641–650 of 835 posts
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What fraction of Netherlands lives in a city vs the rural areas?
Even in the most urbanised part of the country most people still drive for most distances over ~5km. If you have to get from one side of Rotterdam to the other side a car is much faster than a bike or public transportation.
Not Just Bikes: "Rotterdam: the City Rebuilt for Cars": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22ovt1EMULY
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I'm an aging millennial as well. I love having a car! I can't imagine not having a car when you have KIDS! Driving them to their various sports games, with a car full of their equipment. Going camping with them. Getting groceries for a family of 5. I can't imagine doing that on public transport.
I worked with a guy who had two kids and no car. They rode their bikes everywhere, always. He insisted on it. I think his wife was miserable lol. But his kids seemed to like it!
The young are falling out of love with home ownership, cars, dating, drinking etc. I suspect a lack of money is the common factor.
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You still have that freedom to walk anywhere after parking you know. I have done this 100’s of times. Just park then from there go anywhere you want then just take a taxi or lyft back to your car. Public transport sucks, not sure why so many people people like it. Driving is much better unless you live in a large city like NY or LA. My own climate control, radio for music and podcasts, plus driving is therapeutic. I…
> Just park then from there go anywhere you want then just take a taxi or lyft back to your car. I thought I had heard it all but "take a lyft back to the parking lot your car is in" is a new low in car culture degeneracy.
Sitting on a train or bus with screaming kids and breathing everyones air is not something that enjoyable. I prefer my own car it's more freedom.
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To be fair, no one wants to be the person who works the drive through at McDonald's. Back in the day it used to be good money for a high school kid, and maybe it arguably still is, but high school kids, particularly high performing ones, don't have time for part-time jobs that aren't contributing to a college resume. Let alone time to spend any money they make with friends.
I guess I could have expanded on my last sentence more and completed the thought. Of course nobody wants to be the person who works the drive through at McDonald's as their life's ambition. This type of job used to be seen as a stepping stone that provided you some spending money and an opportunity to meet people outside your parents social circle and school, a first taste of the working world, but wasn't a determina…
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I can accept that people can find happiness in vastly different situations, but the "city life" is devoid of a lot of the things that people living in the suburbs and rural areas enjoy that require having a car. People who collect things, or have a workshop in their garage, or go fishing, or hunting, or real hiking, or any outdoor activity really, or who have children (especially more than one). If I lived in the cit…
If I could shape the world to my liking, we'd look a lot more like the neatherlands with mixed-use development, great public transit and protected bike / ped infrastructure. Even with all that goodness, roughly half the population in the neatherlands owns a car, despite how outrageously expensive it can be there. There are still great reasons to own a car, and frankly I think everyone's experience would be better if…
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Proving my point, because something like 80% of the land in Toronto is zoned for single-family housing. The Toronto metropolitan area is one massive sprawling suburb. How would these numbers look like if we had more dense walkable neighborhoods? No need to speculate, simply look at similar statistics from places like Montreal.
Not everyone wants to live in dense housing. I grew up in Buffalo and spent many many hours on the QEW driving family to/from Pearson Intl. Every ride up there I'd be in awe of the number of cranes in the sky as new (I assumed) residential buildings were going up around Toronto. It seems like high density developments are a thing in the GTA: https://toronto.citynews.ca/2022/02/07/gta-communities-worry... and like eve…
Two factors to make dense housing acceptable
1. Larger units
2. Mandated recording booth quality soundproofing between units
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Yep. There was once an Ivan Illich (first I'd encountered him!) piece about cars linked on here some years back, which piece claimed that due to the effects of cars on infrastructure and cities they were only generally beneficial early on, when few had them, and later, if you can pay to have a driver (so, on average, they're now only net-beneficial to the rich). This is for city and suburb dwellers, mind you, not rur…
"Ivan's Car": https://www.deautovanivan.nl/eng.html > We think that the car due to its speed saves time. But when you are traveling by car, you not only lose the time it takes to go from A to B. You also have to work many hours to pay your car tax, insurance, maintenance and fuel. My addendum: Also the capital cost of the car, whether it was bought outright in cash or with a loan.
[EDIT] FWIW, I was skeptical, is why I ran the numbers. He's so right, for the average person in (I'd bet) most US cities, that it's not even a close call, it turns out.
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Akamai was probably the first really significant tech company to populate Kendall. Lotus was up in Fresh Pond. Infocom was on Wheeler Street as I recall. As you, there were a number of AI Lab and other MIT spinoffs in the general MIT area. But, to my original point, the vast majority of computer industry employment was out in the suburbs.
Oh, I thought Lotus was over by the Cambridgeside Galleria area. Indeed there was a lot in the suburbs, but it didn't feel difficult to me to work in tech on the subway in the early 90s when I started my career.
The other thing that throws me off is that when I started working in Massachusetts in the mid-80s and certainly when I was a student there five years earlier or so, the area of Cambridge over toward Lechmere was sort of a different world with east of MIT being sort of a there be dragons here area of old warehouses and the like left from industrial Cambridge. Coming from the west, you mostly didn't walk much past MIT. Things were starting to pick up more in the nineties.
I expect $tatus $ymbols to continue falling out of favor and be replaced by self sufficiency. Rich are also falling out of love with alcohol and falling in love with fitness. This is good for everyone.