161–170 of 344 posts
Funny how the loudest voices in these sorts of articles are always from places with temperate weather.
I walked or cycled miles to school my whole life in one of the wettest areas of Europe. Parents need to toughen up, wrap their kids up, refuse to give them lifts and kick them out the door.
We really do have to radically re-think our cities but the biggest issues aren't going to be practical but emotional. In London parents drive their children around in 4x4s, knowing that their vehicle causes the pollution that is affecting their own children's health. I'm not sure how you even start to get around that but to some extent you will never persuade everybody to reduce their damaging behaviour. You need to…
No. Car is not just the "culture", car serves our need. If you are young without kids, it may not make much difference for you to ride a car, or take a bus, or a train, subway, etc. But if you have a family, it makes a huge pain without your own vehicle. If the city of future requires families to abandon their own vehicle, it is not the correct city of future. Just design a better one.
But of course we do have a car, so can have the best of both worlds.
I imagine that if we didn't have a car we would be using delivery a lot more often. Hard to do a Costco run without one.
I can imagine life with kids but without a car. But of course that life would heavily rely on Lyft & taxis, so is that really car free?
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Many cities in the OECD maybe. Lots of cities in Africa and Asia are going with the American model of car dependent sprawl and it’s completely untenable. My childhood home of Bangalore has become a nightmare.
India still invests a lot in public infrastructure. Bangalore is an exception. Mumbai, Delhi, Jaipur etc have invested a lot in urban infra especially the metro. Bangalore was just not ready for the influx of IT companies and is having serious trouble keeping up. But I love the airport buses though. Given India’s population, landscape plus the stave vs central govt politics, its unlikely India will see major car-depe…
https://m.hindustantimes.com/delhi-news/capital-chaos-delhi-...
Funny how the loudest voices in these sorts of articles are always from places with temperate weather.
I'm loudly anti-car and I live in Scotland. Honestly, when it comes to weather most people are pathetic. A bit of cold/rain won't kill you, just need gloves and a light waterproof later. I walked or cycled miles to school my whole life in one of the wettest areas of Europe. Parents need to toughen up, wrap their kids up, refuse to give them lifts and kick them out the door.
Admittedly it can be good for a child to be self-sufficient and do their own planning.
My City is double decking highways all the while building zero new rail and or bike lanes. They are doubling down on stupid.
People need examples of good public transportation in the US beyond NYC or Chicago because those cities come with a lot of other baggage (high taxes, high rent, high CoL in general). Without an example, it looks to a suburbanite like the trade off is they lose their yard and 75% of the square footage of their home for less flexibility and a dirty transportation experience.
These people do not marvel at the efficiency of the Yamamote line as people are shoved in by train operators during rush hour. They hug the steering wheels of their luxurious personal space SUVs.
What makes it worse is that prominent politicians in the US on the side promoting public transport don’t bother to use it when slightly inconvenient (e.g. the “scandal” of AOC using a minivan when she could have taken a subway). Even people on the “left” aren’t leading by example.
I'd hate walking everywhere, having to get tiny amounts of groceries every day instead of stocking up every 2 weeks, etc. Walking/standing all day at conventions feels like death and a half a mile trip to the fast food places around here turns from 2 minutes to 10 minutes if I walk, which I tried when someone from Europe said that's walking distance. Walking such distances just makes me constantly wish I was driving…
Medium-intensity exercise (e.g., jogging) for weight loss has been debunked. Long-duration, low-intensity exercise (e.g., walking) or high-intensity exercise (e.g., interval sprints) will both lead to weight loss. Most people don't have time for the former (unless it's part of their lives, i.e. they walk a lot in a city), so if your goal is weight loss, skip the jogging and look at HIIT.
Personally, I live a 3 min walk from a grocery store and it's great. I stop by on my 8 min walk back from the train station (after a 17 min ride to work) a couple times a week. Many things I buy wouldn't last 2 weeks (though for things that do, I still take the occasional trip to Costco). If I lived in an area not designed for walking (like 95% of America), I'm sure I'd feel similarly to you, but I much prefer living here in Seattle (and walking) than I did living in a car-oriented city.
The Real Reason Your City Has No Money
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason...
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Kids is actually a tough case, especially when they're infants. You actually need to haul around a bunch of stuff to take a kid out and transit is rarely design around the needs of parents. Strollers are a pain to get into a bus or train, and often worsen crowding because they're so big. And it's just not practical to have to get car seats in and out of car-shares or cabs. Even in places with well considered transit…
Or live in an area (design and build areas) with good childcare options within walking distance. (Where "walking distance" is up to a mile away, not what Americans have gotten used to.) Modern car seats and LATCH anchors actually make it fairly easy to bring a child car seat with you. I agree with you though, all this stuff is bulky and adds up to a lot of baggage. It makes sense to have a car for your child. But tho…
See also: food deserts
> they’d no longer segregate rich from poor Should people who want to spend more on housing be automatically labeled “rich”?
Should people who can't afford housing be automatically labelled "poor"? It's certainly one indicator. Not segrating people improves the world. Segragating them introduces division, self-evidentially. Something to be avoided, then, and worked against. Planners will try to mix properties in a new development, if the local politics is to provide for everyone fairly.
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jesus are we really comparing this https://www.google.com/maps/place/San+Francisco+Bay+Area,+CA... and this https://www.google.com/maps/place/Copenhagen,+Denmark/@55.67... (should open at the same scale) as if they were comparable sprawl?
That is a dumb comparison, the problem we are discussing is that SF sprawl is less dense, of course it will appear huge on a map compared to denser cities. SF metropolitan area is 4.8 million, about twice that of Copenhagen, but its sprawl looks way more than twice the size of Copenhagen sprawl. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco%E2%80%93Oakland%...