261–270 of 994 posts
The land value of your city will be so much better if you have a walkable city. Walkable is always the start, then you map bikes, and public transport on top.
You will have city that is economically productive and vibrant.
I think the thing that really struck a chord with me about car-centric development, as someone who lives in a city with fairly poor public transport (by certain standards, it would actually be quite good if it were in the US) and where driving is the norm for getting around - Prioritising cars actually makes things worse for drivers. We spend many tens of billions of dollars a year on roads in my state and traffic in…
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Exactly. Cars are a better experience in almost all cases, but also have higher marginal costs. They also take up a lot of space, which in a dense city where space is at a premium makes them even more expensive due to the cost of things like parking and big roads. The solution isn't to force people into one option or the other. It's to make all options available at market rates and let them chose.
> Exactly. Cars are a better experience in almost all cases, I completely disagree. On a train or bus I can stand up and stretch my legs, I'm not cramped into a single valid sitting position. I don't get motion sickness on trains or busses like I do in cars, and don't feel claustrophobic. Also in cars I'm constantly stuck in traffic and can't do anything, whereas a bus or train no matter what's happening I can just r…
No during rush hour you're more likely to be cramped into a single valid standing position.
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Car oriented people seriously underestimate how many people that can be transported in a subway train and how much highway space it would take to transport the same number of people in cars. One subway line can transport more people than even the widest existing highway. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Passenger_Capacity_of_dif... (edit: spelling)
People don’t pick their mode of transportation based on space efficiency. They pick their mode of transportation based on their needs and priorities. Taking the subway works when there’s a stop near your home, a stop near your destination, and you have all of the time necessary to wait for it. If these conditions aren’t met then you need additional transport to and from one or both ends of the subway journey. There’s…
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You can also design things so that people are not crammed in at a rate of hundreds of thousands per square km. Then, car-based infrastructure gives you a lot of freedom to place homes and businesses far apart and have reasonable travel time and capacity for everyone. When I moved from Manhattan to an "evil" suburb full of "stroads," my door-to-door time to pretty much everything decreased. Getting rid of waiting for…
Sure. Now tell us how much time it took to get to your office in Manhattan and how much it cost to park there. The suburb is built around the fact that people live there but travel to the main city every day. Now if you have decent train service to the main city, this is starting to be interesting urban design.
Most people do not work in Manhattan. I'm not sure about OPs situation, but there are a lot of other places people work in New York City, not to mention other cities.
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> Growing up in suburban California I was basically in an outdoor prison until I could drive. Having grown up in the Netherlands and having a decision to make where we want our kids to grow up (US spouse), this feels painful to read. I suppose the SWE salaries aren't worth it. Also this is one of the best towns to cycle in the Netherlands: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-TuGAHR78w&ab_channel=NotJu...
Hah, I had a feeling that was a NJB video. It is generally surreal to me that even smaller settlements in Europe have more, shall we say, evolvability than North American ones, and (at least in some cases owing to their antiquity) prioritize the needs of pedestrians.
I think the thing that really struck a chord with me about car-centric development, as someone who lives in a city with fairly poor public transport (by certain standards, it would actually be quite good if it were in the US) and where driving is the norm for getting around - Prioritising cars actually makes things worse for drivers. We spend many tens of billions of dollars a year on roads in my state and traffic in…
Car oriented people seriously underestimate how many people that can be transported in a subway train and how much highway space it would take to transport the same number of people in cars. One subway line can transport more people than even the widest existing highway. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Passenger_Capacity_of_dif... (edit: spelling)
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I love my personal car bubble as much or more than most people (though maybe not as much as you), but at some point we have to get over ourselves. We're all so spoiled. Why the hell do we deserve to all have our own giant speed machines careening through cities where people (including us drivers!) are trying to live? It doesn't make any sense and it's a shame that we've let it go so far, especially in the US. It shou…
Do you have kids? I don't think so (correct me if I'm wrong). Car is absolutely essential for driving around small kids no matter the urban density. I'm more dependent on my car(s) when I got the first newborn than I ever was.
We rent a car ~10-20 times a year, but that's usually for vacations or trips out of the city to visit family. Regular weekly family life we use buses, the underground (metro), trains, or sometimes taxis.
We are considering eventually getting a car, but we've managed for 4 years with children to not need one and it's not been an issue.
(I live in London, United Kingdom)
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You can also design things so that people are not crammed in at a rate of hundreds of thousands per square km. Then, car-based infrastructure gives you a lot of freedom to place homes and businesses far apart and have reasonable travel time and capacity for everyone. When I moved from Manhattan to an "evil" suburb full of "stroads," my door-to-door time to pretty much everything decreased. Getting rid of waiting for…
Sure. Now tell us how much time it took to get to your office in Manhattan and how much it cost to park there. The suburb is built around the fact that people live there but travel to the main city every day. Now if you have decent train service to the main city, this is starting to be interesting urban design.
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I of course understand this attitude, but it fills me with hopeless dread that this country will never be able to do anything hard again. Our addiction to cars is one of the hardest to swallow and easiest to fix problems, and yet the will to do so is simply non-existent. To convince an American to give up on any collective, just point out they'll be mildly inconvenienced. No wonder we never even tried to fight our ca…
Safety is the much bigger challenge for public transit in the US right now. Since the pandemic, most cities have really eased off of any enforcement of rules or laws in public spaces. Driving in rush hour traffic sucks, but it beats getting randomly stabbed in the neck by some psycho who didn’t even pay his fare.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-07-19/new-yo...