I live in a master planned community (Daybreak, Utah), and while you can definitely scoff at the building quality (state of things everywhere right now, it's all done fast and with low quality materials), it's been fantastic, especially during the pandemic.
The whole neighborhood is designed to be walkable, with parks, pools, trails, train stations, grocery stores and restaurants (added in the later phases, which are being developed right now) within 5 minutes of your doorstep.
It gets a bad rap from locals on the outside, but talk to the people living here (mostly expats from out of state) and nearly all of them say the same thing:
> "We love it here!"
and
> "Why aren't more communities built this way?"
I will say though, the US is poorly equipped for bicycle commuting. Even our neighborhood doesn't have many dedicated bike paths, opting instead to share the road with cars. Most diehard cyclists I know will tell you it's a matter of "when" not "if" you have a scary encounter with a driver. And with the amount of gigantic trucks on the roads out here that people use as their commuter cars, you can imagine these encounters don't typically end well.
Ive seen several attempts at master planned neighborhoods with little town center type things with the idea that youd rarely have to leave, around South Florida growing up, and even lived in one for a few years. They all failed miserably. I feel like ones that succeed are just lucky. These communities can have basic predetermined guidelines to how growth can happen but the actual growth needs to happen organically. You cant just plot and build every house in town at the start, and you cant expect that things wont change as things pan out. Otherwise youre forcing residents to live in this deterministic Truman Show world lacking real freedom, echoing the major failures of a lot of mid 20th century heavy-handed big-ego design that we still suffer the effects of today
Better than no planning. I live in a part of Dublin (Ireland) that was rapidly developed back in the 1950s to house families that were being rehomed from condemned tenement buildings in the city. The design came from "garden cities", a design from England in the early 1900s. It wasn't very "organic". Entire housing estates were built. These were modest family homes with gardens, and the estates included ample green spaces. Roads still cope well enough with today's traffic. At several places within 10 minutes walk from my house, there are purpose-built shop-front buildings that housed butchers, grocers, maybe even a pub. This was the high watermark of planned development in Dublin. These houses fetch 450k today, and while building regulations were atrocious back then, I km wouldn't trade my old house for anything that's been built since the 2000s at double the asking price. Sincere those good old days, the government and local councils have basically stopped building entirely and leave it up to private building contractors to hoard land, wait for property prices to hit a profitable price and then apply for permission to build multi-story one-bedroom apartments with minimal parking or greenspace, and no thought given to other amenities whatsoever. Because "We have a housing crisis!!" permission is usually granted.
There is a chasm between the Truman Show and a vertical hellhole. If I had to choose, I'd live in the Truman Show.
It's pretty much the same story in the UK. Early c20th slum clearances, followed by well planned council estates built around a community, later (late 60s or 70s) the estates started to fall out of favour with tower blocks taking their place, which was a disaster and led to the justification for the private development free-for-all that we've had to put up with since the 80s which has resulted in terrible American-style, car-dependent suburbs filled with poorly built and poorly designed houses with no services within walking distance.
Same thing in the UK, council housing was high-quality and affordable for new families. Blame Thatcher for selling off council housing (amid her many disastrous policies).
It's amazing how many problems in the UK and the US today can be traced back to Thatcher and Reagan respectively.
The Irish political/building establishment thrives on crisis and desparation: it's a sort of small time disaster capitalism in which the electorate continually collude with their betters in order to further their immiseration.
Seeing the greenspaces of my childhood filled-in with shoddy-looking, expensive housing was shocking. Fingal County Council planning department seem to be giving the go-ahead to build any and every piece of rubbish using the excuse of "housing crisis" that you mention.
I just returned from visiting Dublin (mainly the Northside) after several years away and was irritated by: ridiculous levels of private vehicle usage; broken in-carriage electronic stop announcements on the DART (light electric rail); difficulty in planning trips connecting dublin bus/iarnrod eireann/dart; bus stops without proper shelters; drivers parking on the pavement(sidewalk); lack of courtesy from drivers at non-signalized intersection. On a positive note I will say that all (especially Dublin Bus drivers) personnel interacted with on an individual level were wonderful.
I’m skeptical that all planning is necessarily doomed to fail. Towns already do a considerable amount of planning via their zoning rules, and subdivisions are planned as well. The example here just seems like a subdivision, but planned for walkability rather requiring you to drive. Where did the place you lived in go wrong?
Half of Polish cities were rebuilt using central urban planning and came up awesome (build quality aside). There were a few rules:
- 5-10 min walk to kindergarden/school and local stores
- 3-5 min walk to a bus stop
- tons of green space
- taller buildings but varied in size and angles so that there is both ample space and variety
I literally had no streets to cross when I had to go to an elementary school, and literally 1000 other kids had 1-2 small streets to cross at most, walking 10-15 min or less.
There's also the classic - Nowa Huta, a former city and now part of Kraków, built next to Tadeusz Sędzimir Steelworks (formerly Vladimir Lenin Steelworks) - "nowa huta [stali]" translates to "new steelworks".
I'm linking to a traffic map, because it's best at highlighting the structure of the place. See the big roads forming straight lines, crossing to form distinct cells? This was intentional, top-down design. Zoom on a cell, see how it's made from apartment blocks surrounding shared, green communal areas.
It's currently the greenest place in Kraków, and despite having a reputation of a dangerous place in late 90s[0], it's one of the nicest and most family-friendly areas in the city.
The urban legend I grew up with goes, this cell-based design is partially for defensive purposes: during a ground conflict, spaces between outermost apartment blocks form choke points and could be barricaded to close off the sub-district.
There's another, less happy story that I've heard - that the steelworks and the city of Nowa Huta were purposefully placed by the Soviets on the most fertile soil in the area, destroying it in the process, in order to get the Poles to urbanize more and generally to spite them. I haven't found a confirmation of this - it might be an urban legend, but it's one that's widely believed over here.
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[0] - Since taken by other districts; last I heard, Kurdwanów was the prime "hot zone". By "dangerous" I mean "you can get robbed at knife point" and "you can get beat up by hooligans". The joke goes, hooligans that lived in Nowa Huta have since grown up, started families, and don't have time for petty crime anymore.
And a lot of old issues about how drab they were are due to how long it took for the green areas to flourish properly after the building spree. These days it's much easier to "kickstart" the green areas.
Indeed, in the places that lacked decoration it's nice to see them added.
A bit of a problem however is when original detailing gets removed on n the estates that did have it, often replaced with cheap pastel Styrofoam insulation.
Oh absolutely! I was surprised to find that the communist city planning in Poland made for extremely livable cities. The block apartments may not have much going for them architecturally, but they are arranged around beautiful parks and gardens, wonderful public spaces dotted with stores and markets. The best way to describe the planning philosophy is US college dorm life on a big state campus. It's even common to have a canteen in the center of the neighborhood just like you would a dining hall. The only sad thing is that as car ownership expands, the green space keeps getting eaten away by parking lots since these areas were designed for car-free living with excellent transit links to the rest of the city.
It's a virulent meme. Planned towns are bad. Organic growth is good. Planning is tyranny, is oppression, is taxation. Please read "Seeing Like a State". Organic growth is freedom, is markets, is good.
It's not entirely wrong, just extremely misleading. Urban planning doesn't have to create complete, inflexible designs, managing every tiny bit of life. And outside some failed experiments[0], it almost never is.
Think of planning towns as growing gardens. You work with the forces of organic growth, not against them, but still nudge and direct them to create a result that's better[1] than what would be there on its own.
--
[0] - Some planners got high on cybernetics/system thinking, in an era we could not computationally support designing complex systems - then others used this to push political ideologies; mix in power struggles and regular corruption, and of course it fails. What's annoying is that it gets painted as "planning bad", "cybernetics bad", "central bad", instead of recognizing the incentive failures in the mix.
[1] - Better according to the gardener. Nature optimizes for its own thing. It's important to remember that natural, organic growth rarely optimizes for the benefit of individual units, whether plants or people.
This is fascinating! Thanks for sharing. It’s hard to tell what the specificity of the planning was… it seems to have included the street layouts and the below-ground infrastructure, but unclear on the facades and the shop/business distribution?
I didn’t know about this but it makes a lot of sense. Those enormous boulevards are clearly not original nor unplanned.
Even the facades in Paris were planned to the point that there were regulations on color and material and design [1]. Regulations were eventually loosened up somewhat.
Well Manhattan, for example—obviously at first it developed organically, but the upper part of the island was largely planned, with a strict grid system of streets and avenues and a large park in the center!
Planning works great for public utilities- roads, libraries, parks etc. The moment we cross that are have a planned bank, grocer, retail I think it falls apart. The grocery shop needs guarantee on revenue to be setup, and then they will slack off because they won’t need to compete or innovate. People will realize once the HOA bill runs in to several hundred dollars and have to deal with shitty services. In the real world, depending on the area, one grocery chain will die and another will take its place.
In a small neighborhood, that would shatter the illusion that you never need to leave, at which point the distant walk to your car for actual shopping becomes a problem. (Or, alternatively, the lack of delivery services because they can't actually reach both your home and the place they shopped using the same mode of transportation.)
You have a bus stop with buses getting to city center every 3-5 min, and the supermarket store around a corner has literally all grocery things I needed when I lived around (it’s the size of 3-4 medium Wallgreenses)
The post I was responding to suggested that it wasn't necessary to arrange for at least one grocery store in the walkable neighborhood, and that leasing to retail establishments could be entirely up to the building owners. I was observing that if that results in no grocery stores located in the neighborhood, that would make the neighborhood much less walkable.
(Even if there's one in walking distance, hopefully it has an excess of carts and doesn't mind them going home with people...)
And unless you want to go out for groceries far too often, you're going to end up with a quantity of groceries that's incompatible with taking a bus. You'd need a car, or a bike trailer for a very dedicated cyclist, or a delivery service and the ability for them to deliver.
I live in a London suburb. I don't have a car, or even have a drivers license because I've always lived places where having a car isn't important enough to weigh up the cost and nuisance (to me).
Before delivery services, I'd walk to the grocery store every few days. It was perfectly fine. When I commuted I'd just pop by on the way home from work. There are at least 4 small-ish shops within 10 minutes walk, and half a dozen bigger ones within 20 minutes walk or a short bus ride (that would also coincide with the commute for a large portion of the people living around me).
And I live in perhaps the worst location locally in this respect - I'm pretty much equidistant from three 3-4 different shopping areas, dead centre of a very low density residential area with few shops.
Overall, the key thing to maintain a walkable neighbourhood is simply that enough people who live there actually want to walk. In that case there will be enough shops nearby. The problem occurs when too many of the people in these neighbourhoods like to live in an area that is walkable, but still prefer to use the care.
I think the key to make such neighbourhoods work is fewer parking spaces to explicitly ensure a sufficient portion of the people living in them actually bring foot traffic to the nearby retail spaces. Do that and you get grocery stores without any need for detail regulation.
Where I live the council won't approve planning applications with more than 1.5 parking spaces per living unit on average. It could probably be significantly lower.
Zoom Google Maps into almost any town in continental Europe[0] and search for "grocery store" or "supermarket". [1]
Or look at one supermarket and see how many shops they have [2].
Depending on the size of the household and personal preference, people might use these shops every 2-4 days, perhaps using a bicycle or trolley to take things home.
[0] I'm sure there are exceptions, like Arctic areas, mountains, tourist towns, etc.
> And unless you want to go out for groceries far too often
I know carless Londoners whose commute takes them past a grocery store on foot every day. So they will literally go into the store for a single item.
However, you're right that this isn't a good solution for everyone - for example, people who are starting a family. Even if you can fit a week's groceries for one person into a backpack, that's no help for four-person households. Grocery delivery services are widely used in London for this reason. As is moving out of the city in order to start a family.
For a grocery store, it's location location location. A grocery store is going to want to be located there. It'll happen organically. I've lived in Europe, there always seems to be a grocery store of some sort nearby. Nobody centrally planned it.
For much the same reason I don't want an hour-long commute: I don't want to waste the time. I enjoy taking a pleasant 5-minute (or 20-minute) walk regularly, but I'd much rather spend 90 minutes grocery shopping a month rather than 10-20 minutes every day or every few days.
Rather than national businesses that take the profit out, how about an accommodation for small business owners to live in the community as well? But not subsidize them so they actually have to be viable businesses.
In many cities, there are plenty of first floor shops with the proprietors living upstairs. It seems that collectively, they'd keep the planning and policies in favor of active and vibrant lifestyle, focus on keeping crime in check, promote community cohesion.
I am one hundred percent certain that both the locatelli grocer that has almost nothing I want to eat in it ever and has nothing but mexican standoff intersections with people walking around really slow, and the 'california' grocery that I really have to work hard at not just eating all the food in inside the store are both heavily planned, in terms of where exactly they are and all of the ridiculously excessive lighting and product placement inside of the stores. There is some vague pretension to a capital market and some vague notion that some of the great many retail businesses which are essentialy a second form of rent extraction may go out of business, but by and large it would seem extremely clear that there is a great deal of planning going on with information that business people are not supposed to have access to. Whether or not there is a viable alternative to said situation is a more complicated question, but there is no question that there is not some kind of innovation() support system where if you just figure out how to build a better mousetrap or run a better grocery store or sandwich shop, you will succeed and grow.
Doesn't zoning largely let you choose where private businesses go? Maybe you can't select exactly where to put the bank versus the grocery store, but you can select categories of businesses, to create the feel you want.
(I'm not sure whether zoning is a "good" thing or not in general, but there are certainly lots of successful towns and cities with zoning rules.)
* People don't want the things that are specified in the master plan, so there's no tenant that would be both legal and viable.
* Businesses are protected from competition (for their space, and for their niche in the area) so they charge too much and deliver too little.
* People want things that aren't in the master plan, and they aren't allowed to exist. (The politically engaged majority can get the plan amended with enough work, but these top-down designs can miss the long tail of niche interests, none individually powerful enough to get itself on the agenda).
The solution in most of the world is to not create too detailed plans, and often to minimize the amount of zones with pretty much all of them having multiple uses.
This means for example that people obsessed with house prices can't stop a grocer from existing within walking distance.
Alternatively in the real world, one grocery store will die because a Wal*Mart opened an hour away and is replaced by an hour's drive instead of a brief walk to pick up groceries because people can't resist a dollar cheaper and ten more in gas.
> People on a budget absolutely pay attention to the cost of gas.
People on a budget do for certain levels of "on a budget". If you only have $5 to buy food (and no credit) and a full tank of gas, it doesn't matter if it costs more in the long term. You burn extra gas now or your kids don't eat.
No, you either didn’t read what I wrote or you haven’t been living on a budget. Poor people don’t waste more money on gas than they save by going to Walmart.
They go to Walmart because it’s significantly cheaper to do weekly shopping there than even other big retail grocery outlets, let lone little ones. My parents absolutely fucking hate going to Walmart but they go there weekly because it’s $50/week difference just for the two of them vs Kroger.
You’re both not wrong. I’ve seen both. I’ve lived both. One of my earliest memories was being chastised by my family for spending a tiny fraction more than the lowest price on something; same brand, twice the volume, didn’t have a shelf life, wasn’t over budget. I got in trouble as a poor kid in a poor family for listening to advice my family had given me to shop smart.
I also got the same in reverse for being less thrifty and more considerate.
Big shrug emoji. I know poverty so much it scares and traumatized me. I appreciate that not everyone does, but I also don’t think it should be represented as something uniquely rational.
Poverty is duress. People make all kinds of good decisions because they have survival instincts, and all kinds of bad decisions because they have a bunch of incentives. They often do both and everything in between in a single outing because, yep, gas is expensive. And they’re tired. And the world is hard and expensive.
I definitely have been living on a budget, having been literally born into poverty and never quite able to move up a level. It's been with me my entire life and I assume it'll continue to be so for the rest of it. Kroger's a rich people store; there are plenty of stores that aren't that have been actually driven out of business by Wal*Mart.
Because their prices weren’t competitive, it’s that simple. Shopping at Walmart is not fun. People flock there because it’s cheaper than everyone else.
You’re suggesting that poor people lose more money by going to Walmart than they would shopping locally, which is just ridiculous. It implies poor people have no basic math skills on a average, which isn’t the case.
Walmart doesn’t crush local competitors with shitty warehouse lighting and angsty employee vibes. They do it by being far cheaper with their massive logistics.
Poor people shop where the money will go the furthest, full stop.
I find this pretty insulting to the average persons intelligence and out of touch with the pricing realities in many locations.
I have two local grocery stores. One is in town and the other the next over. Both are less than 3 miles. The prices are between 2-4x compared to me driving 30 miles in either direction to visit Cost Co/Walmart.
I don’t mind paying more for local or the convenience but I quite literally can’t afford to more than double my grocery budget for the month. So I only buy perishables locally for the most part.
The economics of this are problematic in both directions, but I still need to put food on the table.
I’m not disagreeing with the functionality, and personally don’t find the grid to be particularly bad, but do you really think West Village isn’t dramatically more liveable feeling? I suppose this quickly veers into hard-to-define sensations so perhaps the point is moot :)
I do suspect that a lot of people would prefer to live in that part of town over the more modern areas… as evidenced by the especially insane rent.
I’ve lived in Manhattan for close to thirty years got married here and raised a family here.
What you call a dramatically more livable feeling means different things to different people. Honestly it meant different things to me at 25, 35 and 45. It also meant different things when I was stretched financially and when I was flush.
The village substantially more expensive than e.g. the upper west side? (These places are all outside of my price range so I've never really looked.)
There are also lots of other reasons the tip of manhattan may have been more expensive—for example, it's just the oldest part of the city, so everything started there and expanded outwards.
...that might not be the best metric, I bet there are fewer super small apartments to be had on the UWS! I know the village has a fair number of places that were built before current laws about minimum square feet per apartment.
I don't know what the right metric would be—maybe median rent or even family income? I guess I also don't really think you can tell much from all this.)
Totally ripe for confirmation bias, which is why my comment seemed very uncertain. I’m kind of going from a heuristic of older cities versus newer ones under the (potentially wrong!) assumption that zoning has tended toward more stringency over time.
One of the main reasons to make a plan should be that it allows you to realize when you are starting to deviate from it. That’s a time you have to do some thinking and either realize you’re about to make a mistake or adjust the plan/come up with a new one.
If you do plans badly, you don’t do the thinking, but just declare any deviation from the plan a mistake.
Rather than trying to plan it all out from the beginning, it has a planning philosophy that seems to have sustained it through the decades and my understanding is that the philosophy is used to this day to try to ensure a vibrant town. Not all of the early ideas and development worked either, but change seems to have been built in and the town is looking to grow in the coming years pretty significantly.
I've been there a couple times and it reminds me of various mixed developments outside of city centers I've been at in Europe. The twist seems to be a gearing around walkability and abundant commercial/business zoning so people can live and work there.
I just don't see the point of these kinds of things when you could just move to an existing city. I moved to the middle of an Australian city and I haven't left a 2km radius because there is just no need, everything exists within walking distance. My city is also great because it is surrounded by a ring of parklands so I could go on a 10km walk through nature without ever leaving the parklands (other than crossing a few roads).
I wouldn’t say Seaside, the new urban community where the Truman Show was filmed failed really. It seems to have held on to some sense of year round community that is not completely overwhelmed by the vacation crowd. I always liked staying there before it got too popular because it felt like a tiny functioning city with book store, arts, year round jobs etc, not like a vacation spot that turns into a ghost town after September.
while that is true, a lot of the house are for sale and people will make small changes. Also local governments ask for input from the people that live there. Shops can come and go as these are mostly rentel spaces. So while we do a lot of planning there is still room to make it your own. This village seems to be a Holliday park like experience. With only rentals and pre defined shops
> You cant just plot and build every house in town at the start, and you cant expect that things wont change as things pan out.
I wonder if you have ever talked with actual urbanist, as I have, and this definitely not how they think.
Urbanism can actually be very ‘agile’, with a difference that you have a vision for the outcome you want to reach (which good agile in sw development is adding as well).
A master plan doesn't hurt, they could get it wrong but it's not that much worse than haphazard randomness.
The good cities you see aren't good because of early planning. They're good because of constant vigilance to improve and maintain. Subway systems for example aren't usually part of the master plan of the city at inception but are the result of constant vigilance to improve.
Meanwhile western US suburbia is the result of unplanned urbanization reacting to the whims of corporate car culture. Totally unplanned and terrible.
Those aren't "planning" codes, it's more rules and guidelines. Development is still largely free and left to the market so long as they stick within the guidelines.
It's those rules and guidelines that make suburbia so miserable though. When you can't build retail without 1 off-street parking spot per 100 sq ft or new residential without 1.5 parking spaces per bedroom, then there is no possible outcome other than the car-dependence we see today. Parking requirements make building a walkable town impossible.
Car dependence comes from the low density infrastructure. The rules are a consequence of that. Low density infrastructure exists because many cities were built during a time when car companies were trying to make the automobile mainstream.
Density is limited explicitly by code. It's limited implicitly by parking requirements which are code. Car dependence also largely follows from segregation of uses (residential and retail can't mix) which is again code.
That's too simple of an answer. These codes did not exist until recent times. The codes actually exist because people wanted them to exist, because car culture influenced the way people think and how they should live. All these codes were put into place AFTER low density infrastructure was already the established norm.
You can see it in how cities are built this country. Cities established in the east before car culture took over are much more walkable and have a different set of "codes"
Part of the problem is that presently walkable cities don't have walkable codes, so as they expand or even replace old buildings they become more car centric. They are only walkable because current buildings are from prior to the adoption of the code. The Illegal City of Somerville [0] brought popular attention to this a few years ago.
I don't know why you insist on putting scare quotes around the words "planning" and "codes." In municipal governments all across the country, people who went to school for "Urban Planning" and have the job title "Planner" work for the "Planning Department" and administer the "Planning Code." These the canonical, legal names.
I put quotes around them because they aren't actually planned. They're officially and canonically called "planning" codes but no real long term urban planning is involved. It's more short term satisfaction planning and not the kind of actual planning that goes on in other places like say China or Tokyo. Now you know why.
>Part of the problem is that presently walkable cities don't have walkable codes, so as they expand or even replace old buildings they become more car centric
Unlikely a city doesn't convert a high density building into a low density building because of a remodel. People really need to leave the city in droves for this to happen.
What you're referring to is NEW cities or new expansions.
Somerville is like a one off. It's also not really a walkable city like Tokyo or Hong Kong is. It's more like a walkable town or village.
I think you're right for two reasons. The first being that cities and communities should evolve organically to meet the changing needs of the people living there over time. The second reason is that all successful communities (arguably all successful anything) are so because they're lucky.
Very similar situation here. Master planned community with meh build quality, but our neighborhood is designed to be transit oriented. We don't have a lot of amenities within the community, mostly just a bike trail, and a light rail stop. Hopefully some retail and a grocery store open up nearby soon, because about 500+ units are all being built within a quarter mile. And well over 1000+ within a half mile.
The bike trail is my favorite part. It connects to the major bike trails in my city, which allow me access to all the major sporting venues, downtown, major shopping centers, and job centers. I used to ride ~7 miles per day traveling from the office, and about 20 miles each weekend just going to do things I would have otherwise done via car. It allowed me to sell my car.
The light rail also makes things convenient if the weather isn't so great.
The odd thing is that nearly everyone in the community still drives everywhere, and some own multiple cars. Parking is a disaster and everyone complains about it, but these were all new builds and the buyers all should have known that parking would be limited.
> The odd thing is that nearly everyone in the community still drives everywhere, and some own multiple cars. Parking is a disaster and everyone complains about it, but these were all new builds and the buyers all should have known that parking would be limited.
This sounds a lot like communities built during Soviet times. At the time the idea was everything you needed was in your community, and if you ever needed to travel outside you could use public transport.
This worked fine during Soviet times, as they could house people near where they worked, but nowadays that doesn't work. We still have pretty good public transport, but who wants to take two buses for 45 minutes when you can drive for 20 minutes? The green spaces between buildings have been converted to car parking, but it's still not really enough. As such all new developments within the city have to have underground parking.
In most American cities the bus schedules are like every 15-20 minutes and buses arrive at a near random distribution over that time. So even if traffic is so bad that driving is consistently 40 minutes, the bus-to-stop-to-bus trip is really anywhere from 40-80 minutes depending on your luck. I think people really value being able to estimate their commute and buses add a lot of variance.
The issue is that a lot of transit planning is politically motivated and done to maximize "coverage" rather than more meaningful metrics like ridership, usefulness, and profitability.
Planning for coverage allows you to tell individual taxpayers that they're "served" by the transit they help fund, but most will never use it because it's infrequent and the routes take forever to get anywhere. Optimizing for ridership means you focus on a smaller number of straight-line routes that are highly useful and run them at high frequency so that a smaller pool of people come to rely on them and use them regularly, instead of as a last resort.
> The issue is that a lot of transit planning is politically motivated and done to maximize "coverage" rather than more meaningful metrics like ridership, usefulness, and profitability.
That's definitely my experience in York Region (north of Toronto for those unfamiliar) and Ottawa. Far too many bus stops, but wait times > 15 minutes _per route_ outside all but the most peak parts of rush-hour. Including on their "bus rapid transit" trunk lines. You almost end up feeling like a patsy every time you decide to take public transit.
I enjoy taking LRT and buses in Waterloo Region, especially with my kids, but I think I go in expecting that there's a tradeoff— longer wait/travel time in exchange for being able to read on my kindle or play games on my phone on the way.
Busses are the thing that needs to be self-driving first (after trains, which can already be). Combined with automated passing spots.
The worst about busses is when they come every 30 min, but already arrive full. Or when they have more than one bus for a given timeslot and don't dock the less-full bus first.
In Seattle, a typical local bus trip costs the transit company around $10, while the ticket costs around $3. Running twice as many buses would result in cost of something like $18-20 per ride, which would make it require even more subsidies than it already receives.
That assumes the buses would be similarly packed. With a denser and reliable schedule you get more people using the bus and it can actually require fewer subsidies.
(In other words: instead of a half-empty bus every 20 minutes you end up with packed buses every 5 min)
The "farebox recovery ratio" for cars is also low: taxes and user fees only pay for only ~50% of the cost of roads, at most. The rest comes out the general fund.
I really think the answer to this is to run much smaller and cheaper buses instead of the extremely expensive big ones that only have a few occupants. Shuttle buses cost around $60-70k vs >$600k for a new full size bus. Of course, driver labor is also a significant cost, but I think it's easier to find shuttle bus drivers as it only requires a class B license.
Which country? In both of my post-communism neighborhoods citizens decided to keep all the green areas, and there is a better public transit than it used to have.
Most people still take bus/subway to work, although the car traffic increased.
The same thing happens in all new communities re: schools, sports facilities, fire departments, etc. You can argue that the developer should have to account for these needed public goods, but everyone buying knows they don't exist, then immediately complains that they don't exist once they move in.
Idk if the developer should have to account for those services. I think that's more of the role of local government. And I'm not complaining, just hoping that some things get built. I was fully aware of the lack of services when I moved in, and others should be as well.
The shared makerspace seems like a neighborhood level thing. There's all sorts of services / hobbies that make more sense to be neighborhood based instead of nationally based.
Tools and workshops are like that. The biggest issue with tools/workshops is liability. Someone's going to lose a finger, or a rotary tool will pull out their hair / a piece of their scalp... (even with all the safety precautions, its going to happen. There are some real idiots out there), and then everything goes to crap.
In a neighborhood solution, there's more local trust in each other, and a social contract where people care for each other.
In a city-solution, you need to bootstrap the community out of nothingness. When newbies come in, you've got forms and disclosure agreements and training videos to minimize the issue. It works but... I'm inclined to see how their neighborhood scale makerspace scales.
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Everyone wants that "doohicky": a holder for your lawn-mower's starting line that broke off last week. A new holder for your favorite coffee mug that got smashed. Etc. etc.
3d Printers + some woodworking equipment + a few skilled individuals who hang out for fun / leisure can solve these minor problems.
I do a lot of 3D printing. Almost none of it is for replacement parts. Replacement parts sourcing has gotten extremely good online in the last 10-15 years. Need a recoil start handle for a Honda HRX 217? Dozens of vendors of the original part and more selling knock offs. Even as a Mech E and experienced 3D printer with multiple printers, it’s almost never worth my time to make a part that I can buy.
I had a 3D printer for a while but I just got so little use out of it. Designing anything was like an all day process and any time I found something I needed I would think "Do I want to spend the entire day to get this thing" and the answer was almost always no.
Fusion 360 is ridiculously good compared to anything i used previous to it. You have to spend a little time getting the basics down but once you do it is pretty damn fast. Plus you can import o part models from mcmaster carr, thingiverse, etc and tweak them. It really is better than it used to be imho
I think I was pretty proficient with my tools but most of the work was measuring out everything and then the first few prints either fail or were not designed correctly so it just becomes a big process that wasn't worth it if printing and CAD are not your passion.
I empathize with this... I designed and printed up a mating door bracket assembly . Lots of time spent measuring, designing, and multiple rounds of prototyping to get something that fit AND worked as expected. I was satisfied with the end product but not the journey to get there.
Liability is not a problem. If people get hurt using tools, it’s almost always either entirely their fault, or some rare and random case of very bad luck. Either way, you can have people sign 50 liability waivers before allowing them to touch anything, and buy liability insurance (paid for by member fees).
No, the real problem is not idiots hurting themselves, but rather them hurting tools. Many tools are easy to damage or destroy through misuse, which can be very costly. If people don’t own the tools themselves, they have much less incentive to take good care of them. All your cutting implements will be perpetually dull, for example, unless you hire someone to keep everything in a good order.
IDK. Tool rental companies existed for decades. I'm sure the fine print is so good that you're assuming all liability by merely thinking about using their tools
This seems to be a trend with American dysfunctions. Can't have nice things because of liability. Its pretty interesting to me that a society with such an emphasis on individualism is also the same one which legislated against personal responsibility when it comes to environmental hazards.
> will say though, the US is poorly equipped for bicycle commuting. Even our neighborhood doesn't have many dedicated bike paths, opting instead to share the road with cars. Most diehard cyclists I know will tell you it's a matter of "when" not "if" you have a scary encounter with a driver.
My country is far from perfect, but the US simply culturally hates cyclists. I see outright dehumanisation - comparison to insects and the like - from US media on the regular.
It's extremely unattractive, and given the role of transport patterns in climate change - well.
It did seem strong, I edited it out. Generalising isn't my intention, but honestly, I don't know how to avoid it entirely without losing points worth making, and I'm not sure anybody does.
The point I was trying to make, in this case, is that in every culture you'll find some unpleasant sentiment condoned not just in the spaces you expect, but in the sort of cosy middle class spaces that are perceived (if they don't actively market themselves) as being inclusive and enlightened.
For sake of comparison, Wikipedia says Daybreak is over 4000 acres while Culdesac is 16. These projects aren't close in scale and I think the "neighborhood" in the marketing for Culdesac is misleading regarding what life would actually be like living there. There are several individual buildings in my neighborhood that house more people and I still need a car on a regular basis.
Agreed on some digging Culdesac is very clearly just a “rebranded apartment complex” their units are only for rent nothing like a stand alone house is available and as far as the retailers/restaurants the ones listed will occupy the only spaces built for that purpose… its an apartment complex
Agreed. If their residents don't all end up as students at ASU, then they are going to NEED cars as well. The light rail covers maybe 5% of the metro area and the bus service is terrible if you need to travel more than a few miles.
I'm not aware of any significant employers nearby, aside from the university and a lot of minimum wage retail jobs. I suppose airport workers could make this location work, if they can afford it.
I decided to take a look at Daybreak on google maps, but I'm having a hard time understanding how the layout is different than other developments. I do notice that the lane system looks nice as opposed to just having alleys. Is there other stuff you like?
It is utterly bizarre to read positive comments here then try to look at Daybreak on Google Maps. I see about 5 restaurants in a tiny town center, no convenience stores or grocery, just several square miles of small lot suburbs with dotted pools and tennis courts. Looks like the opposite of walkable to me. No biking infrastructure leading to that light rail station or evidence that anyone would walk anywhere for anything. Human-scale urban planning must truly be a foreign concept to Americans.
There are tons of cul-de-sacs (pro-car, anti-pedestrian) and huge parking lots at the shopping centers. This looks really as bad as some of the worst of American suburbs (edit: as a pedestrian! maybe its nice enough to live in for other reasons).
I’m not the OP, but I’ve seen Daybreak I think emphasis there is smaller single-family home lots, and lots of multi family buildings, all built within walking distances to amenities like restaurants, entertainment, grocery stores, clinics, the light railway station, etc. It kind of feels like a hybrid between large urban downtowns you might find in the US and elsewhere, and traditional American suburbs. Not remotely as dense or large scale as say NYC, but far more walkable and mixed use than standard suburban life.
I’m sure many non-Americans would fail to see what makes that unique, but for American neighborhoods it definitely is.
I couldn't see any real density from the satellite and streetview pictures. Looks like every typical housing development in Australia but with the laneway access for cars and more uniformity in terms of building design and fencing rules. No contemporary housing design that I could find. Walking anywhere (outside of strolling the neighbourhood) would be a longer undertaking, I'm guessing? Hard to see businesses or restaurants amongst the housing?
As a suburb, should look good once the street trees grow up though.
This is a masterplan of a typical Australian development:
https://brookmont.com.au/masterplan - in this case, has gardens and community spaces, but not walking distance to anything useful. There's a big hardware store nearby, but no one would walk to it.
What you're describing is pretty much exactly what every rust belt city that had no development from 1960 to present day is like. Of course everyone who works in an office turns their nose up at those kinds of places because "muh good schools" or something along those lines.
I'm not sure why this comment isn't up-voted enough. Not sure if the parent poster visited Europe or Asia (or most of the world really) but Daybreak, Utah is nowhere near walk-able except for some of the residents living quite near to the attractions (a grill restaurant or whatever); and these commerce already have many times their sizes in parking.
And cerise-sur-le-gateaux these are some of the ugliest buildings that I have seen. Unbalanced colors, indecisiveness between American/European styles, etc... It's really just your average American neighborhood or worse.
I know Daybreak is more advanced as a project and significantly larger, but Culdesac looks a lot more appealing to me if I were the target market. Lots of medium sized, social/public space spaces. Much more reminiscent of the old towns of European cities - Dubrovnik, etc - which are wonderful to wander around, find a small bar/restaurant/etc. I streetviewed one part of Daybreak and it looked very broad and less walkable.
That said, Culdesac might make for a pretty small neighbourhood? Is it replacing a trailer park, going by the angled concrete bits on satellite photos?
We have something similar here in South Australia, replacing a large industrial property: https://lifemoreinteresting.com.au/ It's not car free, but the parking affordances are very much minimised and designed to be trivial to walk/bike everywhere. It's centred around open spaces that are great to visit as an outsider and would be fantastic to live around: https://www.plant4bowden.com.au/ There are a range of architects and building styles so it suits more people - singles, couples and families. Get a townhouse without a car park. Get an apartment with three bedrooms and two basement car parks.
One thing it didn't seem to do when I visited was provide more in terms of ground-level commercial/retail tenancies. That would be the ideal scenario for a community, I think - small stores and businesses at ground level and living spaces around or above.
I know I’m an outlier but, in a city I feel generally safer riding on the road in traffic than on dedicated lanes and paths. In traffic with cars, everyone knows the rules, has the opportunity to see and use signals, and has regulated safety standards.
I’ve ridden on separated bike lanes that were so dangerous I opted to use the main road and still felt safer with people trying to run me off the road honking and screaming at me. I’ve ridden on highly regarded bike paths that are so poorly maintained trees are growing out of them, so poorly lighted that collisions are unavoidable, and mixed traffic with pedestrians in a way that makes tangling with cars feel a lot safer.
I know, I’m in the minority on this. But even after serious injuries in a bike accident sharing the road with cars… that still feels safer to me.
That’s because it doesn’t make sense? Even if you consider you might hit a tree, another bicyclist, or a unlighted lamp post on the regular, it’s still much safer than being hit by a two ton car just a single time.
Everyone knows the rules and uses signals on bike lanes as well.
I genuinely do not understand how you arrive at feeling a road full of cars is safer.
> Everyone knows the rules and uses signals on bike lanes as well.
… is not true. Mostly because I’ve been on too many separated bike lanes that really aren’t separated—in really dangerous ways—and can’t be without eliminating the car traffic entirely.
As an example: there is a separated lane in downtown Seattle. It runs along a one way road, on the left hand side. The road has frequent signals for left hand turns, with separate stop signals for cyclists and cars. The stop signals for cyclists are smaller and uncommon, so they’re easy to miss. And they’re timed in an unusual order that frequently confuses cyclists and drivers alike.
All of those things led to several cases where I was nearly hit by a car anyway, under conditions that just don’t exist in shared traffic.
And this lane like many others has a beginning and an end, where cars can and frequently do mistakenly enter.
If all of that is not enough, some parts of the lane also has parking to its right, with ramps on either side for pedestrians to access/exit their vehicle, which are often used for deliveries to local businesses, often large deliveries where the delivery person has limited vision.
All of those things are more dangerous, and more likely to result in collisions and accidents (at least in my mostly bike-friendly city) than just normal traffic flow.
Sure this example is particularly badly designed. But it’s not dissimilar to many others I’ve ridden.
This is all not to mention dedicated but non-separated lanes where getting doored by people parking is common and drivers frequently use as a passing lane.
In those cases, the otherwise well accepted (here) “if it’s unsafe beside car traffic, take the lane” is considered an affront by a lot of drivers who expect you to stay in the bike lane. So now you have the added risk of road rage for no good reason.
I can absolutely understand why anyone would prefer these trade offs. But to me they make everything about riding in mixed traffic more perilous, and I’d prefer the risk where I know everyone is following the same set of rules.
That said, I welcome communities without cars! And I definitely feel like those communities especially need dedicated bike routes to separate cyclists from pedestrians.
Your description in the beginning, sounds a lot like Europe. Hopefully planners start to reduce the footprint of future construction, so they are walkable.
I have a bit of subjective personal and professional experience with all of this (design, policy, politics, zoning, economics, etc etc etc...
It ALL comes to one thing: ECONOMICS.
And I don't mean a balanced budget - I am referring to greed and corruption.
One may thing that greed and corruption is rampant on a federal level; no just look locally: HOS and Municipal governments (city councils etc)
Did you know that many municipal government agents have been paid off by telco industry to literally write laws against a municipality installing their own data infra?
Alameda California is just one.
Did you know that a single family home must sit on no-less than a 2,000 S.F. lot regardless of size, and all homes (defined by the actual front-door-entrance), must have zero shared infra? (Sewer, water, power, etc)
The zoning laws are working actively against the building of smaller home-facilities -- and all the hedge funds are swooping in with dark money, dark legal and dark politics to fuck everyone over and in ten years we will see the actual impact - but it will be too late.
> all the hedge funds are swooping in with dark money, dark legal and dark politics
I'm concerned about this also. I wonder if this is something that can be mitigated somehow via referendum?
It seems wrong if the will of the people in a democracy has to take a back seat to hedge fund profits, especially when it comes to a place to live. it's tough though, current homeowners don't want there to be more houses...
Or maybe we'll luck out demographically, when the baby boomer generation dies they'll be less demand for housing.
It's more of a polyarchy. The U.S. system is unique (originally but unremarkable today) in two respects: written constitution, and not a monarchy. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. Madison
The argument against the first constitution, the Articles of Confederation, is that the federal government had essentially no power. The argument against the second, it it's effectively created a presidential democracy, or unitary executive. It's a model our diplomats expressly avoided when helping other countries write a constitution. It's fragile, and while it's so far been stable in the U.S. it's possible we've just been lucky so far.
But a polyarchy doesn't guarantee democracy, even representative democracy. It certainly wasn't pluralistic at its founding: white, male, land owners. It took a long time to unwind that and here we are with most states in one form or another trying to make it harder for people to vote. Can a democracy democratically undemocratize itself? Sure.
If it wants to weaken or even obsolete democracy, by any combination of action or inaction, that's what will happen. One of the classic examples is the principate period of the Roman Empire. It had the veneer of a democracy, including having a senate, but there was an emperor who had all the real authority. That period lasted over 200 years, so it's not like we'd necessarily see the end to elections, laws, casting aside the constitution, or any of the other institutions we think display proof of "democracy".
Recently I've been throwing around the word democracy as a way of calling out decidedly undemocratic political activity, because of the positive connotations the word has, given the narrative we're taught in this country that democracy is good, we are a shining beacon of democracy, spreading democracy to those who don't have it, etc. Perhaps trying to use the veneer were taught against those in power playing lip service to the will of the people? It's not as easy for people to shout down the idea of democracy as it is to argue with typical partisan positions.
I've been interested in Switzerland lately, where the people seem to have retained power over their representatives, being able to petition for referendums to add or remove any law they don't like, and with much smaller political structures, having cantons the size of U.S. counties that enjoy more independence than U.S. states.
I chose to buy a house in Ballard Seattle just so I could be near things and not have to drive (along with a bunch of streets shutdown for bike/pedistrian traffic + the Burke Gilman bike trail). It costs a lot more, and we don't have a huge yard, but you can get those things without going for a planned community if you don't mind some urban living.
When I lived in SLC I got most of the same thing (living near U of U in an old Victorian). Well, the biking was a bit harder, no trails, but it was easy enough (maybe I was just younger then, however).
I was in Utah for a while and thought Daybreak looked great. Glad to hear that residents like it there. If I ever move back it’s towards the top of my list of areas I’d be interested in.
Outside of a few neighborhoods in Salt Lake City, Provo, and rural areas, I feel like the vast majority of Utah is the epitome of American suburbs, and all the issues that come with that, so I can see why many Utahns might scoff at something different like Daybreak.
Bike commuting is amazing here, as it is in many parts of the US that have the population density and public funding to execute it.
Anyway, Daybreak sounds amazing, and yeah, communities like that will always get "bad raps" from locals outside of it. It's human nature:
These places are usually priced very high per square foot, due to the huge demand vs. supply of walkable neighborhoods. Locals outside of it see it as a luxury purchase, and then associate the residents with the most snobby behavior of the few snobs who inevitably inhabit it.
I'm going to take a wild guess that the locals outside of the community have stereotypical nicknames for it like "People's Republic of Daybreak" or "Bankbreak" or something like that, lol.
The whole neighborhood is designed to be walkable, with parks, pools, trails, train stations, grocery stores and restaurants (added in the later phases, which are being developed right now) within 5 minutes of your doorstep.
It gets a bad rap from locals on the outside, but talk to the people living here (mostly expats from out of state) and nearly all of them say the same thing:
> "We love it here!"
and
> "Why aren't more communities built this way?"
I will say though, the US is poorly equipped for bicycle commuting. Even our neighborhood doesn't have many dedicated bike paths, opting instead to share the road with cars. Most diehard cyclists I know will tell you it's a matter of "when" not "if" you have a scary encounter with a driver. And with the amount of gigantic trucks on the roads out here that people use as their commuter cars, you can imagine these encounters don't typically end well.