Interchange in Houston is the same size as an entire city center in Italy • Hacker News Board

Re: Interchange in Houston is the same size as an entire city center in Italy

#391

Post by mmm_grayons » Mon, Aug 31, 2020, 11:11 PM UTC

wozniacki wrote: post #189

sudosysgen wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scooters, the RER, the SNCF, the bus, the Vélib and the metro, are very cheap and service even poor parts of Paris and the Banlieue pretty well.

There's also this assumption that people in relatively segregated rich areas want to be connected to poorer areas via public transit - the opposite is more often true. People who wish to live in neighborhoods with low crime often NIMBY off any attempts to add public transit options specifically to keep out the riffraff. Marin County is home to over 252,000 residents, yet it is without a BART station. If you search we…

This is everywhere, though. In spite of the reverence for Parisian living in this thread, it limits how high buildings can go, resulting in pricier housing because "muh skyline".

Re: Interchange in Houston is the same size as an entire city center in Italy

#392

Post by hannasanarion » Mon, Aug 31, 2020, 11:14 PM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #282

hannasanarion wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US used to have tons of small groceries everywhere. The legislative mandate for free parking everywhere has put them out of business, and many were demolished to build freeways.

Yeah, like most small stores they paid their staff less than the big supermarket, had worse selection and charged a lot more. The supermarket took over because they had better prices on better selection. It was nice to walk to the store for something you were missing that was common, but if you wanted to cook something exotic odds are they didn't have it, and so you switched most of your shopping elsewhere and mostly…

Smaller groceries means more selection, not less, because each store can specialize instead of needing to suit the average expectation of everybody in a 5 mile radius.

I live in one of America's few dense cities, and there are three stores I visit often, one Kroger chain with the selection you'd expect, one latin grocery, and one asian grocery where I can get all kinds of stuff that most people in the suburbs who shop at walmart and safeway have never heard of, all within a 10 minute walk.

Re: Interchange in Houston is the same size as an entire city center in Italy

#393

Post by mmm_grayons » Mon, Aug 31, 2020, 11:14 PM UTC

jschwartzi wrote: post #370

philwelch wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much of that has been largely replaced with electronic media, and what remains is a “once in a while” occasion that people are willing to travel to. These days, much of the time, city-dwellers are the ones who have to travel to suburban venues. The main reasons for urbanization were always economic and political. Rome was not built for the Coliseum; the Coliseum was built for Rome.

There are still a lot of us who really enjoy theater, opera, concerts, shows, and the like. And those things can only be had in a city. It's true that local amphitheaters may book a few good live acts every year but that selection pales in comparison to what you can get every weekend in a reasonably-sized city. There are some fun local theater groups in my suburb too. But sometimes I really want to watch something ot…

True, but that's not that common. And few people enjoy them so much as to live in the city for that reason alone.

Re: Interchange in Houston is the same size as an entire city center in Italy

#394

Post by alpineidyll3 » Mon, Aug 31, 2020, 11:20 PM UTC

ryanmarsh wrote: post #248

alpineidyll3 wrote: post #116

These highways suck to drive on and have as much delay as Illinois highways half the surface area. Its one of my least favorite parts about tx. The reason is largely that they just scaled up traffic patterns which are fine for 2 lanes to 6-7 lanes. It's absurd. The local legend in Austin is that the highway designer later committed suicide. I bike to work.

Surely the traffic can’t be worse than the humidity. Kind sir I call your attention to the condensation on the outside of your car windows.

Austin is usually dry. Did you drive to Florida?

Re: Interchange in Houston is the same size as an entire city center in Italy

#395

Post by romanoderoma » Mon, Aug 31, 2020, 11:20 PM UTC

refurb wrote: post #390

romanoderoma wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is US society working according to their very high GDP though? Estonia GDP is measured in billions and yet their infant mortality rate is half than US despite their trillions of dollars of GDP

Be careful with your cherry picked stats. Countries don't measure infant mortality the same way. Not to mention Estonia's lower infant mortality doesn't actually disprove my comment.

It actually does

I cherry picked infant mortality rate because I didn't want to pick the most embarrassing US stats, like life expectancy (lowest in the west despite the highest healthcare spending per capita) and homicide rate (4 times the Nigeria, 6 times China, 10 times Europe)

The fact that even little Estonia can handle infant mortality rate better than a superpower like USA it's kinda revealing

I'm also quite sure that if I picked China and its almost double infant mortality rate you wouldn't have though I was cherry picking

US is good at making money, but it's not a good indicator that they know how to spend them the right way

> The numbers in the U.S. are partly driven by gun deaths. From 2001 to 2010, 15-to-19-year-olds were 82 times more likely to die from gun violence in the U.S. than in other wealthy countries. Thakrar also attributes the higher U.S. child and infant mortality rates to a lack of preventative care.

Thakrar is Ashish Thakrar, medical resident at the Johns Hopkins Hospital and Health System.

Re: Interchange in Houston is the same size as an entire city center in Italy

#396

Post by Dylan16807 » Mon, Aug 31, 2020, 11:21 PM UTC

msla wrote: post #365

CydeWeys wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, actually. I saw a huge fucking grin on the face of the guy riding shotgun in the ambulance as the crowd of cyclists parted like magic in front of them and they had a personal escort of two vested corkers. Guy was even filming. They got where they were going faster than if the usual stop and go car traffic had been there. The great thing about people on foot or on bike is that they can easily get out of the way…

I'm not talking about emergency vehicles or people who get escorts. I'm talking about the doctors who have to make their own way in their own vehicles.

It's okay, the minor negative effects of that are never going to be more important than the ability to protest effectively.

Just like nobody blames normal traffic for killing people via doctor delays.

Re: Interchange in Houston is the same size as an entire city center in Italy

#397

Post by volkadav » Mon, Aug 31, 2020, 11:25 PM UTC

fair, but try driving 85mph through the italian city in a giant cadillac with cow horns on the front bumper while blaring your favorite tunes and drinking something from a drive-through liquor store. ;)

Re: Interchange in Houston is the same size as an entire city center in Italy

#398

Post by refurb » Mon, Aug 31, 2020, 11:26 PM UTC

romanoderoma wrote: post #395

refurb wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be careful with your cherry picked stats. Countries don't measure infant mortality the same way. Not to mention Estonia's lower infant mortality doesn't actually disprove my comment.

It actually does I cherry picked infant mortality rate because I didn't want to pick the most embarrassing US stats, like life expectancy (lowest in the west despite the highest healthcare spending per capita) and homicide rate (4 times the Nigeria, 6 times China, 10 times Europe) The fact that even little Estonia can handle infant mortality rate better than a superpower like USA it's kinda revealing I'm also quite s…

I'll repeat myself. The definition of infant mortality is not the same across all countries. For example, if a baby is born at less than 1 lb or before 21 weeks, it's a stillbirth and not counted as infant mortality in many countries (I have no idea about Estonia). In the US, is is counted.

Regardless, let's get back to my original comment.

GDP is important. It's what pays for government services, you may not agree that the US does enough, but that doesn't change the fact GDP pays for it.

Re: Interchange in Houston is the same size as an entire city center in Italy

#399

Post by brmgb » Mon, Aug 31, 2020, 11:34 PM UTC

wongarsu wrote: post #341

fireattack wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>25 minutes from my work This is definitely ideal, but is it achievable (in average , not for any individual) in larger cities even if they are built for walk/public transit? I don't have much experience in Europe, but I knew in Tokyo, which probably has the best public transit in the world, the average commute time is one hour. This is obviously an extreme example as Tokyo is a megacity, but I think majority of peop…

> I think majority of people cannot live 25 minutes from their work for any cities that have 1M+ populations I generally agree, though in cities like Paris you can get close. But 1M+ is very big by European standards. There are only 34 cities on the entire continent that fit that description [1], and there are multiple capitals [2] half that size (Dublin and Lisbon each have around half a million inhabitants). Once y…

Reading your comment made me interested into looking into some figures to compare cities in Europe and the USA.

If you look at the population of agglomerations (some cities in Europe have ridiculously small limits - Paris is fifteen times smaller than London), you see than London (14,800,000) and Paris (11,400,000) are a bit less populated than the the biggest US cities New York (22,100,000) and Los Angeles (17,700,000) but slightly more than the third Chicago (9,750,000).

The next biggest agglomerations in Europe, Madrid (6,550,000) and Milan (6,200,000) can be compared to Houston (6,750,000), a bit less populated than San Fransisco (7,850,000).

Then you have Berlin (4,725,000) which is close to Seattle (4,425,000) or Phoenix (4,700,000).

Re: Interchange in Houston is the same size as an entire city center in Italy

#400

Post by S_A_P » Mon, Aug 31, 2020, 11:39 PM UTC

jcrawfordor wrote: post #322

xg15 wrote: post #111

> But it wasn’t strictly an “everything is bigger in Texas” ethos that caused Houston to sprawl the way that it does. Rather, Cold War–era urban design philosophy in the U.S. prioritized sprawl because older cities that had urbanized pre–World War II—New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Detroit—were seen as being susceptible to nuclear strikes. Less-dense cities such as Los Angeles and Houston were less likely to be…

As a decidedly amateur historian with interest in this area, I think that claim is true on its own but also does not tell the entire story. It is true that decentralization was viewed as a major component of nuclear survivability, particularly in the earlier part of the cold war. This was the time period during which the FEMA (today's name) crisis relocation program was being devised, for example, and the high cost a…

This is a really great response. I think there are a ton of both selfish and altruistic reasons for the urban sprawl that is Houston. I grew up here (Alief area) and that was the burbs when I was young. (It’s about 15-20 minutes drive from downtown) there was a 10 or so mile gap between where I lived and Sugarland. Now it all runs together. I now live due south of Katy in an unincorporated area about 40 miles away from downtown Houston. Land and housing is still relatively cheap here but it’s filling out every year.

I say that to say this- I didn’t move way out here to get away from some ethnic group or to some other insidious reason. I moved here because I have a large (blended) family and we wanted to own land. It’s a popular narrative to blame sprawl on racism or living above your means. I think the real reason is way more boring than that. Move away from a population center and things get cheaper. Gas is cheaper. Groceries are cheaper. Price per square foot is much cheaper. Those who are upper middle class can live well in the sprawl so of course they do. I have neighbors of every race religion and culture here. They all want the same thing- decent schools elbow room and some fresh air...