I got lost walking to my meeting from the train station in Mountain View, and people didn't even know how to give me walking directions to where I needed to go. It was crazy. It wasn't that far by a straight line on the map, so I figured whatever I'll skip the taxi, but I had no idea what I was getting into. I finally had to ask a bunch of cyclists and it turned out I had to walk about a kilometer along a raised highway to get to the bridge and then cross several insane intersections.
At lunch I was driven to a burger place a couple of km away.
Ok. I get it. You need a car to live there. That just doesn't sound nice to me, frankly, and I don't know if I could convert to that way of living.
But, yeah, in general Silicon Valley is pretty much a sprawl. There are some nice small downtowns scattered around but you mostly need a car to get from place to place and most big companies are on their own disconnected campuses and others are scattered around industrial parks.
I asked, "did the slums exist before the highways and freeways that divide them from the wealthy whites?" The best I've come up with is "Sort of."
Apparently, in the 50's and 60s, city officials throughout the US thought of urban freeways as "a good opportunity to get rid of the local 'niggertown.'"[1] But that attempt at clearing the local slums ended up further disrupting and distressing them, deepening the problem.
[1] Google Books: Downtown, Inc: How America Rebuilds Cities https://goo.gl/mdgYXE
That was before the Cypress freeway tore West Oakland in two, or 980 sheared it away from downtown Oakland, or the trans-bay BART tracks, or before the USPS distribution center was built. The last, for those not familiar, is a 6 story concrete windowless menace that I've started calling the "Ministry of Truth."
Slums exist because the privileged spent a century paving over neighborhoods filled with people that they wished would just stop existing.
You mean Oakland and Vallejo? Yeah that stuff has been there before the start of SV. See MC Hammer and Too Short for references to past gang activity in Oakland.
At least in the bay area the places where there are shops aren't hostile to pedestrians (although if I recall you do see more of this as you move down the peninsula into San Jose).
(I mentioned my experiences with high Walk Scores in St. Louis to imply that they are anomalous in the St. Louis metro, but that dense, walkable neighborhoods exist even in such car-centric MSAs.)
I also got the impression that Dubai wasn’t very walkable, but I’ve never been there.
I was stuck there for a few days for a job and wanted to do literally anything other than sitting in the hotel. There was literally nothing within a 30 minute walk (in brutal heat) so a taxi was required, but I didn't have any local currency, so I asked the hotel concierge where the closest ATM is. I then had to walk 30 minutes, just to find a broken ATM inside of a little structure with a broken A/C. At that point, I realized if I walked another 30 minutes, I would be at the mall. 2 of the 3 ATMs at the mall didn't work. After 20 minutes of realizing the mall was full of Gucci and other designer shops which I had no interest in, I took a taxi 15 minutes to the next nearest mall. Again, nothing but designer shops. Taking another taxi to visit yet another (unfinished) mall, which was worse than the last two, not to mention only 1/3rd of the shops were even open, but according to multiple people and the taxi driver, it was the "hot spot to go". The taxi driver refused to park inside because the line of cars was hundreds long and would have taken ~30 minutes. I ended up walking 15 minutes from the highway to the mall.
I agree the Montreal core is fairly walkable. Cold is generally easier to deal with than heat. There's also a large connected Underground that people use when the weather is bad.
But I have to say, Rochester, MN - the Mayo Clinic - has to be one of the more extraordinarily walkable places I've ever been: the whole city is not only interconnected underground between apartments, parking structures, and offices but there are plentiful underground facilities as well. It amazed me to have streets so empty when I first showed up: I had no idea where everyone was! The answer is: why on earth would you go outside? :)
So the Strip is walkable but mostly in the same sense that a big shopping mall with tower or two of apartments is walkable.
The rest of the city is basically giant soulless suburb. I've had friends who have lived there for close to a decade now.
But the nice area was really only a handful of blocks in each direction. And beyond that you are in mostly rundown post-industrial mill town and beyond that it is very spread out.
I wonder if anyone has ever built a city, or significant part of a city, with either a purely subterranean transport layer, or all pedestrian layers a storey above? (Obviously I'm talking beyond a subway system.)
Also, Minneapolis has a nice skyway network. Then there is La Defense in Paris where the pedistrian level is above street level.
Calgary also has a skyway network (called the Plus-15 http://plus15.com/). Living there one winter was odd to me after Toronto—you'd never see anybody on the streets. And downtown Calgary is reasonably quiet on a normal, nice day. That said that town is also quite walkable—though it's best parts are relegated to certain parts of the city that are separated by less interesting areas.
Victoria, BC is one of my favourite walkable places so far. I also really enjoyed my time in Montreal, but I'm a little conditioned to the cold.
To seanmcdirmid's point:
Now, we are left with the problem that the suburbs aren't going anywhere for the most part, due to lack of political will, and lack of a reasonable market-based solution -- single family homes are often in the $1-1.5 million range for ~1/8 acre lots in less desirable areas, and redeveloping even a relatively small subdivision would be extremely expensive, even if you could get everyone to sell (they wouldn't), and get permission from the city. Redevelopment is limited right now to the commercial corridors, such as El Camino Blvd, and existing commercial/industrial/business districts, all of which are undergoing pretty heavy redevelopment in much of Santa Clara County. Transportation infrastructure including both public transportation and public roads are also undergoing multi-billion dollar improvements, though some of the work may take a decade or more to complete.
source: I have lived in the Silicon Valley area for over 30 years -- its changing faster now than at any point I can remember.
Conversely, the precise details of what goes in to an area should be 'bottom up', but within zoning policies similar to how Japan does it.
http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html
Having lived and grown up in ultra-dense urban cities like Hongkong, Singapore and Tokyo, I very much prefer somewhere with a little more breathing space. Though not to the extent of American suburbs. The European cities are probably a good balance.
Of course there are not that many affordable lots with land near any jobs.
It will be interesting to see where it all leads. I applaud Mt. View's willingness to add 10K homes. its about a tenth of what is needed but it is a great start.
If that is the case, you may find, as I have, some interesting systemic properties in the various studies of Bay Area traffic. The part that really struck me is that traffic is more closely related to people living 'outside' a town or region than people living 'inside' a region. The analysis postulates a model like this:
Lets say you have a single large employer in a city, and no housing. Then every person who goes to work comes from somewhere else to get to the employer, then leaves to go back to where they live. This pattern was exacerbated in the 60's when new cities were all work and the communities around them were 'bedroom' communities. That leads to arterials to the city that get massively clogged during rush hour (and greatly reduced night life / commerce because no one lives there).
Now consider the opposite extreme, you have a large employer or industry and everyone who works there lives in the same town. Now you get short rush hours because people near to the employer can get there easily by walking or biking, people further away can drive but the drive is short. Additionally because there aren't any employees coming in from out of town there is no traffic on the roads between the town and other towns that is commute related.
I am not saying that any place is at either extreme, but in the Silicon Valley area (aka the 'south bay') it is believed that an imbalance exists between available housing and jobs, and further that the imbalance contributes to congestion on the freeways and arterials throughout the various cities. Many of the cities are building additional housing and doing it near transit so that it maximizes the choices the residents have for how they want to travel. There are however some cities that are not so convinced, Cupertino comes to mind, which continues to add office space without adding housing. This is forcing more people to drive through Cupertino to get to work.
Somewhere in the middle of South Bay Suburbs and taking an elevator to grocery store would be ideal. Somewhat like European cities.
I'm curious what you feel the cons are. I've lived in essentially this format now in two cities in two different continents, for a while overall, and I haven't really noticed downsides, except that sometimes I would need to cross the street to go to a different "grocery store" because the one I lived above didn't stock something, luckily the bodegas/farmers markets/produce stands nearby did.
All the cons about living in an apartment/condo vs a single family home (which all basically boil down to a reduction in one's personal freedom on/in their own home).
I personally grew up in a spacious single family home, but love my current life in an apartment. I don't feel it restricts my personal freedom at all, plus I get the perks of living in a vibrant area.
By isolated I don't mean walled, but a natural preference to just be within your conclave.
What might rather work is super fast door to door transit, which in the present is quite unrealistic. Congestion creeps in pretty fast.
To each its own I guess. I used to live in a small town where everybody knew everybody and absolutely hated it. Now I live in a city where I don't know even my closest neighbors, there's no pressure to interact with them and I love it this way. Though it's a personal choice, I see some neighbors socializing in a yard all the time, looking after each others' kids etc.
IMO Dubai is a pretty poor example of what cities should aim for, as you can’t get to a lot of places without a car. Public transport is good to the main tourist areas of the city, but if you want to go somewhere slightly further afield you need to walk (good luck doing that in the summer) or take a taxi.
Is the Bay Area actually opposed to that?
- adjacent to Millbrae BART/Caltrain https://www.smdailyjournal.com/news/local/millbrae-station-p...
- adjacent to Hayward Park Caltrain in San Mateo https://www.smdailyjournal.com/news/local/major-mixed-use-ho...
That's silly. San Francisco isn't the first city to boom. Detroit added more than a million people between 1910 and 1930. Brooklyn added a half a million people per decade in the early 1900s.
And neither of those cities look like Midtown Manhattan or Tokyo or whatever else SF residents seem to imagine is required to support fast growth.
They did it by building vast areas of multi-story mid-density mixed-use developments. There is zero mystery here, both about what was clearly starting to happen in the SFBA 30 years ago and what should have been done about it.
My grandfather told me that his commute from Santa Clara to Lockheed in Sunnyvale involved mostly driving past orchards all through the 1960s and into the 1970s. He left the area in the 1980s, saying that traffic and livability had become too much of a problem. It's been decades of intentionally not addressing the problems - nobody can reasonably claim to not have known or anticipated.
Suggesting that people could have predicted the dot-com boom of the 90s or the tech/startup driven boom of the past 15 years (and that it would be so heavily focused in the Bay Area) seems a little far fetched. It might seem obvious now that it has already happened, but in the 60s and 70s I don't see how you could have known (the industries driving development then were Defence and Manufacturing, both nearly nonexistent now). Plenty of areas in the US were increasing in density and economic development during that time, only one of them became Silicon Valley.
But there certainly have been rapid changes, especially in some currently popular cities. For example, I believe Boton was still losing population in the 1990s and, at one point, when Teradyne moved out that was pretty much the last tech company in the city (including Cambridge) leaving. There may have been some early biotech but pretty much none of the Route 128 computer companies were in the city.
New York City was also in pretty dire straights in the latter part of the eighties.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masdar_City
Robert Llewellyn's profile is optimistic, but gives the basic vision and much technical basis.
All of the above is true, which you've mentioned. You then say that citizens don't want higher density living, but if citizens want more affordable housing in a housing crunch, the way to do that is to increase density. And if you want shorter commute times, the way to do that is to increase density. And if you want workers to be able to afford housing, the way to do that is to push higher income citizens into more expensive housing, freeing up the more affordable housing for those who actually need it.
You can't complain about the cost of living and then refuse to increase density. Keeping density and new construction low during a housing crunch is how you get insane housing prices.
People here seem to be so afraid that their neighborhoods will begin to look more like Dubai or Hong Kong. But clearly what we’re doing now isn’t sustainable, nor is it even that pleasant. Much of SV looks like it did in the 1970s, and you have to sit in a half hour plus of traffic if you want to do anything. I think we would be in pretty good shape if maybe we didn’t go to the extremes, but took a housing model more like Paris, London, or Amsterdam. We can limit heights, but still build dense and create a place people really want to live in.