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American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

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Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#111

Post by 2bitencryption »

wild_preference wrote: post #62
Derived wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America has plenty of cities that are just like cities everywhere else...we're a big country, we hardly have need to pack everyone in like sardines. I live in a major city, downtown. And I'm starting to hate it. No personal space, no yard, shared (or no) garage, and I'm a car enthusiast by the way, which I'm sure is practically a dirty word around most city-dwellers now. I'm seriously considering moving out to the su…

I don’t think so. American cities just aren’t dense enough to please compact-city lovers looking for a walkable experience like Prague. Even where I live in Guadalajara is better than every city I’ve lived in the States because of all the tiny shops near me. In the States I may have a 7/11 near me which doesn’t even carry coffee grounds or fruit/veg. It’s kind if a sad place to live.

> I may have a 7/11 near me which doesn’t even carry coffee grounds or fruit/veg. It’s kind if a sad place to live.

it's only sad because you went to a 7/11 expecting to get produce! I guarantee you there's a real grocery store within a few blocks.

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#112

Post by wool_gather »

lazyjones wrote: post #91
angarg12 wrote: post #2

I visited the US (particularly the bay area) for the first time recently, and I was baffled by the sparsity of buildings. Suburbs and shopping areas are so far away that you need a car to go anywhere, and in turn you need massive expanses to held all those vehicles, which means that stores are even more spread apart, which essentially becomes a snowball. Being used to high density housing and underground parking spac…

But wasn't this because first people decided they wanted to purchase larger amounts of goods per trip, so they needed a car to transport that? In Europe's old cities, people often go shopping every day even if they're single. It's annoying to me, as the infrastructure is mostly built for lugging around as much as you can carry home on your feet and even all the packaged foods come in very small sizes (2 servings). US…

> What I don't understand is the number of restaurants built [...] far away from residential areas

This is probably zoning; in many non-urban places mixed zoning is considered to lower the quality of residential living. So you end up with subdivision mazes without so much as a convenience store in walking range.

> wasn't this because first people decided they wanted to purchase larger amounts of goods per trip

My impression is that it's the other way around: because trips take so long, you maximize the amount you fetch on each.

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#113

Post by blincoln »

mattlondon wrote: post #47
ryanSrich wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few points: 1.) A lot of employers offer some percentage of parking reimbursement. 2.) A lot of employees live 1+ hour away. The bus doesn't work in these situations. 3.) Often times the bus is extremely dirty and dangerous. Risking injury or confrontation isn't worth saving a few dollars a day on driving.

Here in the UK, employers offer things like interest free loans for season tickets or buying a folding commuter bike etc. 1+ hour away is fairly common in London, even on public transport. Not only is London itself pretty large, but it has a big catchment area for people coming in for work from elsewhere. Buses can be made safer and cleaner and more comfortable with investment. Would I prefer to drive in my own car i…

I've visited London, and your rail systems (both the Underground and the national rail) are amazing. I feel very strongly that if more Americans could see how rail works in and around London with their own eyes, it would make people realize that it was the right approach for major cities.

I think that in the US, the problem is that most public transit is absolute garbage[1], and so people who have only lived here don't realize that it can actually be superior to a car for commuting if the people are willing to provide the funds to government and insist on using it to build a world-class public transit system. Therefore, public transit rarely improves, and so it's perceived as "the poor person's option" because it's extremely slow compared to driving, and generally absolutely filthy.

[1] To make things worse, the employees of the transit systems seem to generally be told that the systems they're supporting already are "world-class", and "the envy of the country", so they feel like there's no room for improvement.

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#114

Post by isoskeles »

angarg12 wrote: post #2

I visited the US (particularly the bay area) for the first time recently, and I was baffled by the sparsity of buildings. Suburbs and shopping areas are so far away that you need a car to go anywhere, and in turn you need massive expanses to held all those vehicles, which means that stores are even more spread apart, which essentially becomes a snowball. Being used to high density housing and underground parking spac…

Have you been to many other regions in the US? I live in the Bay Area and one of the few things I love about it is that it's way more "walkable" than other places I've lived in the states, especially the suburbs.

Or, maybe a better question: what part of the Bay Area?

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#115

Post by extradego »

rainbowmverse wrote: post #73
extradego wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right on the money. Before WW2, America was a culture desert. Europeans fleeing the war are the only reason NYC became an international culture hub. Hip-hop is undoubtedly the most progressive Western art form. (Side note: hip-hop's genius appropriations of commercial symbolisms and it's will to collective empowerment directly underwrite and provide the language of the public engagement of today's millenials. It's in…

Appropriation and disproportionate credit for white people is a real and serious problem, but it's not the whole story. Most of the actual musicians who were inspired by black music fully acknowledged their inspirations and were often annoyed at how no one seemed to care about the people they looked up to. The actual artists out on the stage doing the music know exactly what comes from where. Culture spreads like tha…

I have an opinionated view of American culture, and I'm daily surrounded by other musicians, artists. These are the topics we discuss. I am opinionated as a result.

In my previous comment, please note when I say "hip-hop", I am not referring to music, but culture. Nonetheless...

I grew up in the south. My father was literally a clogger. I'm no stranger to folk. But, I am extremely skeptical of a lot of it's history. The mid-century folk-revival era did a real number on our conception of what's really there culture-wise. Behind the curtain, I am honestly afraid it's mostly puritanism, shame, and self-conflict. It's interesting but I think calling it a cultural movement is mostly romanticism. In terms of music, we could delve into details for days, and break down the whole history of hip-hop and jazz, and I do encourage that. There's a lot of good music there. But, I'm afraid it serves essentially the same end in terms of culture; a terribly familiar story. Hip-hop exhibits the whole of the cultural dynamic fairly explicitly, and is internationally renowned. Folk is mostly replicated in parody.

EDIT: Another thing to add... I think most people would be surprised how many contemporary folk musicians (young ones) would actually agree with me. They eventually are challenged with contending with things like: Did folk come from slaves? Or the working class? Or the fraught relations between the two? And is it reconcilable? Where did country music come from?

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#116

Post by tajen »

narrator wrote: post #46
erikpukinskis wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how we have had such economic growth. We use our own population as a testbed where we disintermediate all of our own cultural support systems so that everything must be hired out. Food, transport, entertainment, self concept, family, all of it has been reformed in the U.S. over the last 100 years to replace community labor with commercial relations. This means we get first dibs on these new industries (Softwa…

The reason that everything is so not integrated is because of the American culture of containment. You have very very different kinds of people living in close physical proximity who often want nothing to do with each other. Think East Palo Alto and Palo Alto for example, especially in the 90s when East Palo Alto had the highest murder rate per capita in the U.S. Nowadays, physical proximity means less and less. Rela…

Re: Tinder. The #metoo campaign has helped a lot too, frightening men into never doing real-life courting. “There’s a place to do such things!”, we’ve heard, namely (paid) clubs, Tinder and other commercial places.

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#117

Post by ryanwaggoner »

2bitencryption wrote: post #111
wild_preference wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think so. American cities just aren’t dense enough to please compact-city lovers looking for a walkable experience like Prague. Even where I live in Guadalajara is better than every city I’ve lived in the States because of all the tiny shops near me. In the States I may have a 7/11 near me which doesn’t even carry coffee grounds or fruit/veg. It’s kind if a sad place to live.

> I may have a 7/11 near me which doesn’t even carry coffee grounds or fruit/veg. It’s kind if a sad place to live. it's only sad because you went to a 7/11 expecting to get produce! I guarantee you there's a real grocery store within a few blocks.

I guarantee you there's a real grocery store within a few blocks.

Pretty good chance that's not true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert

"In 2010, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) reported that 23.5% of Americans live in a food desert, meaning that they live more than one mile from a supermarket in urban or suburban areas, and more than 10 miles from a supermarket in rural areas."

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#118

Post by btrettel »

jschwartzi wrote: post #105
btrettel wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Roads have to be repurposed to make light personal transportation safe. Take every two-way two-lane and split it into a one-way, with a physical separation between a car side and a personal transport side. Remove parking from the curbs, and put it in the middle so one side can be for cars and the other for bikes, scooters, skaters, etc. As a cyclist, I'd argue that most separated lanes as implemented are less safe…

> A friend of mine has additionally pointed out that the city tends to put the cycle track on the downhill side of the road (but not the uphill), which is exactly the opposite of what they should do because cyclists go much faster downhill than uphill. I saw a really good example of an unsafe bike lane when I lived in Kent, wa. As you say the planner had put it on the downhill side of a 45 mph main thouroughfare drop…

Great example. I've seen drivers swerve into the bike lane when convenient far too frequently.

This also shows that planners often try to make dangerous roads less dangerous, when they instead should often instead push for cyclists to take entirely different paths than drivers. The planners are thinking like drivers, wanting to take the most direct route, when in my experience cyclists will gladly take a less direct route if it's much safer.

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#119

Post by pythonistic »

ryanSrich wrote: post #40
mattlondon wrote: post #34

I always thought it was weird how there is so much parking in the centre of US cities. When I talk to colleagues in various US cities and they say they drive to work it just Does. Not. Compute . In central London, driving to work is essentially unheard of unless you are the Prime Minister. There is parking available in London, but the prices are fairly high - I just had a quick look on parkopedia [1] and it looks lik…

A few points: 1.) A lot of employers offer some percentage of parking reimbursement. 2.) A lot of employees live 1+ hour away. The bus doesn't work in these situations. 3.) Often times the bus is extremely dirty and dangerous. Risking injury or confrontation isn't worth saving a few dollars a day on driving.

Most of the US cities I've lived in have poorly laid out bus systems; Seattle is a notable exception with plenty of cross-town and downtown routes, and riders are never more than a couple blocks from the nearest stop.

Most cities are laid out in a hub and spoke system, pulling from suburbs into downtown, but most employers are in office parks in a ring outside the downtown area. A public transit commute may mean nearly an hour into downtown, than another hour to the suburbs, followed by a long walk. In other cities, public transit is only available at certain hours: my parents, for instance, can only catch a bus to work before 7 AM and then won't have a bus back home until after 5 or 6 PM.

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#120

Post by wool_gather »

ghaff wrote: post #69
cmurf wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A family member describes to me the love affair of the automobile ~65 years ago did this. It became so ingrained in the culture, intentionally designing cities around the car so that you could drive more . Americans loved showing off cars, they loved driving them. Teenage boys' psyche used it as a way to get out of the house, away from their parents (this is city life in middle America during and post-WWII) in partic…

>Literally no experience required, no driver's education required. Your uncle can teach you how to drive. Driver's ed at least used to be pretty common,in part because it gave a discount for the (expensive) insurance covering younger drivers. I don't see anything special about the typical driver's ed instructor anyway. It's not like the typical driver's ed is some expensive defensive driving course taught by an ex ra…

> you gain experience by doing things not taking classes.

Sure, but "experience" doesn't have to mean you're out there on the highway with everyone else. You don't start scuba diving in the actual ocean. You get experience in a pool for a while first.

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