4 ms·

Great ideas for major, youthful cities full of young, fit childless bike riders heading home in the sunny and dry environs of California with a convenience stor

Great ideas for major, youthful cities full of young, fit childless bike riders heading home in the sunny and dry environs of California with a convenience store on every corner and without sacks of shopping to carry and toddlers running around. But living in an English market town myself and being heavily involved in community life and discussion, I know the cramped confines of many older English towns and villages are a total nut-ache for a sizeable share of residents and people are endlessly campaigning for more parking, better traffic management, and more spacious estates.

rayiner 12y ago
Let me offer the perspective of a not so young, not so childless resident of the not so sunny eastern US: dense, walkable cities are awesome for people with young children. Weekends in the city with our toddler are awesome. We have brunch at one of the dozen restaurants we can get to within a few blocks' walk. We can walk to the park, walk to the drugstore to get the diaper cream we forgot to buy. We can have impromptu, unscheduled social events just by running in to the 3-4 other couples with kids our age who live in our apartment building. And narrow little pedestrian-oriented streets, which we don't have where we live but would love to, are a whole lot more toddler friendly than ones primarily designed for cars. If anything, the advantages of city living are magnified for people with kids. When I was single, I thought nothing of driving 15-20 minutes on a weeknight to meet some friends for dinner. That's a non-starter with kids. These days, 70-80% of our social interaction is hanging out with people from our building.
- JupiterMoon 12y ago
  > Safeway charges $10 to bring groceries right to your door the next day. Other supermarkets do this a lot cheaper. Or free.
  - logiczero 12y ago
    Has anyone else noticed that safeway.com doesn't sell their in-store brand of sandwich bread, which usually costs $1.99? You can only buy loaves of bread that are $4.00 or more. Their entire online store is stocked only with crappy, expensive, name-brand items. So, yeah, in theory you can get your groceries delivered to you, but none of those services are intended for cash-strapped families and/or conscientious shoppers. The prospect of lugging 4 bags of groceries plus 3 kids on a late, crowded MUNI bus is just sooooo inviting...
    - slayed0 12y ago
      It makes sense that not all items can be delivered. They still have to retain their profit margins. As automation ramps up and demand for services like this ramps up, the overhead for the markets will go down and it will be easier to offer the cheaper items as well. I realize this is a bit of a chicken and egg problem but we have seen how quickly startups or even technology being implemented by existing players can respond to increased demand.
      - JupiterMoon 12y ago
        In other countries everything in-store is available online...
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - fragmede 12y ago
      I frequently see something like http://www.lowes.com/pd_60573-41885-640-8213-0200_0__ http://www.lowes.com/pd_60573-41885-640-8213-0200_0__ being used for carrying groceries.
      - _delirium 12y ago
        I see a reasonable number of people using cargo bikes: https://christinemgrant.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/p1030899.jpg https://christinemgrant.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/p1030899... However it's also not that common for people here to carry lots of groceries at a time, unless you're planning a party. It's a lot more common to just pick up a few things each day: instead of one "big" shopping trip a week, most people make a short 10-minute stop every day or two, often on the way home from work. Partly for convenience, but partly also because that way your food is fresher. If you're shopping in that style, your groceries will fit in a regular bike's cargo basket.
- abalone 12y ago
  So you don't actually have narrow streets where you live. That's not really a counter-perspective to someone who's actually lived with them. Are narrow streets really toddler friendly in practice? Cars are less frequent and slower, but when they do come through the spacing is much much tighter and more dangerous. You are basically sharing a sidewalk with a car. If you're lucky there's a few stubby bollards separating you from traffic -- which are meaningless to a toddler. If you have a squirmy/dashy toddler I would be very concerned about them breaking loose and dashing into traffic.
- _delirium 12y ago
  Another kid-related reason that living in the city is popular here (Copenhagen) is that it really simplifies transportation of older kids, since they become more self-sufficient. In a car-dependent area, kids are basically completely dependent on mom and dad to get anywhere, until age 18-19 or so. That is not convenient for either the kids or the parents, especially if both parents work (which they usually do). In the city, by contrast, kids can begin getting around on their own with bikes and/or transit by late elementary age. The exact age depends on how conservative parents are, and it's common to start out accompanying them on longer or less familiar trips, but by age 13-14 or so most kids have graduated to getting around entirely on their own. This doesn't strictly require a city; a compact town where kids can walk/bike everywhere would also be fine. But it does serve as a disincentive to raising kids in areas that are very car-oriented.
icebraining 12y ago
The people I see benefiting more from walkable and narrow streets are not the young and fit, but the elderly, who often can no longer drive but still maintain their independence by walking to the grocery shop, to the park, etc.
- runamok 12y ago
  It's sort of a self fulfilling prophecy. If you take a car everywhere and barely move then by the time you hit 65 you will be in pain all the time and won't be self-sufficient. If you are constantly active you will usually have much better health outcomes and mobility later in life. An article about how walking speed predicts life expectancy: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/walking-speed-survival/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/walking-speed-surv...
toyg 12y ago
However, part of the problems you mention are entirely due to us Europeans adopting the American way of life: huge malls outside town centres, reachable only by cars; a general de-investment in public transport (because you can get everywhere faster by car, right? That's what Jeremy Clarkson keeps repeating...); entire cities being ripped apart to build motorways in the last century (Manchester, Birmingham...); people buying huge SUVs (because that's what Hollywood says you want) to stroll around roads built for horses... and so on and so forth. If we thought a bit harder about what we actually want from life, beyond consumption of glamourized objects, we might find that our old Eurotowns are actually much more liveable than we assume.
- cylinder 12y ago
  But what if most people actually want all those things?
  - restalis 12y ago
    Anyone can get a car and live outside the city. Having "all those things" living in the city is obviously a problem (with the limited supply), as the op clearly put it about SF.
chestnut-tree 12y ago
I'm not a fan of very narrow streets for residential housing. People need a sense of space, and narrow residential roads often mean you're overlooked by homes opposite the street. There needs to be enough space between each side of the street so that residents don't feel hemmed in or claustrophobic. Here is a random Victorian residential street (in a very expensive part of London) that I think has a good scale and width. The road is not too wide, but not too narrow either. Cars are parked on the street rather than in garages; and the houses are of fairly high density too. https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.556208,-0.165162,3a,75y,36.4h,95.29t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1sw-PrGS0qc8hAfTDhiUaC6g!2e0 https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.556208,-0.165162,3a,75y,36...
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]

rayiner 12y ago

Let me offer the perspective of a not so young, not so childless resident of the not so sunny eastern US: dense, walkable cities are awesome for people with young children. Weekends in the city with our toddler are awesome. We have brunch at one of the dozen restaurants we can get to within a few blocks' walk. We can walk to the park, walk to the drugstore to get the diaper cream we forgot to buy. We can have impromptu, unscheduled social events just by running in to the 3-4 other couples with kids our age who live in our apartment building. And narrow little pedestrian-oriented streets, which we don't have where we live but would love to, are a whole lot more toddler friendly than ones primarily designed for cars. If anything, the advantages of city living are magnified for people with kids. When I was single, I thought nothing of driving 15-20 minutes on a weeknight to meet some friends for dinner. That's a non-starter with kids. These days, 70-80% of our social interaction is hanging out with people from our building.

JupiterMoon 12y ago
> Safeway charges $10 to bring groceries right to your door the next day. Other supermarkets do this a lot cheaper. Or free.
- logiczero 12y ago
  Has anyone else noticed that safeway.com doesn't sell their in-store brand of sandwich bread, which usually costs $1.99? You can only buy loaves of bread that are $4.00 or more. Their entire online store is stocked only with crappy, expensive, name-brand items. So, yeah, in theory you can get your groceries delivered to you, but none of those services are intended for cash-strapped families and/or conscientious shoppers. The prospect of lugging 4 bags of groceries plus 3 kids on a late, crowded MUNI bus is just sooooo inviting...
  - slayed0 12y ago
    It makes sense that not all items can be delivered. They still have to retain their profit margins. As automation ramps up and demand for services like this ramps up, the overhead for the markets will go down and it will be easier to offer the cheaper items as well. I realize this is a bit of a chicken and egg problem but we have seen how quickly startups or even technology being implemented by existing players can respond to increased demand.
    - JupiterMoon 12y ago
      In other countries everything in-store is available online...
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - fragmede 12y ago
    I frequently see something like http://www.lowes.com/pd_60573-41885-640-8213-0200_0__ http://www.lowes.com/pd_60573-41885-640-8213-0200_0__ being used for carrying groceries.
    - _delirium 12y ago
      I see a reasonable number of people using cargo bikes: https://christinemgrant.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/p1030899.jpg https://christinemgrant.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/p1030899... However it's also not that common for people here to carry lots of groceries at a time, unless you're planning a party. It's a lot more common to just pick up a few things each day: instead of one "big" shopping trip a week, most people make a short 10-minute stop every day or two, often on the way home from work. Partly for convenience, but partly also because that way your food is fresher. If you're shopping in that style, your groceries will fit in a regular bike's cargo basket.
abalone 12y ago
So you don't actually have narrow streets where you live. That's not really a counter-perspective to someone who's actually lived with them. Are narrow streets really toddler friendly in practice? Cars are less frequent and slower, but when they do come through the spacing is much much tighter and more dangerous. You are basically sharing a sidewalk with a car. If you're lucky there's a few stubby bollards separating you from traffic -- which are meaningless to a toddler. If you have a squirmy/dashy toddler I would be very concerned about them breaking loose and dashing into traffic.
_delirium 12y ago
Another kid-related reason that living in the city is popular here (Copenhagen) is that it really simplifies transportation of older kids, since they become more self-sufficient. In a car-dependent area, kids are basically completely dependent on mom and dad to get anywhere, until age 18-19 or so. That is not convenient for either the kids or the parents, especially if both parents work (which they usually do). In the city, by contrast, kids can begin getting around on their own with bikes and/or transit by late elementary age. The exact age depends on how conservative parents are, and it's common to start out accompanying them on longer or less familiar trips, but by age 13-14 or so most kids have graduated to getting around entirely on their own. This doesn't strictly require a city; a compact town where kids can walk/bike everywhere would also be fine. But it does serve as a disincentive to raising kids in areas that are very car-oriented.

icebraining 12y ago

The people I see benefiting more from walkable and narrow streets are not the young and fit, but the elderly, who often can no longer drive but still maintain their independence by walking to the grocery shop, to the park, etc.

runamok 12y ago
It's sort of a self fulfilling prophecy. If you take a car everywhere and barely move then by the time you hit 65 you will be in pain all the time and won't be self-sufficient. If you are constantly active you will usually have much better health outcomes and mobility later in life. An article about how walking speed predicts life expectancy: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/walking-speed-survival/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/walking-speed-surv...

toyg 12y ago

However, part of the problems you mention are entirely due to us Europeans adopting the American way of life: huge malls outside town centres, reachable only by cars; a general de-investment in public transport (because you can get everywhere faster by car, right? That's what Jeremy Clarkson keeps repeating...); entire cities being ripped apart to build motorways in the last century (Manchester, Birmingham...); people buying huge SUVs (because that's what Hollywood says you want) to stroll around roads built for horses... and so on and so forth. If we thought a bit harder about what we actually want from life, beyond consumption of glamourized objects, we might find that our old Eurotowns are actually much more liveable than we assume.

cylinder 12y ago
But what if most people actually want all those things?
- restalis 12y ago
  Anyone can get a car and live outside the city. Having "all those things" living in the city is obviously a problem (with the limited supply), as the op clearly put it about SF.

chestnut-tree 12y ago

I'm not a fan of very narrow streets for residential housing. People need a sense of space, and narrow residential roads often mean you're overlooked by homes opposite the street. There needs to be enough space between each side of the street so that residents don't feel hemmed in or claustrophobic. Here is a random Victorian residential street (in a very expensive part of London) that I think has a good scale and width. The road is not too wide, but not too narrow either. Cars are parked on the street rather than in garages; and the houses are of fairly high density too. https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.556208,-0.165162,3a,75y,36.4h,95.29t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1sw-PrGS0qc8hAfTDhiUaC6g!2e0 https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.556208,-0.165162,3a,75y,36...

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]