you can walk locally, public transit outside of that and then drive, or is it like Houston, LA or Dallas? Where the difference between living in the "city" and living in the country is that it shaves half the time off your drive to get anywhere and you have to drive to accomplish even basic daily tasks like grocery shopping? LA is the quintessential example where urban planners decided to build around the car and invested heavily in freeway infrastructure instead of robust public transport (and the urban development model that implies). Building cities around vehicles and not around people (as has been done for millenia) is the experiment I'm talking about, and I think it's proven to not be the better model. I think it can swing wrong the other way as well. Building only on the scale for people to walk around causes friction with entering or leaving the urban "zone". If you want to go visit a city, you have no place to put your car, this hurts the economy of the city. And if you want to leave the city, maybe for a trip, or to pick up a bulk good you can't hand carry, you may not have a car to do so (this is partially addressed by services like zipcar and similar).

akgerber 13y ago

America was >50% urbanized by 1920, when the automobile age began: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_Stat... And while most American suburbanization[0] wasn't explicitly centrally planned, it was very much the intentional result of federal policies such as FHA loans that were initially only for single-family homes (and FHA redlining of many urban neighborhoods), the mortgage-interest tax deduction, and the federally-funded construction of urban freeways. [0] many early suburbs were, in fact, built by the Federal government, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greendale,_Wisconsin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greendale,_Wisconsin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roosevelt,_New_Jersey http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roosevelt,_New_Jersey