- It's the cars that make the cities undesirable

- I was shocked how the historical center of London, ON was demolished to the ground and replaced with shacks

- Kids should be able to walk to school alone in safety

- I live in Europe and I was baffled to learn that multi-purpose developments are disallowed in most of North America. This alone makes me reconsider my plans to move to the States. I love how I can just jump on a bike here and be at a large supermarket in 5 minutes

And even when the supermarket/mall is close by in the US, you still can't necessarily walk/bike there. I was visiting a friend who lived in the Midwest and his house was less than a mile from the mall. I asked him how to walk over there, and he admitted he'd never tried. So I set out to try, and the only way I found was by running across a busy 4 lane street without any crossings.

California, in particular, has a population density of about 100 people per square kilometer which is about the same as France. Most of California is either uninhabitable, factory farms, or military reservations. The population is highly concentrated near the coast.

People who haven't been there imagine that Los Angeles is "sprawl" but the truth it is very high density that is "sprawling" over a large plain that is boxed in by mountains. Millions of people have a line of sight to the Hollywood sign.

(I grew up in Southern New Hampshire which is based on Buckminister Fuller's diabolical geometry of airports and subdvisions -- where getting from one subdivision to the next is like going from the right side of your left lung to the right side of your left lung all the way up to the fork in your trachea. That is a self-inflicted wound that has nothing to do with how dense the population is.)

One approach is scale-dependent (divide the area into a grid of square kilometers, sort by population, pick the square kilometer where the median person lives.) but you would get different answers if you picked different scales.

The median of "How far away is your nearest neighbor?" seems parameter free at first but it is absurd if you live in an apartment. (e.g. ignores all the space around your apartment.) I guess you could look for the median (or other decile) of "What is radius in which N people live?" where N might be 100-10,000 but then you're back to having a spectrum instead of a single number again.

Maybe you can't avoid that.

And before anyone says I should just live in places that are like that, It's not so easy to just pick up my life and move somewhere else.

Does anyone have more details on this in written form? It's annoyingly difficult to google for because it's the other London.

Various British cities have been guilty of this; Bradford had a "hole" for about a decade due to an unbuilt shopping centre. https://www.bbc.co.uk/bradford/content/articles/2009/08/27/b...

That said, I drive this mess everyday and my 25 min cross town commute makes Torontonians cry. I don’t bike or bus though, so I do ultimately agree with him.

Regarding downtown. You won’t find more information on that shack thing because it’s not real. Besides a couple historic floods and fires I can’t think of what he means.

It's not just bike and transit unfriendly, it's bad for cars too. There's no easy way to get from one side to the other in less than an hour during the day, short of taking a helicopter.

Compare London to nearby Kitchener/Waterloo. They essentially have a ring road (hwy 85), PLUS a light rail + bus rapid transit system. It's still absolutely full of stroads, but at least it's more accessible and things actually move around.

In London, Oxford is essentially a 10 KM long parking lot every day at 9 AM, and Adelaide spends about two hours a day blocked by freight trains. Every attempt to fix the city frankly makes it worse. I don't know if it's because of poor planning, inept council, the lack of geographical constraints, or some other factor, but this city is the absolute show piece for failed urban design.

So yeah, I think it's completely reasonable to lean into London ON, it's the perfect case study in bad north american cities.

If you live in a large US city, this can still be very manageable. There are two large grocery stores and a small one as well as a Target and a metro line within a 5 minute walk of my house. Apart from the metro line, we didn't really prioritize the grocery stores, etc when looking for a house. That said, there are many downsides to living in big US cities as well.

* 1x big REWE, 3x small REWE, 1x Real, 1x Netto, 2x ALDI, 3x LIDL, 1x Turkish grocery store, 1x Asian grocery store

* Too many kiosks too count (tobacco, drinks, snacks, maybe like a convinience store)

* Too many bakeries to count

* 2 tram/metro stations, soon to be 3

* 5 bus stations (not counting the weird ones)

What they probably meant was they can hop on a bike and be in /any/ supermarket they fancy in this time.

Your city seems pretty good compared to what we're usually seeing from city planning in the US though.

That district has been mostly livable without a car for the past couple years after a grocery store was built there. I say “mostly” because as soon as you want to do anything outside of The dozen or so blocks of the Haymarket a car quickly becomes required again.

This is a common theme of walkable areas in the US and Canada. They do still exist but because of the development patterns of the past 30+ years they are small islands in an ocean of cars. Their scarcity also drives up prices and makes them less affordable than surrounding areas.

Also Carmel, IN for some reason.

It really helps understand exactly what "induced demand" means. If you add another lane, some of the people on the bus will take the car, and thus the new lane is almost immediately full again. If you remove the bus lane, bike lane, sidewalk, same thing.

Adding capacity for cars actually makes travelling by car worse.

It also gives hope. Like just because a city was destroyed to make it more car centric doesn't mean it can't be fixed to be livable again.

There's more to strongtowns than this, but it's all interesting.

If people leave the bus to drive it indicates your bus system is providing bad service.

If more people drive it indicates that your city isn't filling its purpose as being a place where there are a lot of things to do.

Cities need to figure out how to get ahead of induced demand not how use it as an excuse to be a worse city.. sure, this is a hard problem, with many options that make something else work, but induced demand is still a terrible excuse to be a bad city.

I don't have a car. If there were capacity to drive, I would.

If a bunch of capacity to drive was added, I'd buy a car.

So that's one data point.

> If more people drive it indicates that your city isn't filling its purpose as being a place where there are a lot of things to do.

This sounds like an argument from someone who's never heard any alternative to American status quo.

> Cities need to figure out how to get ahead of induced demand

Wait, you said it's nonsense?

I'm starting to think you're misunderstanding me. Induced demand is not an excuse, it's an antipattern no be avoided, and it's not irreversible.

It's about how adding lanes to a road doesn't help traffic (see Katy, Texas).

Or the I101. Adding a lane, or improving the Caltrain? Clearly the latter will improve 101 traffic more.

You incorrectly assumed I'm advocating more lanes of traffic, that is one possible solution - if you do it be prepared to go up (or down), as you will need many layers of layers over layers (bridges) that way. There are many other possible solutions though. It didn't work in Katy Texas because they didn't build enough.

Improving transit would be my preferred option.

The point is if adding a lane of anything doesn't solve your traffic problem (or makes it worse) then you are not thinking big enough.

> It didn't work in Katy Texas because they didn't build enough.

The Katy Freeway is literally the widest highway in the world.

The biggest in the world. Adding lanes doesn't help. This is not controversial.

> Improving transit would be my preferred option.

There are many solutions, and you don't have to pick just one.

Better transit. Dedicated bus lanes. Mixed zoning (so much this). Separate bike lanes. Etc.. etc..

It's not that we should force people to use the bus. It's that if you're stuck in traffic and had a magic wand that could turn 30 cars into one bus, would you use it? Well, clearly yes. Many times. Ok, so now that this driver agrees that they want other people to use the bus, it's just a matter of making the bus experience better, so that they do.

But yes, that falls under (as you say) "improving transit". But there's more.

Anyway, "Not Just Bikes" says this so much better than I could.

So if there are two routes from A to B and one is longer, then the shorter route should be reserved for the modes of transports that have a higher capacity. (That usually means banning cars)

Another really good option is to have dedicated bus lanes so buses don't get stuck in traffic.

As a car driver you massively benefit if other people take the bus or bikes instead of their car. Plus you and especially the ones who are to old, young, poor, disabled to drive a car have good options of getting around.

Well, you don't have infinite money, or space. Adding a bus lane and a car lane clearly will add more capacity than doing just one of them, but adding a bus lane will likely reduce traffic so much in the other lanes that you don't even have to add another car lane.

And adding just a car lane means people would rather be stuck in their car, than stuck in the bus, in the same lane, and we have tragedy of the commons.

So adding a car lane just means emptier busses, but same slow traffic. So what value did adding the lane add?

It'd just be government waste.

The first is true, but the second doesn't follow. For a bus lane to make a difference you need more than a lane, you also need good bus service using that lane. Bus service in many cities horrible and so nobody sane will ride it. A lane of empty buses running around helps nothing. If you propose a bus lane you need to do it with all the service that will happen so we can evaluate it.

It's been shown to be real in studies upon studies - what are you trying to say here?

So how is it an excuse? If spending billions on new lanes doesn't actually help anyone, that's just government waste.

Only when you don't add enough lanes. It hurts some people who are already using the existing lanes, but it helps other people who previously found the trip so painful they didn't take make it at all, but now the level of pain is low enough that they make it. Focusing only on those who are already using the road isn't the answer, we need to focus on everyone.

It's not. This is a fact. It sounds like you are trying to reason about this from pure logic, and are not aware that this is an empirical fact.

You can only go so far armchair guessing about how city planning "ought to" work.

> Demand either exists or it doesn't.

To get to the place, yes. To get to the place in a car, no.

If you double the capacity of a road network, that means more people will choose to drive.

Example: If the city I live in doubled the car capacity, I would buy a car and drive it. But since everyone else would too, it'd actually stabilize to the same congestion. (I forget, but the actually observed phenomenon has a name)

Or let's say you had some billions of dollars to improve the situation of the I-101 in California. What do you think will happen if you add a lane? More people who currently take a tech company shuttle will start driving instead. More people who currently take Caltrain will start driving instead.

And then you're back. I'm not guessing, this is established knowledge. No matter how hard people try to double down on a failed strategy (see Katy Freeway), it just doesn't help traffic. It just makes more people drive.

Now spend those billions on making the Caltrain experience better, and you'll start seeing existing lanes on the 101 free up.

> After all, if you built 100 lanes there wouldn't magically be 100 lanes of traffic.

A 100? Maybe not. But apparently 26 lanes is not enough (Katy Freeway).

But there are other aspects to this too, other than roads and transit. E.g. zoning. It greatly reduces traffic on existing roads if you can just walk over to the store to buy some groceries, because it's a 5min walk. Instead of driving and being stuck in traffic for 10 minutes because it's too far to walk and crosses an 8 lane highway.

Every person who went shopping in the local store is another car not on the road, both ways.

> Demand is fulfilled only up to the point that the demand exists.

This is only true in the sense that it's irrelevant. If you widen every street and avenue in NYC to 26 lanes, then maybe that's enough. But only because there will barely be any houses left to go to.

> There's no magical induction that urbanists vaguely gesture at.

That's not what's happening.

If people leave your transit system for a car it is because your transit system sucks. Fix that problem. (hint, trains can easily reach speeds 3x faster than cars, stops should not take too long, and there should always been a train almost here for when you missed the last one - running good transit isn't easy)

A transit system can almost never compete with a vehicle right in your garage taking you exactly to your destination. Unless you live in very rare circumstances, friction-free car travel will be preferable to most people. But car travel is not friction-free of course. You're setting up a goal post that's impossible to reach

That's the opposite of what I'm doing.

> The problem is people want to get someplace in your city and currently it is inconvenient for them to do so.

I agree. And we already know that "add more lanes" is a very costly (especially maintenance forever. Again, see Not Just Bikes), and we already know it doesn't even help.

> If people leave your transit system for a car it is because your transit system sucks.

No, not sucks. They just have to be subjectively a better choice for the individual.

So yes, then we agree. Money should be spent on improving alternative transport, not car infrastructure.

It's easily accessible on real estate websites (like Redfin, https://www.redfin.com/how-walk-score-works), and now I see there's a publicly available dataset as well: https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/walkability-index.

Walkability that is commonplace in many towns in Europe, roughly match up with very high 90's (98+) walkability scores in the US.

IMHO, anything below mid-90's is somewhere I would never live. The score is necessarily skewed towards US style living where walkability is relatively rare. So the difference between, say 70 and 40 is almost meaningless from the point of view of a walker.

As far as street design and urban planning goes, the key word is "complete streets" which is an umbrella term that covers rationale, design principles and practical guidance for how to implement a street layout (https://www.transportation.gov/mission/health/complete-stree...). This work is based on studies and data, but I've not looked into it.