It seems like people have gotten stuck in this false dichotomy where the only two possibilities are detached single-family homes on an acre of land or 50-story high rises with hundreds of housing units.
An acre of land is 43560 sq ft. That's enough for a 10,000 sq ft per-story multi-story building and dozens of ground-level parking spaces. You can fill a neighborhood with those, put shops on the ground floor and housing above it, and have a walkable neighborhood where every household has one car instead of two.
> bulk stores like Costco is only possible because people have cars. You will have to pry my Costco membership card from my cold, dead hands.
You could pretty easily replace this with ecommerce for bulk goods. It's actually kind of weird that this isn't more popular because bulk purchases should reduce shipping overhead. Why isn't there a Costco truck that drops off a month's supply of groceries at your front door once a month?
And nobody is proposing a law that requires you to knock down your house and build a multi-family unit that fills the lot, but if that's what somebody else wants to do on their property, just let them.
It doesn't matter to me if they build housing as long as it doesn't block my view of the sky and it doesn't add to light pollution.
A lot of the older housing is shit-quality tenements. To give one example of the crappy environment, there was a music festival in downtown, I walked from home (about 3 miles) because I didn't want to add to the parking chaos. I had to walk through a rundown section of town and saw a couple of families with their kids in the yard. The yard was all asphalt. Not a hint of green or dirt.
If we are going to build denser housing with social housing, we have to have green places where kids can play. I am a big fan of rewilding with few trees; that should be the kind of place kids have to play. With dirt to dig into, flowers they can smell, have room to plant a basic garden. let no kid be left inside.
we may not be able to give them a 10,000-square-foot yard, but we can make green commons, and part of their education would be understanding their responsibility to themselves and to others in how to take care of a common space.
As for knocking down my house, well, some "should-ers" have told me that I should do just that. Knock down my house (1930s era) building, put in the 4 to 6 apartments that could fit on the lot, and take a loss on the building to make it affordable.
I wish the single-family homes would stop adding to the light pollution. It seems like every Tom, Dick and Harry with a garage has a motion sensor connected to a million lumens worth of electric light that gets triggered every time the wind blows or a car drives down the street.
> A lot of the older housing is shit-quality tenements.
One of the main problems with housing policy in the US is that there is a group of people who want home values to go up and another group who want housing to be affordable and it should be fairly obvious why they can't both be satisfied at once. So instead we get rubbish political responses like rent control and The Projects and the creation of slums that nominally give poor people somewhere to live while all but purposely making it awful or otherwise restricted to Those People to make sure that no upstanding citizens would ever live there instead of paying four times what it should cost for proper housing.
We have to overcome that in order to have nice things.
> If we are going to build denser housing with social housing, we have to have green places where kids can play.
Sure, and higher density construction is one of the things that allow it. One and two-story homes make extremely inefficient use of land.
Suppose you have to fit 1000 people into a million sq ft of land and you want them to each have 1000 sq ft of indoor living space. If you build one-story buildings, you are not going to have an inch left for a single tree. If you build four-story buildings, they could each have 2000 sq ft and you'd still have half a million square feet left over from which to carve out a nice park or community garden.
> As for knocking down my house, well, some "should-ers" have told me that I should do just that.
Everybody wants to tell everybody else what to do. We need to reject "everything not mandatory is prohibited" and just let different people make different choices.
Bulk stores like Costco are only necessary because people live in such sprawling communities. In places where you live a short walk from a grocery store, you can practice just-in-time logistics, and buy whatever you need as soon as you need it.
It's a lot cheaper, both in economic and environmental terms, to build cities where people don't need to drive for their daily needs.
[0] https://newsroom.aaa.com/2022/08/annual-cost-of-new-car-owne...
... the prevalence of 2000s Nissan Altimas on the road suggests that a cheap car works pretty well for many people.
Car-centric design is a tax on all of us. It's just less burdensome for some than it is for others.
I've lived in both walk-centric and car-centric modalities. It's a lot cheaper to do a costco trip every two weeks in North America than to walk to Co-op or Waitrose or whatever and buy a single, individually-wrapped-in-plastic apple at a time.
Also, Waitrose is upmarket, so that's more like a Whole Foods apple than a Costco one.
I also get much better quality meat, fruit, and vegetables from Costco than Waitrose. So this is a total no-brainer for me. The only downside for some is you need more upfront money to shop in bulk, even if it works out to be cheaper.
Costco has home grocery delivery too. https://customerservice.costco.com/app/answers/answer_view/a...
It costs more that on the shelf because you are paying for someone to do work for you. Again, how much is your time worth?
Yes, a lot of people love to pick out their own food themselves, and buy in bulk only every couple of weeks, and take it home in their own vehicle. You are one of them, but certainly not everyone is like you. I am not.
The idea of a less car-centric world is to give more options that don't require a car, not to prevent you from using a car.
If the savings in going to Costco is big enough to justify having a car, then one alternative option is to join a car sharing group. Every two weeks, book a vehicle for your Costco run. In effect you're only paying for a day's worth of car ownership rather than 14 days, where most of time the car does nothing.
You ever see the bill for a bit of rail, or a subway, or a bus line? These things are horrendously expensive to build, maintain, and run. The money comes from taxes. Now that tax money might be better spent on other things poor and homeless people need, or might be better off circulating in the economy and not taxed at all.
But freezing all that value in the form of public transit isn't going to yield the best payoff for society.
Or the bill for lung cancer due to living next to a busy road?
Or the bill for hearing loss due to noise pollution?
Or the bill for having a kid getting hit and killed by a 3 ton pickup truck?
Or the bill for birds choking on oil after a spill?
...
I can go on.
I personally go shopping by bike, but I notice there are some things I can't readily buy that way, like furniture. (I did successfully buy a microwave by bike, but a larger appliance than that would be pretty daunting.)
I have family visiting me right now in the big city from the small town, and it's weird for us to notice how different things are.
The goal is to be less car-centric.
Those 10 kids, once they get older, will want to go to places, meet friends, and participate in activities. If the only option is a car, then you or someone else must be their chauffeur. Quite a few parents do it, but not all enjoy it.
If the place you live were less car-centric, you could give each of the older kids a bus pass and let them go places on their own, or your kids could walk and bike places on routes which are not shared with cars.
Transit in car-centric areas is generally under-funded, with low frequency service, so really only those who have far more time than money are likely to use it (see previous paragraph). Nor are the routes oriented towards parks, the beach, the local library, or other places kids would go to to meet their friends.
Taking a bus can also be confusing for a beginner. I didn't start using the bus until visiting the UK in my late twenties. I didn't know how to pay, I didn't know how to request a stop, I didn't know what I could ask of the driver, I didn't know the route or what the stop looked like, and more.
If you don't have the experience yourself, and your kid hasn't been with you on the bus to learn from you, then of course you are unlikely to want your kid to use the bus.
On the other hand, go to the UK and you'll see that kids take the regular bus to/from school, along with people doing the work commute or running errands.
There isn't a fleet of student-only school buses, because the mass transit system has enough capacity and frequency. There I am on a double-decker bus on my second day in the UK and to my surprise the bus stops near a school and a gaggle of teens (okay, maybe 15-20) climb aboard.
And the UK is pretty car-centric compared to what I've heard about the Netherlands.
Costco users in urban areas would disagree with your assessment that it's only possible with cars. I'm looking at this Costco in Soma right now and watching people walk out with enough bulk goods to carry in their granny carts or bags in hands.
I used to bike past it on my morning commute and it was heart-poundingly dangerous. Drivers will jump in front of you and slam on the brakes so they can get into the parking garage entrance. The taxis aggressively pulling out from the stop just add to the thrill.
Cheaper for who? Car ownership can be a huge financial burden compared to transit.
I live in Vancouver, I go to Costco which is downtown (15 min walk or 7 min metro ride), drive up to skiing or hiking mountains multiple times a month (weather and etc. depended). I don’t even want to point at even better cities in other countries (most of Japan, Switzerland, parts of France and many more) as that’s cheating. But you really can have your cake and eat it too, it’s very much been done multiple times around the world.
There is an environmental cost to using only cars to get your essential things. We need to start considering them now
One blind spot that I'm aware of is where you are, need, and point of service don't always align. For example, my medications cost a lot more if I go to the Walgreens a quarter mile away versus the CVS a mile and a half away. My partner has a special needs child and she needs to be able to get the child to a variety of services during the day a few times a month. Driving makes it possible. Public transit would make her unemployable.
Of course, some people call this slice of heaven a "nightmarish hellscape of stroads" [0] but thank goodness those people can move somewhere else and leave our cars alone.
Strong disagree. Having spent good amounts of time in parts of the world where you can operate for months without getting in a car, it felt far more free. The barrier to entry in the US being owning a car, paying insurance and paying for a place to store it is the opposite of freedom.
- "In 2022 the average vehicle costs $11,450 per year to own and operate. The breakdown of the figure comes to $4,496 for purchasing the vehicle, $3,120 in gasoline and motor oil expenses, and $3,834 in other vehicle-related costs." - https://www.investopedia.com/articles/pf/08/cost-car-ownersh... . If you are in a two-car family, and a less car-centric environment means you only need one car for those Costco runs and wind surfing afternoons, then you can save thousands of dollars.
- You can go out with friends to a bar and drink, and not worry about having a designated driver.
- There's much less need for “Restricted” or “Hardship” License for repeat DUI offenders.
- Kids have higher personal freedom as they don't depend on a parent to drive
- People who aren't able to drive (due to any of many reasons) have higher personal freedom
- During your commute you can read or do other things which occupy your attention.
- You don't have to worry about finding parking or paying for parking.
- Your taxes go down as you don't need to subsidize so much driving infrastructure
Having mass transit access also opens up possibilities for work you can't as easily get with a car. That's why places already have Park&Ride - parking at the job location is too expensive with only car access.
In a less car-centric society there should be little difference between the health car you get with a car and without. Plus, if your health condition means you can't drive, you'll likely have better healthcare access.
- higher personal freedom - you can go anywhere, anytime. With transit / walking, you can go some places, some of the time. This is huge and opens up a lot of possibilities for work, vacations, socializing, healthcare.
- bulk stores like Costco is only possible because people have cars. You will have to pry my Costco membership card from my cold, dead hands.
It's a lot cheaper to let people drive in to a central bulk store like this and buy what they want in large quantities than to have a network of tiny, walkable stores and try to predict demand and optimally distribute goods to them with delivery vans.