291–300 of 303 posts
I totally believe in the value of being in nature. It's hard to go for a walk surrounded by trees and chirping birds and not come away happier and refreshed, in my experience. But I'm more skeptical about this in the article: > Need a quick break from your "work screen time" for some "fun screen time?" There's a nature fix for that: Check out the #FindThatLizard game on Twitter and Instagram. Science communicator and…
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This! I love going mountain biking but commuting on a bike does not fit well with my person. And I t’s not missing bike lanes that are the problem with commuting, it is the numerous other issues a bike commute introduces to your life that are so often overseen. Cities must become walkable first again to succeed, making them bike friendly only pushes traffic problems a few years away… 5min walking through a park + 5-1…
Hi, what do you mean it doesnt fit your person? i am curious because it feels like such a weird statement.
1. I despise biking in non-ideal conditions (and where I live this is roughly 60% of the time) 2. From my observations as a pedestrian, driver, biker I have concluded that other bikers are bikers own worst enemy when it comes to the commute, a problem that has not improved with improved bike infrastructure 3. Bike commuting kinda never is at home anywhere, at rush hour you are not at home at the bile lane, you are way to slow for general traffic and way way too fast for the pedestrian sections and there is no solution to this, you have to cross at some point somewhere where you are the „bad guy“ 4. I get sweaty when I bike and I don’t like having to shower away my commute before I start my work day (I’ve usually showered already before taking off..) 5. Running errands on the commute route is also problematic with a bike as at rush hour there is just too much going on and too little space in European cities. If we assume that everybody/majority commute by bike this just exacerbates 6. there’s more but I think the reasoning becomes clear
All in all I applaud people for doing it, I just couldn’t live with it and prefer to be a pedestrian that uses fast transport for the big sections. And yes, I also think that mass bike commuting is a delusion, low hanging political fruit that is being pushed to pump greenwashing agendas and does only kick the problem further down the road. The future should be pedestrian first with well decentralised cities, work from anywhere Job culture and fast (ideally self driving) shared transport.
But that’s just my 2c
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It's not obvious to me how blood pressure affects happiness, or how you would even prove a link here without asking people how they feel. I also feel like it is important to point out that asking people how they feel is a scientific measurement, you just have to be careful on how to use that data.
> It's not obvious to me how blood pressure affects happiness People are typically pretty unhappy following a heart attack.
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I should also note that I'm glad that there is a movement to make cities more walkable, but I duck out when that sentiment pours over into a sort of religious zeal against more nature-ful ways of life.
So on a more frequent basis, what would you hope to be doing in nature, assuming you also work?
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> There are a lot more factors to the equation than farming space Yes, but agricultural footprint is the dominating factor. > And what do you think was there before the farms? Nature, to my point. Recall that you're the one arguing that suburbs rather than agriculture is threatening nature: > The enemy of wilderness is not urbanists, it’s suburban sprawl.
> Yes, but agricultural footprint is the dominating factor. Perhaps, but you also need to consider: - transport to work / school / hospitals / entertainment - food distribution - sewage - electricity - emergency services coverage - etc… I don’t have any hard stats for you but my background reading has suggested these are significant. > Nature, to my point. Recall that you're the one arguing that suburbs rather than a…
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> Okay, because we haven’t actually touched on many of the reasons us pro-density folks think it’s a good thing: how do you suggest we reduce our emissions as much as we need to in the coming decades? Keeping in mind that a large proportion of emissions are from light-duty vehicles and heating/cooling buildings, both of which increase with lower densities. Massive projects to resettle people in urban areas or dramati…
> It's much faster (and far more politically tenable) to electrify as much transportation (e.g., EVs) and heating/cooling as possible while moving our grid to clean energy. Vehicle turnover is very slow, so I don’t expect this to happen as quickly as you might be thinking: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/03/10/climate/elect... Improving public transit doesn’t have to mean huge rail projects though, it can ju…
The best case for getting people to uproot and move to cities in significant numbers is still measured in generations, not years or even decades. The best case for extending public transit to every suburb and exurb (never mind rural community) is probably on the same order. The worst case for EVs is a couple of decades (to 80% of cars on the road; obviously there's a long tail that diminishes).
> Improving public transit doesn’t have to mean huge rail projects though, it can just mean running buses more frequently and giving them their own lanes to skip traffic.
The only people who are likely to take buses in the suburbs (with few exceptions) or exurbs or beyond are those who can't afford cars or who lack a driver's license. An extra lane to skip traffic isn't compelling because traffic is a mild problem outside of cities (perhaps with the exception in certain city-adjacent suburbs). Frankly, the same is true of rail.
> This also isn’t necessarily fast, no. But I don’t think it’s either/or; I think we need both.
I like the idea of more public transit and walkability, but I don't think there's any legitimate case to be made that these initiatives will meaningfully reduce our carbon footprint in the necessary timescales.
> I don’t think we can. The two are directly opposed to each other. The less dense a place is, the further apart everything is, which inherently makes it less walkable.
Walkable doesn't mean you can get to every place by foot, it just means you can get to the places you need to go to by foot. Today, suburbs and exurbs have huge zones for residential and commercial such that most people have to drive to get to the commercial areas, but we could easily rezone to allow for a finer-grained patchwork of residential and commercial zones. The finer-grained patchwork means that less of any zone needs to be reserved for parking/cars (it's not just breaking one big parking lot into many smaller lots with the same total area--in a finer-grained patchwork, fewer people need to drive so the total area for parking/cars is lower) which in aggregate means more space for other things. It may never be as walkable as a dense city, but there's still tremendous opportunity for improvement.
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> Okay, because we haven’t actually touched on many of the reasons us pro-density folks think it’s a good thing: how do you suggest we reduce our emissions as much as we need to in the coming decades? Keeping in mind that a large proportion of emissions are from light-duty vehicles and heating/cooling buildings, both of which increase with lower densities. Massive projects to resettle people in urban areas or dramati…
I don't think anyone wants to force you to live an urban lifestyle. I personally wish there were places I could move that was walkable, bikeable, and without having to cross 4 lanes of loud polluting traffic. Those places don't really exist, since most major US cities have been built to accommodate cars first. And even those are way less affordable (because people want to live in cities and theres not enough housing…
For what it's worth, I'm bought into walkability/bikeability/etc. I'm just tired of the density, social problems, and distance from nature associated with most US cities. I think it would be really cool to get some like-minded people together and build a little village with walkability/bikeability/nature in mind.
Wouldn’t be an NPR blog post without bringing up colonialism, and sure enough, there it is.
Would you be similarly frustrated if an article on recent history references WW2?
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> It's much faster (and far more politically tenable) to electrify as much transportation (e.g., EVs) and heating/cooling as possible while moving our grid to clean energy. Vehicle turnover is very slow, so I don’t expect this to happen as quickly as you might be thinking: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/03/10/climate/elect... Improving public transit doesn’t have to mean huge rail projects though, it can ju…
> Vehicle turnover is very slow, so I don’t expect this to happen as quickly as you might be thinking The best case for getting people to uproot and move to cities in significant numbers is still measured in generations , not years or even decades. The best case for extending public transit to every suburb and exurb (never mind rural community) is probably on the same order. The worst case for EVs is a couple of deca…
Why are you using the standard of "public transit to every suburb and exurb" for transit and "80% of cars" for vehicle electrification? There's a lot of low-hanging fruit in the first-ring suburbs that we can tackle before the exurbs; those may be a lost cause for now, but a lot of people live in those inner suburbs!
And that aside, we need to at least stop the bleeding, right? If metro area growth boundaries keep expanding outward, that means more cars on the road and more energy and materials needed to make that happen. If we don't allow existing towns to build up at all, the only way for them to build is outward.
> I like the idea of more public transit and walkability, but I don't think there's any legitimate case to be made that these initiatives will meaningfully reduce our carbon footprint in the necessary timescales.
Alone they won't, just like vehicle electrification alone won't. We need to both reduce VMT and electrify, and we need both now.
https://rmi.org/our-driving-habits-must-be-part-of-the-clima...
> but we could easily rezone to allow for a finer-grained patchwork of residential and commercial zones. The finer-grained patchwork means that less of any zone needs to be reserved for parking/cars (it's not just breaking one big parking lot into many smaller lots with the same total area--in a finer-grained patchwork, fewer people need to drive so the total area for parking/cars is lower) which in aggregate means more space for other things.
This isn't separating walkability and density, this is higher density. This is the kind of thing we need!