This is something that cities the world over should be doing, both from a bee and a people perspective. Density is a lot more nice if greenery is nearby. Doesn't really matter if it's a park or an allotment or a library with a wide area. Just plenty of "something" with a large "big something" every so often.
In most cities I have experience with, high quality outdoor space is largely reserved for the parts of town populated by people living in detached, one-family dwellings. The more dense parts of town are clustered next to noisy streets or with pollution. Not much greenspace. The cities that have gotten it more right than wrong are usually in western Europe and parts of Asia.
> Christian Schmid-Egger, who coordinates Berlin’s wildflower meadows on behalf of the German Wildlife Foundation, said any conservation effort would ultimate require broader changes in agricultural practices: “If we are going to save the bees, we won’t be doing it in cities.”
He's not wrong, but he's also not fully right either. One of the biggest damages we've done to our biome is to pave so much of it, largely to make space for automobiles. Animals and insects need places to thrive all over and setting aside more space among our population for both people and insects makes for a better environment.
I do some "guerilla seeding" now and then where I live, scattering seeds in abandoned city spots that are waiting for new housing to be build (which can take years). It is so beautiful what flowers emerge, and when I see how both residents and tourists enjoy them, taking pictures and such, I felt it should be common practice to sow such spaces with flowers. Suggested it to our municipality, but after a "Maybe, we'll consider it" nothing happened. It is such low effort, low cost though.. it has a good ROI in terms of well-being for bees and humans alike :)
I’ve been doing something similar. Collecting native seeds from plants that grow well here after they bloom, and distributing them to barren spots that need more growth and color. I just started but hopefully next year there will be more Echium and Lupine around here.
Small warning for Europeans: here Lupine is a introduced species that displaces endemic plants. It probably should be removed if it's growing in your lands.
Well, what is native? The Lupinus polyphyllus is the most common lupine species in Central Europe and has been present here for more than a hundred years. It is also one of the better bumblebee plants. When farmers mow the meadows (cutting down most of the native bumblebee plants) the bumblebees can't find anything there and are grateful for any garden.
I know that nature conservation authorities had to do that here in Germany when these plants spread from people's gardens into natural reserves. Please use local species instead of invasive ones.
In my city, a grassroots organization that started as a bunch of "guerrilla gardeners" now has their urban meadow projects sanctioned by the city, more meadows are being created, and they do paid consulting for the city as well on the topic of biodiversity and various restoration projects. Very nice.
That's a good approach; I looked around what to sow or plant; here is a site with useful information: http://hummelgarten.ch/dokumente/ (mostly German, but there are also a few English documents).
One of motivations was that seeding wild flowers gives reason to cut grass less often, allowing to save money and noise. Maybe the same applies in USA and cost cutting could be used as an argument?
Other motivations were biodiversity and that it is less ugly (though not everyone is fan of them).
In highly litigious cultures like the USA, wouldn’t a city be wary of attracting lawsuits from people with bee-sting allergies for putting them at supposed risk?
The US may be litigious but judges and lawyers aren’t stupid. The key issue is that it would generally be pretty hard to find someone sufficiently culpable.
Many cities plant lots of male dioecious trees (ie some individuals of the species only have staminate (“male”) flowers and others individuals only have pistillate (“female”) flowers, the city plants only the trees that produce staminate flowers) which produce twice as much pollen as they would if trees were selected more randomly. This is because they drop less litter. But it is bad for people with allergies. I don’t think any such people have had success suing their cities for this practice.
I know I'm not arguing the merits of this specific case, but a world with no bees is a world where basically everyone is dead. Living can be hazardous, but some (very slight) dangers are necessary in a world that makes living possible.
It sounds like the “high quality outdoor space” you are referring to is something to be found in typical North American suburbia, but I would argue that this is typically a bleak crabgrass hell and not much higher quality or more alive than the road/parking-lot hell that surrounds it. But maybe you are instead imagining streets lined with elm trees (well elm was traditional but most died of Dutch elm disease—other species are used now).
Occasionally one may find an undeveloped lot which has more native species growing there, but perhaps we just disagree on what a high-quality outdoor space is, and you have something much more human-focused than natural in mind. I would argue that these do exist in the dense parts of big American cities (think Central Park in New York, which has a lot of space but also serves a dense population and so can afford more gardeners, flower beds, and varied features in general; New York also manages to sustain two botanical gardens which have reasonable examples of natural habitat too.) Though I would imagine the typical US city with a hollowed-out downtown mightn’t have good parks or shared spaces.
My view of a high-quality outdoor space is one where humans can be without the need to pay, with the ability to sit, and some space for play or leisure. We should also plan for pets being present because no matter how many signs you put asking people to not bring their dogs, cats, turtles, or ferrets, people will bring them. So let's not assume otherwise. A water fountain would be great, a public restroom (like a Portland Loo) even moreso in larger areas.
This same space should also have as much of its volume as possible given over to natural surfaces. Grasses and hardy flowers, in particular. We don't need a rose garden. Most plant species native to an area look quite nice if not mowed down or stunted with pesticides.
We should encourage property owners to give over some of the massive amounts of space currently used for automobile operation and storage to these public spaces. Eliminate parking minimums so that grocery and other big box stores in urban areas are able to rip up the artificial paving and return that space to natural use, for example. Make more planter box seating in movement rights-of-way. Unused parcels owned by governments should not be fenced off but have some furniture plopped down and an "everyone welcome" sign placed here.
I also want people and their cities to think about more than just downtown. Comparatively few people live in "actual" downtowns. We need to deal with that, too, so that downtowns are not just clusters of tall office buildings that empty out at the end of a workday. Nothing says that Downtown cannot be a vibrant neighborhood of its own, arguably even easier than trying to kickstart other neighborhoods. But just saying "putting green space in downtown is difficult" misses the many, many other areas of most cities and towns.
(I'm sure someone will come along and say "but you can't possibly do this because the homeless" so yes, this does mean we are addressing environmental concerns at the same time we are addressing human concerns.)
Every so often I come across the well-intentioned phrase "encourage property owners to <do something that sacrifices property rights>"....
Quite literally the entire history of "rule of law" in human societies can be summed up as a less-expensive-than-violence program of defense of rights of property ownership.
The only kind of encouragement property ownership will sacrifice rights to is that which comes from an army.
What is the difference between the current American urban planning system where certain property is restricted to certain purposes and eg developers must devote certain amounts of land to parking lots and the proposal of the GP where some land must be devoted to certain “green space”? (FWIW I mostly disagree and think the city or some trust should just own that green space.)
It seems to me like you’re ranting against the status quo and not anything particular about the parent comment.
This is fundamentally false. Witness the many conservation easement programs, or the agreements that have made possible many trail systems.
There are absolutely systems of encouragement - many of which may not even be economic! - that cause property owners to accept restrictions on their rights.
Not to mention the many laws that fundamentally restrict property rights, from zoning to noise ordinances.
Property rights haven't been absolute in a long time. We have all kinds of laws and taxes that regulate and incentivize what exactly you can and can not do with your private property.
I don’t know how to square this description of high quality outdoor spaces with your claim above that it exists in the suburbs of American cities (is this your claim?), and my understanding of American cities. Is there some specific place you have in mind? Or is “high quality” relative with you describing an unattained ideal here and the reality further above?
Dogs? Public spaces? Water fountains and such? Horrific!
I will never ever use a public water dispenser ever again after seeing that woman let their dog drink from one. He basically licked the whole thing from left to right.
Public anything is basically burnt for me (not just by that incident) because you never know what pigs were there before you.
Now imagine that the dog literally licked the part that the water comes out of all over.
I'm totally fine with dogs. I'm totally fine with dogs licking their owners and anyone that wants them to. Heck I have nothing against dogs licking my hands. But I absolutely cannot understand how I am downvoted for an unsanitary practice that nobody has a chance to do anything against. The next poor guy going to the fountain 30 seconds later will have no idea.
Would you find it OK if I went and spit on the nozzle before you went? That's the equivalent.
Yeah, that's a dick move from the dog owner for sure.
But, it's both not out of the realm of something you should probably expect from public features and also probably not harmful enough to swear off of them.
You’d hate Switzerland. Public fountains everywhere, their supply fresh from all the surrounding mountains, multiply redundant, many of which are clearly intended to be dog friendly.
And like you said, dog friendly is awesome. What is not awesome is when dog owners assume that everyone is fine with the same things that they're fine with from _their_ dog.
Now for one thing that I love here for example is how dog owners clean up after their dogs. That is exemplary. There's a law here that requires dog owners to clean up after their pet and take the poop with them/to the next trash can. Compare that to Germany, where there's dog poop all over the place. Not many people clean up after their dogs there (haven't been in a while, so maybe it's changed and Switzerland might be different - my great aunt always carried a bag and a shovel even 35+ years back but she's the only one I've ever seen do this and we had lots of dogs around)
As a non-American, American cities haven’t impressed me at all.
However, you may find it interesting to explore the rest of the world via Google Street View: I grew up in the South Downs of the UK, did my degree in Aberystwyth, spent several years in Cambridge and roughly one each in Plymouth and Sheffield, and now live in Berlin. These all have a lot of greenery within and on their doorsteps, the worst among them (Sheffield and Plymouth) being roughly similar to my memories of Manhattan.
Street View images of Spain, Greece, and Cyprus remind me a lot of rural California (when actually visiting, Spain and Greece felt accurate, Cyprus felt like the UK). Most of England, Wales, and North-West France reminds me of New England. The only places I’ve been to that were as bleak as Nevada/Salt Lake were literally beaches, and even there the bleakness didn’t stretch to the horizon.
Rhine Valley has some colossal eyesores, but even then you get to fantastic countryside in a fairly short cycle ride. Everywhere in Switzerland, even the cities, is basically a paradise on par with Yosemite, with the occasional mistake present (e.g. Zürich motorway); and, with the caveat that I was 9 and this was multiple decades ago now, I have lots of green memories from when I visited Singapore, Bangkok, Adelaide, Sydney, Canberra, and Cairns.
(Nairobi had a lot of green in a lot of places, but I really did not feel like I grokked any of the cities’ underlying patterns in the week I was there, so I can’t say if greenery implied rich places or poor places).
I think it’s pretty silly to argue about the obvious failures of American urbanism and successes in Europe on every HN thread about cities. I think main reason these failures weren’t made in European cities is that those cities did not have the same kind of population growth or free space or money as American cities.
One difference with America is that there is a little more hope of achieving something more like a natural environment. Above I wrote about how the “greenery” of American suburbia is in some sense inauthentic and dead. America does however have a lot of their natural environment still in a reasonably wild state (modulo invasive non-native species.) In places like the U.K., this inauthenticity extends across much of the countryside too. The fenland near Cambridge used to be wet and marshy before the fens were drained. Much of that habitat is now lost (though there are some efforts to recreate it.) Much of the landscape of the U.K. is not much more diverse or natural than an American lawn, and even bits that look more wild like the various moorlands have been significantly changed by humans to have more land for grazing (or fowling) rather than bogs or forests.
So if you read my comments you’ll know that I really can’t stand the automobile culture on America. Just want to get that out of the way.
But something I’ve come to realize is that American suburbs have great potential if only people wanted to do things and were allowed to. All that green space? That’s a garden waiting. It’s a place to re-plant native trees. AND it’s also a place to do fun stuff outside like throw a football or play soccer a bit.
But many people don’t take the time to do any of these things, which is such a shame. We have all this space and green space that we can do things with. Why aren’t more people planting!? :(
Don't put all of America in one basket. I realize you probably really meant the USofA but I can tell you that Canada is not too far off ;)
We have the same 'everything is lawn' problem. I too am fighting crab grass hell in the front but that's more of a 'I can't really grow trees or anything else on the septic field' problem.
Where I am specifically we have a lot of trees. Forest community. There are so many lots here where the only sunny places are the septic system and the pool. Loving it!
I do get your frustration though. Even with all the above said, of the immediate neighbors I can see in all four directions only one is really doing it right if you ask me. I always see everyone put out the bags of leaves in fall for example and I really don't get it. Compost them! I do it and one other neighbor does. The rest as well as most of the entire neighborhood just puts them out by the curb. At least only one of those neighbors waters the lawn regularly and the rest just leave it out to get brown, so there's less peer pressure to not be the one house with a brown septic field lawn ;)
What I didn't dare yet is to just sow a bunch of meadow flowers and not mow, coz all the neighbors do mow and there are bylaws too.
> Don't put all of America in one basket. I realize you probably really meant the USofA but I can tell you that Canada is not too far off ;)
Yea I guess that's a good point. Canada, Australia, and New Zealand too tend to be more suburbanized versus other countries. Not quite as bad as America but the problems still persist there too. :(
>So if you read my comments you’ll know that I really can’t stand the automobile culture on America. Just want to get that out of the way.
disclaimer : i've enjoyed 'automobile culture' my entire life, and have touched nearly everything that it has to offer.
the 'automobile culture on America' , at least applied to the United States specifically, is absolutely compatible with a better managed use of public places; I'm not sure why you framed your comment in such a way as to hint at an incompatibility between the two concepts : automobile culture and citizen-centric management of public spaces and infrastructure. The two are absolutely compatible.
I'm not saying that there aren't problems that are caused just-about-entirely by the automobile culture, but improper use of already-inhabited suburban sprawl isn't one of the major ones unless you want to paint all of 'suburbia' to be a 'Bad Thing' and condemn automobile culture simply due to the enablement of commutes and suburban enclaves to exist.
I'm thinking back to the GP that I replied to and my comment was basically not trying to defend the suburbs (it would be very hard to defend continuing construction of them), but also we can see some nice things about them. At least that was my drift.
I'd agree that automobile culture does't cause people to not plant gardens (although maybe it does since why do that when you can just drive to the grocery store?) if that's where you were going.
Suburbia isn't the best form of development (we already know what that is) but automobile culture just makes it a monster. It'd be one thing if you could ride a bike from the suburbs to the grocery store and back. But even a mile away is just out of the question for most people. So instead we build giant highways, spend money on highway job construction programs, and tolerate lots of money being spent on cars that become a necessary prosthetic to live life in much of the United States. Not to mention all of the unnecessary deaths, particularly teenagers, caused by car wrecks.
> But many people don’t take the time to do any of these things, which is such a shame. We have all this space and green space that we can do things with. Why aren’t more people planting!? :(
Many people do. Massive corporations (Lowe’s, Home Depot) have huge gardening sections with all of the tools to help people do this. They usually feature plants from local nurseries as well to help encourage things that thrive in the region.
I don’t know where you got the idea that American suburbians don’t garden, but it’s 100% bullshit. Every neighborhood I’ve lived in ranging from shitty part of town to an strict HOA-controlled planned community had people planting their own flora. The HOAs add constraints but generally leave the backyard to your choosing and still lots of flexibility in the front.
> I don’t know where you got the idea that American suburbians don’t garden, but it’s 100% bullshit.
Yea idk. I can walk down my street and look into backyards (not very many fences here) and I don't see any gardens. None.
So, I'm speaking generally but in my experience the vast majority of people in the suburbs do not actually garden. Landscape, sure, and a lot of times they pay some cheap labor to do that. Actually garden and grow food? Very few.
It certainly didn’t help that I mixed the natural with the artificial, but to be specific: American city layouts are terrible with respect to “high quality outdoor space”, so much so that visiting taught me why American culture seems to more often talk about youths hanging out in malls rather than in parks. Even in places like Manhattan — compare the pedestrian density of Central Park to that of Times Square.
American municipalities give me the impression of treating their green spaces (or sun-bleached yellow spaces, as the case may be) a checkbox item, not of actually understanding them and valuing what they can provide. (At least not those I visited; I’d be very surprised if it was universal!)
This is very important and worrisome. People usually know only the honeybees. But, for example, bumblebees are at least as important in pollination (even more diligent than honeybees because they fly even in bad and cold weather).
But this year is extreme; here in Switzerland I hardly see bumblebees anymore, no idea why. I am far from being the only one who has noticed this. Here, for example, a detailed blog (in German), where an incredible planting in contrast to previous years is hardly visited by bumblebees: http://www.hummelgarten.ch.
Well, I remember much harsher winters twenty years ago which apparently was no issue for the bees. And until some weeks ago I actually saw many bumblebee queens on the flowers, but then by end of May the number suddenly decreased sharply. Must be another reason.
But I'm not sure whether this is really the cause of my observation; everything looked normal in April and May, but suddenly by end of May the bumblebees vanished. I still see some from time to time (one or two a day, compared to dozens in normal years). I also found a few exhausted ones on the ground that could no longer fly, but there were no mites on those.
I'm in Canada, meaning really cold winters (caveat: which the species here would also jsut be more used to to be fair). I am seeing the same amount if bumble bees in my suburban yard, which I suppose is good.
I don't see many honey bees or yellow jackets. In comparison to what I remember from Germany. I have been eating pie outside without issues for many years here. In Germany that's impossible without getting a yellow jacket or five attacking your pie.
But we do get our honey from a local bee keeper and so far KO drying up if supplies. Fingers crossed.
maybe they removed stray cats? This was the famous example by Darwin on the equilibrium of ecosystems. If there are no cats, mice proliferate, eating all bumblebee nests, and clover disappears because it depends on bumblebee pollinization.
In the city I live in we are lucky to have a lot of parks, but also they leave the grass uncut in large portions of them. It grows long, with flowers and other plants providing greater biodiversity and a habitat for many more insects and small creatures.
Some short grass is good, but the overabundance of lawns—particularly as the default coverage for parks and gardens—is a big problem.
In Singapore, during last year's Circuit Breaker to break a surge in COVID-19 infections, the grass verges were left uncut (grass cutters were not allowed to work). It led to a surge in butterflies in my local area.
Sadly, it ended after the Circuit Breaker ended, but I did notice some local parks now having long grass that would have been cut in previous years.
Here's a commentary about that period in the local papers.
Minneapolis gave small grants to homeowners for this purpose. The program was well publicized before it began and all slots filled immediately.
I know an entomology researcher that is studying the impact on native pollinators and (unofficially) they are feeling very bullish about the whole thing.
Many towns now let neighbours care about "Baumscheiben" (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumscheibe) along their streets. In my town there are many that have been "adopted", and they are sometimes spectacularly beautiful.
There are a few rules: the tree and its roots must not be damaged, you must not plant things that grow too tall, because it would create dangers in traffic.
City dwellers get to garden a little bit, the town saves on upkeep.
And today I'm in Muenster and I saw a nice addition to that: the town placed several large water containers along the sidewalk, so the people don't have to carry water from their homes.
In my city (not Germany) they've started ripping up the bricks between trees on pavements (because nobody walks on them), and making whole strips of plant beds between pavements and roads.
Can any Googlers confirm or deny if this is also what Google is doing near their campus? I was out walking my dogs near the Google campus and was just stunned by the landscaping that looks like a bunch of unmanicured wild flowers in bloom. It was simultaneously beautiful but very natural looking. There were definitely a lot of bees and “life” around them. As a resident of Mountain View, I really appreciated it but wasn’t sure if it was deliberate and if it was, if this is a new trend.
Yes, it’s similar. Google maintains a few honey bee hives throughout their Mountain View campus, and several areas are landscaped with California endemic species to restore local biodiversity. It’s great to hear the pollinators are staying busy!
I live in Texas and I saw a monarch butterfly for the first time a few weeks ago. I hope more people let wildflowers grow - as the people who are currently doing so seem to be helping the biome recover.
The biggest cause of these declining populations seems, to me, to be intensive agriculture which leads to both loss of habitat and various toxic chemicals (pesticides but also fertilisers and huge quantities of slurry). Another cause may be pollution but it seems to me that we’ve had pollution for longer. In the U.K. this intensive agriculture was started in the war as an effort to produce more food locally. It meant less land was left fallow and land which had been too poor quality to be viable was farmed (with low yields and lots of artificial inputs.) It also means that any agricultural runoff is worse for the environment it runs into (even fertilisers may cause algal blooms in rivers which can then remove the oxygen from the water.) Because farms have to stay competitive, there isn’t much choice but to continue these intensive practices. To some extent, switching to certified organic practices allows farms to stop such practices.
It’s not so obvious what the solution is. There are a lot of people to feed and reducing the productivity of the land in a rich country puts pressure on land in other countries. One suggested solution is people changing to more land-efficient diets with less meat, but I don’t really see this happening much.
Well insecticides and habitat loss kill insects. Intensive farming involves insecticides and habitat loss. And fertilisers in runoff may damage ecosystems causing further loss of habitat.
Fertilizers are chemicals. Just because it helps plants grow doesn’t mean it’s not toxic to other living beings, including humans. Imagine you being an insect just chilling and suddenly you’re covered in urea. You’ll die instantly.
Most people mean synthetic chemicals when they talk about chemicals. Organisms have adapted to naturally occurring chemicals and their concentrations, which makes them usually less toxic to them.
Urea based fertilizers could be harmful to insect life (e.g. it's the active ingredient in "SB Plant Invigorator"). It's also worth noting that the fertilization for mono-crops is detrimental to diverse plant ecologies - native orchid species in the UK have been decimated due to fertilizer run off from agriculture - lots of other species native to low nutrient chalk downland are also effected. The knock on is dramatic decreases in insect populations and diversity, butterflies have been hit especially hard.
I remember when this was just a proposal. Half of the users of the Facebook group that it was posted in declared that such gardens were ableist towards people with bee allergies. Yikes.
We had a no mow may in the uk, in city and town I live in it generally received positive feedback and has continued through june, subject to weather. It's makes a pleasant change to the square bland strips you'd usually see.
Urban sprawl catering to the car lifestyle is the mistake. Most major cities that cater exclusively for cars are hellscapes covered in concrete and parking lots. I truly despise car traffic. Cities should be higher density, feature plenty of parkland so you can ride and walk through it, plus end of trip facilities for those bikes, obviously you need some roads for necessary services, but then have an abundance of public transport.
I spent a couple of years living next to a main road. Not a highway, but one of the main routes into London from the south east.
The noise was terrible. It wasn't even that the road was particularly constantly busy, but because it was the "main" road there was always vehicles. And motorbikes. Motorbikes were the worst, by far. Being woken suddenly every hour by someone on a motorbike revving their engine wears down on you night by night.
Living in a very walkable old-inner-city I have essentially zero cars going through the neighbourhood, especially at night. But motorbike and scooters (!) are able to go through and a single scooter is easily able to eradicate cumulative hours of sleep throughout the neighbourhood within seconds.
How these things have not been regulated out of existence by now is beyond me. The only silver lining is that I see more and more electric scooters. As they're starting to make economic sense I hope that the others will phase out, but the old ones will have to be removed by force (of law) or they'll keep ruining people's health (air & sleep) for decades...
I think once electric motorbikes are a bit more viable, internal combustion ones should be banned. I'm sure there's plenty of responsible bike owners, but the bad eggs are _really_ bad. They're so incredibly antisocial in urban environments (and rural too - at my parents house in the mountains you can hear them racing up and down the roads a couple of miles away).
My current situation: I live in an apartment ~30 km away from the next big city (where I used to commute to by train before Covid enabled me to have home office). The house is in a nice cul-de-sac, and when you look out of most of the windows you can't even see a car most of the time (Ok, they're in the underground parking garage between the houses, but out of sight). However, at night, when it's nice and quiet, you can still distinctly hear the buzz of cars, trucks, motorbikes etc. on the freeway which is ~2 km away. Shows that you can't really escape the effects of automobile traffic, unless you want to live somewhere so secluded that you need to use the car to do anything, and add to the problem...
I have just moved from the main road in my neighbourhood (not a major road for the city, but busy for the area), where I was on the ground floor with a bus stop outside and apartment building entrances across the road and next door.
Now, I'm on the top (5) floor, on a much quieter side road, and the different is astounding. I can actually sleep with the window open in hot weather.
"pedestrian-first" might be better described as "car-last". "Pedestrianised" areas are usually better for folk with mobility scooters, wheelchairs, mothers with pushchairs and bairns and that.
Less private vehicles with one occupant taking up space means there is more bandwidth for busses and trams etc that can transport many people (and which have ramps for pushchairs, wheelchairs, etc).
A mobility scooter works if you live close or can use transport that uses that. And also if you want one or have access to one, lots of e.g. elderly people don't use them. They're limited to where they can drive and walk an increasingly short distance.
Exactly, removing some private cars from the roads and private car infrastructure (car parks, parking bays, over-engineered roads) means more bandwidth for public transport which those with mobility scooters, prams, etc, can use.
So if e.g. their hairdresser was suddenly in a pedestrianised place they would not be able to go there anymore. A bus would not help, they would not be able to walk to a bus stop, the bus might not go near enough to the hairdresser. So in their case the bus is less accessible than a car. I'm not saying this is true in general, as some disabled cannot drive but can get the bus.
I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to say here. We should not invest in public transport for the less able because it will inconvenience people who currently prefer to drive or walk?
In pedestrianised places, you see these people actually walking, or the closest equivalent.
I can run across three lanes of traffic in the 40 nanoseconds of pedestrian green I'm given, or stamp on the pedals when cycling so I can make a turn in 25 mph traffic. My dad can't - so the majority of the town, for him, doesn't exist.
Those groups are exactly the people most screwed over by car-friendly design, and using them as a reason to push it more is rather poor taste.
Not everyone who struggles to walk more than 20 feet wants to use a scooter (or can even afford one), many elderly people in that situation already have a car, and many of them are able to drive relatively safely. Like people with respiratory or heart issues.
And right now they have the option to use a mobility scooter or a car, if they lose the option to use a car then there will be places that will take a lot longer to get to. I think it's reasonable for people like this to prefer being able to drive everywhere, it gives a huge amount of independence and is clearly can be more convenient than public transport.
And there is a dignity aspect as well, I don't know how seriously people will take that argument but I understand that many older people would avoid doing trips rather than using a mobility scooter. I think that deserves consideration as well.
I think there are reams of people living in cities like SF, NYC, and DC that are retired and make do without a car. In fact, I would bet that the elderly live better lives on all metrics when they are able to live carless in a walkable neighborhood.
Cars probably do help them kill their dignity- at the expense of their grandchildren's quality of life.
A lot of accusations flying around here about my intent. But just bear in mind that I have a particular person in mind that I know is unable to visit anywhere in pedestrianised places. They do not have a mobility scooter, can only walk like 20 feet, are able to drive still.
So my comments are not motivated by some kind of hidden agenda, I am just thinking about someone who has apparently fallen through the cracks of the desire that some people have to make cities less accessible for cars.
It's a consideration I voice when I get the opportunity, and hopefully it will be factored into whatever planning happens. Not all elderly people like using mobility scooters, can afford them, want to spend extra time getting public transport etc etc.
Remove all parking spots instead of those for disabled people and your issue is resolved. No one will drive into the center unless they're disabled because they won't be able to find parking. So you can massively reduce car lanes, speed limits, etc. and thus effectively pedestrianizing the area.
It is possible to have it both ways. Look at some of the city design in the Netherlands. The YouTube channel "https://youtube.com/c/NotJustBikes" is a great start.
There is a large number of disabled people that are physically unable or legally not allowed to drive, but can get around pedestrian spaces and public transport just fine. This includes most wheelchair users and blind people.
The point is already moot.
Also if you can use a car, you could use a mobility scooter or electric wheelchair, and you will greatly benefit from denser, more developed pedestrian areas featuring amenities such as elevators.
Amusingly, one of the image captions in this article describes Kreuzberg as a "suburb". Kreuzberg is many things, but it's most definitely not a suburb.
Depending on who you ask, it's either one of the most "dangerous" "immigrant" neighbourhoods in the country, or one of the creative centers of the Berlin art scene, or startup/hipster central. But suburb.... no.
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 189 ms ] threadIn most cities I have experience with, high quality outdoor space is largely reserved for the parts of town populated by people living in detached, one-family dwellings. The more dense parts of town are clustered next to noisy streets or with pollution. Not much greenspace. The cities that have gotten it more right than wrong are usually in western Europe and parts of Asia.
> Christian Schmid-Egger, who coordinates Berlin’s wildflower meadows on behalf of the German Wildlife Foundation, said any conservation effort would ultimate require broader changes in agricultural practices: “If we are going to save the bees, we won’t be doing it in cities.”
He's not wrong, but he's also not fully right either. One of the biggest damages we've done to our biome is to pave so much of it, largely to make space for automobiles. Animals and insects need places to thrive all over and setting aside more space among our population for both people and insects makes for a better environment.
One of motivations was that seeding wild flowers gives reason to cut grass less often, allowing to save money and noise. Maybe the same applies in USA and cost cutting could be used as an argument?
Other motivations were biodiversity and that it is less ugly (though not everyone is fan of them).
From city official website: https://www.krakow.pl/aktualnosci/237069,1926,komunikat,zdec... https://zzm.krakow.pl/dzialania-antysmogowe/393-sianie-lak-k... https://www.krakow.pl/aktualnosci/247208,29,komunikat,nowe_l...
Many cities plant lots of male dioecious trees (ie some individuals of the species only have staminate (“male”) flowers and others individuals only have pistillate (“female”) flowers, the city plants only the trees that produce staminate flowers) which produce twice as much pollen as they would if trees were selected more randomly. This is because they drop less litter. But it is bad for people with allergies. I don’t think any such people have had success suing their cities for this practice.
My understanding is that it's even worse than twice, because the female flowers of some species actually filter the pollen out of the air.
Occasionally one may find an undeveloped lot which has more native species growing there, but perhaps we just disagree on what a high-quality outdoor space is, and you have something much more human-focused than natural in mind. I would argue that these do exist in the dense parts of big American cities (think Central Park in New York, which has a lot of space but also serves a dense population and so can afford more gardeners, flower beds, and varied features in general; New York also manages to sustain two botanical gardens which have reasonable examples of natural habitat too.) Though I would imagine the typical US city with a hollowed-out downtown mightn’t have good parks or shared spaces.
This same space should also have as much of its volume as possible given over to natural surfaces. Grasses and hardy flowers, in particular. We don't need a rose garden. Most plant species native to an area look quite nice if not mowed down or stunted with pesticides.
We should encourage property owners to give over some of the massive amounts of space currently used for automobile operation and storage to these public spaces. Eliminate parking minimums so that grocery and other big box stores in urban areas are able to rip up the artificial paving and return that space to natural use, for example. Make more planter box seating in movement rights-of-way. Unused parcels owned by governments should not be fenced off but have some furniture plopped down and an "everyone welcome" sign placed here.
I also want people and their cities to think about more than just downtown. Comparatively few people live in "actual" downtowns. We need to deal with that, too, so that downtowns are not just clusters of tall office buildings that empty out at the end of a workday. Nothing says that Downtown cannot be a vibrant neighborhood of its own, arguably even easier than trying to kickstart other neighborhoods. But just saying "putting green space in downtown is difficult" misses the many, many other areas of most cities and towns.
(I'm sure someone will come along and say "but you can't possibly do this because the homeless" so yes, this does mean we are addressing environmental concerns at the same time we are addressing human concerns.)
Quite literally the entire history of "rule of law" in human societies can be summed up as a less-expensive-than-violence program of defense of rights of property ownership.
The only kind of encouragement property ownership will sacrifice rights to is that which comes from an army.
Still, tho, good ideas, cheers.
It seems to me like you’re ranting against the status quo and not anything particular about the parent comment.
There are absolutely systems of encouragement - many of which may not even be economic! - that cause property owners to accept restrictions on their rights.
Not to mention the many laws that fundamentally restrict property rights, from zoning to noise ordinances.
I will never ever use a public water dispenser ever again after seeing that woman let their dog drink from one. He basically licked the whole thing from left to right.
Public anything is basically burnt for me (not just by that incident) because you never know what pigs were there before you.
Now imagine that the dog literally licked the part that the water comes out of all over.
I'm totally fine with dogs. I'm totally fine with dogs licking their owners and anyone that wants them to. Heck I have nothing against dogs licking my hands. But I absolutely cannot understand how I am downvoted for an unsanitary practice that nobody has a chance to do anything against. The next poor guy going to the fountain 30 seconds later will have no idea.
Would you find it OK if I went and spit on the nozzle before you went? That's the equivalent.
But, it's both not out of the realm of something you should probably expect from public features and also probably not harmful enough to swear off of them.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Drinking_fountai...
And like you said, dog friendly is awesome. What is not awesome is when dog owners assume that everyone is fine with the same things that they're fine with from _their_ dog.
Now for one thing that I love here for example is how dog owners clean up after their dogs. That is exemplary. There's a law here that requires dog owners to clean up after their pet and take the poop with them/to the next trash can. Compare that to Germany, where there's dog poop all over the place. Not many people clean up after their dogs there (haven't been in a while, so maybe it's changed and Switzerland might be different - my great aunt always carried a bag and a shovel even 35+ years back but she's the only one I've ever seen do this and we had lots of dogs around)
Zürich area (not sure about the rest of the country) has free dog poo bag dispensers every few hundred meters.
However, you may find it interesting to explore the rest of the world via Google Street View: I grew up in the South Downs of the UK, did my degree in Aberystwyth, spent several years in Cambridge and roughly one each in Plymouth and Sheffield, and now live in Berlin. These all have a lot of greenery within and on their doorsteps, the worst among them (Sheffield and Plymouth) being roughly similar to my memories of Manhattan.
Street View images of Spain, Greece, and Cyprus remind me a lot of rural California (when actually visiting, Spain and Greece felt accurate, Cyprus felt like the UK). Most of England, Wales, and North-West France reminds me of New England. The only places I’ve been to that were as bleak as Nevada/Salt Lake were literally beaches, and even there the bleakness didn’t stretch to the horizon.
Rhine Valley has some colossal eyesores, but even then you get to fantastic countryside in a fairly short cycle ride. Everywhere in Switzerland, even the cities, is basically a paradise on par with Yosemite, with the occasional mistake present (e.g. Zürich motorway); and, with the caveat that I was 9 and this was multiple decades ago now, I have lots of green memories from when I visited Singapore, Bangkok, Adelaide, Sydney, Canberra, and Cairns.
(Nairobi had a lot of green in a lot of places, but I really did not feel like I grokked any of the cities’ underlying patterns in the week I was there, so I can’t say if greenery implied rich places or poor places).
I think it’s pretty silly to argue about the obvious failures of American urbanism and successes in Europe on every HN thread about cities. I think main reason these failures weren’t made in European cities is that those cities did not have the same kind of population growth or free space or money as American cities.
One difference with America is that there is a little more hope of achieving something more like a natural environment. Above I wrote about how the “greenery” of American suburbia is in some sense inauthentic and dead. America does however have a lot of their natural environment still in a reasonably wild state (modulo invasive non-native species.) In places like the U.K., this inauthenticity extends across much of the countryside too. The fenland near Cambridge used to be wet and marshy before the fens were drained. Much of that habitat is now lost (though there are some efforts to recreate it.) Much of the landscape of the U.K. is not much more diverse or natural than an American lawn, and even bits that look more wild like the various moorlands have been significantly changed by humans to have more land for grazing (or fowling) rather than bogs or forests.
But something I’ve come to realize is that American suburbs have great potential if only people wanted to do things and were allowed to. All that green space? That’s a garden waiting. It’s a place to re-plant native trees. AND it’s also a place to do fun stuff outside like throw a football or play soccer a bit.
But many people don’t take the time to do any of these things, which is such a shame. We have all this space and green space that we can do things with. Why aren’t more people planting!? :(
We have the same 'everything is lawn' problem. I too am fighting crab grass hell in the front but that's more of a 'I can't really grow trees or anything else on the septic field' problem.
Where I am specifically we have a lot of trees. Forest community. There are so many lots here where the only sunny places are the septic system and the pool. Loving it!
I do get your frustration though. Even with all the above said, of the immediate neighbors I can see in all four directions only one is really doing it right if you ask me. I always see everyone put out the bags of leaves in fall for example and I really don't get it. Compost them! I do it and one other neighbor does. The rest as well as most of the entire neighborhood just puts them out by the curb. At least only one of those neighbors waters the lawn regularly and the rest just leave it out to get brown, so there's less peer pressure to not be the one house with a brown septic field lawn ;)
What I didn't dare yet is to just sow a bunch of meadow flowers and not mow, coz all the neighbors do mow and there are bylaws too.
Yea I guess that's a good point. Canada, Australia, and New Zealand too tend to be more suburbanized versus other countries. Not quite as bad as America but the problems still persist there too. :(
disclaimer : i've enjoyed 'automobile culture' my entire life, and have touched nearly everything that it has to offer.
the 'automobile culture on America' , at least applied to the United States specifically, is absolutely compatible with a better managed use of public places; I'm not sure why you framed your comment in such a way as to hint at an incompatibility between the two concepts : automobile culture and citizen-centric management of public spaces and infrastructure. The two are absolutely compatible.
I'm not saying that there aren't problems that are caused just-about-entirely by the automobile culture, but improper use of already-inhabited suburban sprawl isn't one of the major ones unless you want to paint all of 'suburbia' to be a 'Bad Thing' and condemn automobile culture simply due to the enablement of commutes and suburban enclaves to exist.
I'd agree that automobile culture does't cause people to not plant gardens (although maybe it does since why do that when you can just drive to the grocery store?) if that's where you were going.
Suburbia isn't the best form of development (we already know what that is) but automobile culture just makes it a monster. It'd be one thing if you could ride a bike from the suburbs to the grocery store and back. But even a mile away is just out of the question for most people. So instead we build giant highways, spend money on highway job construction programs, and tolerate lots of money being spent on cars that become a necessary prosthetic to live life in much of the United States. Not to mention all of the unnecessary deaths, particularly teenagers, caused by car wrecks.
Many people do. Massive corporations (Lowe’s, Home Depot) have huge gardening sections with all of the tools to help people do this. They usually feature plants from local nurseries as well to help encourage things that thrive in the region.
I don’t know where you got the idea that American suburbians don’t garden, but it’s 100% bullshit. Every neighborhood I’ve lived in ranging from shitty part of town to an strict HOA-controlled planned community had people planting their own flora. The HOAs add constraints but generally leave the backyard to your choosing and still lots of flexibility in the front.
Yea idk. I can walk down my street and look into backyards (not very many fences here) and I don't see any gardens. None.
So, I'm speaking generally but in my experience the vast majority of people in the suburbs do not actually garden. Landscape, sure, and a lot of times they pay some cheap labor to do that. Actually garden and grow food? Very few.
Not as common to grow food, but planting native trees/flowers/bushes is not uncommon.
You do know that’s the natural state of that region, right? It’s like complaining about the bleakness of the Sahara or Antarctica.
Maybe you meant Las Vegas? Because otherwise your post loses its point. Are you complaining about city layouts or the fact that deserts exist?
American municipalities give me the impression of treating their green spaces (or sun-bleached yellow spaces, as the case may be) a checkbox item, not of actually understanding them and valuing what they can provide. (At least not those I visited; I’d be very surprised if it was universal!)
But this year is extreme; here in Switzerland I hardly see bumblebees anymore, no idea why. I am far from being the only one who has noticed this. Here, for example, a detailed blog (in German), where an incredible planting in contrast to previous years is hardly visited by bumblebees: http://www.hummelgarten.ch.
It seems as if varroa mites have carried viruses from infected honey bees to wild bees and are killing a lot them.
But I'm not sure whether this is really the cause of my observation; everything looked normal in April and May, but suddenly by end of May the bumblebees vanished. I still see some from time to time (one or two a day, compared to dozens in normal years). I also found a few exhausted ones on the ground that could no longer fly, but there were no mites on those.
I don't see many honey bees or yellow jackets. In comparison to what I remember from Germany. I have been eating pie outside without issues for many years here. In Germany that's impossible without getting a yellow jacket or five attacking your pie.
But we do get our honey from a local bee keeper and so far KO drying up if supplies. Fingers crossed.
If you're buying somewhere (supermarket etc.): caveat emptor.
Many of the flower mixes are neither native nor appropriate for common native insects, but designed for beauty.
It may be a good idea to search for reputable vendors.
There are "famous" standardized mixes in Germany, but I cannot remember the names.
Some short grass is good, but the overabundance of lawns—particularly as the default coverage for parks and gardens—is a big problem.
Sadly, it ended after the Circuit Breaker ended, but I did notice some local parks now having long grass that would have been cut in previous years.
Here's a commentary about that period in the local papers.
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/commentary/covid-19-cir...
I know an entomology researcher that is studying the impact on native pollinators and (unofficially) they are feeling very bullish about the whole thing.
There are a few rules: the tree and its roots must not be damaged, you must not plant things that grow too tall, because it would create dangers in traffic.
City dwellers get to garden a little bit, the town saves on upkeep.
And today I'm in Muenster and I saw a nice addition to that: the town placed several large water containers along the sidewalk, so the people don't have to carry water from their homes.
Maybe these meadows could serve bees and beers? :)
https://www.westcoastseeds.com/products/bee-turf and/or https://www.westcoastseeds.com/products/alternative-lawn-mix
It’s not so obvious what the solution is. There are a lot of people to feed and reducing the productivity of the land in a rich country puts pressure on land in other countries. One suggested solution is people changing to more land-efficient diets with less meat, but I don’t really see this happening much.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_intoxication
Maybe you are thinking of herbacides or pesticides?
It's the ugliest lawn in the neighborhood. But the local fauna like it.
I haven't seen a single honey bee this year. Not a one. Fewer carpenter bees and even wasps than usual. It's concerning.
When I first slept in my new flat it felt like someone lifted a heavy rock off my chest. I hadn't realized just how much the noise affected me.
And I am not a noise sensitive person, in fact Metal and Noise music are kinda a thing I like.
I think cities first and foremost should look out for the people wjo actually live there. Widening roads is the polar opposite of that.
The noise was terrible. It wasn't even that the road was particularly constantly busy, but because it was the "main" road there was always vehicles. And motorbikes. Motorbikes were the worst, by far. Being woken suddenly every hour by someone on a motorbike revving their engine wears down on you night by night.
How these things have not been regulated out of existence by now is beyond me. The only silver lining is that I see more and more electric scooters. As they're starting to make economic sense I hope that the others will phase out, but the old ones will have to be removed by force (of law) or they'll keep ruining people's health (air & sleep) for decades...
Everything was so calm and quiet from up there... until WRRRRRREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!! a scooter cut through the night. :|
Now, I'm on the top (5) floor, on a much quieter side road, and the different is astounding. I can actually sleep with the window open in hot weather.
Less private vehicles with one occupant taking up space means there is more bandwidth for busses and trams etc that can transport many people (and which have ramps for pushchairs, wheelchairs, etc).
Perhaps I'm just stupid, but I can't parse the intent behind this response - what do you mean, exactly?
- does not have a mobility scooter
- cannot walk more than like 20 feet
- is able to drive
So if e.g. their hairdresser was suddenly in a pedestrianised place they would not be able to go there anymore. A bus would not help, they would not be able to walk to a bus stop, the bus might not go near enough to the hairdresser. So in their case the bus is less accessible than a car. I'm not saying this is true in general, as some disabled cannot drive but can get the bus.
But - n=1? Seems like this context disacknowledges improvement of infrastructure.
I can run across three lanes of traffic in the 40 nanoseconds of pedestrian green I'm given, or stamp on the pedals when cycling so I can make a turn in 25 mph traffic. My dad can't - so the majority of the town, for him, doesn't exist.
Those groups are exactly the people most screwed over by car-friendly design, and using them as a reason to push it more is rather poor taste.
And right now they have the option to use a mobility scooter or a car, if they lose the option to use a car then there will be places that will take a lot longer to get to. I think it's reasonable for people like this to prefer being able to drive everywhere, it gives a huge amount of independence and is clearly can be more convenient than public transport.
And there is a dignity aspect as well, I don't know how seriously people will take that argument but I understand that many older people would avoid doing trips rather than using a mobility scooter. I think that deserves consideration as well.
Cars probably do help them kill their dignity- at the expense of their grandchildren's quality of life.
So my comments are not motivated by some kind of hidden agenda, I am just thinking about someone who has apparently fallen through the cracks of the desire that some people have to make cities less accessible for cars.
It's a consideration I voice when I get the opportunity, and hopefully it will be factored into whatever planning happens. Not all elderly people like using mobility scooters, can afford them, want to spend extra time getting public transport etc etc.
It is possible to have it both ways. Look at some of the city design in the Netherlands. The YouTube channel "https://youtube.com/c/NotJustBikes" is a great start.
The point is already moot.
Also if you can use a car, you could use a mobility scooter or electric wheelchair, and you will greatly benefit from denser, more developed pedestrian areas featuring amenities such as elevators.
Depending on who you ask, it's either one of the most "dangerous" "immigrant" neighbourhoods in the country, or one of the creative centers of the Berlin art scene, or startup/hipster central. But suburb.... no.