Depending on where you live, forces such as fear, uncertainty, misanthropy have lead to the exact opposite.
We live in insane times where in parts of settlements at peace you can't even WALK to where you need.
The car mandate is INSANE. I'll drive somewhere, then figure "the next place I need to go is a five minute walk. I'll walk!"
Then the sidewalk disappears and I'm trudging across lawn next to 60mph traffic.
Another time I wanted to walk to a shop right on the other side of the road. It would have taken 45 minutes.
The cultural hostility towards pedestrians is wild.
The only way to get to the other side of the road was using a vehicle - there were few hired shuttles that were driving people from hotel to work and back, quite insane.
A week before I was in SF and public transport there was decent, but the vehicles were like from 1950s in comparison what I'm used to use in my country, e.g. if I wanted the bus to stop I had to pull a wire (yes, a wire!) to notify the busdriver that he/she should stop on the next bus stop. That's just one of the issues, and the quality of the bus was no where near the current ones we had in Europe.
On the other hand the bus drivers were very friendly and open.
How else do you signal the bus driver to stop? And why is this an issue?
The NYC MTA years ago used these rubber push strips held in an extruded aluminum profile. They were all over the interior next to each window and ran along the edges of the ceiling for standing passengers. They were frequently broken, cut or pulled from their bases by bored school children. This lead to the button circuit being stuck closed preventing more presses from triggering the bell and annunciator lamp at the front of the bus to notify the driver. People would then miss their stops and start yelling or walk to the driver to ask them to stop. The pull cords are old school but insanely easy to fix and maintain.
In Europe we have buttons. The pull cords and push strips seem weirdly over- and underengineered at the same time.
What's wrong with pulling a wire? Works well, easy to maintain.
A button press is something we use.
Hardly the kind of thing I was expecting in SF. Same for BART, looks like something straight out of the 70s. Or those huge concrete slabs cut with saws, used for sidewalks. In Europe they generally use asphalt.
American infrastructure generally lacks... panache, style, IMHO.
We couldn't afford a car when I was younger so we had to subsist on Translink and Skytrain, and those systems were roughly on par with Muni and VTA. Outside of the Vancouver core, pedestrian infrastructure was weak to nonexistent in suburbs like Richmond, Surrey, South Vancouver, etc or towns/cities like Nanaimo or Abbotsford.
Calgary and Edmonton were worse.
Friends have lost friends cycling on mixed-mode roads. Drivers don't expect to see cyclists, and the normal traffic speeds involved leave little room for the kind of error that even benevolent humans make all the time, to speak nothing of the many hostile drivers.
I would love to cycle. I love bicycling, and am glad it was an option for you! But I don't believe it's viable where I am without significant structural changes.
Detroit comes to mind, not sure if the rule is still on the books tho.
This is one of the major factors I appreciate about the places I've lived in California; for the US it's an exceptionally good environment for pedestrians and cyclists.
Still not great by any means. But whenever I visit friends/fam back in IL where I grew up, I'm teleported back to that cultural hostility in a big way. It doesn't end there though, even as a driver there's rampant aggressive hostility/road-rage behavior to contend with.
It feels like the entire region is full of people fighting for scraps on the streets, just without getting out of their cars. Pedestrians/cyclists are basically just bystander casualties to the mess without infrastructure to isolate them from it.
Business says "put money in the hole. Deliver money to hole with fast wheeled box."
Everything else is disposable, sacrificial.
Suburbia can still have mixed use areas. We had a shopping center in our development for all the basic needs. We had parks and nature preserves and even areas with condos for cheaper housing.
Good Christ, I lived for years in small towns in the most rural area of the UK without a car! Your towns aren't built for walkers and public transport and that sucks, but there's no need to project that to everywhere else!
Of course, we have not here decided that Government Is The Problem, so we tend to wield it a little better. A number of my neighbors want to change that, being as afraid as they are of "Transit-Oriented Development" (you can guess what that means), but hey--democracy isn't free, we need to push that nonsense back.
And I'd say you're grossly mischaracterizing the US. Every small town I've lived in has ample sidewalks, crosswalks, and is easily walkable. Where my children go to school I can walk from one end of town to the other without ever having to risk life and limb. Heck a few of the sidewalks extend a mile out into the country just in anticipation of the city eventually growing. The town I grew up in was the same. The entire US isn't small-town Texas.
The UK is smaller than the US state of Oregon, which is the 9th largest state in terms of area.
There is literally nowhere in the UK that counts as "rural" by US standards. The UK has a population density of 277/km^2, while the United States as a whole has only 35/km^2. The comparison is much worse if you look at western/northern states like North Dakota (4/km^2) or Alaska (0.5/km^2). Even California (widely considered a very crowded state) has only 250/km^2, still considerably less than the UK. In fact, there are only 4 states of 50 which have a greater population density than the UK.
The old saying that Americans consider a hundred years a long time, while the British consider a hundred miles a long distance seems to be accurate even in the long term.
In any case, the UK is 52nd worldwide in terms of population density, meaning that it is more dense than 197 other regions and dependencies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...
Western individualism doesn't really play with that collectivist setup though, everyone needs their own private building, their own private micro park, etc.
Why stop there? Build communal cafeterias and dormitories that you can hot-bunk 3 shifts per day. Quality of life is totally a thing, mang.
Weirdly, for a "decent option" these only seem to exist as the norm in areas where people are forced into them by totalitarian governments.
In the United States the few setups like this that have existed were called "The Projects".
To put it mildly, they were not widely considered to be desirable places to live.
Have you ever considered that your "collective anthill" housing ideas might actually, you know, suck ass?
And that the basic idea has wound up sucking ass every single time it's been put into practice?
Whether it's called "The Projects" or "Housing Estates" or "Collective Worker Housing Blocks", it just plain sucks,
Essentially no one (very likely not even you, if it came down to it) would, or ever has, moved into one of these human zoos voluntarily.
There's SOOO much legislation in the US that freezes everything in place (when zoning doesn't cut it they just add 100 rules like minimum parking and achieve the same thing) and then someone like you points to the result and says: "see, everyone wants it".
The US basically has 2 types of housing, overwhelmingly: single family homes and residential skyscrapers. The stuff in the middle is low digit percentages.
Soviet-style certainly is better then US style suberbia but its not actually good compared to real urbanism.
What you actually want is not a bunch of identical blocks spaced far apart. You want proper streets with connected blocks with commercial in the lower floors to frame a real urban feeling. That has many advantages. You can still provide real public parks and open spaces in such a structure (see Oslo for example).
There is a reason tons of tourist go to places that are beautiful urbanism and almost nobody goes even to the best Soviet microdistrics to look at them. And nicer building wouldn't change that.
> Western individualism doesn't really play with that collectivist setup though, everyone needs their own private building, their own private micro park, etc.
And yet somehow the capitalist west has built amazing cities and towns for 100s of years.
And places like the Netherlands, Austria, Denmark are very much on the forefront of modern example of these things.
Which you can answer that cities done well can also be great.
Noise, crime and no access to nature is not a common denominator of cities. While my city is noisy, mostly due to the overuse of vehicles, I am 15 minutes by foot / 5 minutes by bicycle from the nature[1] and crime is not a something of concern here.
If you want an example of a city that does well in all 3 areas I think Utrecht is a good example.
> Suburbia can still have mixed use areas. We had a shopping center in our development for all the basic needs. We had parks and nature preserves and even areas with condos for cheaper housing.
Also, isn't that getting close to the definition of a small town...which is itself kind of a small city?
[1] And I don't mean a park.
Kind of? A large master-planned community might have thousands of homes and its own commercial district. They've always reminded me a bit of historic small towns.
http://www.crowwinghistory.org/brainerd_street_views.html
Along that main street you had mix buildings where people lived and did their business out of. There was no separation between living and commercial.
Farmers lived further out, not directly connected to the city.
From there cities cities grow incrementally up and incrementally out. At some point they stop. Brainerd now has the same amount of people as they did 70 years ago. Other cities, like New York sustained that phase much longer.
That such a hilarious understanding of 'nature' and 'cities'. I live in a city and I can be in nature very quickly.
In fact, the sprawling nature of suberbia is what destroys the most amount of nature and makes it harder for everybody to access nature.
> Suburbia can still have mixed use areas.
The term 'Suberbia' talkes specifically about US style subburbs and just based on facts, 99% of it simple doesn't allow commercial usage.
Sometimes you have commercial zones next to the R1 zones, but usually the ratio is very small and the distance to the commercial zone is very far for the majority of people. Thus commercial areas are often reached mostly by car.
Mixed use zoning is almost nowhere to be found in most of the US.
The term 'Suberbia' refers to that.
> We had parks and nature preserves and even areas with condos for cheaper housing.
Then it isn't really what is called 'subberbia' at all. Subburbs can be done well, but not subberbia.
And in most places in the US where there is a massive lack of alternative housing options with a vanishingly small part of the total land area allowing anything but low-density residential zoning.
So yes, subburbs can be done well, but if its done well its not called 'subburbia' anymore. And the amount of places where it was done well is incredibly small.
Which city? It's always helpful to look at google maps to see if people are using terms in a different way.
A city by definition is surrounded by suburb (sub-urbe) and neither is forest, so if you live in the city you need to get to the suburbs and the cross the suburbs before you can get to a forest (or desert/etc).
I'm sure there's some city somewhere where the highrise apartment building transition immediately to forest, but I'm not sure where. Not common, for sure.
> So yes, subburbs can be done well, but if its done well its not called 'subburbia' anymore.
This is a circular claim. So if a suburb works well it's not a suburb?
And if you have a good train connection, you can go out of a city very fast an efficiently.
Zürich, you have forest 1.6km from the downtown train station. Or 9min with public transport to an even larger forest.
To small? Ok, lets look at Berlin. From main train-station, you have a gigantic park only a few minutes away. If that isn't nature enough for you, its a 7.5km distance to a forest outside of the city.
Amsterdam, less then 5km to be in the surrounding country side.
Vienna, 4km to country side, 7km to a nature reserve.
I have not been in any European city where going into to country side isn't trivially easy. Even my 80+ year old grandmother who lived in the cities former industrial area would go for daywalks in nature.
> This is a circular claim. So if a suburb works well it's not a suburb?
No its not 'suberbia'. 'Suberbia' has a particular definition.
This video gives some perspective of what I am talking about:$
Suberbia is not a word in English, reference:
The reality is that it is very expensive and heavily, heavily subsidized. US style Suberbia is a result of the US government massive policies in encouraging suburbia style housing and highway building during the New Deal and then in the Post-WW2 boom, plus of course the Red-Lining and destruction of city centers.
These places never ever pay for themselves. You can look at the data gathered by 'Strong Towns' and 'Urban3'.
In fact the poorer parts of the city/state and of course the town center are subsidizing the richer suberbia. Its a fucking travisty of epic proportion.
Suberbia is expensive to set up initially, needs massive infrastructure backing to be viable and is horrible energy inefficient.
Cheap for who, though?
As an individual I can't change society but I can choose where to live. So if rent in the city is 4K for 1 bedroom and in the suburb it's 2K for 3 bedrooms, suburb is cheaper.
I have lived in a couple of large European cities and each was very different from each other, so I can't draw a "generic conclusion".
Cities can become what people imagine they would like - which sometimes is wrong/sometimes is right (in the sense: sometimes they imagine they would like X but when they have it they are more unhappy, other times they are more happy). But we should talk more about what we like and wish rather than where we want to be or not (city/country-side).
It's okay but noise is a real problem as is air pollution and crime.
I think in the future China with its electric vehicles and strict law enforcement will probably end up with better cities.
By radically lowering speed limits [1] and slowly rebuilding our infrastructure to reflect that. It will take a long time, it took 100 years to build infrastructure that assumed a person could cross 15 miles of suburbia in as many minutes.
[1] I do mean radical; cars shouldnt be able to go faster than 30 mph. For folks with a need for speed (myself incld.), perhaps will exempt motorbikes
[1] Illich, Ivan. "Energy and equity." (1974).
I've never read too much of him (no time, I have many of his books), but his argument that cars, on average, have an effective speed of 5 kph blew my mind.
That flipped my understanding of cars.
The irony is that he was a far left hippie who flirted with getting defrocked and I am supposed to be a "far right" conservative (whatever that means).
Have you read E.F. Schumacher? "Small is beautiful" is right your alley.
Thats why I insist that this is a 100+ year project. Our current infrastructure is built around 80mph cars (I drive 90!) and it will take forever to build sustainable infrastructure.
I drive far; my folks and I get together once a month and they live 300 miles away. My in laws live 600 miles away and we see them relatively often, again by car.
I hate flying (Im tall and ppl smell), so I drive a lot. In fact I love driving, and I will never not own at least one car.
But lets be frank. I live 300 miles from my parents because cars enabled me to do so. Fast transportation has radically lowered the cost of living away from family, lowered the cost of not investing in our communal areas.
Besides, I make exceptions for motorcycles: no speed limit for them :)
/s
You might just ban them at that point. Why waste ANY resources on a car? We could return to horse drawn carriages, they are biological and therefore more environmentally friendly [1]
[1] https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Great...
Most people did not own horses, especially not in cities.
They were generally limited to farmers, businesses (to draw carts/carriages), and the rich (Gilded Age).
For most of history most humans walked to their destination on a day-to-day basis. This changed slightly with the invention of rail roads and later bicycles. The automobile didn't go mainstream until roughly the 1920s:
* https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262516129/fighting-traffic/
Look at any pre-WW2 development and you'll see neighbourhoods built for human scale:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb
Design things 'properly' and neither cars, nor horse-drawn carriages, are needed by people for most of their daily tasks. This is evidence by the fact that humans lived like that for centuries just fine.
Less draft-y, better control temperature, and indoor plumbing with modern building science.
> I don't know why cities, streets and bicycles are needed.
Cities have less environmental impact, streets offer easier movement, and bicycles are probably the most efficient way of a human being moving.
I'm not sure how designing communities where private automobiles are a necessity improved upon communities where they are optional nice-to-haves.
Feces (including horse) spread disease. Motor oil leaking is mostly leaking on places where nothing grows anyway because all the traffic compacts the earth and so plants cannot grow (Deer in woods make trails where plants cannot grow, this isn't about cars at all) . As such I give the win to the leaking fluids for the local environment.
Cars generally are burning fossil fuels and putting more CO2 into the air. A horse is burning plants and so are net zero CO2 (assuming you don't use fuels to make the hay!) So for the earth horses are better.
Both cars and horses can kill people if they hit them. Car drives generally pay some attention, and horses generally will not run over people. However there are failures where both can kill. I don't know how to find statistic to tell which is worse in practice though.
A horse is a rich man's toy. Generally in the horse days humans walked, even the rich would walk most of the time - you can walk just as far and fast as a horse in a day. The horse was used to pull carts or carry heavy loads (though most people fail to realize just how much a human can carry and give the horse too much credit here). While a car is the common person's way to get around even when they could walk. Thus for human's the horse is a win because you exercise (though I'd really want to add a bicycle to this analysis)
To be a tad pedantic, it's more accurate to say a "rich woman's toy".
The vast majority of horse owners/managers are women [1].
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/388979/gender-distributi...
- Horses dont do 30 mph sustained
- Horses eat. A lot
- Horses need care
- More horse riding would be a good thing
Oddly many of the neighbors seem to already have golf carts in their garages ... I guess to tool around the neighborhood? (Christ, can't you even walk to the pickleball court, ha ha?)
Renewable energy isn't really renewable. Wind energy still requires oil and mining, and dams disrupt river ecosystems. Nuclear produces toxic waste that lasts for hundreds of thousands of years.
Our society has gotten into an incredible mess with more energy usage (e.g. climate change).
Energy use is not in itself creating any value. It's a cost for value creation. More energy available can allow us to make more value, sure.
If only there was a word besides "hard" for this situation
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/10/01/5510187...
However when things are going well for the hunter-gather they did have a lot of leisure time and so they could well be happier overall even though the lows were worse.
Personally, I would trade the lows if I could live in a world where most technology did not exist (that would mean in particular, I could drink from any stream or relax without hearing an ICE.) And no, that does not mean going off into the woods now, where the experience would be vastly different, being surrounded by advanced society.
There are places in the world where you can get away. there are still hunter-gather tribes around, and some of them would welcome outsiders to join. (some will kill you on sight) You can also buy land in middle of nowhere Alaska (or Montana) where effectively there is no civilization in anywhere close. I'm not sure what country you live in, but odds are there are options where you can just disappear for civilization if you really wanted. While you can get to civilization from the above if you want, it wouldn't be hard to avoid it.
Not sure why you say going to the woods now is not an option. There are enough people choosing to do similar things (ex: Amish style of people). Nowadays we have more options in terms of life style than at any point in history (not without some tradeoffs, but still). You have to make a choice and make your peace with it, don't think it's productive wishing you would not have the options...
With nuclear power, eventually you'll add so much waste heat added to the atmosphere that it will be worse than greenhouse gases:
If we continue increasing energy consumption at current rates and cover it with nuclear power the ocean will boil in 400 years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vRtA7STvH4
Obviously that's not meant to be a serious scenario. But it's illustrative.
I don't see the problem of lifting everyone up while using less energy. We just gotta be smart about the solutions we make, rather than just brute-forcing it by using lots of energy.
Like: I prefer to bike to work. That makes my life better. I also prefer living in a walkable/bikeable town. If I'm forced to drive a car the energy associated getting to work will be very high. If I can use an e-bike it's a tiny fraction, and I get to exercise without wasting time in a gym.
I am ok with those that want to live on a self-sustaining homestead but its not for me.
To grow beyond current limitations we must first acknowledge them on a fundamental level.
Carbon tax and VR? I wish cities were more walkable and that people didn't buy so much junk.
However, I also hope that we ask the question, how can we make our society better such that we have to drive less and use less energy? Because what would be even more friendly than a lithium-sulphur battery is no battery at all.
Let's not forget that with all this optimizing within our existing lifestyles, we should also try and make our lifestyles different so that we don't need any cars at all...(I know, not possible on a massive scale immediately, but over time...)