Add up the roads, parking spaces, parking garages, gas stations (not to mention auto shops, drive thrus and car washes) and the total urban footprint is a gargantuan 50-60% by many calculations. That's not automatically a bad thing, especially if you are a car, but all of that space creates massive buffers separating all of the other stuff that humans want to walk to. To make it worse, those buffers are far and away the most dangerous thing in any urban environment.
On the bright side, the pandemic seems have enabled many cities to finally reclaim some of that car land for use by people. Though it's not clear how long that will last.
When I moved to LA, I did the following calculation.
Average number of cars per person, 2/3 x Number of people in greater LA area, 16M = 10M. 10M cars x average parking spot is 7ft x 15, 105 sq ft = 1 billion sq ft. 1 billion sq ft to square miles = 36 square miles. That's a square 6 miles on a side. Just to park the cars once. There is at least 3x that number of spots in the city. A hundred square miles of parking. No kidding. Also, the city of LA maintains 5000+ miles of street parking.
The scale is mind boggling.
And the cost is astronomical. The cost of real estate is estimated at $2.7 million per acre. Those hundred square miles are worth close to $200 billion.
Speaking of real estate, does anyone have data on the impact of personal range on the ability of land owners to extract rent?
The feeling I get from sampling shopping experiences at various levels of density is that higher density means higher rent and higher prices.
Cars are enormously wasteful in a physics sense, but in an economic sense they do wonders to commoditize our complements, and I fear that getting rid of high-range infrastructure would take us out of the frying pan and into the fire.
Density and rent are definitely correlated, but I think the causation mostly works the other way: in areas with high value (high rent), people will build more densely to take advantage of the high-value location.
That's how density increases naturally due to market forces, but we are talking about enacting policy to directly spur increased density and what its effects will be.
I would expect the policy to create lots of value, but because of the way land ownership works, I would expect most, all, or more than all of that created value to accrue to the people who own the correct land. More importantly, I would expect it to bleed away from those who don't. Shops away from Main St would be screwed, while the new lovely walkable storefronts would have $5 coffee and $15 sandwiches and the apartments within walking distance would have $5000/mo rent. Those massive flows of money wouldn't go to shop owners or workers or maintaining the infrastructure (see: NY, SF), the money would go into the pocket of whoever owned the land, because our policy choices would have just gone towards ensuring that owning the correct land was all that mattered.
It just seems crazy to me how eager people are to build an economic steamroller and then throw themselves in front of it. Fight to commoditize your complement, don't fight to help your complement commoditize you!
I have to wonder how much of the city overall is used for cars -- roads, highways, and the "buffer" land surrounding them (like the land in and around a highway interchange); parking lots and their access streets; businesses dedicated to servicing cars, like gas stations...
Something I only recently learned is that zoning rules generally require housing developments to include a certain amount of parking. This drives up the cost of housing, because of the space required (either up or out.) Many cities are reducing or eliminating these requirements in an effort to make housing more affordable. However, it does mean that parking will become harder, as there will be more competition for street spaces.
> However, it does mean that parking will become harder
In the city I'm near, using public parking lots means a 20 minute walk to your destination, with a $10 fee from all the time walking (or uber), with private parking costing around $15, and no meters in sight. This creates an isolated area that people never go to for a bite to eat, coffee, window shopping, or anything really, since it's a > $10 fee just to step on the sidewalk. Not surprisingly, there's incredible churn for the businesses down there (pre Coronavirus). The only people they have to service are the other businesses in the area and the few that live there. With coronavirus, it was all wiped out.
Your city may be similar to mine, insofar as the "residents" of the downtown area are mainly the people who work there and have already paid for parking. Not surprisingly, a lot of the restaurants do most of their business at lunch time. A city where you have to drive a car to a curated pedestrian zone is not walkable by my highfalutin sensibilities. ;-)
I get around town by bike. This is not for the faint of heart in the upper Midwest, but for a person in decent health, the obstacles are primarily psychological.
I also suspect that the cost of parking is a psychological obstacle. It's similar to how people who claim to enjoy live music are offended when asked to pay a $5 cover to see a band.
> Your city may be similar to mine, insofar as the "residents" of the downtown area are mainly the people who work there and have already paid for parking.
If massive parking requirements is the #1 urban planning disaster of the last century, the #2 surely has to be zoning regulations that prevented mixed use areas where people can live/work/play in close proximity. And this was only to… force people to buy cars to get from place to place! Look at any city area that was developed prior to the advent of cars and they are unanimously multi-use dense areas. Cars ruined everything.
You can see this in the south bay in an incredibly acute way.
Where are Google, Microsoft, and a bunch of other enormous campuses located? East of the 101. Where are all of the residential areas? West of the 101. Gazillions of commuters need to cross the 101 to get from their home to their office twice a day. This means that everything is limited by a few small overpasses that are crazy expensive to expand.
What if people could build apartments over there? Too bad. Not zoned for housing.
My town, though much smaller, has its own "101" with similar bottlenecks. But there are now (at least) three bike bridges across it. While not free to build, they're doubtlessly much cheaper, especially since the bikes can use already existing neighborhood streets with minimal impact on the residents. I'm not sure there's a master plan for improving bike routes, but when they have to tear up a road for some reason, they usually design its replacement to accommodate bikes with dedicated lanes, bridges, tunnels, etc.
Bikes are great! 101 has at least one bike bridge. But I'd personally feel really unsafe in the bay area biking. Zero protected lanes. Tons of cars merging through bike lanes to enter turn lanes. Fast-moving roads that also have direct access from driveways.
I grew up on the outskirts of Chicago. Mostly built in the 1920s or 1950s. Everything you need is within a one mile walk, even Home Depot. Cinema closed down but Walmart opened up about two miles away. Plenty of street parking, alley garages, and lots of nice amenities. Only moderate rat load.
I think this is the type of neighborhood people like, when the schools are good, at least.
Lots of neighborhoods used to be like this, though usually not big box stuff. Used to be bodegas, fruit markets, small hardware shops, tailor, dry cleaners, etc.
Until the mid 80s to early 90s there were neighborhood Sears and Wiebolts as well. Wiebolts went under in 1986.
Elderly folks could give up their car and age in place as long as they could get up the porch ramps and such. Didn't need to go to home, and homes need not be far from neighborhoods. Plenty of housing options for all stripes.
Feels like one of those “better is worse” situations. Yes - “most” people prefer the selection/prices if Target over the (relatively) overpriced mom-and-pop store, but downstream effects weren’t clear, undervalued.
The solution to this is plentiful, well-placed municipal parking garages priced cheaper than street parking. Santa Monica does this where they have about 6-7 city-run garages spaced throughout the city with easily visible electronic signage indicating the amount of available spaces. Street parking is much more spare and priced higher. It's an enlightened alternative to tearing down buildings for more single-level lots. See Google Maps satellite view of Spokane, WA for how not to handle city parking - about half of downtown is gray asphalt.
> Spokane, WA for how not to handle city parking - about half of downtown is gray asphalt.
Downtown Spokane isn't that bad, although it used to be much better. They have parking garages downtown, but those were built during better times (when Spokane also had multi-level car dealerships across the street from the mall), it turns out downtown real estate just isn't that expensive anymore. There is a lot of gray asphalt simply because there isn't much demand for the asphalt to be anything else.
I wouldn’t cite SM as the model of municipal parking. Especially in conjunction with how poorly these support the expo light rail line - it’s not really feasible to drive in and get on the train to go to work for a day.
> This creates an isolated area that people never go to for a bite to eat, coffee, window shopping, or anything really, since it's a > $10 fee just to step on the sidewalk.
I take the bus into downtown Seattle with my son every weekend. He enjoys the center, the monorail, and the market, but I would never do it if I had to drive and find parking.
Yes, there is public transportation, but this is $6 and 20 minutes to the closest light rail stop. I never tried a bus.
My point is that this area is almost only served by foot traffic, but getting your feet on the sidewalk has a pretty significant cost.
I don't think this is odd though, since it's been the experience I've had getting to any downtown area. Visiting downtown San Fransisco costs around $10 to actually get too, after all is said and done, even from within the city, unless you walk/bike/spend 20 minutes.
Lyft Line and Uber Pool were usually $4-5 around San Francisco before COVID and you can use electric bikes through the bike share for $15 for the entire month. Obviously it’s easier if you live near the walkable area, but it doesn’t need to be as expensive as you claim and SF is one of the more expensive cities.
The thing you’re missing is that I spent much less than $100 a month in transit costs when I lived in SF. When you have a car there, you will spend probably $500-$1000 on the car, the insurance, the gas, parking meters, etc. Then you will likely need to pay for a parking spot. In the Mission the going rate before COVID was about $400+ a month. My friends who had cars and didn’t have dedicated parking would also get $75 parking or street cleaning tickets fairly often.
So I literally could take a $5 ride each way every time I didn’t feel like walking and I had a huge cost savings, much less hassle with parking and street cleaning at 6 AM, less environmental impact, no problems drinking and driving, etc. After a while, most people without dedicated parking end up leaving their car in the same spot as long as possible and mostly use it for weekend trips outside the city.
Driving a car around SF is generally more than 20 minutes. Most areas downtown can be reached in the same or less time by bike, and it also removes any issues with parking/waiting for a car.
This wouldn't be a bad thing if the public transportation was also effective. It should be hellishly expensive to use a car in a big city. It just shouldn't destroy your ability to get to work if you don't have a car.
In my experience, NYC is the only city in the US that has made this work. The MTA is plagued with cost overruns and other problems, but you really can get places quickly using the subway.
Only solution i see is a brand new city built from ground up with entirely new rules and welcoming people to that kind of life. Car free, autonomous pods, grids, public transit and small footprint. If it succeeds then others will have a model to emulate. I do not know what legal changes will be needed to make something like this happen. There is no reason other than safety where existing archaic town planning rules need to be implemented everywhere.
In many places outside urban cores in the US, the rules are such that the amount of parking created is far in excess of demand.
You could try and rent your spot, but it would be pointless. Inside urban cores the parking is frequently underground and gated off so that it makes it hard to rent out without breaking the security rules for your building.
At the last place I lived in Vancouver, BC there was 2 levels of underground parking for 3 stories of living space. It is absolutely wild to think that a building along a major transit corridor was required to reserve 2/5 of their building for private vehicles in a city that is famously progressive with transit (for north america)
That's interesting, but I doubt it would be allowed by most apartment leases, and I think for townhomes, many people wouldn't want some rando parking in their garage.
The original purpose is literally to stop cars parking on streets.
Carsharing services are a game changer for urban people who use a car once a week or so (go to the shops, visit family, etc.) And should be substituted in any requirements at a 30:1-50:1 ratio or thereabouts. Developera still need car parking to attract many buyers however
i was just reading an article in my local paper this morning about a new building in town that got a zoning variance approved. it's a ten-unit visitor accomodation development, and they have ten parking stalls on the property (which is less than the minimum parking spaces code requires).
there was apparently a 45-minute debate at the council meeting where neighbours were arguing that the development should be denied because ten parking spaces wasn't enough for ten units. of visitor accomodation. because apparently people go on holidays with multiple cars.
During holidays, visitors can mean many more than two additional cars per family. Living in that building means choosing not to entertain friends and family, or irritating the crap out of your neighbors by taking up the parking. If they're lucky, they'll be communicative and work out parking custody, but more than likely it'll be a resentful petty mess.
The big challenge is having both shared urban infrastructure and personal cars that aren’t a luxury. Cities should focus on keeping cars out of the center to the maximum extent possible.
Pavement does not absorb rain water, and causes flooding.
Pavement causes heating, and raises local temperatures. More pavement, the greater the additive effect.
Pavement replaces vegetation and black soil.
The results should be pretty obvious.
Skipping the whole CO2 debate, and just look at that.
Sometimes I think Americans don’t know how badly they want this.
Americans will tell you how wonderful European cities are with their small streets and their public squares filled with great restaurants. They think we don’t have cities like that because we’re lacking some fundamental European-ness.
No. We just put cars everywhere. Cars ruin everything. Now you have wider streets. Louder streets. More dangerous streets. Far less foot traffic which means very low chances of discovering a new favorite place. You have lower business density which totally changes the economics of an entire neighborhood. Etc.
In this and so many other things Americans say they want what they see elsewhere but are uninterested in doing anything about it.
- Politicians need to be willing to withstand accusations that they are allied with property developers who earn more than they spend.
- Politicians have to be willing to piss off people who support minimum parking requirements and other restrictions.
- Those same politicians have to be able to get re-elected.
- Large numbers of people have to credibly promise to volunteer and vote for a local politician who supports the walkable urban development policies alongside positions they disagree with.
An individual can want it, but it requires costly collective action to change. If just one person goes to a town council meeting and argues in favor of letting a housing developer build apartments near them, that will have little impact unless they also talk 2 other people into both taking similar action and recursively getting similar alignment.
The rate at which YIMBY activism spreads is too low.
I’ve lived in walkable US cities. The main ingredients are mixed use, high density, effective public transportation, useable sidewalks, and zero surface level parking lots. Roads and underground parking is fine because they don’t lower density that much and density defines how much you can reach in a reasonable walk.
What I think people miss is public transportation is the least important part of the equation. Once people start walking everywhere you can increase the number of trips people take with public transportation, but you want people making short trips not simply long commutes.
Roads often do make a big difference - if there are too many lanes it you end up with a block-sized, loud and dangerous chasm in the middle of what could be a bustling neighborhood.
I live in Tokyo and it’s dominated by streets that are literally barely wide enough to have two cars pass each other at <5mph, and I’ve come to love that.
IMO this still just comes down to density. Getting to a park just across a 3 lane divided highway isn’t a problem especially via skyway or underground tunnel. Walking 5 miles to that same park isn’t.
Narrow streets can significantly boost city density which then gets people out of their cars. One way streets make crossing traffic easier. But, if there’s nowhere to walk to then it’s all kind of pointless.
I kinda disagree. Highways are usually real barriers within cities. So much so that, if a city made the mistake of running highways through itself or along its waterfront, it's now worth it to spend billions burying the thing or building some kind of giant elevated park on top.
Not saying you’re wrong but in Tokyo most of the streets I mentioned have no sidewalk but just by the nature of being tiny they don’t need one - cars will pass at very slow speeds anyway. Agreed that it only matters if you can achieve high density, but part of achieving high density is designing for it, including not optimizing car traffic.
I found Boston much more walkable than SF having lived in both. Due to smaller size, higher density, better transit, flatter, safer. I also find Boston seemed to be prioritizing it more, whereas sf govt really struggles to prioritize peds, muni, bikes.
You are right, and there are also design speeds routinely imposed on new/“improved” U.S. roads that enable or even require (under govt safety standards) wide roads, which just encourage faster driving and worsen the problem. Even here in nyc we have some roads like this. Thankfully they are a smaller proportion than in the rest of the country. But mainly that’s because of the age of the streets — we are lucky to have old ones not ruined by our engineers and government.
Americans aren’t homogenous: those who adore European cities aren’t the same ones demanding parking minimums at their local neighborhood groups. Those people don’t give a hoot about European cities: they just want everything within a 10 mile radius of where they live to be easy to drive to and don’t want to think through or be reminded of the externalities.
I was going to write almost very similar comment. A follow up question will be how badly they want it and are they willing to give up their cars to have a walkable City and you would immediately see how many are actually interested in it
Zoning is a dragon that even a clear majority can’t slay in many cities. In Boston there is a major controversy that all new construction must have 1 parking space for every 2 condos.
Property developers, residents, and everyone else hates this regulation as the people buying these condos aren’t getting cars. You end up with buildings that are 1/3rd empty parking lot.
Bear in mind that the most popular neighborhoods of Boston were built in the 1600s without cars in mind.
The problem is that American cities also generally don't have functioning mass transit systems. And even in those that do (New York), they don't always go where you need them to go, so mass transit trips can be 2-3x longer than a car trip.
Want to do a big shopping trip? Have more than 1 child you need to move around the city? Want to do more than 1 specific errand in the same afternoon? Without a car, all of this becomes a huge pain in the ass even in New York or Boston, which have extensive networks of subways and buses, let alone anywhere else.
And now let's say you want to get out of the city for the weekend. Do you rent a car? That's way more expensive in the long run compared to owning.
We would need to fundamentally redesign our cities/towns and transit systems for Americans to be able to give up their cars.
I lived in the Boston area for five years and it was a great experience overall, it's quite walkable. The one thing I could never quite get used to was public transit taking longer than walking! You often had a choice of walking for 20 minutes or waiting 15 minutes for a 6 minute bus ride. (Tip: in winter, walking isn't just faster, it feels much warmer too.)
This really confused my Mexico City brain. Here in Mexico City public transit is horribly crowded but faster than walking. The subway is usually faster even than driving, which makes sense because you're not in our terrible traffic.
I guess part of the problem in Boston is that there just aren't enough riders: after waiting 10 minutes for a bus it wasn't even full! Here in Mexico City a more typical waiting period is 5 minutes and the bus is usually packed. I bet in Boston it's just not economically viable to run transit more frequently. Although maybe more people would opt for public transit if it were more frequent?
Anyway, I do recommend living Boston for a few years even with its wonky public transit. It's very pretty and has plenty of character.
Apparently 12 minutes of waiting is the critical point where you start to lose riders of public transit. If you want people to really use your system, you need to keep wait times consistently under that.
> And now let's say you want to get out of the city for the weekend. Do you rent a car? That's way more expensive in the long run compared to owning.
Are you doing it every weekend? Renting a car for just the odd weekend away would be way cheaper than owning. The initial cost / capital depreciation aside even.
I live in London and don't have a car, a £50+ train out to my parents' seems a bit absurd next to the cost of a train to Paris, Ryanair flights, or my Netflix subscription. But I could do it every other weekend just for the cost of insuring a (basic, sensible) car.
I could probably go more often than I do, take taxis there and back (>2h each way) and still come out ahead vs. car ownership.
Really need a 'day to day' (or specialised, such as needing capacity for something, or disabled access) use to make it worthwhile IMO, too many people I think see it as just a 'standard' thing which must be had.
Cars are unfortunately too cheap. My last car was a basic VW polo, and the insurance was £350/year, road tax £99 and probably £200 a year amortized over the 5 years on servicing/wear and year, with a 400 mile range on ~£50 worth of fuel. The break even point on that is ~5-6 trips per year, and much lower if you use the car for basically anything else. I can fly to eastern Europe for £15, but the transit to the airport is more expensive than that in my city.
Arguably they aren't cheap... they're just able to externalize their greatest cost: roads. If the cost of building and maintaining the US road system were baked into say the cost of gas or registration... you would be looking at an entirely different cost of ownership.
It's not that easy. For one there is a notable population which will complain and even for those who want to get rid of cars it is a long project: You need to change the city structure. If you have a resedential area without shops to run errands and no workplaces whatsoever people will need to travel long distances each time. Long travel time (whatever the means) means that you don't do grocery shopping for a day or two, but a week or two, which means you carry more and that's only viable by car.
Transforming city structure and society takes time.
As a resident of another very walkable European city, I love the ease and affordability of e-scooters. They haven’t replaced walking for me, they’ve replaced the longer trips where I might take a bus, train or taxi. They’re cheaper, more convenient and especially during the pandemic have meant fresh air and the joy of being outside.
Actually, it seems that European companies have the larger market share in Europe, with Tier (Germany) as #1, Voi (Sweden) as #2, and Bolt (Estonia) as #5.
The problem isn't cars. Cars are the symptom. The underlying issue is zoning that disincentivizes walkable areas and public transport infrastructure so bad that most people don't even want to use it.
What choice is there if you live in an area designed for cars? In the average suburb there is nothing around for miles, the streets are wide and designed for cars as you said. At that point the only workable option is to buy a car like everyone else. Urban centres which are walkable tend to have the highest home prices. It's a tough feedback loop.
The suburbs have to be made livable first, with plenty of shopping, restaurants, theatres, parks nearby so that living without a car is feasible.
Personally I hope to live in/rent apartments all my life and even raise a family there, but i don't know what it'll be like.
I always wish for big pedestrian zones like those public squares in Europe. I have noticed closing off streets has become more common but we need to commit and make those full time pedestrian areas. We don't need to park 3 feet away from everything.
That said, I don't like driving _everywhere_. When I moved to university, it was incredibly freeing to just be able to walk somewhere I wanted to go rather than getting in my car and driving miles to get anywhere. I grew up in a suburb in Texas so walking anywhere except _maybe_ a friend's house was entirely out of the question.
I visited Portland recently and it was lovely to be able to get around the whole city without a car. We didn't rent one, save for one day when we went > 100mi out of the city. No Ubers, no Lyfts- just walking, buses, and lightrail.
Yes, though a lot of Americans don't see it that way. People I talk to think I must hate driving, because I think we should have effective options for walking, biking, and public transit.
I don't hate driving. I hate being forced to drive.
I liked driving too, but I lived in a larger German city for the past decade and didn't need a car. If I want groceries I walk across the street. If I want to go to work I cycle there (which is faster than taking the car or the subway at that time of the day, additionally you are more awake at work and get a little movement).
The few times a year where I need to transport something bigger, I just rent a car or get one from a car sharing service, or I transport it in the subway/S-Bahn.
I grew up on the countryside, where cars were a necessity and give you freedom, but living here not having a car gives me freedom. I don't have to think about my car, where to park it, where I parked it, how to maintain it etc.
What's hardest to find, and what I prefer, is somewhere it's easy to walk and drive. I've lived in walkable places where if you do have to drive, traffic is a nightmare. And then of course there are places where you can drive without traffic but there is nowhere to walk to. I think I prefer the latter with my lifestyle, though it becomes more frustrating for meeting friends, going our for dinner + drinks, etc.
For sports / leisure, "driveable" areas are better for getting out of town and into nature faster. In bigger cities (in Canada) I never would have considered going skiing after work, but it is possible in smaller places. I find it's also easier to go to league sports in a driveable place. For running, walkable is obviously better, and one reason I like living in the city is that I can step out my door and safely go for a run, where as further out that option doesnt exist.
Most Americans would say the Netherlands is tough for driving I think because the cars are smaller, the lanes are smaller, there is light rail everywhere, many pedestrians and bikers everywhere, etc.
I think all these decisions are why the Netherlands are so lovely and most of America is seemingly highways, strip malls, and suburbs.
One of the most popular Dutch vacations is biking around the country and camping instead of staying at hotels. It’s quite far from American car culture in that regard.
> One of the most popular Dutch vacations is biking around the country and camping instead of staying at hotels. It’s quite far from American car culture in that regard.
American car culture is to go on vacation to drive up camping spots. You can't actually camp in many places without a car. There isn't really public transit from Seattle to Mt. Ranier national park, for example, and the distances is too far and the terrain too hilly for just biking it (the Netherlands is lucky to be flat, in this regard).
Yes being flat does help for sure. In much of Europe I think they solve this problem with trains or sometimes buses to get to the parks or outlying areas. For example, much of Italy is hill towns and no one wants to walk up huge hills to get to each town but you can typically get there with transit.
The United States admittedly is quite large and spread out but if we started to connect more things with transit then I think it would stop feeling so much this way. Like why couldn’t there be a connection from San Francisco to Tahoe that doesn’t involve driving? It’s a very very popular weekend trip and a train would be great for moving skis and other equipment.
If you live near Seattle, you’re lucky to have some of the better planning in the United States and some of the more open-minded people with regards to transit, camping, etc. In a place like Florida, for example, it is fairly common to meet people who’ve never been camping unless maybe you count a music festival. The priority is often air conditioning, a nice hotel room towering over the beach, etc. which is not what the Dutch seek out for the most part
We have lots of choices, but driving is the norm. There is a train near Ranier, it’s still operable (steam train!) but is now for tourism. Let’s hope it reopens.
Switzerland has trains and postal buses to serve its mountain villages and make tourism easy. The distances involved are a bit greater out west, however.
Yes I was delighted to learn in Switzerland that before my flight out I could take my suitcases to any train station in the country and they would route them to the airport for me and make sure they made it on the plane. It’s some truly incredible infrastructure!
Japan manages it pretty well. The mass transit system of Tokyo is well known. But the city is also zoned such that walking or biking from an apartment/house/hotel to a restaurant, supermarket, or even a major park or museum is easy and fairly safe. The roads are clean and well-maintained, and traffic really isn't that bad. Street parking is rarely allowed, but small parking lots are numerous albeit expensive.
Biking and public transit moves most commuters off of the streets, leaving the roads to the owners of luxury cars and driving aficionados who don't mind paying the tax premium to subsidize their vehicular access. I pay $450/yr in road taxes, kei car drivers pay maybe $75, and someone with a big-displacement engine like a Lexus IS-F or a Mercedes AMG probably pays $800-$1000 every year. I'm totally ok with this system.
I spent 3 weeks in the New Jersey suburbs of Philadelphia and HATED how I couldn't walk to anything....but the roads are also of absolutely terrible quality (potholes everywhere) and are mostly straight and boring highway travel, so they aren't even fun to drive. Then I quarantined in Tokyo for 2 weeks and everything was a convenient 5-minute walk away. If I LIVED in Tokyo, I would still own my sports cars there, as I love the freedom of being able to travel longer distances, at any time, with privacy and storage capacity.
I'm in another region of Japan where the public transit is almost non-existent but the walking-friendly zoning helps to compensate. I don't NEED a car to get to the convenience store or the supermarket, but they definitely make life 100x easier, especially since the weather here is terrible more often than not.
So I'd say Japan is proof that walkability and driveability are not in "irresolvable conflict".
> Help me understand this. Where do cyclists and ground-level public transportation go if they're not on the streets?
Public transportation is much denser ( even a paltry bus can fit at least 30 people vs a car which occupies slightly less space, but usually has a single person in it), and bikes take much less space. You can fit 4 bikes in the space of a single standard sedan; and a small bus is what, 2-3 sedans but 30 times the capacity?
You'd think, but come to San Diego and take a look at downtown. I frequently see 2-3 buses driving in a row down Broadway with single digits of occupants between all three.
>>>Where do cyclists and ground-level public transportation go if they're not on the streets?
Cyclists are on the sidewalk, and use little ringer bells to signal to pedestrians to move outta the way. For public transit "off the streets" I was mostly referring to the subway system. Buses and taxis are still "on" the street but the users are out of privately-owned vehicles. I wasn't clear on that.
>>>Wait a minute, quarantined and walked around?
Technically "restriction of movement" not "quarantined", I get sloppy and often use the two terms interchangeably. Quarantine = you are COVID+, inside a specially-designated hotel, which you can't leave. ROM = you are COVID- pending additional testing, can stay in any hotel, but can leave your room for essentials such as groceries/take-out food.
> Cyclists are on the sidewalk, and use little ringer bells to signal to pedestrians to move outta the way.
No, cyclists are on the bike lanes or, if they aren't there, with the cars. The sidewalk is for people on foot only, who are the most vulnerable and should be separated from other faster modes of transport.
US and Japan both have a number of mid-tier cities in the 4000-6000 per km2 range (look at the "list of [US|Japan] cities" pages on Wiki and sort by descending pop density). Japan has a number of efficient cities far from the Tokyo/Osaka megalopoli that don't benefit from their network effects. Consider Fukuoka, Sapporo, or Kagoshima (all fairly remote/isolated cities) compared to Miami, FL and Santa Ana, CA (for high-density US cities outside of the Northeast Corridor). Hiroshima and Sapporo have surprisingly-low pop densities closer to Nashville and Kansas City. We Americans should be able to draw some applicable conclusions even when we look outside of Tokyo. The initial reaction is usually "the density disparity makes it cost-ineffective when applied to the US". If we zoned and developed along Japanese patterns, wouldn't our city densities increase, due to the higher quality of life delivered by the efficiency improvements? People would actually want to live in places where they had flexible transit options and safe walkable neighborhoods with integrated commercial and entertainment activities.
> I think it's hard to find because those two preferences are in direct, irresolvable conflict.
Plenty of places that were built pre-WW2 have people walking for groceries and such, cycling and taking transit to work, and yet still have cars (street parking and back yard garages) for other longer distance errands:
Toronto is one example of where neighbourhoods were built that are not Manhattan- and Hong Kong-level densities, but are still not entirely car dependent. They were built semi-recently, and not some long-ago time period that is unrealistic to try to recreate.
They also have recognizable architecture that is not from the Middle Ages or Napoleonic age. You can explore some of these neighbourhoods (in Toronto and elsewhere) and realistically visualize similar houses being built today.
Of course Toronto suffered from the same automobile malaise as many other North American cities, first in the 'inner suburbs' (North York, Scarborough), and later in the "905".
Well I think there are cultural differences and that Europe is not the only acceptable model.
Both america and Canada are bigger and wilder than Europe. Cars are nice and a necessity to live in both countries. The neighborhood here is a good example of a walkable neighborhood that is also uniquely north American. That's okay. We don't need to replicate Europe when we have perfectly good, culturally appropriate models here.
The neighborhood here is exactly like my neighborhoods. It's lovely. I don't need to have old town Prague levels of walkability to be happy. Quite the opposite, where I am is perfect
> Both america and Canada are bigger and wilder than Europe. Cars are nice and a necessity to live in both countries.
Only in the rural parts. In Canada the population is highly concentrated very close to the US border (i.e., the southern part). While the 49th parallel is the 'meme' of the Canada-US border, 72% of the population lives below it, and 50% lives south of 45°42′ (45.7 degrees), including Toronto/GTA, Montreal, and Ottawa.
I've never run into a walkable city center where there was one super-obvious and convenient place to park--maybe a gigantic underground garage--and then you walk everywhere from there. Feels like that might work.
The attractive city centers have nice stuff, but too few people who live within walking distance to keep them in business and in good shape. They need a way to bring in suburbanites and visitors to supplement the native population.
In a lot of areas, street parking is actually a really good way to provide a barrier between the sidewalk and traffic. This physical safety provides psychological safety, so people feel a lot more comfortable with sidewalk dining, etc. A lane of parking can also separate car traffic from a bi-directional pair of bike lanes.
Also, a lot of cities have too many and/or too wide lanes, which makes drivers feel too safe driving unsafe speeds. You can use parking to "eat up" the extra space and make the street feel more crowded, which will make drivers slow down and drive a lot more carefully.
So street parking should absolutely not be seen as just a negative thing, it can serve a very useful function in the layout of a street.
On a similar note, my city used to have a lot of 50 km/h four lane streets through residential areas, even though they were only minor trunk roads that didn't warrant that many car lanes. There was also a severe dearth of bike lanes, and since these are residential areas with lots of houses, there were always cars parked in the right lane and cars turning left into driveways.
The solution was to remove two lanes of traffic, forbid street parking, add a bike lane along each side of the road, and add a centre turning lane. this was all done with just paint and "no parking" signage. There was a bit of complaining about the loss of street parking, but other than that it's worked out great, and I actually see people using the bike lanes now, and traffic actually flow smoother.
Montreal is similar. Parking downtown: horrible. Parking out in the 'burbs and then riding the metro into town? easy, and lovely. For a lot of things, anyway.
Might be a Canadian thing. Toronto is similar. If I recall correctly, Toronto operates the second most used public transit system in the United States or Canada, while the public transit authority there is the largest parking garage operator in North America.
It’s a pretty good solution for medium-sized cities, but it breaks down as population increases. Toronto has largely stopped building these garages because they’ve run out of room for them after immense population and ridership growth.
Toronto is a pretty big though, so it’s still a solution worth exploring for medium-sized cities that can still reasonably build these facilities.
In Europe this is solved by having a train station in the center. Even the little towns have them which is why it can be lovely to spend a day exploring the area whereas in the United States it’s often easier to assume a small town will have little walkability and maybe you’ll just stop there for gas.
Where have you been that has both? From my reading, it seems like cities need to prioritize walkable / bikable OR cars, but I've never seen example of a city doing both well.
IMO Portland is actually kind of like this (for now). I've heard Berkeley, CA sort of, too.
In Portland (where I live), I have a driveway and convenient street parking right outside my house, but I can also walk to many shops and restaurants, and have a pretty good busline nearby. I usually take the bus if I'm going downtown, so I don't have to worry about parking. But in my part of town, which is less dense, I can conveniently drive or bike. Parking can be a little annoying on this side of town, but it's usually okay.
That being said, Portland is clearly moving in a denser direction. Housing has gotten too expensive here, and the only way out of that is density. Our cycling infrastructure and public transit are decent, but need to get better IMO. All of this will probably negatively impact the car-friendliness, but I think that's the right move for Portland right now.
It's desirable only because they don't build the outer burbs this way. As you drive out of the city, the time of building gets later and later. When you hit some point where the homes were built in the 60s, suddenly the walkable neighborhoods, which were the standard before then, make way for huge, sidewalkless developments.
If they just built more of the commenters neighborhood, and my neighborhood, there would be more desirable land.
Towns tend to be this way, not so much cities. I live in a single family neighborhood in a large city and it’s both walkable and drivable. It’s not great driving beyond a 1-2 mile radius, but I don’t need to go that far more than once a week. My kids’ schools are all walkable distances, 30 minutes tops, or a 5 minute drive. Same for the gym, restaurants, bars, the grocery stores, etc.
Ottawa, Canada is pretty good for this. It's a pretty small city but has a few neighborhoods that would be considered walkable, while in 20 minutes you can be out into the country. Compared with Toronto or Montreal where in 20 min if you're lucky you've entered a highway so you can sit in traffic for an hour to clear the city. Not sure about in the US.
In the US, most suburban areas have plenty of low traffic streets, and many have additional recreational paths for pedestrians.
When I lived in a quite rural area, it was no problem jogging on the low traffic roads, and if I wanted long runs, I could have gone ~3 miles on those roads to a converted railroad that ran for miles in either direction.
Hong Kong has that in some places. It makes it hard to navigate on foot, as pedestrian routes are no longer obvious lines but require entering building perpendicular to your direction, for example.
However, the idea is nearly perfect. All it really needs is to put the cars in tunnels. Underground there's plenty of room for driving, parking, etc.
I live adjacent to a mid- sized downtown area. It’s walkable, but from my house to anything on the other side of it… not as walkable. Driving it is very annoying though… lights, weird traffic patterns, a million turns, one way streets, etc. if any single one of those roads were converted to a bike only street, it’d be 100x easier and more rewarding to bike it.
I wish American towns… especially the smaller ones where streets are too narrow for bike lanes, would embrace no-car streets. The fact that they don’t exist AT ALL is disheartening.
The hardest thing to do is explain that experience to people. Also having grown up in the burbs, it wasn't until adulthood in SF and Europe that I realized how materially different 'walking' can be.
It's shocking, because it's something so fundamental, right in front of our eyes, that's just hard to fathom.
So 1) we have to think about how we communicate this and 2) we may want to thin of ways to even adapt the Burbs to something more ammenable.
On the later, it seems crazy, but people do like convenience, and expansion of commuter lines may bode very well. People will use transit if it's faster and more convenient.
If Dallas were connected to Planto etc. through something fairly quick, clean and safe it would transform the city. Not holding my breath.
I remember hearing a joke that Americans like vacationing in Paris (or Rome, London, etc) because it reproduces the walkable life they only ever had in college.
I like living out in the country on a large private wooded lot. I have lived in dense cities where I could get groceries and other necessities within a short walk, and with pervasive public transportation. Hated it. I like space and seclusion. I like being able to drive anywhere to get what I need, when I need it, and not having to wait for a bus or a train.
It looks like you need a car indeed. I grew up the way you live and just loved it when I first lived in a city where I didn't need a car. If you needed a bus/train to do your groceries I understand that you hated it, that's why I'd rather choose to stay at a walkable distance of everything.
You like pollution? You like polluting waterways with micro plastics from your tires? You don't care about the 40k killed every year in the USA? You don't care about the destruction of countryside with roads???
But you do like ice cream? You like millions of animals getting killed? People getting killed from antibiotics no longer working? Water shortages? The planet getting killed?
I don't know what you're trying to achieve with your comment, but I'm quite sure I didn't turn you vegan just now.
Even if you care about not killing the planet, what matters is not that you make it clear that you do, but that you're effective in preventing that from happening.
This is a classic example of listening to what people say vs observing what they do. And it’s a good lesson in product development. Ask your users “do you want X?” And the answer is inevitably “yes”. Ask them “do you want A or B?” And you’ll start to get a better approximation of user behavior. Better yet is observing actual behavior.
In this case Americans have chosen the suburbs in droves.
Americans want walkable areas in close proximity to the exact kind of house they live in now with all that entails: large single family house on a large lot with their 2+ cars.
People would don’t love in the US may not realize just how large the lots are most Americans live on. In Australian cities a quarter acre block was once the dream. More typical now is half that.
You will find areas in Atlanta where the lot size is one or even two acres.
It’s only the older typically East Coast cities that have anything remotely approaching the density you might see in Europe.
Your thesis is flawed. It is illegal to build new dense walkable neighborhoods in almost all of north america. But existing neighbourhoods of that style tend to be both highly priced to live in and also popular tourist destinations, implying high desirability.
The older east coat cities built walkable neighbourhoods before they became illegal.
They’re illegal because people vote for representatives who makes them illegal and show up to city council meetings to petition for them to be illegal.
Existing areas in that style tend to be expensive, but are often (at least where I’ve lived) some of the most NYMBY areas in a city. They like the benefits their density has brought, but won’t tolerate the lot next to them getting one iota more dense.
> They’re illegal because people vote for representatives who makes them illegal
Yes, but that's not because nobody wants to live in them. It's because a loud subsection of the people that already own single-family homes there don't want them built.
You seem to recognize this. That's different from saying "Americans don't want to live in this sort of housing".
Ah sorry! That’s fair - I understand what you’re saying now. That said, I’d argue that this is a bit of people wanting their cake and to eat it too. They want a contradiction - to be close to everything (so they can walk places and be in the middle of the action), but also far away from it (so they have privacy and room). So - It’s true to say that people want density, but also true to say they don’t.
The people who show up to city council meetings and pay attention to local politics are a tiny minority. It is not a stretch to believe that they do not represent what most people want.
Is that because they don't prefer that design, or because protecting the price of their house is so essential to their long term financial stability that they'll block literally any policy, no matter how good, if it threatens their house price?
> It is illegal to build new dense walkable neighborhoods in almost all of north america
Yes.. because of the people's representatives. Why is that do you think?
> The older east coat cities built walkable neighbourhoods before they became illegal.
Technically, they were built before the modern automobile era when there was really no alternative. Additionally, geography played a part. Manhattan is land-constrained. So is San Francisco. LA, Chicago and Atlanta are not.
By any quantitative measure, Americans have clearly chosen a car-dependent lifestyle. Since WW2, houses have gotten larger while families have gotten smaller. When given the choice between less space is a downtown neighbourhood or more space in the suburbs the vast majority of people choose the latter.
People will even choose more space and pay exorbitant private school fees rather than live with less space but get a "free" excellent public school system, even though the latter is almost always more economically sensible, even more so the more children a family has.
I've never dealt with a city in my region that didn't have variance procedures for building and land development permits. In my own experience, these committees are nearly a rubber stamp unless an adjacent property owner expects to be inconvenienced. You're observing what's called realized preferences.
Coffee-table planners seem content to frame everything as a political problem, as if developers are an extended civil service or some kind of unthinking machines. There is also an unsurprising lack of investigation into places in the world where zoning free-for-alls actually do exist. Most are not like Martha's Vinyard. Many people don't actually want to live in a favela, and they vote and spend their dollars accordingly.
The east coast built walkable neighborhoods because they were built before cars existed. Several of these states have a net negative domestic migration, which does not suggest that people want to live there.
1. Zoning prevents density, which precludes having enough foot traffic for neighborhood stores to exist (if zoning actually allow them).
2. Parking minimums force things farther apart because so much of each lot is asphalt.
3. Street design that prioritizes car speed over pedestrian safety.
In the end, it's not safe, pleasant, or practical to walk in suburbs built from the 70s on. These things are a patchwork of local and state law so specifics vary by area.
> In this case Americans have chosen the suburbs in droves.
They've chosen their preferred option, given the current (meager) options. That doesn't mean people wouldn't choose walkable cities over suburbs---the option of walkable cities just functionally doesn't exist in the US for a middle income family.
And this isn't due to organic demand for suburban neighborhoods, either. In the US, central planning has had a major role in accelerating the development of suburbs. Tax incentives for home ownership were first rolled out during the New Deal, and these especially targeted single family homes. After the war, the dual-use civil-military interstate system was created and highways were subsidized which allowed neighborhood development far from the city center. Auto and petrochemical development were targeted for national security, which acted as a subsidy toward the gasoline-heavy suburban lifestyle. The 1970s energy crisis shifted US foreign policy toward stabilizing petrol prices, which has resulted in various military and CIA operations to that effect (Paul Wolfowitz was talking about securing oil in Iraq before 2nd Bush was even in office). Suburban homes in many cities consume more resources via public roads, water, sewer, electric than they pay in property taxes, but taxes are kept low for political reasons, because that's where voters live.
So there are quite a lot of extra-market forces that have shaped city planning. Now all of this has reached a scale where it is self-sustaining, but that doesn't mean people would have picked this route if the initial conditions were not so favorable.
People do vote with their dollars. The walkable neighborhoods in my city tend to cost 2-3X more than houses in less walkable areas.
There are actually huge swaths of affordable houses built on the outskirts of many towns, but people don’t want them because they’re not close to the walkable parts of the city.
This can be misleading. The supply in walkable areas will, by near definition, be lower than places you have to drive to. Such that the evidence isn't that houses are more expensive in walkable areas. The evidence is that it is not economically viable to build more walkable neighborhoods.
Edit: I meant to say it could be an alternative, not that it is.
It is far far far more economical to build walkable neighborhoods. They require far less infrastructure costs, from water piping to sewer to roads. Quite often the only places that can sustainably fund themselves on property taxes are walkable multiuse neighborhoods. A ton of suburbia is sitting on huge infrastructure bills that will come due in the near future.
Car-dependent neighborhoods only exist because law prevents more dense uses. I don't know of a single such car-dependent neighborhood that doesn't strictly prevent a change away from being car dependent. From zoning to codes, anything that could lead to a walkable neighborhood is banned by law from even starting.
If we didn't outlaw walkable neighborhoods, and vigorously defend the banning of apartments and corner stores by swarming of planning meetings and recalls of city council members, vigorous actions perpetrated by the few and not the many, the balance would be entirely different.
In every single family neighborhood that is far dependent, you'll find a small number of people that will go to war to prevent any change to that. And all our systems are set up to allow a small number of people to control the outcomes of planning decisions.
This sounds good on paper, but you just have to look at how Walmart destroyed brick and mortar shops. They would build a single giant shop for an entire region and folks would drive to it in droves.
That is to say, I want to agree. I just can't square that with how I've seen small towns destroyed by shopping centers that require cars for the residents to drive to. (Ironically, this is different from the situation that requires companies to drive to the customers. Though, there, reverse pressure exists such that the more reliant on the company driving, the less pleasant the shopping experience.)
I don't quite understand the contradiction. If you're talking about small rural areas, sure, but that's a tiny fraction of our population. And rural areas don't typically vigorously block apartment and walkable development.
And I haven't seen every rural town, but all of the ones that I know of have plenty of housing near a walkable core too. I know lots of rural people that have no trouble getting in 20,000 steps daily because of that walkability of homes neat the downtown.
But suburbia, the vast majority of our new housing over the past 50-60 years, is not rural, and is of a very different character.
Strong Towns has been reporting on this for years, from the fiscally conservative side. Though I don't call myself any sort of fiscal conservative, the data and analysis is very good, IMHO:
Well this is also combined with a shift away from rural areas in terms of job opportunities, as farming has either become hugely automated, or staffed by skilled labor that is severely underpaid.
Where there is economic opportunity, density and walk ability are forbidden by law, not by market preferences or by natural choices.
I want to believe this, to a large extent. But it doesn't square with my experiences in small towns.
I fully grant that I'm rather removed from my experiences in said small towns. And I should fully lay the cards on the table that I haven't driven a car for my own commute or basic transportation in almost a decade. I far far prefer biking/walking to work. Even still, we drive the kids to school where we are now. (We walked them back in Seattle.)
I’m interested in what you mean by car-dependent neighborhood?
From what I’ve seen it has little to do with accommodations for vehicles at the residence level and more to do with the proximity of interesting places to walk to. It does help if these ‘interesting places’ don’t have much parking accommodation.
By "car-dependent" I mean the style of US urban planning that has dominated since WW2, with huge tracts of single-use zoning, miles and miles wide. Usually dominated by cul-de-sacs with feeder roads. There is nowhere to walk to, distances are far enough that bicycles even become challenging, and it's impossible for transit to serve the road design, because density of housing is too low and the intentional lack of a connected road network makes it too difficult to ever run buses in a meaningful way.
Cul-de-sacs are used to minimize the danger of cars (the largest cause of child death) and keep traffic to a minimum where people live, at the expense of circuitous routes. And they shift car traffic to even more dangerous feeder roads, that have high speeds and few crossings, that serve as extremely dangerous barriers for pedestrians and bikes.
I have lived in highly walkable neighborhoods. They utilize highrises to increase density (supply) of housing and commercial space. Walkable areas are by necessity higher density, meaning they pack more supply into the same footprint.
My census tract in Chicago is denser than 96% of America. There are like two high-rises, one for seniors and some shorter new construction near the transit stops in the 5-6 story range.
The bulk of my neighborhoods density is created by missing middle housing, two and three flats, four-six square apartments, and a healthy smattering of SFHs on narrow lots.
I have a backyard. My neighbor grows a garden in between her house and her two car garage. She pollinates her garden with the honey bees she keeps.
The dichotomy between “car centric suburbia” or “huge 100 story high rises” is false. You can get to walkable density without going over three stories on average.
Some do. I lived in upper Queen Anne in Seattle. Very few highrise houses and all very expensive now. I would be a liar if I said I didn't miss how walkable it was.
I also lived in Buckhead area of Atlanta. Also very walkable for me, though there were a few high rises.
I lived in the Junction in West Seattle for 7 years. Highly walkable, lots of highrises in the core, but still lots of (very expensive!) single family homes. Now I live on Alki and it is much less walkable. I can get around but have to climb Admiral to get to a grocery store. Several of our bus routes were permanently closed.
Queen Anne benefits from being in Seattle and the economic benefits that has to businesses that make a neighborhood walkable. It’s also just very old and was built when walkability was a necessity. Unfortunately it is prohibitively expensive because higher density development is difficult or impossible.
I think we are talking past each other. When you said “The supply in walkable areas will, by near definition, be lower than places you have to drive to.“ I interpreted that to mean there is less total supply. You seem to be speaking to available supply.
> What places are we talking about that are a) highly walkable, b) expensive, and c) not at capacity?
I don’t think there is such a place. If a place is walkable it is going to be at or near capacity which makes it expensive.
The lack of these areas seems to be a result of an unwillingness to increase density.
I was meaning it in terms of purchasable supply. Nothing is stopping anyone from building a new city center in the middle of Montana, such that it has plenty of buildable supply.
That is, you can say that dense cities are more effecient, but that only matters if you can build another one. Otherwise, there are more affordable homes further from existing city center then there are in them. And that is going to be hard to change.
You seem to be pointing that existing cities should double down on their density. I'm claiming if that was such a clear path to success, it would be done in new places.
> Nothing is stopping anyone from building a new city center in the middle of Montana, such that it has plenty of buildable supply.
I don’t think it is that easy. The state has to approve a new town. I don’t think you can just create one at will. Nearby landowners are certainly going to have opinions.
> You seem to be pointing that existing cities should double down on their density.
Ideally, yes. But really I am saying they can’t because zoning laws prevent it. Existing home owners favor this constraint because it keeps prices up.
I think it is easier than you'd think to get a builder to build a neighborhood. Convincing mixed zoning to move in is more difficult. Largely due to how confusing store ownership is. Often the buildings need to exist and be owned before businesses look to lease in places.
None of which is to say I disagree with zoning being problematic. I fully agree with that points. I just think it is oversold. Folks like having room, and folks are typically over afraid of letting kids play in parks on their own. (I can't really argue against some of that fear... :( )
I have sensed an emerging "story" in various media over the last 6-12 months that within the US at least, there are vanishingly few cities or large towns that are (a) highly desirable places to live (b) affordable to median income folks. Or maybe the story is that if this is not true to today, it seems that it will be in 5-10 years.
I don't think this is necessarily a new story, all told. I think I remember it back in the 90s.
That said, does seem to be getting more pronounced. Really, just seems that there aren't any new cities. All of the places folks wanted to live, are the same places folks want to live today. :(
> "In this case Americans have chosen the suburbs in droves."
"chosen the suburbs" implies that there was a choice.
The limited walkable cities that have been built since 1950 (like Seaside, FL) are some of the most coveted real estate in the United States. The plain fact is that walkable cities are illegal to build now because of zoning laws and building codes.
Supply and demand drives prices up, but it doesn't tell us how large the demand is, only that there is enough to drive up prices. it only takes a small number of unmet demand go drive prices up.
> The limited walkable cities that have been built since 1950 (like Seaside, FL)
I think you should check the population of Seaside (or Celebration). Oh that's right, it's never had a census scan. Suffice it to say that calling either of them "cities" is quite a stretch.
There is some truth in this post, but it's also important to understand that in most of the places with very large lots, it is illegal to subdivide the lots and build denser housing. If greater density was legalized, it would almost certainly be built and inhabited in a great many places.
People have this all-or-nothing thinking about this, but realistically most cities ought to have a mix. A single person in their 20s doesn't necessarily need or want a house with a yard, but they might want one later on. Right now, in most places that means allowing more options for apartments to be built, and more medium-density for people who are somewhere in between.
I think it's largely because we're still at the point in American politics where the folks against densification are still strongly tied to a certain pastoral vision of America: large lot sizes, single family homes, easy parking, and heavily manicured neighborhoods. It's more than just density, it's a legally codified way of life. Folks understand that the moment restrictions are eased that this pastoral view of urban development will necessarily change. It takes a lot of restrictions to have a built environment like America's and the only way to maintain that built environment is to resist any change to the restrictions.
But I agree. A vision of sustainable development would be a dense urban core with decreasing density away from the core, instead of endless SFH large-lot sprawl. Families or other individuals that want/need more space can live on the outskirts and take a train in to the urban core for work. Younger people or those who don't need the space can stay in the core, and folks in between can live anywhere in the spectrum of density.
Suburban character isn’t the result of consumer choice. In most suburbs, alternative kinds of development are literally illegal to build. Cities regulate the number of units, the heights of buildings, how far they must be setback from the street, how many parking spaces they require, and so on and so on.
Landowners lobby for and enact these regulations precisely because they know that if people were allowed to vote with their wallets they’d choose to live in denser developments.
You can’t make cheeseburgers illegal and then argue that nobody orders cheeseburgers in restaurants because they’re unpopular.
I hope no one will think it too unorthodox if I respond to my own comment just to add that given these constraints on land use patterns it’s obviously the case that Americans choose to drive automobiles. It’s fairly common to hear people describe this, too, as another kind of “revealed preference” for driving over the alternatives. But it’s a revealed preference in the environment as it exists today, which is the only environment that’s legal. If people were allowed to build other kinds of environments, then they would build other kinds of environments and in those other kinds of environments they would make other choices about transportation.
If you only look at people on the beach, you’ll find a revealed preference for flip-flops. But in other kinds of environments, people wear other kinds of footwear. If you only looked at people on beaches, you’d draw some funny conclusions about what people like to wear on their feet.
The big takeaway here is that the suburbs are the result of big government social engineering on a massive scale. You really can’t look at anything about land-use or transportation and conclude basically anything useful about “revealed preferences.”
It's not a hard choice when suburbs have been subsidized like hell for about 70 years while money has been drained out of cities to pay for said suburbs. Here in Ohio there is this garbage designation for "rural farming areas" called townships that get huge infrastructures subsidies/grants, even though they are all just suburbs/exurbs.
Look at any of the areas around Cincinnati, Columbus, or Cleveland and check out how many of them have township in their name. It's pretty incredible and absolutely disgustingly dishonest.
Drained out of the cities? Nearly all of Texas is what most people would consider "suburb". Even the "urban" areas are mostly sprawl. Very little of Texas is walkable by any stretch.
Yes, a significant amount of tax dollars come from cities and are funneled to suburbs/exurba via "grants" and other subsidized funding methods, which urban areas don't get the benefit of receiving.
There are pockets of walkabality here and there but it's a drop in the ocean. Those locations are sparse, job and home location specific, and EXPENSIVE.
I live in San Antonio. Low COL right? Ehhh, not where I live haha. The desirable areas near town are not cheap. Alamo Heights is super expense and not walkable at all. A 1 bedroom near the Pearl is over 2k/mo now essentially. Actually, I've seen effeciencies for about that much and there are not really grocery stores around within walking distance.
Texas has a 1.9t GDP and it's almost entirely generated by people living in urban sprawl and rural areas. Austin is no exception as someone has pointed out.
Most of the people who work in the smallish Texas high density centers live in the sprawl. We have no income tax so of court that's made up with prop tax. School quality is highly dependent on quality of the neighborhoods they are located near. It's not fantastic but the idea that the sprawl is "draining" the cities is off base since the vast majority of workers producing the value live in the sprawl.
Austin is a giant suburban sprawl that's better than most Texan cities because it has a reasonable bus line. It's all low density, all of it, with massive parking lots everywhere.
A quarter acre is a little over 10,000 square feet, which is what I'd consider a normal-size lot in a normal town. A 5,000 square foot lot is smallish, but pretty typical of new construction. I leave near Portland, OR.
One way to have large lots and walkable cities at the same time is just to have smaller cities or towns. People are drawn to large urban areas because that's where the jobs are and that's where the interesting people and things to do are. If we had more towns that were desirable places to live, it would go a long way towards fixing the housing shortages and long commutes and so on that are typical of major cities. (This is easier said than done, though.)
You aren't looking at the right variables. The revealed preference isn't shown by where people chose to move because pricing due to exogenous factors has a huge impact on availability. The right way to look is in some mix of "price per square foot" and "cost per dwelling unit" metrics, both of which show a strong preference for (1) dense urban living like NYC and (2) walkable suburban living like downtown palo alto, Berkeley, LA or many other inner ring suburbs in east coast cities.
If you live in a truly walkable city you don't need a yard because there's parks. You also don't feel crammed because it's walkable and spend time walking around as opposed to a small yard or no yard where your options are to be inside or drive somewhere. And you don't need a larger house if there's a more appealing outside. Ayooooo these issues go away for most people when you introduce real walkable cities
Americans want their own private spaces and that preference is not going to change, especially when there is so much land available.
> you don't need a larger house if there's a more appealing outside
The outside is intolerable at best, if not outright dangerous for up to half of the year in much of the US. imo, our attitudes about walkability are due in large part to not having a mild climate like Europe.
Not all Americans chose to live in the suburbs. Many Americans are finding themselves displaced from cities in to far out areas. This happens because demand to live in cities is causing increased rents.
I know there are people happily living in suburbia by choice. But there are also many government policies from restrictive zoning to an imbalanced 80:20 highways to transit spending ratio that has profound impacts on how people live.
Americans choose suburbs in droves because the schools are more well funded. Most agree that this tradeoff gets the a far worse commute than if they lived in the city. I have many coworkers who commute 2 hours a day for their glorious backyards? No, there are other economic factors driving the decision, but the joy of having a lawn to maintain and living on a highway 4 hours a day are not among them.
For the record, I'm not defending car-dependent living. I wish there were more walkable options in the US for people to live in (myself included).
But there's an awful lot of copium in these kinds of threads that shallowly blame the lack of choice as to why American life is so car-dependent. Housing markets are extremely good at responding to consumer demand.
Here's a good quantitative data point of people expressing their preferences [1]:
> In 1973, the median new single-family house was just 1,525 square feet, according to the US Census Bureau. By 2010, it had grown to 2,169 square feet. And, by 2018, it had bloated to 2,435 square feet. Who in 1973 would have believed that a newly built typical American home would be 60% bigger than theirs in 45 years?
> There's another even more startling factor to take into account. Statista.com claims the average household in 1973 comprised 3.01 people, meaning the home offered 507 square feet per person. But by 2018, that household had shrunk to 2.53 people. And each had 962 square feet to stretch out.
Houses have gotten 60% larger while households have gotten 15% smaller in the last 50 years. That didn't happen in spite of consumer demand.
> But there's an awful lot of copium in these kinds of threads that shallowly blame the lack of choice as to why American life is so car-dependent. Housing markets are extremely good at responding to consumer demand.
With-in the limits allowed by zoning policy. I'm not entirely laissez-faire but I think a lot of NIMBYism and just plain old inertial has been baked into by-laws and such.
Certain mandates can do good (tighter building envelopes, better insulation), while other mandates can do bad (minimum lot sizes).
These places now cost quite a lot, but in roughly 1960-90s they were relatively cheap because all the WASPs moved to the suburbs because 'downtown was for immigrants'; this particular neighbourhood was >90% Polish during the time period. Just to the east of this neighbourhood is Little Portugal, and to the west a large Ukraine community used to be concentrated (with a smattering of Lithuanians).
Now that urban living has become fashionable again, it has been gentrified (no more Poles) and the prices are crazy high.
But there's nothing unique about how it was built, and nothing is stopping communities from (e.g.) instituting zoning to mandate higher density (but less than Hong Kong levels):
While this suggests that people want more space in their homes, it doesn’t imply that they prefer car-dependent neighborhoods. That would only follow if > 2,000 sq ft precluded walkability.
I paid a large premium to own a home in one of the east coast’s walkable areas. Lot sizes here average about 0.15 acres, which is over 6,500 (single-story) square feet. Homes have front yards, back yards, off-street parking, gardens, trees, and still easily fit > 2,000 square feet of living space.
The dichotomy of “walkable vs comfortable” is a false one. There’s a middle ground between tiny high-rise apartments and sprawling McMansions.
Framing it as user choice ignores a lot of history and politics. Long Island, for instance, became suburban largely due to Robert Moses' starvation of public transportation and his prioritization of cars. Because Long Island lacked any sort of industry of its own, most inhabitants commuted into New York City. Because Moses built massive highways without reserving any right of way for a train, most of these inhabitants drove into cities. Because they drove cars, they would naturally prioritize living in spaces where they could have a garage, i.e. a suburb. As more people drove, the trains lost revenue, ran less frequently and lost more customers. If fast trains had been built to and from Long Island, it's not unbelievable to imagine it'd have become as dense as New York.
Or take the white flight. A lot of movement to suburbs was predicated on fear of minorities and urban crime.
Once kids are in the picture, school districts with greater proportions of wealthier families is the priority.
Plus, the easiest way to avoid dealing with homeless people and/or gangs is to live in far flung suburbs where everything is so far that cars are a necessity.
"Avoid" being the operative word! Unfortunately we've chosen to slap on the suburbia band-aid that just introduces more negative externalities. Dense cities in Europe and East Asia are much safer _and_ score better on education metrics, so it's not like eschewing urbanity is working well for us comparatively.
Those neighborhoods are deeply subsidized. I don’t doubt that most Americans would like their exact house (or bigger) in a walkable neighborhood over something that’s actually be available in town today, but it’s not a purely market driven choice today.
Yea, you have to ask people “do you like walkable cities enough that you’d be willing to let a for-profit developer build houses and vote for an otherwise-unsavory politician who repealed minimum parking requirements?”
Agreed. If we truly wanted them we would be willing to give up car ownership, single family homes, and suburban sprawl. I doubt that will ever happen in this hyper-individualistic culture. Hopefully it is uncontroversial by now to say that an enormous swath of American society does not believe in self-sacrifice.
I think you are dismissing or not considering a major part of living in a walkable area - the cost of housing at any square footage. I know I did until quite recently.
I really want to live in a walkable city, and would be thrilled not to own a car and live in a smaller space. I'm a remote dev, and as my partner just finished graduate school and is starting their professional career I thought we'd have the perfect opportunity to live the dream and move somewhere where we could use walking/biking as our primary form of transportation.
Turns out, there's a very limited supply of walkable communities in the US and they have a significant premium. We gotta pay off graduate school loans and even with higher salaries, it would be years of additional repayments living in somewhere like Seattle or New York vs a suburb of Raleigh, NC. There are small and more out of the way walkable communities, but not really any with good job prospects. Maybe at some point in the future, but right now I honestly don't think I can afford it.
I would love to give all that up. But until change happens, I can't. It's a chicken-and-egg problem. I believe many would give that up if they could, especially younger people, but there's no option to give it up currently.
On one of my relatively few visits to America, from my hotel room I could see the zoo less than half a mile away. In reception I asked the best route to walk there. There was a stunned silence and outright puzzlement, as if I had asked what trains I needed to catch to get to Patagonia[1]. No one was even certain it was possible.
In the end I worked it out OK, only having to wait at a level crossing for a seemingly infinitely long freight train to pass. The zoo had more food outlets than animals, but that's another story.
Hah, I had a really similar thing happen the first time I went to the US, something like 10-15 years back in Houston!
The office was only a mile or 2 from the hotel, so I thought I'd walk. On my way out, the receptionist asked where I was going and if I'd like her to call a cab. I replied that I was going to walk to somewhere close by, and her eyes just about popped out of her head - "you can't do that, it's far too dangerous to walk!".
I walked anyway of course, looking out for anything even tenuously dangerous, and found nothing. It was most puzzling! I later conferred with local colleagues in the office, who reiterated what the receptionist had said - nobody walks anywhere!
Coincidently, one morning I too met an enormous freight train at a level crossing - it was actually pretty amazing waiting multiple minutes for such an incredibly long train to pass!
I recently moved from a house in the suburbs in Australia to an apartment in the city. Got rid of my car and now I just walk to everything I need. I couldn’t be happier. Driving was such a huge stress on my life that is now gone. I can get anything I need within a 10 minute walk.
The thing is it just doesn’t seem like the average person is willing to give up single family houses to gain walkability. For me, I would never go back.
Or... hear me out. You could just build walkable suburbs. Why there is a distinction between 'suburb' and 'smaller city' is beyond me, but there really is.
A small city still has a walkable downtown core with apartments around which there is a small area of single family homes within walking distance to the downtown area.
A suburb is just tracts of single family homes and nothing else for miles on end. No real 'business area', certainly no walkable one.
We could just talk a normal suburb, rezone some homes to business districts and take cars off that street. Voila. Now you have a mini downtown near a bunch of single family homes. Oh yeah, and you have a nice business district that's cheaper than the real downtown that is a good launching place for local businesses. win win win.
Now do that everywhere, and then connect the little townie areas via rapid transit and you have something lovely.
Exactly. I lived in Kawasaki, Japan, which is a large suburb of both Tokyo and Yokohama. Much of Kawasaki is walkable and has amenities such as restaurants, grocery stores, and shopping centers within no more than a 15-minute walk from most residences. Kawasaki is also served by many commuter train lines; once again, the majority of residents live within 15-minute walking distance from a train station, and there are local buses that serve those who live too far to easily walk to a train station (and even in these places a train station is generally 30 minutes away walking distance).
Suburbs don't have to be car-dependent; most of Tokyo's suburbs are transit-oriented (some of them were actually planned by railroad companies) and are generally walkable.
I grew up on the south side of Indianapolis perhaps one of the worst walkable places there is. There are major streets there still named for street car service “Stop 11/Stop 12/etc”.
The wild thing is that it was direct public policy that lead to the death of extensive public transit there.
You can kind of have it if you mean walkable to just the general store, a cafe and a few other things but you can never have everything because many kinds of stores can only exist with a certain population close enough.
What I love about living in the city is literally _everything_ I need is within walking distance. I have not used a car or any form of public transport in months and have felt no need to, I can buy anything within walking distance and all offices for any job I would take in this state are within walking distance. You just can’t have that with houses because each house takes up a significant space which you have to walk past to get anywhere.
Even with single-family housing, the density is high enough to support a supermarket and other stores that are visited at a rate of once per month within walking distance, easily.
Population is 36,000 or so. I've added the walking distance from the outskirts to the very center, which is 2.3km. You'll note that there are supermarkets distributed throughout, usually within a few hundred meters.
I guess it depends on which suburb. Some suburbs in Sydney are fairly liveable. Especially where there is a mix of housing, or, as much as I hate them, large apartment complexes. You can get all the things you need and have a few restaurants, all within walking distance.
Other suburbs, especially those huge “communities” with lots of cookie cutter homes seem really isolated. You have to drive.
So do I! I’m kind of baffled reading this thread - folks are discussing my neighborhood as if it’s a theoretical impossibility.
A “small” SFH lot is 0.15 acres. That’s over 6,500 square feet! You can comfortably build a >2,000 square foot house with a front and back yard, off-street parking, garden, trees, etc in that space. Simultaneously, it will only require about 50 ft of sidewalk length.
My wife and I share one car, which we primarily use to visit friends in the suburbs. I walk to the grocery, dining, bars, coffee shops, parks, greenways.
Our house is nearly 100 years old. We would have loved to buy something newer, but American neighborhoods haven’t been designed in this sensible way for a long time.
We must be twins. My lot is 0.14 acres. My house is a two story colonial plus finished basement. Easily > 2500sqft with room to spare.
Also a hundred years old. They don't build them like this anymore.
One car as well. For further out things or things I need to get to fast, I bike. The car is used to visit grandma and grandpa about 15 miles away, to go shopping for big items, and that's it
Where is that? You may have a different idea of walkable than the other poster. As soon as you have tons of parking spaces, mandatory setbacks, etc. you’ve taken much of the room away from pedestrians forcing them to walk much longer distances (often in bad weather) to get to where they want to go. That’s why the two are at such odds.
I live in Portland city limits but not downtown. Where I live was built as a suburb but the city grew into it. Actually Portland has a lot of these downtowney areas and they're surrounded by blocks and blocks of single family homes and small apartments
But if you go farther out into newer developments, they just abandoned this lovely system and made awful cookie cutter burbs.
Before this I lived in San Rafael and larkspur in Marin county which also have nice downtowney areas surrounded by single family homes. Old Marin county had just this pattern of walkable enough neighborhoods with tiny downtowns. I don't see why this sort of thing isn't possible. When I lived there I walked everywhere
Portland is a pretty unique place. They famously drew a circle around the city and said development can’t go outside of that area which forced a certain density and allowed transit to be planned well in advance.
I didn’t spent a ton of time there and admittedly it was January so it was quite frigid, but the distances can still feel quite long between things outside of downtown. Portland made a few mistakes when they embraced car culture including getting rid of their street cars like many American cities. They also annexed a lot of less walkable areas around the city. There is no subway and the light rail seems well run but it doesn’t exactly cover the whole city. My sense is that most people who want to walk will end up biking or taking some form of transit in many neighborhoods because of the distances between things. In the winter it was quite hard to find lively streets and public squares to be quite honest. I suspect it’s because it’s easier to just drive when it’s cold, things are a bit far, etc.
Marin is lovely but most of it is extremely spread out. There are a few towns like you mentioned that one could conceivably get by without a car but it’s not easy. Looking at San Rafael, Google Maps shows 4th street is a walking area (denoted in beige) and a very small area a few blocks south near the Safeway around 1st and 2nd streets but it isn’t a very big area. Usually a giant chain supermarket is a pretty clear sign that things were designed for cars and not for pedestrians who would typically be better served by neighborhood markets and small shops near their house to grab some essentials. Zooming in near the walkable areas of San Rafael, Google Maps instantly highlights many car oriented businesses like at 2nd street and D street where we see a Chevron gas station, an Arco gas station, and an O’Reilly Auto Parts store all on one corner. I don’t know about you but even if it’s technically walkable that’s not what I want to walk through every day when I go outside especially if I need to walk past it to get to the train to commute to work, etc. A major highway cuts through the east side of the city which also limits expansion of pleasant walking areas and litters the area with on-ramps and other car-centric design.
Marin county famously blocked BART from expanding north in order to keep out the “riff-raff”. These sorts of decisions had major consequences and while you can find a few blocks here and there that are walkable, the county as a whole is largely long drives through tree covered asphalt in order to get between areas.
If you’re happy with a few blocks of downtown then admittedly some of the towns probably meet your needs but it’s not exactly designed for most people to live a car-free live. Even the Bank of America ATM there proudly shows on Google that it’s a drive-through ATM which I’ve never seen once in Europe (or San Francisco for that matter)
Close-in marin, so Sausalito, Marin city, Larkspur, Corte Madera, San Rafael, and the 'Sir Francis Drake corridor' (San Anselmo, Kentfield, etc) are very walkable. I don't really understand the consternation about bart, the bus service is reliable, and both the marin transit and golden gate transit are the gold standard in american public bus service IMO. Clean, WIFI, nice seats...
My wife and I frequently took public buses into San Francisco for date nights, and would come back late (last bus arrives past midnight, IIRC).
> Marin county famously blocked BART from expanding north in order to keep out the “riff-raff”.
Really good idea. Marin is a lovely place, and BART is famously terrible. Until the other cities in the bay area manage to enforce some semblance of law, I don't blame Marin for wanting nothing to do with them.
> Zooming in near the walkable areas of San Rafael, Google Maps instantly highlights many car oriented businesses like at 2nd street and D street where we see a Chevron gas station, an Arco gas station, and an O’Reilly Auto Parts store all on one corner.
Living in a walkable area does not imply removing every reminder of a car LOL.
> They famously drew a circle around the city and said development can’t go outside of that area which forced a certain density and allowed transit to be planned well in advance.
This is not why Portland developed this way. There are many places within the metro area that have not. Portland developed this way because it started as many small towns that merged, similar to Marin. The difference between PDX and Marin is that PDX is today much denser, but the basic layout is the same.
I'll also note that you're getting really bogged down with the fact Marin has no public rapid train transit, as if thats necessary for walkability. Marin is walkable because there are so many downtowns, if you live nearby, you just go to your downtown, and the downtowns it does have are spectacular. Downtown San Anselmo, Fairfax, etc are IMO the definition of an American downtown. They are so charming it's painful.
People can only walk so far especially if the weather is bad, they are older, etc. The point is if I have to walk past multiple gas stations and a car service center with broken down cars and fumes then it’s not a nice place to walk. I have lived next to a car service center before and even though it was tiny it was a constant blight on the neighborhood.
Not to mention almost all the grocery stores in San Rafael are east of the highway while the Google-labeled walkable areas are west of the highway. So in practice people probably don’t walk to the grocery store on a regular basis unless they go to the Safeway. You may have a different view but Safeway is a terrible grocery store by Bay Area standards so it’d be a real shame for that to be your only realistic option without resorting to bus rides.
Bus transit is less reliable than metro for a number of reasons, most notably getting stuck in traffic. It’s fine if it works for your particular usage pattern but a bus that runs once an hour and doesn’t have an exact arrival time isn’t the most convenient. I’d much rather have a metro that comes every couple minutes like almost every major city in Europe and Asia.
You seem to hate BART but I’m not really sure why and why you believe the cities outside the North Bay are full of lawbreakers. San Mateo has a higher household income and SF is tied with Marin. Marin is just full of more NIMBYs. It’s not like their shit doesn’t smell just because they live in a less populated county.
As for why I focus on public transit, it’s because you can only walk so far before you need another mode of transit. If you don’t find a convenient one, then most likely you’ll take a car. If people take cars a lot, then the city will be designed to support those cars which makes it harder to walk. Then fewer people can reasonably walk to all their needs so even more people buy cars creating induced demand as the highways and roads constantly need to be widened over the decades.
Maybe you’re happy with a tiny little downtown like those in most of the Marin cities but for most people from a major city they would be bored with what they could easily explore on foot in one of those towns in probably a few weeks. Without a way to connect to other cities, you’re basically just trapped in a tiny little area without resorting to once an hour bus service and cars.
Then don't do that. You only need tons of parking and mandatory setbacks if you've designed the area for lots of cars going too fast. If you just don't, then suddenly a lot more ends up being in walking distance, and you don't need as much parking because more people are walking or biking.
Well of course this is what I prefer. But the other poster was saying they didn’t see why cities can’t be designed for cars AND for pedestrians. My point is that the policies put in place in almost all American cities for cars (mandatory parking requirements in new buildings, lots of street parking or parking lots, mandatory setbacks from the street for buildings, highway entrances, etc.) work directly against making a city dense enough to be able to easily walk to enough things that you don’t end up resorting to cars.
Well if businesses are clustered together for the convenience of drivers, it will also be especially easy to access for the people living close enough to walk. But the math may hold be that this cannot be so possible for everyone.
That seems to be the direction things are moving in. There was a move a few decades back away from malls and towards "town centers," which were basically a mix between a mall and a downtown area - a few blocks of pedestrian friendly streets filled with shops, surrounded by a ton of parking buildings. The current trend (from what I've seen) seems to be to try to integrate nearby single-family homes into the development, as well as increasing the density a bit. Now they're starting to feel like small downtown areas in the middle of the suburbs.
This exists in some areas for example the closer Chicago “suburbs” like Lakeview
There the lot sizes aren’t big so there’s density, but at the same time no high rises so it still feels pleasant. And every few blocks is zoned commercial
Our suburb has some medical and dental offices in the center of it. Yay, something I do a couple times a year is within walking distance. Talk about useless.
Groceries are about 2 miles away. Which would be bikable if the infrastructure was there. In my experience it would be easier to reach bikability than walkability. Most suburbs are already somewhat bikable aside from the infrastructure.
>The thing is it just doesn’t seem like the average person is willing to give up single family houses to gain walkability.
As other comments have mentioned, you can have both. In addition to that, the reason that people choose single family-houses is not necessarily entirely by preference: almost all of the land zoned for housing in the U.S is zoned for single family-homes. Add onto that some arcane rules about minimum parking amounts, minimum setbacks from the street, and the fully absurd standard to which suburban streets are created (too wide, essentially mini-highways), and you get the mess that exists right now.
By addressing these problems, you'll go a long way to improve walkability.
I have the same experience. I live in a city where every place I need to go to is at walking distance. Rarely I take an Uber , an even then , is way cheaper than having a car loan, car insurance and gas expenses. Every time I mention this topic here in the US, people seem to get a little bit defensive, and say: "America is so great, that everyone can afford cars and no one takes the bus".
We need more apartments for purchase rather than renting in America. That's practically unheard of in Texas- just about anything in a shared building is only for rent.
Landlords hoard housing and sell it back to people for a profit. It's arguable that most people would be better off buying their housing directly, but like you say the options are extremely limited.
This exists. It's usually called a condo or a townhome. I'm sure they exist in Texas too. You'll find them in more urban areas. They aren't as popular during a pandemic, but they usually cost less than a house, and if the organization is functioning well enough, then you also have the outside maintenance covered.
That seems to be the norm in Australia. When a building gets approved, the developer puts all the apartments up for sale before it gets built. Of course most of them get sold to landlords but it’s not one company that owns the whole building and there is nothing stopping you buying one as they are always selling.
I’m not sure why a freak accident should be used as an example of anything. If anything it stands to show how insanely problem free modern buildings are if one building falling down is shocking news globally and known as one of the worst non malicious building issues in the developed world.
The incentives do not line up since condo owners who will be out before problems affect them will vote to kick the can down the road. Even if other buildings do not collapse, it is common to hear of excessive repair bills because of it being delayed until the last minute.
This happens with cities too, but the tax base is greater to spread the cost over and there is a higher likelihood of more qualified people working, rather than on individual condo boards.
> I’m not sure why a freak accident should be used as an example of anything.
Maybe follow the news a little more. Several MSM outlets over the last month have done in-depth stories about the fundamental problems with the condo model of ownership and maintainance. It has nothing inherently to do with construction methods; the evidence is that what happened in FL is a risk in an awful lot of condos all over the US.
That is a freak accident, the more common problem with condos is the management jacking up the fees and trapping people in the building because nobody wants to buy a unit in a building with outrageous fees.
I think the problems of governance are non-trivial in tenant-owned apartments. Not that they can't work, obviously. But, I think the ability to 'vote with your feet', is a bit more powerful than the ability to reconcile disagreements between owners.
I think for things to work, we need to seriously cut down the fees for selling a house. The fees and laws are set up for someone who buys/sells once every few decades. So if you move frequently, there is no way you could be a owner without taking serious losses.
* Homes built with a variety of beautiful architecture
* Area is not overbuilt to the point where all greenery and sunlight are gone and replaced by large buildings
* alleys behind the lot, with garages hidden, to keep a single car (which is still really necessary in modern life)
* small, thin, tree-lined streets
* within walking distance to locally-owned bakery, a grocery store, coffee shop, public transit, etc.
The problem with living in these desirable, walkable, neighborhoods is that once they're built up enough, there is intense lobby to fill the the area with higher density housing because of the critical mass of services available.
Of course, that's necessary, but buying in these areas put you at big risk of having to move away if you don't like massive density increases, whereas buying in a suburb protects you from that change.
> The problem with living in these desirable, walkable, neighborhoods is that once they're built up enough, activists lobby to destroy what was built to fill it with high density housing because of the critical mass of services available to the area.
You're absolutely right. I live in one of these neighborhoods (actually literally was built as a streetcar suburb) and we have historic district protections so we're safe.
However, the impetus to build the 'high-density' housing is because we stopped building neighborhoods like mine with a corner store, bakeries, grocery store and restaurants within walking distance.
IMO, new developments of tract homes should mandate that within the housing tract, the developer makes a business district with space for local businesses.
It's simply the fact that we have a massive business shortage in this country that people feel the need to build high-density housing near the paltry number of business districts we have.
Or, I mean, we could not, and everyone else can just subsidize my housing appreciation. Personally, I'd like to spread the joy of my life, but housing activists seem hell-bent on driving my home price up, so whatever.
That business district would probably sit mostly empty if the density of customers isn't there. At best you'd get a strip mall with big box stores every 5km like typical American suburbs.
If you want a thriving business district with a mixture of local business you need to have density.
> If you want a thriving business district with a mixture of local business you need to have density.
I simply disagree. You can have single family homes and a thriving business district. Not ginormous mcmansions. But modest, good-sized single family homes. I disagree with your assessment because I've seen how great things can be in my own neighborhood. I'm not even suggesting no high-density housing. On the actual 'satellite downtown' core a few blocks from my house, there are a few big apartment buildings. This is fine... apartment buildings are perfect for younger people and couples.
The apartment buildings are what add density. People who live in single family homes will invariably take the extra 15 to 20 minutes to drive to Costco and save money.
(1) I know this shocks most people used to cookie cutter American suburbs and cities, but you can put an apartment building in a small satellite business district surrounded by single family homes.
(2) Sure. We drive to costco as well. We also shop our local downtown. For example, every Sunday, the local bakery sells off their wares (very nice breads, pies, and cakes) for pennies on the dollar. We also often end up at our local grocery store for sundry items we've run out of or forgotten. Why is preventing people from ever going to costco any concern? I would never suggest to never drive... that's just silly moral policing. I just suggest walking most places because it's way nicer and less stressful.
Here's an example. I bike to my gym every morning. It takes 10 minutes. It'd actually take longer to drive given the stop lights. However, if I lived in the burb I was born in, I'd have to drive, because the nearest gym would be miles away. Or, I'd have to purchase my own gym equipment. Instead, in my city, I have a 24 hour gym within biking distance, and I only need to take neighborhood streets to get there. It's lovely.
There are many services people need regularly that aren't bulk grocery shopping and we don't need to drive to, things like gyms, haircuts, restaurants, specialty hardware, small groceries, etc.
Everyone is subsidizing your housing appreciation when you don’t allow more housing to be built. The activists who are driving up the price of your property are the activists trying to stop upward growth. It’s pure supply and demand.
> Everyone is subsidizing your housing appreciation when you don’t allow more housing to be built. The activists who are driving up the price of your property are the activists trying to stop upward growth. It’s pure supply and demand.
I advocate for building and development. I'm just pointing out that the activists that are supposedly rallying for 'high-density' just end up increasing my home price because (1) the high-density builders want the land and (2) people want to live in neighborhoods like mine. Heads I win, tails you lose.
The narrow streets with trees is essential. When I used to live in San Diego, the street next to my house, 1 lane in each direction plus parking, was at least 40 ft wide. It was treacherous to cross and obviously people flew down it.
Now I live in a temperate east coast city with tree canopies across the street, which in front of my house is only 19 ft wide. I know because it's narrow enough that I was able to use a normal tape measure. 19 ft accommodates parking on one side, with just barely enough space to squeeze two cars passing each other (though in reality they take turns, as at a narrow bridge.) Still plenty of room for ambulances and fire trucks, and ample space for the police to drive recklessly fast.
yah, it’s surprising to know that most cars are only 6ft wide, and bigger trucks typically 7ft wide. my street is ~40 ft wide, and reckless/distracted drivers threaten pedestrian safety all the time (running stop signs, staring at phones, etc.). needless to say i’ve yelled at my share of them. i’d love to replace the parking lanes with protected/grade-separated bike lanes and put in a tree-filled median. not only would that make the drivers more mindful, but it would make the neighborhood more pleasant and walkable/bikeable.
As a rule of thumb, you need 10k people / square km (25k people / square mile) to sustain local services and to enable most people live without using a car daily. If 50% of land area is used for streets, parks, and commercial purposes, that 2-3k lot should house at least five people. I believe the average single-family home in an area with no housing shortage houses ~2 people.
Once population density is substantially below that, there are not enough people to support public transit outside specific routes. Most people will need a car in their daily life. You can still find basic services such as supermarkets within a walking distance, but more specialized services such as restaurants and coffee shops become scarce outside central areas.
You could still have a mix in that area. A handful of apartment buildings or multi-family homes/lots at medium density could solve the density problem without going overkill
How do you feel about medium density? I live in a neighborhood with some of the qualities you describe, and it has lots of small courtyard condos, and 2-3 story apartment buildings. These would've been illegal to build up until the last year or so, but I feel like they're not at all disruptive. I would say even a 5 story building on the main streets is fine in the kind of neighborhood you're describing. This gets you a lot of density without necessarily changing the feel of the neighborhood that much.
They built tall, 3 story, modern "block" townhomes in the backyard next to my 100+ year-old home. They stick out (nothing else on the block is remotely as tall or modern), block sunlight in my back yard all winter, and critically damaged a 100 year old tree in my backyard (of course, nothing I can do about that--developer got away with it).
They are a massive eyesore and have made my outdoor space just...frustrating and no longer private. Every time I go back there, I see the giant black wall next door. We're planning to put up 30ft tall, thin trees, at our expense, just to try and restore the space to where it was before. Developer walks away with his money and I get to pay for it.
The challenge with medium density is that it's built without existing residents' thoughts in mind w/ regards to footprint, design, size, etc. You end up with neighborhoods that aren't cohesive. Of course, requiring existing residents' input means that there would probably never be new housing, so that isn't a realistic option.
The people that moved in are great people, and we need more housing where I live. Change is gonna happen whether I like it or not. We have a housing crisis. New housing is eventually going to be built somewhere, and it's going to come for neighborhoods with the most walkability and services first.
> Of course, requiring existing residents' input means that there would probably never be new housing, so that isn't a realistic option.
Yeah it's unfortunate there's not really a way to say "this is getting built, but you have some influence on the details". From what I've seen, a lot of cities have things like design review and environmental review, but they're just used for predatory delay, which just inflates costs and timelines.
You want to live in St Louis then. Not the suburbs but the city of St. Louis. It matches your requirements to a T. Outside St. Louis city county however is the complete opposite.
If you want more walkable cities you have to stop subsidizing the suburban sprawl that has been paid for with debt spending. The infrastructure that is falling apart around us is happening because its unsustainable, and if we just print 1T dollars every few years to kick the can down the road all you do is create a bigger problem to be solved in 20 years.
American suburbs are largely a Ponzi scheme. They start out with loads of funding to build out all of the infrastructure and then in 20 years they can not afford to replace it all so they are funded by building another suburb. Eventually most of them will fail or some economic trick will be pulled to fund them.
If that specific bill was the only debt we were printing to subsidize car dependence it would be bad enough, however the majority of spending is done by municipalities which sits currently at 4T and its estimated we need to add 6T to that over the next 10 years to keep up with repairs. After we have spent that 10T we will then have to repair all the roads built in the past 20 years which is growing at about 500,000 miles of roads per decade.
I've been to a few cities in the US (I'm a foreigner), like Denver and Atlanta, and they are very pedestrian hostile. Almost no sidewalks, every street looks like a roadway (large) and every shop seems to belong to these islands where you can park your car and do your stuff. Not saying this is good or bad, but it's very different from every other country that I've came across. An exception in the US would be Las Vegas.
In both cities you will find new developments in the city that are imminently walkable and highly desirable (more expensive than other parts). I think these cities are actually great examples of the shifting preferences indicated here. They were built to sprawl, but are finding large success when they improve pedestrian infrastructure.
I think one of the things we need to do is actively work at decoupling parking from specific buildings. We currently require x number of parking spaces per residential unit or per commercial venue and it helps keep us trapped in a situation where you need a car to make your life work.
We need to find ways to accommodate parking in a way that helps us be flexible and let's people who prefer cars keep them without making them a privileged class pushing out all other options.
We don't really talk about that. We talk in an either/or fashion rather than talking about how to make it genuinely optional and a personal choice. We expect everyone to get on the same page and agree rather than working on saying "We don't really need this much parking. The parking lots are never full. Let's scale back the parking and make it shared somehow so there's enough parking, not too much parking and it no longer strangles mixed use, walkable development."
When visiting family in Germany I really enjoyed the practice in smaller towns of having one large parking facility outside of the city center, and having basically no parking available in the city center itself. The psychological sensation was uplifting, because normally when walking in a city I am subconsciously aware of the ever-present danger of death by automobile and all of my movements reflect that.
Has anyone done a recent survey of how many people want more free parking spots? More traffic lanes? More bridges and tunnels for cars? Do people want higher or lower speed limits? Cheaper or more expensive gas for cars? More or fewer lanes dedicated to busses/bikes? We should not jump to conculsions about what people want before asking all relevant questions.
Everyone wants more walkable cities. Thats like asking if people want cleaner water or better hospitals. Such questions are meaningless on thier own.
My belief is that Americans want walkable cities except they fundamentally hate other people. Not personally, just existentially. Other people take stuff that the average American wants - a parking spot next to the door, getting a coffee right away, being seated instantly in a restaurant. Or simply having to see people they dislike.
So the drive, which means they have to see even fewer people.
What a bizarre take. I've experienced Americans doing the following for me as a stranger:
- Waving hello as I walk past
- Holding open doors as I approach, despite being able-bodied
- Creating an opening for me in busy traffic when they don't have to
- Picking stuff up for me that I've accidentally dropped
The list goes on.
The reason why Americans drive is that they have a large population living across a sprawling landmass. Trains used to be the norm as American cities were being developed in the 1800s through the early 1900s. But because the scale of cities grew, they became less efficient than cars for most people to get around
To make cities more walkable, changing driver behavior needs to be a significant focus.
Minneapolis consistently ranks as one of the better cities for pedestrians, but even here the drivers here are really aggressive towards pedestrians to the point that some don't even care if you're pushing a stroller. Bike lanes, trails, and enhanced crosswalks are great, but they can't protect you from drivers that ignore traffic laws and drive dangerously.
The city knows it has a problem. This picture taken today is of a sign posted on one of the main bridges into downtown:
Road design has a huge part to play here. Places with very safe streets have very few lanes, lots of traffic calming, smarter signals, and design which makes drivers slow down and pay attention. The road in that picture is broad and open, so it’s no wonder cars feel like they’re the priority: the design promotes it.
I agree that cultural change is necessary too, but there are so many relatively cheap things we could do to improve streets for non-cars! And if we do, they’d end up being able to move more people anyways, because cars are incredibly space expensive.
Easier said than done. My Bay Area City is implementing city planning measures to reduce traffic fatalities; things like bike lane protectors and removing right-turn yield passages into a sharp right turn that forces drivers to be slower. You would not believe the amount of sheer vitriol from many folks....
It's absolute pie in the sky to think Americans will give up their cars. Walkability is great for a sunny Saturday morning farmers market. But that's not going to move the needle on carbon in any significant way. Living in a "walkable" neighborhood with two cars in the driveway is like recycling. It makes us feel like we're doing something meaningful to rationalize all the junk we buy on Amazon.
But one car per household would make a significant difference. It's not just carbon emissions. It's also the energy required to manufacture and ship the second car. You can still drive anywhere, anytime but one car forces you to coordinate and make choices. Gotta start somewhere.
> It's absolute pie in the sky to think Americans will give up their cars.
Yep. I live in a very walkable neighborhood and walk to work. Almost everybody else still drives a full size truck or SUV, even if they are only going a few blocks.
I think a lot of city dwellers fail to realise not everyone is attracted to urban life and some people actively disdain it. I really don’t like being in built up areas for more than a few days, if I lived in one I’d be a miserable alcoholic within a month. If you listened to half the people in discussions like this they’d pile us all into Warhammer 40k style arcologies!
Urban life genuinely holds no appeal at all for me, I’m just not wired for it. I know this isn’t true for everyone or even the majority but it is for a lot of people, I’d honestly rather emigrate to a foreign country with all the stress and work that entails than live in a city even for a year. My dream house would be an old stone cottage somewhere overlooking the sea with no light pollution and the nearest neighbour at least half a mile away! It’s not that I’m antisocial, it’s just that cities are sensory overload par excellence and I just feel really uncomfortable after a while of that. I’m social enough, but I prefer to have the choice to keep the world at arm’s length if necessary.
>>>But one car per household would make a significant difference. It's not just carbon emissions. It's also the energy required to manufacture and ship the second car. You can still drive anywhere, anytime but one car forces you to coordinate and make choices.
I know a woman who divorced her husband and moved back to Japan because they only had 1 car, and her lack of mobility kept her from getting a job or doing much of anything besides sitting in the house. I think they were living in the Atlanta suburbs, which I'm not familiar with.
People say this until you explain the details. Sure they want walkability, but density? "I don't want to live in some awful human hive". Parking? "why would I go anywhere where I have to pay for parking?"
Walkability flows from density, And NIMBYism has killed that.
The cities are losing population and this started before Covid. Now, with working from home possibilities, it has been revealed, in NYC at least, that many people only were living here to be close to work. It's evident from the house sales behavior in more suburban and rural areas, and while things are coming back, it seems to be skewing towards a younger demographic and 'new people' rather than people-who-had-left. Moreover, a lot of people are downgrading apartments and buying weekend homes with fresh air and birds in trees.
Let's forget cities for a second. A lot of American towns could be a little more pedestrian friendly. They should copy European cities like France and Netherlands and Germany, where even smaller towns have public transport that doesn't suck, safe sidewalks with safe crosswalks, and separate bike lanes.
Instead we have roads with people's driveways, commercial stuff, people walking, all intermixed making traffic slow and dangerous.
The evidence that Americans want more walkable towns is in the fact that these towns are so much more expensive and often populated by white collar professionals who can afford them.
There are ~1.2 billion cars globally. Expected to grow to ~1.8b by 2050? About the time many carbon zero targets are supposed to be achieved.
And yet. Any proposal that a tiny fraction of all the cheddar supporting automobiles be repurposed for nefarious questionable uses, like maybe add a few bike lanes, triggers a violent reaction accompanied by charges of being an anti-car jihadist.
I think the inside of a downtown should only have one way streets and parking on the side, and have big centers with plaza like things.
Then you mostly drive on the outside until you’re parking.
I hate how the roads are in our downtowns ever since visiting Italy and seeing these huge plazas all over in the cities.
No need to give up single family homes at all. Just make sure every suburb has a dense multi use zoned core with shops and apartments above the shops. Then make that core easy to reach from all across the suburb by walking/cycling/bus/rail (yes that will take away some of the space allocated to cars). Then as a bonus, connect those cores to each other with rail. This is essentially how Dutch suburbs work.
I wouldn't mind more walkable if it didn't come at the cost of being around many more people.
Every walkable city I've been to is either filthy, cramped, loud, over run, and/or very very expensive. I don't want to live so close to people to hear them, smell them, or be bothered by them or their pets.
You could get something like this if there is good public transport between points. Like the place where I am staying now, its relatively less crowded than the inner cities. I can walk and get any essential items like milk or meat. If I need something that I cant get, just take a bus and shop in the city. Most of the time, my daily needs are met near my home itself
Back in 2020 I moved to São Paulo to start a new job, fresh out of college. I knew the biggest problem people that live there face is the commute, so I was smart about it. I rented a place 30 minutes walking from the job and bought a electric scooter. My day started at 10, so I could wake up at 9, walk or ride the scooter to work (São Paulo have some great bike lanes). On raining days I would call an Uber. Back in the day they would offer a "shared" ride, where the driver would pick up anyone in their routes. It was extra cheap, sometimes less then a dollar to go from work to home. Then, everything changed when the Covid attacked
Specifically, make a mega mall underground (with parking under that), with a single 10 story building above for office space (open offices already don’t really have windows). You can build the building to have gaps where the roads should be, but more like tunnels. Then another 10-15 huge 50-80 story towers above the office space. Between the towers on the “roof” of the office space, a giant park with bike lanes and scooters.
It’s a mall (with everything you need), an office, parking spots, a park and “a neighborhood”.
I also think North America needs more apartments that are 3000-4000 sqft (4 bedroom 6 bathroom multi-story condos).
I'm happy to hear this statistic, but American cities need to change so much to make it happen - mainly removing cars as other commenters pointed out. A good start would be making public transportation more available through buses and trains, followed by limiting cars in already more walkable areas of the city.
Not Just Bikes is a great YouTube channel that explores city planning and often compares American cities to cities in the Netherlands. He has a video on Strong Towns as well.
I live in England. Our cities are walkable, but they are often a nightmare to commute to by car (and bus, train, even though this is getting better).
What I think would work in American suburbs is light rail/tram systems. They aren't as popular in England, but are very popular in Germany. As a tourist, they made getting around very easy, even without a car.
Honestly this stuff is part of what makes me want to move to Shanghai, or another city in east Asia at some point in my life. The public transport there was just incredible - super efficient, super clean, extremely accessible. I'm in tech though, so probably stuck to the bay area :/
It'll be interesting to see what different remote working makes. Sure, a short commute to work is nice, but if I'm working remotely I dont have to live in this big city any more and I can now live in a smaller town with a car.
On the bright side, the pandemic seems have enabled many cities to finally reclaim some of that car land for use by people. Though it's not clear how long that will last.