341–350 of 411 posts
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In places that have good mass transit for their suburbs, sure. But what about all of the places that don't? Because sometimes I have to go to work in weather conditions like hailstorms, thunderstorms, or freezing rain.
Build mass transit. It's one of the best ways to increase economic activity.
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This is so out of touch it's kind of offensive. Unlike you, most people struggle to make ends meet, are happy they have a job and can provide for their family. The upper-class "let's build architecture that inspires" screams "I have more money and time than I know what to do with". It's like looking down at people who eat at McDonald's (I got your reference!) with comments like "these folks wouldn't know good food if…
Stroads are more expensive to build than the alternative, and hence this entire argument can be dismissed outright.
Yeah, it’s be great if it were dense and walkable but guess what, we cant jump from farm land to NYC 5th Ave in one step.
It comes across as incredibly ignorant to be honest.
It's funny. As someone who has never been to the US stroads are what define the American urban landscape for me and what I want to experience. They feel really exotic. It's like being in an American movie or TV show.
Has anyone ever put a picture of a stroad up as art/instagram etc like you see with downtown NYC, Paris, small european villages, shanghai, rural mountain towns, old downtowns in America etc? Of course not. It is the McDonald’s of city planning. Cheap, ugly, bad for you but also shockingly expensive once the medical/infrastructure maintenance bill comes due. Its the overweight, white trash, lower back tattoo of aesth…
Just trying to find some positive examples of American small towns. As a European, if I were to relocate to the US, where would I find strong town communities? I know for example Ithaca, NY, might qualify. Other examples in the South, Midwest, etc? Also stroads are not just an American problem. I have found horrible stroads in places where you would never expect them such as Oxford or Copenhagen.
Small and medium sized college towns (<100,000 residents, maybe) usually fit the bill as well. But, have the downside of many seasonal tenants and the other things you'd expect with a heavily young-adult-oriented area. But, even in these, you sometimes find you need to drive to a strip mall for big grocery runs - America doesn't really do small neighborhood markets and the price of real estate often drives grocery stores to the outskirts of town.
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There is a big difference between buying a car and doing literally every trip in a car because the only connection from the place you sleep to anywhere is six lane road with speeds exceeding 40mph. Of course cars are convenient for some things. I live in a city where the majority of households has access to a car, but only a quarter of the trips (accounting for 40% of the traveled distance) are made by car. I still c…
Sure, but in the Strongtowns models there is not space for cars - at least everyone owning a car they only use for weekends. Only the rich own cars. Or those that live outside the urban core. Welcome to our future if Strongtowns has a say.
BTW, it's already kind of true that only the rich own cars, car ownership correlates very strongly with household income.
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I think a true shift towards Urbanism in our cities may be only possible if there's a whole lot of money in it for somebody with political leverage. But who? I'm not sure. Real estate developers? They're already making money hand over fist building our cities in the shitty car-centric way. When the US made its shift to car-centricity with the interstate highway system, there was a ton of money in it for oil companies…
Not everyone wants to live in a human anthill though
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I think the appeal of NYC is the cost and luxury of vacationing there. Even the skyline views - they're nice but I don't think they hold up to mountains. However, I grew up extremely rural so I am biased towards what I know and people like what they like.
I don't think anyone goes on vacation in cities explicitly because they are more expensive - the appeal is that there's a lot of fun things you can do in cities.
Cities like NYC and Paris have high baseline cost of doing business there. If the stuff that did cater to tourists didn't also have broad mass market appeal or other usefulness at those high price points (e.g. a hotel can serve business travelers as well) it would be priced out replaced with other stuff
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the argument is that streets and roads serve fundamentally different purposes and thus have different design goals, and stroads do both and thus fail at both. Roads are for transit, getting cars a long distance between interest points, and streets are for navigating within a point of interest like a neighbourhood. Roads want to optimise for higher cruising speed and streets are to optimise for parking, mixed-use with…
Traffic engineer here. Generally there is a hierarchy of roads called functional class. It goes local street - collector - minor arterial - major arterial - freeway. From local to freeway the speeds increase and the land access decreases. Good urban design should connect only roads one "step" apart, that is local roads should only connect to collectors and so forth. Reality is clearly different. I would imagine every…
Don't get me started on all the perfectly functional things they screw up because some jerk central planner in DC wrote a spec based on national averages.
To me, a generation that is too busy to buy groceries in the store or buy goods at a physical store in general does not strike me as one to push for walkable cities. Half the urbanites I know get gassed just walking for a coffee.
This has always been the drama of urbanism. Only a minority is pushing for it, while the rest furiously resist thanks to years of car-centric propaganda (and vested interests).
"you'll be fighting all these strip mall tenants and owners who are making a living mining the public investment in roadway capacity for their own gain." The gall of these people. I, in contrast, ride public transportation down a publicly maintained street to a workplace where I earn a salary. No mining here.