Thanks to parking minimums the actual buildings you want to go to are _dwarfed_ by their parking lots.
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2014/06/13/the-whole-city-of-flo...
Also, forcing everything to be so far apart makes it nearly impossible to traverse on foot, serve with public transport, ride a bike to, etc.
Because of high city density, I can walk to nearly every destination of day-to-day shopping or services. I can commute in 30-40 minutes from (more) affordable Brooklyn to job-packed Manhattan.
I can take a train if I want to read, or a bike if I want to enjoy the view.
Car traffic is pretty slow here, admittedly. But I need a car maybe once or twice a month, and Lyft provides it.
The cost of it living in an apartment, and not your own house with a lawn to tend. I'm fine with that.
Unfortunately, the US lacks another such city, except maybe Chicago. Most US cities are large sprawling villages around a small downtown where all buildings are offices and commerce, and nobody actually lives.
New York exists because it was built before we made it illegal to build cities like it.
One of the reasons we lack other cities like it is because we made it illegal to build large buildings without huge amounts of parking and gigantic roads.
Though, would Boston not qualify?
You just described San Jose, which brings us back into the Bay Area.
Is that for you, or for the average person, or for most persons ? If not the last, it's just a personal opinion, and a possible typical mind fallacy.
Noise pollution exposure is known to be associated with stress, raised blood pressure, memory loss, nervousness and depression.
Congested traffic is associated with stress and aggression, even domestic violence.
Air pollution is associated with perceived annoyance, not to mention all manner of medical conditions that have (IMO) obvious mood implications (COPD can be a real downer).
As a matter of opinion it seems obvious to me that a space designed for cars is not as comfortable to people as a space designed for people. As a matter of statistics, there are a lot of associations between motor traffic and poor mood, and illnesses with mood implications.
If nothing else, inhaling less poison and, crucially, hearing less engine noise helps.
This equation has shifted due to eBikes, as they can blow past the snarled traffic on the handful of roads that connect the area, but it still leaves elders, youngsters and the infirm housebound.
Has anyone put together a summary of parking minimum ordinances are across the US?
At the end of it, we live in a world where every bit of profit matters more than earning slightly less and having something better looking.
I mean let’s compare Los Angeles County vs Greater London: 4,058 sq mi vs 606 sq mi Density 2,100/sq m vs 14,550/sq mi.
I mean the difference is insane! And ignoring the towers springing up all over London because of greedy developers, London doesn’t feel all that cramped or as if there’s concrete everywhere.
US cities need better public transport and more dense areas. Leave the rest to nature!
You need to build systems where people trying to maximize profit isn't a problem. It's not something we've completely figured out (see: externalities)
Ironically if greedy developers got their way in the US we'd have more low or no-parking buildings, as evidenced by the fact that they weren't build "enough" (whatever that means) parking until the law forced them to.
What's wrong with people building things that others want to buy?
Plus, I don’t think housing should really be left to the free market. This is the UK after all, social housing is one of the best things we’ve ever done (IMO).
I.e. the article isn't credible.
A quick search would’ve shown you who the author of the column is.
Not sure I understand?
Edit: Anyway, the poster I was replying to was making the point that these towers are alleviating demand and subsequently pushing prices down, which is not happening.
If I have a market of 10 dumpy old cars, people will pay X for it. If I destroy 1 dumpy old car and add 2 brand new cars, people will pay more for the new cars (like your new building) but the dumpy old ones will be slightly cheaper.
I.e. relative vs absolute.
This research shows that there’s an average of 1.5% price increase per floor. Care to share a counter-claim source?
Also I do hope you know the context of my posts relate to the UK market?
Some people want to live on top of each other in dense urban areas. That's fine and this should be an allowed pattern of development.
"Enable them to live and work farther away from each other" is, simplified, pretty much the entire reason I wake up in the morning. I opt out of dense urban living. If the towns want to opt out of having people like me working there, so be it.
It doesn't work for anyone.
I'd love to see a city that had like, a super dense core, then a ring road with endless car parks around it or something like that. You drive in, from your country home, get the subway for 10 mins from the ring road to the CBD or your urban dwelling friends' place, sorted.
Zone the ring road to kill sprawl.
Ban cars inside the ring road other than trucks for deliveries, workmen etc.
Best of both worlds.
It's not gonna happen in a pre-existing city though, the winners will block it (and rightly so).
First level is the subway from New Jersey or Brooklyn/Queens. Next level is a commuter line like NJ Transit or Metro North.
You can live as far as 90 miles away and have a somewhat reasonable commute, while living in a fairly rural area.
I personally would much rather live in the dense urban core and have easy access to the outskirts, but commuting to Manhattan works for some people.
I suspect for the majority of those couples, living in/near Albany would be vastly preferable to NYC, even before you consider the after-hours of political work is probably benefited more by locality.
There are a LOT of people that do that commute and many of them drive from much further away and work much further away from Grand Central Terminal.
It was better than the 15-1:30 commute I used to have from Seattle to Bellevue in a car though, just because there was almost no variability and I wasn't driving.
I usually was at work from 10-5 and usually sleep closer to 6 hours a night. That gave me about 6.5 hours of free time. I also worked from home twice a week.
I personally hated it and only lasted at the job for a little over a year, but I could understand how some people could make it work.
Not sure id have done one at double the time.
There are hundreds (thousands even) of people that drive from further north to get to the Poughkeepsie train station every day. It's bananas.
The UK often does something similar with "park and ride" bus schemes. To reduce congestion in inner cities, there are large car parks on key roads coming to the city, and usually you can park very cheaply or free and get a relatively cheap bus ticket into the centre. Often the buses also have privileged access so they can bypass queues where people chose to drive their cars all the way in instead.
I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, it certainly does reduce congestion and all its negative consequences locally and in the short term, which is obviously a good thing. On the other hand, it sustains a culture where we drive longer distances in vehicles much larger and less efficient than we actually need in order to get to work, which is a significant cause of negative consequences over a wider area and a longer term.
I heard a suggestion long ago that the best thing to do about congestion in our cities might be nothing at all. The argument was loosely related to the points in the article here: the underlying problems are the need to make so many journeys in the first place and the inefficient modes of transport we use to make them. By allowing journeys into crowded cities to become ever more expensive, financially and otherwise, we would force better solutions in terms of how we plan our residential, business and recreational spaces. We could encourage areas with relatively dense populations where good public transport both within and between them is practical and efficient, where currently many of our cities here haven't really got critical mass to run a good 24/7 public transport system but are too big and often badly designed for historical reasons to support the volume of traffic that now wants to move at peak times. We could encourage the use of smaller, more efficient personal vehicles where public transport isn't sufficient. We could encourage the use of remote working for those whose jobs allow it. And in general, newer and more efficiently designed places to live would become relatively attractive compared to those with historical baggage that don't work as well practically.
I haven't seen anything like enough evidence and analysis to know whether that's really a good general solution, but it has always struck me as a reasonable enough proposition to be worth exploring.
Perhaps. I mean, it certainly seems to be working so far - anecdotally people are stuffing themselves into smaller and smaller apartments, flat shares, etc, naturally.
I'm biased so it's difficult for me to really conceptualise it. In that scenario, I would (and in fact have) just nope out entirely and move to the country because I can afford it.
It seems unfair to tell everyone who can't to just suck it up and live in a shoebox.
Our starting position is that a lot of employment is very centralised in big cities or industrial areas, sometimes for historical reasons that aren't necessarily as relevant today.
With better planning of future cities, with an emphasis on keeping everyday services like schools, shops, basic medical care and sports facilities more local to where people live, both the provider and the consumer have less need to make routine long journeys that overlap lots of other people's routine long journeys.
There will always be a need to centralise certain key facilities more, say hospitals that need to respond to a diverse range of serious conditions very quickly but also serve a wide area because fortunately there aren't many people with each condition at any given time. However, there is no need for your dentist or optician to be based 10 miles away in the nearest city centre when there are more than enough patients who need that sort of care within a one mile radius anyway.
In my country (the UK) we do this much better in some respects than others.
Schooling is usually relatively local in the early years, for example. Most kids don't have to travel silly distances to reach secondary school (ages around 11-18) either.
Some places have much better routine medical facilities available locally than others. This is definitely an area where we could improve.
Shopping in bricks and mortar stores is so bad now that we're increasingly seeing our traditional high streets turning into deserted wastelands, far too expensive and time-consuming to reach for a quick visit when you just want to buy a new shirt for the weekend or toy for your child. Online stores and huge, car-friendly out-of-town shopping centres with almost exactly the same 100 brands as all the others are driving all the traditional, local, interesting shops out of business, sadly.
More generally, far too many of our vanilla office jobs are based in city centres entirely unnecessarily. Their staff don't live nearby any more because they can't afford to, so what was once an advantage is now a disadvantage that causes big problems for and because of commuters.
So I don't really think living in shoe boxes is the answer. Moving everything else so it's more readily accessible from good quality homes is the answer, according to this argument at least.
Just to be clear, this isn't necessarily an argument for moving everything out to the suburbs or smaller, more rural towns. The same principles can also be applied in much larger cities, by better balancing residential, business and leisure facilities in each neighbourhood. The trouble is usually that historically this wasn't so well understood, so existing planning/zoning rules often aren't very effective but you can't just transplant everything overnight to where you'd ideally like it to be. Hence the desire to promote newer and better designed areas as a general trend, and in (lots of) time allow the older and less practical areas to be rearranged.
> Our starting position is that a lot of employment is very centralised in big cities or industrial areas, sometimes for historical reasons that aren't necessarily as relevant today.
So first of all, I don't want to get stuck in a home office. I want to share an office with my coworkers and engage in normal human social behavior during the workday. A coworking space does not appeal to me either: I'm not comfortable spending my workday around strangers who appear and disappear every few weeks.
But besides that, I think that work is only one part of the equation. There are other reasons why people live in big cities. I grew up in a German city with 100k inhabitants, and there was basically nothing I could do after 8PM once shops had closed. I now live in a larger city where there is a lot of stuff going on everyday in some place (tech meetups, concerts, etc.). You just don't have that in a village or small city.
Another, smaller thing: I have some chronic ailments, so it's convenient to be living in a large city with a good coverage of specialist doctors and hospitals. A small city (say, 10k inhabitants) will have a couple GPs and probably an ophthalmologist, but will likely lack more niche specialists.
There are more reasons. That's not to say that everyone wants to live, or should want to live, in a big city. But it's not a good idea to force everyone to live in small communities either.
That's all fair enough. Everyone is going to have their own preferences for something like this. But why should the office be located in a hard-to-reach central area at all, if most or all of its staff live somewhere else?
But besides that, I think that work is only one part of the equation. There are other reasons why people live in big cities. I grew up in a German city with 100k inhabitants, and there was basically nothing I could do after 8PM once shops had closed.
Again, that's a fair point. I did acknowledge that there would always be a need for some facilities to be located more centrally and serve a wider area. Anyone wanting to use those facilities will also benefit if there are fewer unnecessary journeys competing for space with their private vehicles or overcrowding public transport, though.
That's not to say that everyone wants to live, or should want to live, in a big city. But it's not a good idea to force everyone to live in small communities either.
I agree, and this is the point I was trying to make in my final paragraph before. Sorry if it wasn't clear.
The problem, IMHO, isn't having large cities. Many people prefer to have less personal living space but be nearer to a wider range of facilities, much as you described yourself. The problem, IMHO, is the design of many large cities today where there is a central area with most of the places people want to go, surrounded by suburbs with most of the places where people live.
The geometry of such a design prevents it scaling well. As the city grows, the residential area spreads outwards. This means more people live further from the area with the services. Typically, the area available for the services also can't grow proportionately, creating a problem of where to put enough new services to meet the needs of the growing population.
A less centralised design based on clusters that each combine residential accommodation, basic services for the local population, and possibly some sort of business district, has much more ability to grow without separating large numbers of people from their everyday needs, even if you then position large numbers of such clusters close together, introduce additional areas among the clusters for more specialised facilities, and form a big city.
Because most or all of its staff live in different somewhere elses and mass transit is horrible at random route commutes. If you take a city and express it in polar coordinates defined by each spine of mass transit as being at a constant theta, putting the things that lots of people need to come to near the center makes the most sense.
Locating an office 3 miles out of the center at a random theta means that a lot of people need to commute into the center, change to the line serving the office [waiting], and continue their commute out, reversing the same on the way home.
If I'm competing for the best employees, I'm far better served to pay more to put my office near the transit hub and lower the inconvenience for my employees.
All the above assumes a significant commuting base on fixed route rail that tends to cluster around hubs. It might be possible construct (more expensive) transit that was not hub and spoke. If you do that, I predict you end up in the less centralized design you describe in the last paragraph (which still seems like it doesn't serve the needs of people who need to work together but are served by different of the numerous hubs).
Right, but the problem with this isn't the different somewhere elses, it's designing mass transit systems that are only useful on arterial routes into or out of the centre of a radially organised city.
This is often how things work today, but there's no reason it has to be, as long as you have a reasonable alternative layout and sufficient volume of journeys to make comprehensive mass transit viable at all.
For example, consider a big city like London. There are enough travellers to run both the Underground (metro) and bus services almost 24/7 now. A wide variety of routes, many of them not just arterial paths to or from some central hub, cover most of the Greater London area.
In that sort of situation, even if you aren't living within convenient walking/cycling distance of your normal place of work, it makes little difference whether you're travelling into the centre of a city or further around it.
If I'm competing for the best employees, I'm far better served to pay more to put my office near the transit hub and lower the inconvenience for my employees.
The assumption of a single, central transit hub rather than a more distributed, uniform arrangement is the problem here. It has much the same inherent scalability problems as any of the other services that some of us were discussing further up the thread.
All the above assumes a significant commuting base on fixed route rail that tends to cluster around hubs. It might be possible construct (more expensive) transit that was not hub and spoke.
Exactly. The challenge is to match the scale of the city with the scale of the transit system so the "(more expensive)" becomes negligible. But since in this case the costs of inefficient transportation systems and unnecessary journeys are more than just financial, that doesn't seem like a crazy idea.
Coincidentally, my office is right next to the busiest tram stop in the city center, which is great because I don't have to change lines during my commute.
You have congestion because there are just houses dotted everywhere clustered around the city, making the 'last few miles' hellish. Later, those suburbs become 'urbs'.
I'm saying have urban and rural with a sharp divide. Inside the 'event horizon' of where you'd normally have suburbs, have car parks and dump people on to urban transport that uses space more effectively like trains/buses/etc.
The problem with this design is that cities commonly grow over time. If you have a core which is full of 30 story buildings, it makes much more sense to allow the radius of the core to expand from 10 miles to 20 by bulldozing some car parks and replacing them with more 20 and 30 story buildings than to have to bulldoze the existing 30 story buildings and replace them all with 95 story ones.
The sharp divide is what we already have and is one half of the causes of the existing problem. You have a core which is zoned for higher density surrounded by suburbs that aren't, which prevents the dense core from expanding outward as necessary. The other half is that even the core doesn't allow very high densities, so you generally don't get 50+ story buildings even there, you just get outrageously high rents instead because it can neither expand upwards nor outwards.
You're essentially suggesting that it expand only upwards, but that's still a lot more expensive than expanding in both directions, and there comes a point that it becomes impractical. We don't really have a lot of experience constructing large numbers of 200 story buildings and even if we could figure it out it probably wouldn't be cost effective and result in affordable rents.
Meanwhile there is a threshold density above which you can have things like effective mass transit, at which point expanding outward at the same density allows you to maintain those advantages over a larger area without paying the high cost of constructing buildings at the limits of our engineering talents (and also paying to destroy existing tall buildings in order to do it).
Which is basically what naturally happens without zoning density restrictions. In theory someone could then build a 30 story building in the middle of the suburbs, but that doesn't make a lot of sense when it's more profitable to put that building closer to the core, until the core is already full of those, and then the most profitable place for that building is right next to the core. Which is how the core expands as needed. You don't really need to prohibit people from building at inappropriate densities when appropriateness is already closely aligned with profitability.
If anything, suburbia with individual owners and smaller governments are better maintained than urban core.
On the whole, suburbs also have nicer libraries, though there are examples to the contrary - e.g. Cambridge, MA has a really fantastic main library.
The quality of libraries and schools mostly tracks how wealthy the suburb/city is.
I agree with you that no matter how wealthy the suburb, food, entertainment and public transportation are going to be seriously underwhelming compared to a city.
Being chained to public transit corridors and schedules is very difficult for workers with marginal means.
I live in the city and love it. Fortunately I bought my home earlier -- today it would be dumb. Living in the city is great, except when school lotteries mean that your kids have to go to school 45 minutes away from your home, because of a court order from 1970, and you end up paying for private school. My city has to fund a large police department and fire department, so my city taxes are 30% higher than a suburb. The city school district has to provide much more special ed and social services, so those taxes are 40% higher.
Good news is that living for my family is cheap and convenient. But I can't improve my home, because the value won't go up due the taxes. If I had invested about 30% more in 2002, my housing investment would be about 150% more valuable today.
Yeah, having a corner grocery might be good, but without
mobility, the grocers are going to realize that you don't
really have much choice about buying from them, and maybe
start charging higher prices, or not stocking as much
variety, or higher fewer people and having less service.
This is precisely what happens in cities.
It's true that won't always be at the small place literally on your own corner. And some of those places bump prices a fair bit in exchange for being open at most hours. But a little searching and you will find many gems.
You can't really get the costco/wallmart experience easily in city cores, but I don't really want it so no loss there (for me). If you want one-stop shopping you are going against the grain, really.
Things are more expensive in corner stores because it's more expensive to run a corner store. You don't have as many customers, but you have higher expenses. You can't stock a larger variety of goods because space is limited and you have to move the lightest, most profitable goods to stay afloat. You can't dedicate $20,000 worth of real estate (one corner of your shop) to 12 kinds of salsa.
Which is one of the deeply ironic things about urbanism as a movement. We have made our cities hostile and overly expensive to families. So people of color--who disproportionately are the folks still having kids--are decamping to the suburbs in large numbers: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2015/07/31/black-f... https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/0504_ce... (p. 10). From 1990-2010, the percentage of african americans living in the suburbs increased from under 40% to over 50%. For Hispanics it increased from around 45% to 60%. For whites, by contrast, the percentage living in the suburbs was relatively flat.
My Bangladeshi immigrant family members moved to Queens in the 1990s, and as soon as they got their feet under them economically they moved to Long Island. That’s the story of big cities like NYC: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/18/upshot/how-much-slower-wo.... Large urban counties would be shrinking if it wasn’t for a continuous stream of international migration. (But of course eventually the immigrants become part of the stream of domestic migrants leaving the city.)
A large part of that is schooling, followed by crime wave paranoia. Most who have kids want to decamp to the best school district they can afford, even at the expense of other aspects of quality of life. Safety is an issue too, because a lot of Americans are irrationally paranoid about children being able to navigate by themselves. In Japan, a 7-year-old going to school by themselves by taking the train is normal; in the US, it's grounds for calling Child Protection Services.
Have you never lived or shopped in a dense city? In most you'll have 2-3 grocers within a 5-7 min walk, with many more within a 15 min walk, including discount grocers and specialty grocers.
Have you ever lived in a dense city in the US?
http://maps.dcoz.dc.gov/zr16/#l=12&x=-8575451.094054567&y=47...
All the yellows and browns are residential zoned. And almost no mixed-use zoning. This makes your experience sound as if by design, not as nature would do it.
Well, looks like that regulation isn't great for stores. Here's the exceptions to residential units in the residential apartment zones:
https://dcregs.dc.gov/Common/DCMR/RuleList.aspx?DownloadFile...
Huh. 420.1.c explicitly bans corner stores. 420.1.g kind of looks like you can do a store under the apartment at least. This zoning map really doesn't look friendly to foot traffic.
My experience was as the OP, grocery stores I haven't even bothered to try yet within a 10 minute walk. This is the zoning map of Somerville.
http://3pb8cv933tuz26rfz3u13x17-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-c...
It looks totally different, granted the scale is much different.
https://www1.nyc.gov/site/planning/zoning/zoning-maps.page
They appear to have each section of the map available as a PDF. I guess everyone just does it a little different. I'd expect NYC to be closer to Boston though since they're from the same era and both have limited area to spread and have a lot of grandfathered in buildings.
I'm a bit surprised DC is so segmented by land use, though I suppose it's a more recent city it's not as if 200 years is chump change. It seems like the zones are created and existing stuff gets exceptions carved out, and if they get torn down then they lose those exceptions and become the default type. So if buildings get destroyed quickly or if there's a lot of space for new construction I'd expect more simple separations between land use types.
The cities I've been in in those places are pretty much all as I described. Manhattan and Brooklyn are the only US places I know well. Those have lots of grocers, but are very expensive, which I chalked up the fact that everything in NYC is expensive.
It could be that this is just a difference in how American cities are laid out and regulated. I have noticed that when I'm in most other American cities they seem either very small at their core, or very car centric.
For example, Boston's historic core is incredibly small. Washington seems to be a ghost town during the evening, except in georgetown. Pittsburgh has a tiny core. Santa Monica was hard to walk instead with all the traffic lights at each block.
I haven't been in any of those places enough to have a definite view though, or at least I didn't grocery shop there.
Rereading your initial comment, I realized that all the cities I lived also had excellent mobility. You could bike or transit easily to any other part of town.
The corner stores were small and had limited selection, but had a decent produce selection, and the store closest to me had a daily meat delivery, so I could ask for pretty much any cut of meat and they'd have it for me the next day. I'd usually make a weekly trip to the full store for staples, and then stop by the corner store for daily needs.
But nowadays, proximity to grocery shopping is moot for me since I just shop online and have it delivered.
This is not true, unless you’re including Harlem and FiDi. Manhattan stores are pricy, I permit that, but that’s not for a lack of competition.
Have you ever lived in Manhattan?
But increased accessibility reduces those problems, because it becomes less difficult to do things people need to do, regardless of socioeconomic status. You have the option of being mobile, but you don't have to be.
Now, getting more specific to the OP: traffic congestion is due to inefficiency. Adding lanes/roads doesn't address the source of the issue: cars are inefficient mass transportation mechanisms. Traffic jams only occur when large masses of people are transporting themselves. You can either A) add more mass transit, or B) bring the services closer to the people, so they travel less.
The latter helps the traffic jams, but it also helps people who don't even have an option to be in the traffic jam. Mobility helps the well-off, accessibility helps everybody.
(downvote away, you know i'm right)
But the reason the Bay area is so expensive is because Apple, Google, Facebook and 246 other Nasdaq-traded companies all call it home. It's ridiculous, if only for disaster planning. One natural disaster away from wiping out $3tn. Sitting on a fault line, no less.
So, yes, you could spend hundreds of billions hacking out better infrastructure links into this mess, or raise the speed limit, and that will increase "mobility". But that quickly translates into higher house prices even further out, and crappy new stock as developers get greedy. It's a vicious cycle that we've been over again and again and again, in many major cities.
Hotspots are toxic national planning mistakes that should have been smothered and forced out before they reached critical mass. Instead local pride (and land ownership) fosters them. Instead of fixing the problem, we're just trying to find new ways to make better returns on real estate investments. It's not sustainable.
Congestion will never be "solved". Because the commute time people are willing to tolerate is, as the article demonstrates, roughly constant. Adding lanes doesn't decrease congestion. But it doesn't increase throughput. Which means more people have more access to good jobs.
That is a good thing. One of the reasons why the Bay Area is so expensive is that the commute to cheaper areas in Central Valley is so long. Mobility allows choices. The type of home and the neighborhood you want to live in, is no longer as tightly coupled to the type of job you want to do, the place of worship you want to attend, the school you want your kids to go to, or the doctor your family wants to see.
Yeah, having a corner grocery might be good, but without mobility, the grocers are going to realize that you don't really have much choice about buying from them, and maybe start charging higher prices, or not stocking as much variety, or higher fewer people and having less service.
Mobility means more choice, and more decoupling. This means you not having to live in a high priced, crappy home because of proximity to your job. The further the distance we can make 30 minutes of commute, the more choices people have.