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We Should Be Building Cities for People, Not Cars (2016)

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Re: We Should Be Building Cities for People, Not Cars (2016)

#151

Post by elihu »

coldtea wrote: post #90
johngalt wrote: post #24

This is one of those scaling vs. switching cost problems. If you have a small town, then cars are a better option than transit. In a large metropolis, transit is better. The problem is that as a city scales up, each individual step results in continually adding infrastructure for cars without ever making the active decision to switch, and redesign the entire city. When a small town grows into a medium, it makes sense…

> If you have a small town, then cars are a better option than transit. In a large metropolis, transit is better. Were did that came from? In a small town, you can get by fine with walking, bikes and so on -- like tons of Europeans do in tons of small (and even larger) towns, including towns where cars are totally forbidden and others were (because the town was built in medieval times and its buildings still stand ju…

> In a small town, you can get by fine with walking, bikes and so on

In a small town, most of the population served by the amenities in that town don't actually live within city limits. The people in town may be fine with walking or biking, but providing non-car transportation options to rural people isn't as easy. Most people who live on farms would find it difficult to get by without a car.

Re: We Should Be Building Cities for People, Not Cars (2016)

#152

Post by Zarath »

AcerbicZero wrote: post #130

It seems this discussion comes up fairly often, and the solution is almost always some variation of "make driving too expensive and/or too inconvenient, to force people to use public transit". On the surface that kind of makes sense, using a large stick to strongly encourage change, but I think at its core it misses a huge portion of the problem, which is that bad public transit is 10x worse than just sitting in a bi…

How much can you condense a city if you have no roads at all? What I mean is that walking/biking/scootering in a city with no roads is probably twice, if not more, times more efficient.

Re: We Should Be Building Cities for People, Not Cars (2016)

#153

Post by 2trill2spill »

Zarath wrote: post #152
AcerbicZero wrote: post #130

It seems this discussion comes up fairly often, and the solution is almost always some variation of "make driving too expensive and/or too inconvenient, to force people to use public transit". On the surface that kind of makes sense, using a large stick to strongly encourage change, but I think at its core it misses a huge portion of the problem, which is that bad public transit is 10x worse than just sitting in a bi…

How much can you condense a city if you have no roads at all? What I mean is that walking/biking/scootering in a city with no roads is probably twice, if not more, times more efficient.

How are you suppose to move goods around if you have no roads? On bike?, on foot?, by rail? Biking and on foot would be impractical for large items or many items, and if we used rail it would have to be all over the city, so your back to the same problem with roads but instead of cars and roads its trains and rail.

Re: We Should Be Building Cities for People, Not Cars (2016)

#154

Post by scythe »

coldtea wrote: post #120
scythe wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>>If you have a small town, then cars are a better option than transit. [...] >W[h]ere did that came from? In a small town, you can get by fine with walking, bikes and so on This isn't really the point. Sure, you can build a small town which prioritizes walking over cars. There are even examples in the US, such as Helen, Georgia. However, most people (US) would not prefer to live in such a town. In Europe, those tow…

> However, most people (US) would not prefer to live in such a town. Citation needed. Most people in the US were never given the chance to live in such a town (all other things being equal, like them being able to afford to live there). And there's also the cultural conditioning. Besides, there are rich areas in the US too, with little to no cars and lotsa walking and jogging, and people go live there just fine, payi…

>Citation needed.

There is no need for a citation for such a claim. It is well within the boundaries of my personal experience. I live in America, I have known lots of people, and I've become familiar with what they want.

>And there's also the cultural conditioning.

People should only be conditioned to live the ways you want them to, of course. It's only "cultural conditioning" when you don't like it.

Re: We Should Be Building Cities for People, Not Cars (2016)

#155

Post by peterwwillis »

AcerbicZero wrote: post #130

It seems this discussion comes up fairly often, and the solution is almost always some variation of "make driving too expensive and/or too inconvenient, to force people to use public transit". On the surface that kind of makes sense, using a large stick to strongly encourage change, but I think at its core it misses a huge portion of the problem, which is that bad public transit is 10x worse than just sitting in a bi…

> The homeless will continue to do whatever they can get away with, and those of us with higher incomes will grumble a bit and pay the taxes. The only solution I've seen that has a chance to change this is to come down hard on poor public transit behavior, perhaps by putting actual people on the buses with the specific job of cracking down on the drunk/high/piss soaked/etc types, in an effort to improve the quality of the service to the point that the middle-upper income groups uses it again.

Talk about missing the forest for the trees. Or should I say, the city for the abandoned human beings.

If you aren't taking public transit because you don't like the homeless people on the buses, how about you help them become less homeless or have a place to stay, rather than just shooing them away?

Re: We Should Be Building Cities for People, Not Cars (2016)

#156

Post by refurb »

lgregg wrote: post #117
paulddraper wrote: post #49

> Websites like Zillow and Apartments.com offer calculations for commute length and walkability to everyday destinations like grocery stores If I'm walking to the store, do I (a) try to carry 20+ grocery bags home for my family of five or (b) make a grocery trip twice a week? I don't love either of those. And that's only groceries, not shopping in general. My wife got a 50lb bag of fertilizer from Tractor Supply yest…

If you live within walking distance, why would you carry 20+ grocery bags. Just shop for what you need in the next day, not an entire month.

That sounds incredibly inefficient.

Re: We Should Be Building Cities for People, Not Cars (2016)

#158

Post by btingle »

peterwwillis wrote: post #155
AcerbicZero wrote: post #130

It seems this discussion comes up fairly often, and the solution is almost always some variation of "make driving too expensive and/or too inconvenient, to force people to use public transit". On the surface that kind of makes sense, using a large stick to strongly encourage change, but I think at its core it misses a huge portion of the problem, which is that bad public transit is 10x worse than just sitting in a bi…

> The homeless will continue to do whatever they can get away with, and those of us with higher incomes will grumble a bit and pay the taxes. The only solution I've seen that has a chance to change this is to come down hard on poor public transit behavior, perhaps by putting actual people on the buses with the specific job of cracking down on the drunk/high/piss soaked/etc types, in an effort to improve the quality o…

What do I look like, mother Theresa? It's not my job to solve the city's homelessness problem. Do you mean to say that politicians/public officials/etc should be dealing with the problem?

Re: We Should Be Building Cities for People, Not Cars (2016)

#159

Post by black_puppydog »

ManFromUranus wrote: post #139
AcerbicZero wrote: post #130

It seems this discussion comes up fairly often, and the solution is almost always some variation of "make driving too expensive and/or too inconvenient, to force people to use public transit". On the surface that kind of makes sense, using a large stick to strongly encourage change, but I think at its core it misses a huge portion of the problem, which is that bad public transit is 10x worse than just sitting in a bi…

Homeless people using transit as a shelter is a huge problem, it makes transit undesirable. Also politicians are so milquetoast they won't address the problem for fear of looking like a 'bad guy' when in reality transit was never designed to be a homeless shelter, so homeless need to be forcibly removed from the vehicle and excluded from the transit system where possible. Eventually homeless ruin everything they touc…

Okay I guess I have to heavily adjust my view of public transit here. Given, I've only seen European transit systems, but none of them had a problem of that scale. Sure, the occasional junkie and drunk, but nothing even remotely bad enough to have an influence on my everyday transit behaviour.

That being said: I prefer biking, and with two saddle bags I can easily do the shopping for two. And I've seen friends get e-bikes and ditch a lifelong car lifestyle on the countryside.

EDIT

And "by the way": why do the richest societies of the world afford themselves the " luxury " of having homeless people at all? It's so weird...

Re: We Should Be Building Cities for People, Not Cars (2016)

#160

Post by scythe »

moltar wrote: post #99
Zaskoda wrote: post #62

I'm one of those folks who would love to drop everything I have going to wander off into the desert/forest/underwater/whatever with the intention of bootstrapping a new city from scratch. The more I talk about it, I've found that there are a lot of people who would love such an adventure - if we could all just find some effort worth getting behind. It's sort of like starting a hippy commune, only with high-tech inten…

It’s possible and been done. See this doc for a good example of this happening in US: https://www.netflix.com/title/80145240

I think the Rajneesh movement is a pretty bad example of the kind of project the OP talks about. Among the ways it could be improved on, it would be nice to not destroy a town which was already there, to build a secular community without a cult leader, to avoid kidnapping and drugging homeless people, and to not poison hundreds of people in an attempt to interfere with an election. Oh, and maybe let people wear a color that isn't red.
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