81–90 of 570 posts
So a city of 30k people requires less infrastructure than a city of 6M people? Where are the examples of major metropolitan areas without big freeway intersections?
Yes, it's one of the weirdest pet-peeve trends over the past 5-10 years. No, I do not like it, thanks for asking.
Wait, you didn't ask me? You mean nobody was asking me, it's just something I decided to couch in a response to a conversation that wasn't going on?
But seriously, I wonder what's going on when we do this. My theory is that it originally caught on to lend credence to what we're saying when we pretend our statement is actually a response to an open question, though now it's just subconscious rhetorical device to emphasize a point, I would imagine.
As for the article, growing up 45min outside of Houston, that interchange is all I think about when I entertain the idea of moving to Houston or DFW. There's something grotesque about it and the feeling it gives me. Cars, traffic, and this need to slave away in a commute.
Austin keeps voting down highway extension proposals. I'm sure anyone who has to sit in Austin traffic daily hates that, but we can't have every damn city in Texas becoming a concrete metropolis.
"Rather, Cold War–era urban design philosophy in the U.S. prioritized sprawl because older cities that had urbanized pre–World War II—New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Detroit—were seen as being susceptible to nuclear strikes. Less-dense cities such as Los Angeles and Houston were less likely to be targeted for a nuclear attack. Sprawl was a deterrent against Soviet aggression." That's the first time I've heard th…
Whenever Americans are confronted by foreigners with the fact that they under perform or do less well in some area, they find some good excuse why they are actually not under performing. The sprawl is not just a side effect of car culture, or zoning laws, or whites not wanting to live next to colored people, or the land being cheaper far from city centers.
No, it was actually a feature designed to prevent a nuclear attack.
The elephant in the room is the assumption that _everyone wants to be stacked on top of each other_. I do agree that designing cities around cars has ruined a lot of nice places though.
They don't want to be stacked, but they do want jobs, they want Chinese/Indian/French/... restaurants, they want daycares, they want schools, they want high-schools, they want notaries, and hospitals and clinics, they want shopping malls and delis, they want pharmacies and pawn shops, ... It's almost like wanting 50000 people with different professions nearby means you have to live next to 50000 people. Until we disc…
GDP: Houston, Texas = ~$500B/yr Siena, Tuscany = ~$11B/yr
I think the point being made here is that manufacturing and distribution require roads. People can live in sardine cans however manufacturing / industrial sectors cannot. Zooming in on a engineering marvel for traffic handling and comparing it to high density mixed use housing is a tad non sequitur. Albeit an interesting photo and thought exercise.
"Rather, Cold War–era urban design philosophy in the U.S. prioritized sprawl because older cities that had urbanized pre–World War II—New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Detroit—were seen as being susceptible to nuclear strikes. Less-dense cities such as Los Angeles and Houston were less likely to be targeted for a nuclear attack. Sprawl was a deterrent against Soviet aggression." That's the first time I've heard th…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And? Can't aspire to a better future where we don't sit in traffic for hours to get across the city, choking our skies with car smog and carbon dioxide that'll ruin the environment for future generations? Our design philosophy around cities are the biggest mistake made of 20th century American politics, and I'll die on that hill.
Don’t live there if you don’t like it?
I live in Texas. This assertion is true of most cities in Texas also. Houston is the largest population center in Texas with 6M+ in the city. Also Houston is a busy center for interstate and international commerce especially for trucking.
It's interesting that protests generally happen in dense parts of cities. Now imagine a city without a dense part - protesting becomes more difficult. Myanmar's non-democratic military government actually moved their capital from a dense city to a new city so spread out and with no downtown area - potentially to prevent the ability to protest the government. https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/inside-burma-s-ghost-t…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann%27s_renovation_of_Pa...