Re:Workers Are Fleeing Big Cities for Small Ones, and Taking...
by perl4ever on Saturday September 07, 2019 @11:52PM
(#20908506)
People write stuff like this a million times a day. The reason it has no effect on me, for one, is that at the end of the day, I think if living in a suburb was as relatively wasteful as people claim, it would as a consequence be correspondingly relatively expensive.
Usually people say something about externalities to explain why they deplore certain activity, but it seems to me that when you spend an incremental dollar (such as to live downtown), it rapidly diffuses into the economy and represents the average amount of carbon-intensity. So I think how much you spend is the key to focus on, rather than the "niceness" of what you spend on.
Commute fuel costs aren't remotely the biggest inneficiency with living in a diffuse suburb, though. Someone has to grade and pave all those extra miles of road. Someone has to pour all that concrete for sidewalks that no one walks on. Someone has to trench and lay piping and cable through all that unused space. Those large diffuse houses need more energy to heat and cool both because they're larger and because they're diffuse.
And even then, granting that you're not commuting to work, your kids are commuting to school on vehicles that need to travel much farther, your family is commuting to dinner and shopping over much larger distances, and everyone that needs to be at your home for any reason (to repair something, deliver something, etc...) needs to spend more fuel and time to get there.
Suburban sprawl is a bad trade. The worst of it, for you, may be the psychological impact of the daily commute. But that doesn't mean the rest of it isn't bad.