Re:Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war
by dragonwriter on Tuesday June 07, 2016 @06:06PM
(#11858354)
> Increasing traffic on your street is going to be a fact of life if we insist on building out and out rather than up.
Its also a fact of life if we insist on building up. I've never seen a suburb that could compete with NYC on traffic snarls.
> Densifying existing areas doesn't create the same problems
Yes, it does, though it tends to be limited (at about the level where traffic is frequently slower than walking) by lack of parking spaces limiting the number of cars.
> as with increased density comes other transit options
Other transit options are necessary to allow densifying existing areas, because of the point above; you rapidly hit the point where you can't get more people in and out with existing infrastructure. That doesn't mean you don't cause the same traffic problems with density as with sprawl -- you do, and in fact you maximize them that way.
Then one day they build more subdivisions around your subdivision and suddenly your street becomes a convenient way to get to this newer subdivision just as you were driving down roads that were quiet before until your subdivision got built.
Increasing traffic on your street is going to be a fact of life if we insist on building out and out rather than up. Densifying existing areas doesn't create the same problems as with increased density comes other transit options, especially public transit, as well as the reduced need to travel so far since everything's packed into a smaller area.
Instead of grocery stores being a mile apart, you might have two or three within a single square mile because of demand.