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.
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.