Suburban sprawl is stifling the US economy
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Re: Suburban sprawl is stifling the US economy
#2But NIMBYs who won't allow construction in cities have made cities unaffordable.
Re: Suburban sprawl is stifling the US economy
#3But NIMBYs who won't allow construction in cities have made cities unaffordable.
And ironically they pay way more in taxes building excessively large public transit systems.
Re: Suburban sprawl is stifling the US economy
#4Suburbs are horribly designed, case in point Irvine CA. Worst place I have ever been too. Giant 8 lane surface streets but still endless traffic. No useful public transit so everyone is sitting in a car.
The future looks bleak for socal unless population normalizes.
Re: Suburban sprawl is stifling the US economy
#5An individual with the choice of living in the city or in suburbia is faced with a conundrum. Although you would think that by living in the city the individual will save money by expending significantly less natural resources and dramatically lowering his carbon footprint, it ironically costs him less money to do the exact opposite by living in the suburbs. This is because if the individual chooses to live in the city he must pay an extraordinarily high commission in the form of capital gains or rent to land lords. From a financial standpoint living in the suburbs is the only rational choice.
This type of counterintuitive behavior only occurs because we live in an era where oil is dirt cheap. This is the only time in human history where living farther away from the city is actually cheaper then living closer to it. Before the advent of the automobile, urban infrastructure centered around walkable cities as you will see throughout Europe. One day, as we start running out of oil, the suburbs will become the new ghettos.
Re: Suburban sprawl is stifling the US economy
#6I'm from Glasgow, Scotland myself and I've never been to US but I've done a fair amount of research. Our societies differ a lot if it goes to moving around. I can normally walk around the whole town(600k people). I take the public transportation when I'm lazy.
I am always amazed when I hear from my US friends "you have to have a car otherwise you can't get anywhere" or "there are no sidewalks". Wow. In Europe most of the cities are a lot more densely populated than in the US which cuts costs, but even though there is more people packed in the same space(lots of people live in flats), they don't mind bacause everything is close and they save their time. And green areas? Why have a back yard when you have a park 5 mins away.
It's interesting how the standards of living differ between us. It seems to me that a lot of people crave a suburbian house in the US. I'd love to live there for a while to get a feel of the society and why it thinks in this way.
There's a TED talk I stumbled upon some time ago - only 5mins but perfectly approaches part of the problem we are discussing here ;) "How to reinvent the apartment building" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-KnaYZJg48
Re: Suburban sprawl is stifling the US economy
#7But NIMBYs who won't allow construction in cities have made cities unaffordable.
And ironically they pay way more in taxes building excessively large public transit systems.
> excessively large public transit systems
Because the "real" solution is for every single person to own and drive a car that seats 4, but 99% of the time only has 1 person in it?
Re: Suburban sprawl is stifling the US economy
#8Suburbs are horribly designed, case in point Irvine CA. Worst place I have ever been too. Giant 8 lane surface streets but still endless traffic. No useful public transit so everyone is sitting in a car. The future looks bleak for socal unless population normalizes.
My favourite part of suburbs is the grid of street maximally designed to make driving over them less efficient than avoiding them.
Intuitively one would think this decreases traffic but instead it turns the neighbourhood into a kind of watershed where all traffic quickly converges to the same few progressively broader street.
The harder the grid planner tried to inhibit through-traffic, the worse the effect.
Re: Suburban sprawl is stifling the US economy
#9I'm from Glasgow, Scotland myself and I've never been to US but I've done a fair amount of research. Our societies differ a lot if it goes to moving around. I can normally walk around the whole town(600k people). I take the public transportation when I'm lazy. I am always amazed when I hear from my US friends "you have to have a car otherwise you can't get anywhere" or "there are no sidewalks". Wow. In Europe most of…
Berlin is a bit like a US city in term of sheer surface area. But the individual neighbourhoods are much more livable and self-contained and the S-Bahn (suburban trains) efficiently connect all the sprawl. The individual neighbourhoods also have fairly efficient grids compared to US suburbs and usually higher densities (taller buildings, more multiple-tenancies).
Re: Suburban sprawl is stifling the US economy
#10I'm from Glasgow, Scotland myself and I've never been to US but I've done a fair amount of research. Our societies differ a lot if it goes to moving around. I can normally walk around the whole town(600k people). I take the public transportation when I'm lazy. I am always amazed when I hear from my US friends "you have to have a car otherwise you can't get anywhere" or "there are no sidewalks". Wow. In Europe most of…
> whole town(600k people).
If you want to compare to a similar city in the US look at Portland, Oregon. The city proper has 500k ~ 600k (~2.5m if you count the 'metro area' -- for comparison Toronto Canada has ~2.7m people in the city proper).