The total land area is also irrelevant: Spain has a pretty low total population density, but that's because most of it is empty. The people live close to each other anyway. You can have a house 20 minutes by car anyway, and thus live 20 minutes away from the hospital instead of 3 minutes if you really like yards that much, but barely anyone does, because the car life is expensive and a hassle
Still very walkable and nice for kids.
Price for these houses is ca. $100_000 (some little over, some little less).
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=&layer=c&cbll=55.7224384,8.533...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...
A big part of this is long term cultural: medieval towns (and even much older) were all clustered very tightly into blocks with city walls against attacks, those slowly evolved into the vast majority of the towns & villages in Spain today, and have left a culture where flats and dense city centers are the expected norm and the primary model, even for towns surrounded by empty space. You can easily find small towns of apartment blocks and tight wall to wall houses in windy city centers, of just 1000 people, surrounded by fields for miles.
The Spanish would argue that surburanism is generally less enjoyable (walkability, community, socialability) and less secure (houses are easier to rob than non-ground floor flats) while dense apartment/etc living is better value (less land cost, shared maintainence in apartment blocks) and provides better airflow/heat management & opportunity for balcony views (attic flats etc).
It's not like the land was wasted with parking lots. It's just as generic a desert setting as you can expect. Hot, tumbleweeds everywhere, Sand as far as the eye can see in any direction, etc. It's all single home housing so it could be denser, but that's pretty much the only benefit of living there; I grew up with a half acre yard (full of sand and an awkward tree in the middle, but actual land) and it gave my grandparents some piece of mind when we went out to play.
Cars and driving are awful
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopkins,_Minnesota
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northfield,_Minnesota
None of those are rural, they're suburban.
And frankly, even your rural non-homestead areas could use some redesigning. Now you make it unsafe walk in what are basically villages, the quintessential walkable settlements that we've invented back in prehistory.
And this isn't like a chicken or egg thing where people aren't walking because it's not nice to walk. The car came first, and then the suburb (as we know them) came second. These places were designed for cars. We're talking about 20-30+ min walks each way to get from most homes to the nearest "commercial area". Even if it was the walkable utopian dream of tree lined sidewalks and pedestrian-centric intersections, it won't change the fact that the vast majority of people would not choose to walk, and so it makes sense that these places are optimized for the way people actually get around.
This is part of a larger frustration where it feels like a very common thing that people in cities want to enforce their expectations and cultures onto rural places that already have their own way of being.
A sign of confidence, you know, the typical American fashion, would be to allow mixed zoning for compatible uses and see what happens, "invisible hand" and all.
Just because the majority are fat doesn't mean it's healthy
I'm not sure why you're shoe horning body weight into this - that's a whole separate can of worms that tenuously related, but not relevant to the fact that these places are so spread out in such a way that walking isn't feasible for a myriad of other very practical and immediately relevant reasons (weather, ability to organize child care/education, ability to run errands before/after work, time spent "commuting", etc.)
In a lot of places it's close to impossible to do what you're saying. There are no side walks. Many suburban streets and especially those bigger roads (stroads) are horrible. No shade because no trees because HUGE ADS SHALL BE VISIBLE FROM CARS, lots of dangerous driveway exists every 5 minutes that you can't even walk in peace lest you are run over by a huge truck, etc.
Streets are dangerous for cyclists (and I mean the regular cyclists, commuter/grocery shopping style, not the lycra-clad racers).
There are modern ways to design infrastructure, it isn't even a lot more expensive than the old fashioned way, and it makes for a lot more pleasant environment for everyone. Even drivers get to enjoy it because... people start walking (under 1km) and cycling (under about 5-7km), so a lot of car traffic just vanishes. So the remaining car drivers get to vroom-vroom a lot more :-)
- removing lanes of traffic to make more space for pedestrians
- reducing speed limits
- increasing gas taxes
You're reacting like advocating for a better pedestrian experience is somehow an attack on drivers, but that's totally not what this post is. Instead, the author points out places where they're already creating affordances for pedestrians (sidewalks, crossings with refuge medians, new curb ramps) but are doing it in a way that is not impactful.
You can make it a more comfortable for people to walk on the sidewalks that they're actually paying for, so the option of walking 20 min to the grocery store is more feasible, normal, appealing, without expecting that people in car-dependent neighborhoods are going to give up on car ownership.
> so it makes sense that these places are optimized for the way people actually get around
This is a misleading framing for two reasons:
- high car ownership does not imply that people don't want to also feel comfortable walking in their own neighborhoods. You can own a car, but walking your dog or walking with your family to a park or walking to the nearest store can still be a welcome option. People can get around in multiple ways, choosing different options at different times for different purposes.
- to the extent that a high proportion of trips are in a car, part of that is because the other options are crappy because of the argument you're making
We can have pleasant walkable neighborhoods and cars, and your kids can walk home from school and you can drive them to costco on the weekends. End this nonsensical pretend conflict between the two.
Further, much of Northfield is very rural, big corn fields, etc.
Could there be improvements in transit and workability? Certainly… especially between the historic downtown and the two colleges…
… but Northfield is actually a good example of a town where car (truck ?) oriented transit and stroads, etc., are well suited.
Definitely not in NYC, everywhere you see the disdain with which NYCers treat their communal environment
My boys (one with ASD and the other with ADHD) are often extremely loud. When they are, you can hear them clearly from a surprising distance away from my suburban USA home even when they're still in the house.
But walkable cities can be both 1M population or 10k population. What applies to a footpath in a city of 1M applies to a footpath in a city of 10k too.
Truly rural areas usually aren’t the topic of these discussions nor sites like strongtowns. For obvious reasons.
The population density of America is 33.6/square km according to Wikipedia. For comparison: Sweden up to the north is 25/square km.
There is a large difference in this regard.
EDIT: I added the part I was replying to out of concern of the downvoter’s who didn’t manage to catch that.
But I think the point you make about Sweden also applies to anywhere. How much land a country has that isn’t a city isn’t very relevant to how its cities look. If the US had 10 more alaskas or the EU had 10 more Swedens wouldn’t matter for how cities are built.
In the debate about Covid there was a trope about Sweden being so sparsely populated that no lessons could be drawn from there. Yet looking more closely it’s obvious that this is merely because most areas of Sweden have almost no people, and it’s rather Urbanized. I.e it’s actually locally dense but mostly empty.
“Mean distance between humans” is a much better measure of population density, both for city design and epedemics. Australia is a prime example where on average, 3ppl per square kilometer live. A figure that says nothing about actual population density.
It's not a utopia. It's about prioritizing people over traffic. Prioritizing the experience of being in the city over the convenience of getting there or driving through.
And it doesn't even have to be a city. The same idea also applies to suburbs. You can have good transit connections to the city, apartment buildings and local services in the core, single-family homes a bit further away, and large parks and forests within walking distance. Suburbs like this are typically more sparsely built but more densely populated than American suburbs. They also tend to be nicer once you leave your home.
So yeah, I understand your argument.
Further, a bunch of these examples seem like cases where the resources for the better design would not have been out of reach. The case where there are only crosswalks on 3 sides of an intersection so pedestrians need to walk the long way around (and wait for the light to change multiple times) would be straight-forward to have done right. The example in the "convenience" section where the path forces pedestrians to take a longer path, would have taken only a modest amount of additional concrete to address. Examples where there's too little demarcation between the sidewalk and street often have a green strip on the other side of the sidewalk. The same amount of space could have been used with the sidewalk shifted over and a green strip with trees placed between the street and sidewalk. None of these are "idealism run afoul".
I grew up in a commie block in a region of Europe where cities are fairly sparsely populated (approximately half the density of Amsterdam and close to 1/8th that of Paris proper).
I see it as a good middle ground that while still walkable, doesn't have the aforementioned downsides of dense city living, like:
-Noise, or actually the contortions you have to go through to keep it at acceptable levels. The inverse square law really does a number on people who live in a densely populated area with a night life or renovations going on (there's always renovations going on).
-Garbage disposal. I remember spending a mostly sleepless night in Bilbao because guess when is the only time a garbage truck can actually pass and collect refuse in a timely manner? Modern humans produce way more garbage than their 19th century counterparts.
-General tidyness. I want to see Tokyo one day because it appears to be the only large, densely populated area in the world which isn't filthy. I'm not even talking about trash. It's the puddles of animal (and human) urine scattered here and there.
-Lack of green spaces. Land is precious in densely populated cities, so you can't have this sort of stuff. Meanwhile when a dog has to go, they have to go, hence the previously mentioned puddles.
-Cost. Did I mention land is precious? The other day my friend showed me the sort of palace he can buy by selling his two bedroom in a commie block. Especially in recent years cost alone has pushed many people out of cities.
-Cost (of living). My car-oriented hellhole of a suburban mall where I sometimes do shopping has more stuff and at prices 30% lower than all those neat corner shops. The reason is that everything, from rent to logistics is expensive in a densely-populated area.
I could go on, but this is the gist. You couldn't pay me to live in a place with more than 5000 inhabitants per square kilometre.
At the end of the day, there's a lot of people that are fundamentally anti-progress. If it makes things better, they don't want it. Doesn't matter what it is past that. Their solutions to our problems are either that the problems don't exist, or if they do, we should do nothing and they'll solve themselves.
Look, nobody is looking for a utopia. Nobody expects that. But making small steps in a better direction is a good thing.
Look around you at your cities. Is this the best it could possibly get? Do you truly believe this is the apex of human society? I know you don't. Why, then, do you (and others) feel so ideologically opposed to making some amount of change? I just don't get it.
Having grown up in both rural and urban areas, and having seen many articles like this one, they tend to (more often then not) read like this: "I know what's best for everyone, and if only these rural hicks would just let us do what's best for them everything would be perfect". That's mostly where my frustration lies - not with weather or not some town has a sidewalk or not.
> Look around you at your cities. Is this the best it could possibly get?
As someone who has spent significant time in parts of Minnesota very near to Northfield... yes. I genuinely think these places are as close to the "best it could possibly get" as is realistic to achieve. This is based on my experiences and my preferences having lived in these places. Your opinion seems to differ from that, which is why you seem to think that these places are in need of being changed - but do you even live in a place like the one in question?
> Why, then, do you (and others) feel so ideologically opposed to making some amount of change?
Because it is not at all obvious that these are actually improvements for the people who actually live there. As I tried (and maybe failed) to convey, places like Northfield, MN were designed for cars - nearly everyone (~98%) who lives in Minneapolis has a car [1] and would use their car to get to the Allina clinic in question. Even if this was an excessively pedestrian friendly intersection, it would still be true that an overwhelming majority of people going to this clinic would drive.
Look around on google maps at this clinic and intersection [2] - there aren't even many residential places within walking distance in the first place. So in this case the suggested "improvement" would only even be relevant to a small number of people. And I'm not against making changes that only benefit a few people, but there needs to be a real case for people needing (or even wanting) it. And that needs to be to stand up against...
The fact that there are tradeoffs to rebuilding infrastructure to be more walkable. If there was some magic wand that just made this intersection walkable with absolutely zero tradeoff, then sure, wave your wand. But the truth is that there are real factors that matter: cost (both up front and mantainence), restricted access (during construction), and the not insignificant cost of having people idle in their cars at this intersection (which crosses a pretty significant thoroughfare for people in the Northfield to get to commercial areas from their homes - which are not a walkable distance away) to name a few.
Again, my frustration here is not that people are trying to make "progress". My frustration is that this "progress" is often defined by people who don't have to deal with the consequences, and that articles like this do not ever seem to actually account for the actual experience of the people who live in these places.
I would turn the question around to you: Why, then, do you (and others) feel so ideologically compelled to push changes onto others and expect them to share your definition of "progress" even when they tell you otherwise?
[1] http://www.newgeography.com/files/job-access_03.png
[2] https://www.mapdevelopers.com/draw-circle-tool.php?circles=%...
> people who actually live there
See, again, nobody is saying this should be a thing for everyone. Nobody is really going to target rural areas with any infrastructure changes because, well, nobody cares. And that's the draw of rural areas - you don't have that infrastructure. People don't live in towns of 2,000 people they want rich public accommodations, lol.
> don't have to deal with the consequences
Au contraire, you have it backwards. The Suburbs are the ones who do not have to deal with the consequences of urban sprawl. They're subsidized, on welfare, by the dense, walkable parts of the city. Because dense areas are simply more efficient and produce MUCH more taxes. That money is then taken and given to the suburbs, who cannot exist on their own.
> are tradeoffs
Sure there are. But this position of "we've tried nothing ever and we're all out of ideas" is lame. Sorry. There are trade-offs in our current status quo but because it's status-quo you refuse to acknowledge them as tradeoffs.
Again, nobody is claiming magic wand or Utopia. You have the expectation that we can make things better for pedestrians with absolutely no friction. And when the solutions don't meet the absurd expectations, YOU set for yourself, you deem the whoooole idea bad.
That, to me, is a mindset problem. In order to justify your need to maintain the status-quo you have to construct a logical framework where change can never be good, ever.
> push changes
Simple, we're not. These things are decided democratically and you're seeing more and more people talk about it because, well, they want it. Sorry if that makes you feel as though you're becoming a minority. I don't know what the future holds and maybe in 10 years everyone will be drooling over motor vehicles and concrete again. In which case, good for you.
The reality is these ARE being talked about by the people they affect. These aren't random outside forces. These are me, and others, living in our communities who want change in our communities. We don't want change in your community. Nobody cares about the boonies and that's the entire draw of the boonies. If you want people to start caring about you move out of the boonies. Then, I'm sure, you'd be very upset.