They're not wrong about these things, they're super hazardous. Through-drivers become frustrated, drivers looking for the store they want aren't paying attention to the road, people window-shop while driving, peds are wandering everywhere, etc. Highly problematic.
This is trying to solve the wrong problem. We should be using smaller vehicles, such as electric scooters or automated microbuses in dedicated lanes, etc.
We should rethink why people need to travel great distances on a daily basis. Work-from-home was a major one that got the shake-up and now it's not a given that we must commute up to an hour or more each way each day.
I've always owned/driven a car since graduation, up until a few years ago. Then I decided to park the vehicle and walk/transit/uber for the incidental health benefits. I'm surprised I've not had much issue with this, though if I were to add it up it's probably costing me more time and money than driving myself. I could get a small e-vehicle or live somewhere more livable to improve that if it mattered more.
That's kinda what I concluded, these guys seem to have a relatively good point but there's no practical way to action it; in the US about half the country has already been laid down according to this template. Trying to disrupt that is just disrupting the economy and will do an infinite more amount of damage to livelihoods in the short term than good in the long term.
I'm reluctant to characterise anything as a 'wrecker' movement but... I get a bit of that vibe from them. A bit like those environmentalists that use environmentalism to disguise their misanthropic tendencies.
I really don't know why I think that about this movement, though. It's weird. Just rubs me the wrong way.
but it's easy to point out what's wrong, why this initiative is misguided.
i'm a misanthrope myself. ironic that you're pointing out what's wrong with the misanthropic take.
Car dependent cities are a terrible health hazard! I get it, different strokes for different folks, but iono, have car dependent owners really experienced anything else? You warn of economic damage as if that's the only Good there is.
We can't A/B tests our lives, so we're gonna bias the life we know. So it's self perpetuating. The take isn't throw up your hands because economic damage, that can't be it? Eh that's why im a misanthrope.
you mentioned koolaid somewhere in your replies. sounds like you're drinking good ol U.S. of A koolaid.
good on you! the car the picket fence the lawn and the McMansion. it's just that it doesn't really work that way for most people. and "most people" ends up being apparently very tricky in US history let's just say.
Why would it do any damage? Stroad usually can easily be converted into road, and with some political will and investments into a street. In both cases economy will improve - either by making roads safer and faster, or by bringing jobs to the newly created streets.
That is the whole point of being against stroads - they are rotten compromise between roads and streets.
I guess all I can really say at the end of the day is that I get a weird 'feeling' from the Strong Towns movement, and I can't put my finger on why. Guess that isn't very helpful, is it.
I get the same feeling from other such organisations and people.
They seem to be focused on aspects that are typically less important to the rest of society.
The most head-scratching example of this that I've seen was a guy saying that people should move to Chicago because it's underrated and has a decent transportation network.
Y-yeah. But that's not the only thing that people consider when they move and let's just say the city itself has a reputation.
In my corner of the world there's a lot of putting the cart before the horse in this regard - typically via closing streets for traffic without improving public transport.
Net effect is just more congestion because people have places to go regardless how much you reduce "induced demand".
It always feel like they are changing something different, but I am not entirely sure if it actually will work or make my life better. And this is as European.
At same time. I'm pretty sure sprawl would be better with more mixed zoning. Ofc, with buffers to oil refineries... If some idiots starts that argument.
>I get a weird 'feeling' from the Strong Towns movement, and I can't put my finger on why
An organization with a subtly culturally imperialist name ("the cities are all fine, but all small towns are all broken everywhere") is unlikely to have your best interests at heart even if its conclusions may have some validity.
The thing that this lobby group misses is that, ultimately, most smaller towns are in maintenance mode (we soft-banned most resource extraction and what is left only requires a tenth of the workforce) and that's true to a degree for smaller cities as well. This isn't something you can easily do with a major city because the infrastructure is more heavily used and won't as gracefully degrade, but you can keep rural roads serviceable for a long time with simple maintenance.
And this is why "stroads" exist in the first place- that's already the cost-optimized solution (take 2 lane road, expropriate some front yards/front parking, now you have a 4-lane road that can support through traffic and exiting traffic), and reworking them is not going to help a town that Strong Towns claims in the same article "are financially irresponsible and don't even have enough tax revenue to sustain maintenance".
Surely, if they don't have bread, perhaps they might consider cake?
Sigh. Because roads with turn lanes CAN NOT be converted into straight roads without forcing cars to take long detours through slow streets.
This will inevitably slow down the traffic, which is the goal of these propaganda outlets. They WANT traffic to become untenable. Just read their suggestions on "improving" roads with turn lanes.
Well, the point is to get rid of a lot of the traffic. And that's a good thing actually, with better air quality due to less pollution, more safety since there are fewer cars going around, which in turn helps with emergency services as it becomes easier for them to reach their destination, you get more incentives to use public transit, a bicycle or even walk places. Hell, for those times when you absolutely do need a car, lessening traffic makes that nicer as well, since you don't need to sit in traffic as much.
So yes, this propaganda is good for the environment and the planet, good for communities and good for individuals.
Go ahead and point out the lies and/or misinformation.
You are asserting anecdotes ("it'll make driving slower for sure!"), compared to strong towns and https://www.youtube.com/@NotJustBikes, who are professional planners and civil engineers.
They specifically address your exact points in their videos, stroads are bad for everybody, even cars.
Usually stroad development is surrounded by parking spots and it is easy to change where the entrance is. Sometimes entrance from the street is already in place (parking has multiple entrances), you just need to block the road access.
I just tried implementing this on some random stroad and you can easily remove more than 2/3 access points without any investments.
> I just tried implementing this on some random stroad and you can easily remove more than 2/3 access points without any investments.
No, you can't. Who's going to remove these access points? Like actual physical labor. Are you going to rent heavy equipment with your own money and remove them on a 5-mile stretch of a stroad?
My guestimate is that will cost around 10% of annual upkeep to remove access points for particular stroad. If access point is already under maintenance of stroad owner then removing it will pay off quite quickly (~10 years). If not the benefit will "just" be faster and safer (st)road.
> We should be using smaller vehicles, such as electric scooters or automated microbuses in dedicated lanes, etc.
No. The current model is pretty close to the perfect one. Surface roads efficiently and _flexibly_ move people. There is NOTHING else that comes even close to them.
We just need to push self-driving cars, and then start working on the REAL problem: dense cities. They should be deconstructed and un-densified, except for selected historically-significant areas.
I loved Houston, TX. Its road system and zoning are freakishly well-designed, and it allows people to have commutes that are far more comfortable (and shorter!) than in dense cities.
In fact, Houston ("Greater Houston Area") had shorter commute time than ANY European city of a comparable size!
I moved out of there because I couldn't tolerate the climate. My second-favorite city is Salt Lake City.
thanks for the reply. never been to houston. been to salt lake city, it's too spread out for me but surprisingly it feels walkable, even in 100°+ heat. probably because it's super flat. I enjoyed the people there.
do you ever wonder why dense cities are dense though? we're all fooled? slaves? red pilled or whatever color the saying is
> do you ever wonder why dense cities are dense though? we're all fooled? slaves? red pilled or whatever color the saying is
There are no conspiracies, just pure market forces. Dense cities are more efficient for _companies_ because they allow access to larger talent pools. Basically, if you are Google, it might make sense to open an office near Amazon's campus, and hire away some of Amazon's engineers.
This has an externality: more people will have to commute into that small area, resulting in longer commute time. Alternatively, they can move to live closer to that workplace, downsizing their living space and/or increasing the real estate price (more people competing for an inherently limited resource).
We also know the market way to fix that: price the externalities via taxes or cap-and-trades. In this case, the density needs to be treated in this way.
This ignores that people actually enjoy living in dense cities. There is a reason that so much media is set in NYC or a big city, people see it as exciting.
I just looked up Houston's commute time and all[^1] the[^2] sources[^3] I found seem to say otherwise.
I also found this[^4]: Apparently Europe's cities with the longest commute time have about the same commute time as Houston. Not to mention that Paris and Budapest have populations many times the size of Houston.
You're trying to compare numbers across different studies with different methodologies. The articles above show that Houston is consistently terrible for a given study.
Also, the article you linked draws from an irrelevant page on businessnamegenerator.com (???). Is this a troll?
Houston is famous for its nonsensical zoning and inefficient infrastructure. It's difficult to react to Houston being "freakishly well-designed" with a straight face.
I've been to Houston and it's just a terrible place to visit, even considering the oppressive weather.
then start working on the REAL problem: dense cities
Absolutely not.
I moved from the Midwest - small to medium sized towns (populations of 3k to 60k) - to a larger city in Northern Europe. It wasn't safe to walk in the US, and if I walked at the wrong times, there was always police presence and occasionally harassment. Things weren't close: Even in the small city, I couldn't safely walk to every store.
I never really knew freedom until I lived here without a car. I walk to the grocery store and places that are 30-50 minutes away. I use public transportation. The two of these mean I get a lot more physical activity than I ever would in the US and this is without having to do special exercise.
I'll never be stuck in the house due to poverty again. Other folks aren't as likely to get stuck in the house due to disability either. I like living in the countryside, but it is a trap unless you can travel. In general, this means you have to drive and pay for a reliable vehicle.
What an awful idea. Sorry, but just no. Smearing cities out over large areas turns them into giant ponzi schemes that inevitably collapse. You're just turning nature into a giant parking lot because fuck you, that's why. And what are you smoking that you would look at soul-sucking traffic jams and say "Yes, I love misery. Let's do more of that!".
Their subreddit activity agrees with you. Posts get little to no traction on a regular basis.
That said, their model of change is murky. On one hand, they seem to want to be governmental consultants and on the other hand, they want to educate the citizenry on how to advocate for more robust city design. The middle road they’ve taken between those two doesn’t really fit anyone.
Perhaps if branding and terminology nitpicks are scaring you away, then maybe you never cared about the issue in the first place.
Is suboptimal branding really something that should keep you from being engaged with important things? What does it say about us that this is normal behavior now?
I imagined the object of writing this article and sharing it was convincing people who, indeed, don’t yet “care about the issue.” If the point is just preaching to the choir, sure, don’t worry about it.
The jargon bothers me as well, though I figured they picked the weird word so they could use analytics to see how well their concepts are spreading and being repeated.
Sometimes something just has a weird... vibe... for want of a better word, and this gives that in a big way.
It's ok. They'll make up a new word next year when this one flounders. There will also be one that's a mashup of "garage" and "funroom", to try to make you feel like a fool for wasting square footage on the garage.
On the contrary, the term has been effective in raising awareness of terrible street design, and has exploded in interest (as far as these things go) in recent years.
It has come up in a few places including successful articles in Vox (e.g. https://www.vox.com/23178764/florida-us19-deadliest-pedestri... - I heard about this from a podcast episode completely unrelated to this subject area). It has a Wikipedia page - this concept did not have a Wikipedia page before this concept was coined.
The term is pure propaganda, nothing more. I propose we call high-rises "human anthills" and bike lanes in most cities as "emplanes" ("for empty space lanes").
The problem I've got is that colloquially in my brain street and road are pretty interchangeable. The thing they're calling a "road" I would call a highway or a freeway, I'd happily call either a street or a highway a "road". So my brain gets stuck on the pam "they're the same picture" meme.
And it doesn't matter how wikipedia defines them or whatever, nobody needs to bother pointing out their definitions, my point is that colloquially I certainly grew up using them completely interchangeably. So now you're stuck both re-educating me on words that I've used incorrectly for decades while introducing a brand new mashup word. Then you have to start teaching why the mashup word is useful.
I'm perfectly fine to accept it and move on myself, but I think in the larger scheme of things this argument is going to land on some obstinate fucks who will just drag people into arguing that "streets are just roads, so the term stroad is stupid". And generally we're stuck in this country between people who enjoy precision and exactness and fairness in language and think its the foundation on which everything is built, and other people who don't see the importance. Since we both speak English we miss the fact that we're not talking the same language and attempts at persuasion aren't working at all.
Interesting article but not realistic IMO. It's just that roads/streets capital investment is incredibly complicated and so much thought/systems/law has built up around their concept and creation. The entirety of the problem is literally just cars. Cars are the problem. We've created a society that needs them but we're butting up against our need to move fast but we forget we're human and stupid. I think either a new novel way to travel or self driving cars that actually work are the only answers that can solve this.
Isn't that what people mean when they say that cars are the problem? With a personal vehicle, all you need is a road and you can start from any point on the road and stop at any point. That means people and shops can be as spread out as they want. This leads to sprawl which perpetuates the problem as cars (or other motor vehicles) become necessary for any meaningful distance.
Edit: when people advocate to remove cars, I take it as removing cars as a viable option of transport and then designing the roads, public transport, facility placement, etc to make that a reality.
What's wrong with sprawl? It allows people to live in spacious houses. The overwhelming majority of people want that (more than 80%).
Take a look at your assumptions.
There are some problems with cars: gasoline use and general unsafety due to human drivers. EVs are solving the first one, and self-driving will solve the second one.
It gives the commons the freedom of movement, it's hard to control them when they live and work where they please. Controlling the commons becomes much easier when they are densely packed into singular locations.
That was sarcasm, if it wasn't obvious; though I'm fairly sure a number of the people with anti-car agendas actually believe this.
Nah, the issue with sprawl appears when everybody finally left the city center: the infrastructure becomes too expensive to maintain without the city center to subsidize suburb roads and water management, and the city either stop fixing it or indebt itself too much.
If you're living in an exurb that's becoming suburbia, and the city propose you to close your septic tank and attach yourself to the suburb water management, only do it if you really, really trust your local politicians. And I mean, really.
In particular, water and sewer costs don't go down a lot. An anecdote: I live in Seattle which is fairly dense, yet my sewer+water costs 5 _times_ more than in sprawling Boise, ID.
My mother used to live in a small village near a small city, an exurb. Now, it's becoming suburbia, but not the good kind, the 'full detached home' kind (not joking, there isn't even a single semi-detached home here). I see how it changed everything, in the wrong direction. It killed the local bar/dinner in exchange for a monstrosity old people cannot access. It killed the community, the traffic tripled, you had to attach yourself to waste management (and now they have issues). My mother had to add a wall/fence to break the sound of the road, when trees and plants were sufficient, and during rush hour you still feel like you live in a city, without the city access advantages.
I would typically call most of Seattle suburbia. It does not seems as sprawly than Stockton (that I actually visited unlike Seattle), but it doesn't look good.
Also, high rise is as bad as suburbia in my opinion, I hate it with less passion because I only had to live in high rise building temporarily. But the cost each time you rise 3 meters is exponential for everything (except electricity), so if your city is 10% high rise, 80% detached/semi-detached homes, no shit it'll be expensive.
Is Boise, ID a suburban sprawl? Or is it a fairly dense city without a shit ton of high-rise units?
That paper makes a city-to-city comparison, not a urban-to-suburban comparison. But what it does say is:
> These results indicate that a 10% increase in density would reduce operational costs for fire protection by 1.3%, streets and highways by 2.7%, sewer by 3.1%, etc.
Not sure about you, but this is the exact opposite of "doesn't go down a lot".
If you want actual urban-to-suburban comparisons there's the case studies done by urban3 who map fine-grained expenditure and tax income:
> Holcombe and Williams [25] found mixed results. They found that for cities with population less than 500,000, higher population density was associated with lower per capita expenditures on highways and sewers, but this relationship did not hold for larger cities. Further, per capita expenditures on services, such as police, increased with density for cities with population above 500,000, and there was no relationship for smaller cities. Their general conclusion was that for cities larger than 50,000, per capita expenditures are not associated with density. Further research by Holcombe and Williams [26] found no relationship between sprawl and highway expenditures and, actually, a positive relationship between population density and highway expenditures.
...
> Fewer studies have shown reductions in costs for water, sewer, or sold waste, though this may be expected. Some costs have also been shown to increase with density, such as housing and community development or police.
My own research (will publish on Github once I validate it) finds similar results. Municipalities peak in efficiency around 100-200k people.
> If you want actual urban-to-suburban comparisons there's the case studies done by urban3 who map fine-grained expenditure and tax income
Woohoo. Yet another propaganda outlet. Note that it tracks _tax_ _income_, which is misleading. It's skewed towards Downtowns, simply because that's where companies are registered and pay taxes. But people who _work_ there don't typically live nearby.
In fact, if you look at total _personal_ income taxes per zip code collected in the US, it's not even close. Suburbs are paying for most of the US.
I would say I have something of an anti-car agenda but I don't have any thoughts like that. I really don't believe anyone else of my people have that thought either.
My reasons for being anti-car is simple. Where I grew up, residential and commercial areas don't have much separation. My own family runs a small cloth retail business right out of our house. There are grocery shops, barbers, electricians, everything you might need right outside of my house. If I wake up in the morning and realise I am out of tooth paste, I don't even need to open my eyes. I can just walk outside and buy it.
My sister moved to a bigger city. She owns an apartment in a pretty big complex. It has, like, 30 towers, 10 floors each, with 10 apartments on each floor, each one being nearly as big as my own home. But, since its a residential complex, any commercial activities are not allowed inside. Since its so big, it had to be built outside the city limits. Now imagine if she's in my situation. She would have to take a car, drive for at least 20 mins, then another 20 back, all the while dealing with the disgusting feeling of unbrushed teeth.
Or perhaps, she has a kid. He's very young, let's say 10. If the shop was right outside, he would be able to go and buy the toothpaste. Now with the whole driving problem in between, he can't do anything other than complain about the lack of toothpaste.
> Controlling the commons becomes much easier when they are densely packed into singular locations.
Please explain what kind of control you are talking about here. In my opinion, it would easier to control them when they are so spread out. You can easily target one single house when it has its section of the road, its own utility connections, etc. It would be a lot harder to single out a single dissident when it would mean harming many other neutrals and turning them into dissidents as well.
It takes up space (maybe not an issue in the US), it requires a lot more energy, and it makes using healthier transportation like walking and cycling a lot more difficult.
But yes, living spacious with a private garden and not to close to your neighbors is very nice. I would love to have both.
> I can get my 10k a day steps in a nice sprawl with shady tree lanes much easier than in Manhattan.
Are you allowed to have shady trees on road sides? I would think that they would be disallowed since they block visibility and force drivers to slow down.
If new neighborhoods had to pay for their own pipes, roads, electrical hookups and couldn't put that on existing tax payers it'd help municipal finances a lot. Sprawl is expensive from an infrastructure perspective. And the spending to benefit a few at the expense of many is not unlike some sweet heart tax deal "bringing in good jobs" at the cost of several million dollars a pop
Sigh. Sprawl is _CHEAPER_ than dense cities for most infrastructure.
To give you a perspective, one mile of NYC subway now costs about as much as 1000 miles of 6-lane freeway. One mile of new light rail in Seattle will be enough to maintain all roads in Washington state for half a year.
The same story for water, sewer, and electricity. Dense cities are _incredibly_ expensive to maintain because projects become extremely complicated, with lots of project management overhead (more people-hours). And people are EXPENSIVE, compared to raw materials.
This isn’t a true cost analysis: NYC subway lines can simultaneously be more expensive in absolute terms and cheaper per commuter-mile-year.
The amortized cost of a commuter journey on the subway is a tiny fraction of the cost of and on roads, for all parties.
(This is true even when the subway is obscenely expensive to construct, as the 2nd Avenue line is. But treating deep-tunnel construction under some of the densest and most expensive real estate in the US as the norm is essentially dishonest.)
The NYC subway serves 1.8 billion rides in a down year, comprising tens of billions of passenger miles. Amortized over decades of 24/7 operation, there’s no road in the US that comes close to that, even with obscenely expensive deep tunneling.
Roads are cheap on paper, and expensive per commuter-mile. Mass transit is expensive on paper, and cheap per commuter-mile, especially in dense cities.
If the argument is about sustainable transportation, then yes: big numbers matter. Scale matters, and mass transit is the definition of scale.
I genuinely don’t believe that Houston carries “about the same number of commuters” as the NYC subway. It has a quarter as many people; you should cite a source. I can’t find one for that.
No. Scary big numbers don't matter by themselves without a context.
1.8 billion rides per year for a 8-million city works out to less than 0.7 rides per day per capita. I can guarantee that Houston has more road trips.
> Scale matters, and mass transit is the definition of scale.
Yes, and multi-dozen billion dollar corruption on public projects is also the definition of scale.
> I genuinely don’t believe that Houston carries “about the same number of commuters” as the NYC subway. It has a quarter as many people; you should cite a source. I can’t find one for that.
I'm using the data for the Greater Houston Area (pop: 7.2 million), which matches what people think when they say "Houston".
> 1.8 billion rides per year for a 8-million city works out to less than 0.7 rides per day per capita. I can guarantee that Houston has more road trips.
That's just the subway. Add another 100 million for MNRR and LIRR, plus another 100 million for PATH and NJT. And those are all post-COVID numbers; you can roughly double each to get an actual picture for the volume of mass transit needed to run NYC.
> I'm using the data for the Greater Houston Area (pop: 7.2 million), which matches what people think when they say "Houston".
The NYC Combined Statistical area has 23 million people in it[1]. Nearly as many people commute into just Manhattan as live in the actual city of Houston[2]. You simply do not get those numbers with road-based transit.
It doesn't matter how you cut this: Houston is operating at a fractional scale, and will continue to do so as long as roads dominate its development patterns. Houston's government appears to be aware of this[3].
> one mile of NYC subway now costs about as much as 1000 miles of 6-lane freeway
Is that freeway going through the middle of the city? I think not. Any construction in a dense city becomes expensive. But you need to divide that by the number of people using it as well. Everyone in the city can use a subway. Only that one house on top of the hill is using this pretty expensive road that goes to the top of the hill in the middle of nowhere.
Dude. Did you read the rest of my comment? It is obviously expensive to spend 100U (some hypothetical unit since I don't wanna waste time looking for the exact numbers) instead of 10U. But it is more expensive when each one of a 1000 people have to spend that 10U rather than all of those 1000 people contributing 0.1U to get 100U total.
Light rail is ~$27 million/mile and subway is ~$290 million/mile, if you look at the numbers for the latest finished projects in Finland. American infrastructure is unreasonably expensive because, for a number of reasons, Americans lack the ability and interest to build it efficiently.
Dense cities are common around the world. In most of them, the infrastructure is not particularly expensive.
Your comparison is based on administrative borders rather than on the cities themselves. If you compare population densities in urban areas (as listed in Wikipedia), Seattle has 3600 people / square mile, Helsinki has 4800 people / square mile, and NYC has 6000 people / square mile.
Typical Helsinki consists of medium-density residential areas separated by large parks and forested areas. The urban core is dense but not particularly tall. The kind of suburban sprawl you often see in American cities, with massive areas with a low population density but little undeveloped land, is largely missing.
> Your comparison is based on administrative borders rather than on the cities themselves.
"Urban areas" are poorly defined in many cases. In some cases (e.g. "Greater Houston Area") they match what people think about "Houston", Seattle metro area does not.
> The kind of suburban sprawl you often see in American cities, with massive areas with a low population density but little undeveloped land, is largely missing.
Yes, and? Helsinki is still sparsely populated, so new infrastructure is cheap enough. The costs go up, once the density increases.
Administrative borders are arbitrary and rarely have anything to do with the actual borders of the city.
Population density figures should be reported as averages over people rather than averages over land. They are usually not, because it's difficult to calculate them that way. If you have a residential area with 20k people in a square mile next to an undeveloped square mile, the population density is usually reported as 10k people / square mile. But from the perspective of the people living there, as well as for the purposes of infrastructure construction, the actual population density is closer to 20k people / square mile.
Re: expensive. Hard disagree. To put things in technology terms roads don't scale to meet commuters needs. And as others have pointed out it is a unit cost problem with your reasoning (total cost per commute).
At some scale we aggregate processing and trade latency for bandwidth (busy poll versus hardware interrupts). We trade the ability for everyone to start their journey _right now_ for the ability for lots more of us to get to our destination via a common carriage (be this packets or people the pattern is the same).
Where land is cheap and commuter traffic isn't an issue maybe roads make sense but that doesn't mean sprawl is cheap in time-spent.
Think about children! They are stripped of the independence of move, because they can not drive a car. And everything is so far away (school, after-school activities, friends places) so it takes forever to go there by foot/public transit.
And self-driving cars seem nowhere near the production-ready deployment. It's very strange to rely on a solution which may be probably somewhere in the future. Why don't you mention a teleport then?
We have something similar to self driving cars. Taxis and other public transport! Sprawl means that a taxi just waiting around the corner isn't gonna make money. That leaves uber and similar apps which are expensive. Reducing sprawl makes it possible to find a taxi a short walk away from your home. I was able to commute to school myself using public transport because those roads were busy enough that I had to wait just 5 mins in front of my house for one to come. That wouldn't have been possible if I lived in a suburbia.
> We have something similar to self driving cars. Taxis and other public transport!
No we don't. Taxis are not a solution because they are INCREDIBLY dirty. You might as well be riding on train-cars worth of coal.
And public transit is worse, because it's inevitably slow and inflexible.
Edit: taxis are expensive not because they are cars, but because they need dedicated drivers. And here in the US even taxi drivers earn a somewhat liveable salary, and as a result they have a huge carbon footprint. But if you're OK with semi-slave labor, then it can work, agreed.
By taxis, I don't mean Uber drivers. We have auto-rickshaws here. They go from any point in the city to any point (so you have the flexibility of private vehicles) but they mostly follow common routes and they pick up and drop off people anywhere along the way. So they end up more efficient since they are nearly always at full capacity rather than your SUV that's burning more fuel carrying itself than any people and stuff inside it.
Public transit is excellent when you design for it. It can be fast and flexible. The problem is when the implementation is half hearted. Transit systems are things that become better with scale. The more you invest in them, they better they get.
And now the time has come to speak about economic part of sprawl and self-driving cars (let's assume they will happen soon)
When you say that "they are trying to push people into dense cities". One should read as "I want the govt to continue subsidizing construction of roads and suburbs.". Because can you really afford that lifestyle without making the ends meet, if you will have to fully pay for all of that?
And will you be able to easily afford a self-driving car, if that will ever come to existence?
And don't you think that you will fully own your self-driving car with open-source firmware running onboard? Most likely you won't. Think more of a subscription-based self-driving feature, which will have unpredictable pricing, and mandatory always-online. Do you really want that "freedom"?
Induced demand is a funny thing: most people want more space (I want more space!), but suburban sprawl in the US reveals how little that space actually gets used: guest bedrooms that aren’t opened for years, furnished basements with untouched pool tables, a single common room that everybody actually uses, &c.
Put another way: car-driven development induces desire for sprawl, but living patterns reveal actual preferences here.
> What's wrong with sprawl? It allows people to live in spacious houses. The overwhelming majority of people want that
That's true. I would rather live in a house that's more spacious than not. But more than that, I would rather live in a house that allows me to buy an ice cream if I have 5 minutes of free time than in one that makes that ice cream buying an hour long trip filled with smoke and noise.
You can have spacious houses without having to live all alone.
> There are some problems with cars: gasoline use and general unsafety due to human drivers.
You missed another problem with cars: they are space inefficient. I don't have the exact numbers but you can fit way more people in a bus than you can a car. And of course, you can fit even more people on the street if they are walking on their own feet.
> EVs are solving the first one
They may solve the gasoline problem but they aren't solving the space one.
> self-driving will solve the second one
I am not gonna hold my breath.
There is another way that could solve both of those problems, you know. Make cities more compact. With compact cities, you don't need to drive that much. And if all your destinations are close by, there is no need to allow cars to go to 100 KMpH. In fact, limiting intra-city driving to be under 60 (or lower) KMpH would be safer, fuel efficient, and less noisy (I think). You could even make the roads thinner then since everyone is moving at a slow speed, which opens up more space inside the city.
60 km/h is an insanely unsafe driving speed when there are pedestrians or cyclists anywhere nearby: that's how we end up with heaps of dead children in the streets. Driving on ordinary streets in populated areas should be more like 30 km/h (20 miles/h), and roads should be designed so that cars naturally go that speed even without significant enforcement by traffic cops.
That's why I also added a (or lower). I do not know what a safe driving speed would be. I just know its way less than the 100 KMpH that roads are usually designed for. Driving speed should be about equal to a leisurely human-powered bicycle speed. Or maybe lower since they have more mass, but no one's gonna agree to that. (Maybe that's a good thing?)
> But that's not true even for most of the very dense Manhattan!
I do not know Manhattan. I do not live in Manhattan. I live in India. I have lived in my hometown, and in Delhi and Hyderabad (two very big cities). I can only talk about the specific areas within those cities. I can definitely buy ice cream within 5 minutes of walking. And not even fast walking.
> You simply can not drive efficiently in dense cities, because of everybody else!
If you are in a dense city, you don't need to drive at all. If my workplace and my house were separated by an hour of driving and no transit means other than a road, then I would have to drive. Along with the thousands of others who also have to live so far away from their offices. I live a 10 minute walk from my office. I don't even own a car (or any vehicle, for that matter)! Neither do at least half of the other people who live nearby. While the rest of the people are stuck in 10 minutes of traffic jam, I can walk through them and relax in my air conditioned cubicle.
> What's wrong with sprawl? It allows people to live in spacious houses.
That's fine in an ideal world when you have a low population density and consistent or declining population.
The reality is sprawl in the US coincides with population growth or migration quite often. Person 1 moves to a place where they can be far from people, have a nice forest behind their home, and have open roads. While the distance from their home to their destination is long, the roads are empty so it's stress free driving.
Persons 2 through 300000 think that sounds great, so they move there as well. They all want to be far from people and have empty roads, so they abandon their 30 minute train commute for free living in the city.
The forest behind Person 1's home gets chopped down and replaced by a packed suburb. The main road Person 1 took is now packed with traffic from the other people that moved there dreaming of his lifestyle. His 25 minute smooth commute is now 80 minutes. Construction is constantly ongoing to widen the roads to handle more traffic, instead of reduce the source of the traffic, and this makes traffic worse due to lanes being shut down. Roads quickly become full after construction ends, resulting in more traffic.
This is the story of basically any city in America since the 1950s. People want more space and the freedom to drive to work, and end up in a packed neighborhood and whining about traffic when everyone else follows them. Someone who gets their first taste of it thinks "wow, this is great!" But it's becoming a nightmare for people who moved there 10 years prior. And it'll transition into a nightmare 10 years later for those who are loving it now. The nice nature gets knocked down and you're back to living in a space with too many people, but with none of the benefits of a proper city. You can't walk 2 minutes to a dozen different restaurants, relax by the river, or sit down on transport and read a book while going somewhere. You're stuck in traffic while every tree around you is being chopped down.
And because HN is mostly programmers, most people here probably love the sprawl because they work from home and don't need to wake up at 6 AM to sit in traffic and huff car exhaust from 7 AM to 8:25 AM and arrive at the office at 8:30. But millions in the US are trapped in that loop.
Is this just work commuting or other things as well? I can pick up some groceries on my way home, in the US even this activity adds more mileage to your car.
Sure. It's even worse for that. Cars save even more time for errands, because transit is typically optimized for hub-to-spokes transportation to downtowns.
> even this activity adds more mileage to your car.
What about all the other trips a family/individual makes that isn't work-commute related?
Things like: going grocery shopping, going to sports/hobbies activities, entertainment, going out to restaurants and bars, meeting friends at parks, etc.
I tried to do that, but there is no reliable statistical data for these kinds of errands.
So I did something else: dropped random points inside the cities and plotted routes between them using biking, transit, or cars. In every city I tested (even Berlin!), cars win. And often by 3-5 _times_.
It's understandable, transit is optimized towards traveling to a small number of destinations (typically Downtowns) and lateral travel is often hard.
In Berlin I highly doubt it's 3-5 times for the majority of trips.
To try it out I just plotted a simple route from Schöneberg to Mauerpark, it takes ~42 min with transit, ~28 min with a car. With a car you need to find parking (and pay for parking). The same route is ~32 min on a bike.
From Charlottenburg to Lichtenberg (cross city) it's around ~42 min on a car, ~1h10m with transit + walk, or ~1h on a bike. Again, without factoring in times for parking, etc.
Those car trips are estimates with no traffic on a Saturday noon, any other time with more traffic and these estimates should get ~20-30% longer.
"Stroads" are roads for all users, not just bike bros. And roads are absolutely beautiful, they allow people to move. As a result, well-designed car-oriented American cities are _far_ more efficient than nicely-looking but horrible-to-live European cities.
If you want to use pejorative names, then I propose: "slumhive" ("slum beehive") for any high-rise building and "broads" ("bike bro roads") for bicycle lanes.
Stroads are bad for cars too (not just pedestrians and bicyclists). That's the argument against stroads. Roads are good and streets are good but stroads is the worse of both with the benefits of none.
No. Roads with turn lanes are _flexible_, they allow fast arterial flow, with easy turns. This allows far more variation in design than just high-speed roads and slow local roads.
Moreover, removing "stroads" does NOT reduce fatalities! Boston's accident rate went up from 16 vehicular deaths in 2016 (before they drank the KoolAid) to 26 this year.
The attacks on surface roads by groups with an agenda (push people into dense cities) is predictable. They want traffic to become untenable, so they just lie and insinuate.
Interesting, so you don't think that separating different kinds of traffic (through traffic and local traffic) would inheritly also be better for car drivers?
The whole thing with "stroads" is that they allow to seamlessly transition between these modes. You can't have the left turns on a regular road, so you either need multi-level interchanges (that take too much space), or you need to force drivers to make right turns and circle around.
The latter _can_ be a solution for some roads, but it necessarily lengthens the trip and significantly increases its time because you have to make 3 right turns instead of one left turn.
Yeah, and there are absolutely no people with an agenda to make cars a necessity. I mean, who would that be? It would need to be a huge industry that makes its profit from selling cars to people. I can’t think of any such industry. /s
Sure, hyper-dense cities are not ideal, but neither are spread-out asphalt wastelands where cars are the only means of getting around. This is terrible for anyone who can’t drive (children, people with impaired vision, people who can’t afford cars). I have also lived in Houston (without a car) and I found getting around absolutely miserable. Even when I had friends pick me up with their cars, the distances were huge and a lot of the time, this would be because of parking lots creating gigantic empty space everywhere. (At least, this was my impression.)
> Sure, hyper-dense cities are not ideal, but neither are spread-out asphalt wastelands where cars are the only means of getting around. This is terrible for anyone who can’t drive
This is the only rational argument against cars. I especially want children to have more autonomy.
Yet it'll be far better solved by self-driving vehicles. They already exist, and they work.
None of the claims in the last paragraph are true. Self-driving vehicles still have serious limitations, especially in the city context we’re talking about, and children aren’t going to have their own cars.
The only rational argument? Cars are also dangerous for their surroundings and their passengers. In addition, individual cars are an environmental disaster, in terms of noise, air pollution, climate, and use of natural resources. Finally, I believe (admittedly without having a source at hand) that not using a car is beneficial to one’s health because modern humans move their body way too little — biking or walking, even just to the next bus stop, are much better (but of course, this last part is ultimately a private decision).
I don't know whether the design of American cities is efficient. They might be. and I do believe in roads for all users. That's why a bike lane is called a bike lane and not a bike road. Bike paths and 'bike superhighways' exist in my country but they're unimportant.
But having been in the us only once it was very obvious the us has a problem with safety for drivers. There were cars at the side of the highway (Orlando to Tampa) everywhere, presumably from accidents. Of course traffic wasn't moving. I wasn't driving on holiday and I was glad about it.
It's possibly to do with the fact that Americans all need to drive, ensuring lax standards for driver tests. Maybe if you guys would embrace bike lanes you could also embrace real driver certification. Just dump people who can't drive on second tier transportation like bikes, ebikes, escooters and trains and ensure everyone else gets proper training.
As someone living in Amsterdam, Netherlands, I don't understand the resistance. I agree with the article and I think it is advocating for the right thing, so it's the right kind of propaganda.
Maybe there is more common ground between you and Strong Towns than you'd think? They don't just advocate for "bike bros." Here everyone bikes from kids in elementary school to their grandparents. The key is having separate car infrastructure (roads, highways) and biking/pedestrian infrastructure (streets, bike lanes, pedestrian-only areas).
The net effect is that many people here choose non-car transport (public transport, biking, walking), which reduces traffic. This also makes getting around by car more efficient, for destinations where you need to use a car, because there is less traffic.
If you want to live in a single-family home in the suburbs and own a car, you can do that here too. It's fine because there are roads to get around the country. Not stroads though, so no need to worry about pedestrians or cyclists when you're on a road, so they allow moving faster.
If you want to live in an apartment in the city without owning a car, you can do that here too. It's fine because there is public transport, proper bike lanes and streets to get around the city. Not straods though, so no need to worry about cars.
I'd say it's both nicely looking and quite efficient. Not sure by what metric would an American city be more efficient, but generally I wouldn't want to trade places.
The question wasn't if you enjoyed driving vs. other modalities, it was "do you enjoy driving on a stroad?".
Personally, I hate them. They're chaotic, prone to accidents, ugly and well, everything TFA talks about. Well built infrastructure makes it better for everybody.
Roads are all fine, I just want them to be gravel or dirt ;). While we're dreaming that is.
I grew up in rural California and dirt roads were quite common not far out of town, it's a different way of driving and one that'll make you wonder why you aren't using a mountain bike, if you aren't hauling a bunch of kids or gear.
This all said I am beyond biased, I escaped the bay area to London at least partially because I don't want driving to be a part of my daily life. But I understand opinions vary and people back home love their cars and TV ;)
Town centers with a concentration of pedestrians , bikes and vehicles are going to have a higher rate of accidents no matter what you do. Separating the through traffic from the town centers kills the town centers...route 66 anybody? The focus should be on being more concientious drivers and having respect for the place you are driving in. Lack of respect isn't going to be fixed by dividing up and killing the heart of town centers.
Wow, I didn’t realise this, I was travelling through a bunch of highly walkable cities (guess where) over the last couple of weeks, I guess I didn’t realise they were dead because I couldn’t see past all the people, shops and businesses, and apartments in the way…
This is the closest thing to 'flat earth' that I've seen on HN--surprised by the strong and unsubstantiated viewpoints. At least I now have a mnemonic for remembering the "strongtowns" movement name. nvm, overthinking it: rhymes with wrongtowns.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 196 ms ] threadWe should rethink why people need to travel great distances on a daily basis. Work-from-home was a major one that got the shake-up and now it's not a given that we must commute up to an hour or more each way each day.
I've always owned/driven a car since graduation, up until a few years ago. Then I decided to park the vehicle and walk/transit/uber for the incidental health benefits. I'm surprised I've not had much issue with this, though if I were to add it up it's probably costing me more time and money than driving myself. I could get a small e-vehicle or live somewhere more livable to improve that if it mattered more.
That's kinda what I concluded, these guys seem to have a relatively good point but there's no practical way to action it; in the US about half the country has already been laid down according to this template. Trying to disrupt that is just disrupting the economy and will do an infinite more amount of damage to livelihoods in the short term than good in the long term.
I'm reluctant to characterise anything as a 'wrecker' movement but... I get a bit of that vibe from them. A bit like those environmentalists that use environmentalism to disguise their misanthropic tendencies.
I really don't know why I think that about this movement, though. It's weird. Just rubs me the wrong way.
i'm a misanthrope myself. ironic that you're pointing out what's wrong with the misanthropic take.
Car dependent cities are a terrible health hazard! I get it, different strokes for different folks, but iono, have car dependent owners really experienced anything else? You warn of economic damage as if that's the only Good there is.
We can't A/B tests our lives, so we're gonna bias the life we know. So it's self perpetuating. The take isn't throw up your hands because economic damage, that can't be it? Eh that's why im a misanthrope.
good on you! the car the picket fence the lawn and the McMansion. it's just that it doesn't really work that way for most people. and "most people" ends up being apparently very tricky in US history let's just say.
That is the whole point of being against stroads - they are rotten compromise between roads and streets.
They seem to be focused on aspects that are typically less important to the rest of society.
The most head-scratching example of this that I've seen was a guy saying that people should move to Chicago because it's underrated and has a decent transportation network.
Y-yeah. But that's not the only thing that people consider when they move and let's just say the city itself has a reputation.
In my corner of the world there's a lot of putting the cart before the horse in this regard - typically via closing streets for traffic without improving public transport.
Net effect is just more congestion because people have places to go regardless how much you reduce "induced demand".
At same time. I'm pretty sure sprawl would be better with more mixed zoning. Ofc, with buffers to oil refineries... If some idiots starts that argument.
An organization with a subtly culturally imperialist name ("the cities are all fine, but all small towns are all broken everywhere") is unlikely to have your best interests at heart even if its conclusions may have some validity.
The thing that this lobby group misses is that, ultimately, most smaller towns are in maintenance mode (we soft-banned most resource extraction and what is left only requires a tenth of the workforce) and that's true to a degree for smaller cities as well. This isn't something you can easily do with a major city because the infrastructure is more heavily used and won't as gracefully degrade, but you can keep rural roads serviceable for a long time with simple maintenance.
And this is why "stroads" exist in the first place- that's already the cost-optimized solution (take 2 lane road, expropriate some front yards/front parking, now you have a 4-lane road that can support through traffic and exiting traffic), and reworking them is not going to help a town that Strong Towns claims in the same article "are financially irresponsible and don't even have enough tax revenue to sustain maintenance".
Surely, if they don't have bread, perhaps they might consider cake?
Sigh. Because roads with turn lanes CAN NOT be converted into straight roads without forcing cars to take long detours through slow streets.
This will inevitably slow down the traffic, which is the goal of these propaganda outlets. They WANT traffic to become untenable. Just read their suggestions on "improving" roads with turn lanes.
So yes, this propaganda is good for the environment and the planet, good for communities and good for individuals.
You are asserting anecdotes ("it'll make driving slower for sure!"), compared to strong towns and https://www.youtube.com/@NotJustBikes, who are professional planners and civil engineers.
They specifically address your exact points in their videos, stroads are bad for everybody, even cars.
I just tried implementing this on some random stroad and you can easily remove more than 2/3 access points without any investments.
No, you can't. Who's going to remove these access points? Like actual physical labor. Are you going to rent heavy equipment with your own money and remove them on a 5-mile stretch of a stroad?
What's so hard to understand?
"What's so hard to understand?"
No. The current model is pretty close to the perfect one. Surface roads efficiently and _flexibly_ move people. There is NOTHING else that comes even close to them.
We just need to push self-driving cars, and then start working on the REAL problem: dense cities. They should be deconstructed and un-densified, except for selected historically-significant areas.
gotta say i never met any human describe US car infrastructure as "perfect" no matter where on the car lover spectrum they fall.
disclaimer: i'm a bike bro as you call it
I loved Houston, TX. Its road system and zoning are freakishly well-designed, and it allows people to have commutes that are far more comfortable (and shorter!) than in dense cities.
In fact, Houston ("Greater Houston Area") had shorter commute time than ANY European city of a comparable size!
I moved out of there because I couldn't tolerate the climate. My second-favorite city is Salt Lake City.
> disclaimer: i'm a bike bro as you call it
Well, duh.
do you ever wonder why dense cities are dense though? we're all fooled? slaves? red pilled or whatever color the saying is
There are no conspiracies, just pure market forces. Dense cities are more efficient for _companies_ because they allow access to larger talent pools. Basically, if you are Google, it might make sense to open an office near Amazon's campus, and hire away some of Amazon's engineers.
This has an externality: more people will have to commute into that small area, resulting in longer commute time. Alternatively, they can move to live closer to that workplace, downsizing their living space and/or increasing the real estate price (more people competing for an inherently limited resource).
We also know the market way to fix that: price the externalities via taxes or cap-and-trades. In this case, the density needs to be treated in this way.
Not so much: https://www.builderonline.com/money/economics/80-percent-of-...
I also found this[^4]: Apparently Europe's cities with the longest commute time have about the same commute time as Houston. Not to mention that Paris and Budapest have populations many times the size of Houston.
^1 https://houston.innovationmap.com/houston-worst-traffic-comm...
^2 https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/transpor...
^3 https://houston.culturemap.com/news/city-life/03-04-19-houst...
^4 https://www.mynewsdesk.com/eurofound/news/budapest-paris-and...
The average commute time for Berlin is 31 minutes, London is 47 minutes (https://www.timeout.com/london/news/london-is-only-the-sixth...), Paris area is 32 minutes, Madrid is 31 minutes.
Population: Paris area is 12 million, Berlin is 4 million, Houston Area is 7.5 million, Madrid is 6.5 million.
What am I missing?
Also, the article you linked draws from an irrelevant page on businessnamegenerator.com (???). Is this a troll?
Houston is famous for its nonsensical zoning and inefficient infrastructure. It's difficult to react to Houston being "freakishly well-designed" with a straight face.
I've been to Houston and it's just a terrible place to visit, even considering the oppressive weather.
Absolutely not.
I moved from the Midwest - small to medium sized towns (populations of 3k to 60k) - to a larger city in Northern Europe. It wasn't safe to walk in the US, and if I walked at the wrong times, there was always police presence and occasionally harassment. Things weren't close: Even in the small city, I couldn't safely walk to every store.
I never really knew freedom until I lived here without a car. I walk to the grocery store and places that are 30-50 minutes away. I use public transportation. The two of these mean I get a lot more physical activity than I ever would in the US and this is without having to do special exercise.
I'll never be stuck in the house due to poverty again. Other folks aren't as likely to get stuck in the house due to disability either. I like living in the countryside, but it is a trap unless you can travel. In general, this means you have to drive and pay for a reliable vehicle.
I disagree. The current model looks to be awful in most ways to me. I don't see how self-driving cars address most of the problems with it.
That said, their model of change is murky. On one hand, they seem to want to be governmental consultants and on the other hand, they want to educate the citizenry on how to advocate for more robust city design. The middle road they’ve taken between those two doesn’t really fit anyone.
Is suboptimal branding really something that should keep you from being engaged with important things? What does it say about us that this is normal behavior now?
The bad naming of strongtowns is just a passing comment on the jargon.
Sometimes something just has a weird... vibe... for want of a better word, and this gives that in a big way.
Trending awareness: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...
It has come up in a few places including successful articles in Vox (e.g. https://www.vox.com/23178764/florida-us19-deadliest-pedestri... - I heard about this from a podcast episode completely unrelated to this subject area). It has a Wikipedia page - this concept did not have a Wikipedia page before this concept was coined.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroad
And it doesn't matter how wikipedia defines them or whatever, nobody needs to bother pointing out their definitions, my point is that colloquially I certainly grew up using them completely interchangeably. So now you're stuck both re-educating me on words that I've used incorrectly for decades while introducing a brand new mashup word. Then you have to start teaching why the mashup word is useful.
I'm perfectly fine to accept it and move on myself, but I think in the larger scheme of things this argument is going to land on some obstinate fucks who will just drag people into arguing that "streets are just roads, so the term stroad is stupid". And generally we're stuck in this country between people who enjoy precision and exactness and fairness in language and think its the foundation on which everything is built, and other people who don't see the importance. Since we both speak English we miss the fact that we're not talking the same language and attempts at persuasion aren't working at all.
Edit: when people advocate to remove cars, I take it as removing cars as a viable option of transport and then designing the roads, public transport, facility placement, etc to make that a reality.
Take a look at your assumptions.
There are some problems with cars: gasoline use and general unsafety due to human drivers. EVs are solving the first one, and self-driving will solve the second one.
It gives the commons the freedom of movement, it's hard to control them when they live and work where they please. Controlling the commons becomes much easier when they are densely packed into singular locations.
That was sarcasm, if it wasn't obvious; though I'm fairly sure a number of the people with anti-car agendas actually believe this.
If you're living in an exurb that's becoming suburbia, and the city propose you to close your septic tank and attach yourself to the suburb water management, only do it if you really, really trust your local politicians. And I mean, really.
Wow. Toxic propaganda is really successful.
If you read ACTUAL analyses, the dense cities are not really that more efficient: https://www.mdpi.com/2413-8851/5/3/69
In particular, water and sewer costs don't go down a lot. An anecdote: I live in Seattle which is fairly dense, yet my sewer+water costs 5 _times_ more than in sprawling Boise, ID.
My mother used to live in a small village near a small city, an exurb. Now, it's becoming suburbia, but not the good kind, the 'full detached home' kind (not joking, there isn't even a single semi-detached home here). I see how it changed everything, in the wrong direction. It killed the local bar/dinner in exchange for a monstrosity old people cannot access. It killed the community, the traffic tripled, you had to attach yourself to waste management (and now they have issues). My mother had to add a wall/fence to break the sound of the road, when trees and plants were sufficient, and during rush hour you still feel like you live in a city, without the city access advantages.
I would typically call most of Seattle suburbia. It does not seems as sprawly than Stockton (that I actually visited unlike Seattle), but it doesn't look good.
Also, high rise is as bad as suburbia in my opinion, I hate it with less passion because I only had to live in high rise building temporarily. But the cost each time you rise 3 meters is exponential for everything (except electricity), so if your city is 10% high rise, 80% detached/semi-detached homes, no shit it'll be expensive.
Is Boise, ID a suburban sprawl? Or is it a fairly dense city without a shit ton of high-rise units?
Seattle is 8000 people per square mile, Boise is 3000 people per square mile.
I don't know why, I end up on French Wikipedia when searching for known US cities. I'm sorry, I'll be careful next time
> These results indicate that a 10% increase in density would reduce operational costs for fire protection by 1.3%, streets and highways by 2.7%, sewer by 3.1%, etc.
Not sure about you, but this is the exact opposite of "doesn't go down a lot".
If you want actual urban-to-suburban comparisons there's the case studies done by urban3 who map fine-grained expenditure and tax income:
* https://www.urbanthree.com/case-study/lafayette-la/ * https://www.urbanthree.com/case-study/eugene-or/ * https://www.urbanthree.com/case-study/south-bend-in/
Not only do these show the urban areas being much more efficient, the suburban areas are so inefficient they're not even breaking even.
> Holcombe and Williams [25] found mixed results. They found that for cities with population less than 500,000, higher population density was associated with lower per capita expenditures on highways and sewers, but this relationship did not hold for larger cities. Further, per capita expenditures on services, such as police, increased with density for cities with population above 500,000, and there was no relationship for smaller cities. Their general conclusion was that for cities larger than 50,000, per capita expenditures are not associated with density. Further research by Holcombe and Williams [26] found no relationship between sprawl and highway expenditures and, actually, a positive relationship between population density and highway expenditures.
...
> Fewer studies have shown reductions in costs for water, sewer, or sold waste, though this may be expected. Some costs have also been shown to increase with density, such as housing and community development or police.
My own research (will publish on Github once I validate it) finds similar results. Municipalities peak in efficiency around 100-200k people.
> If you want actual urban-to-suburban comparisons there's the case studies done by urban3 who map fine-grained expenditure and tax income
Woohoo. Yet another propaganda outlet. Note that it tracks _tax_ _income_, which is misleading. It's skewed towards Downtowns, simply because that's where companies are registered and pay taxes. But people who _work_ there don't typically live nearby.
In fact, if you look at total _personal_ income taxes per zip code collected in the US, it's not even close. Suburbs are paying for most of the US.
My reasons for being anti-car is simple. Where I grew up, residential and commercial areas don't have much separation. My own family runs a small cloth retail business right out of our house. There are grocery shops, barbers, electricians, everything you might need right outside of my house. If I wake up in the morning and realise I am out of tooth paste, I don't even need to open my eyes. I can just walk outside and buy it.
My sister moved to a bigger city. She owns an apartment in a pretty big complex. It has, like, 30 towers, 10 floors each, with 10 apartments on each floor, each one being nearly as big as my own home. But, since its a residential complex, any commercial activities are not allowed inside. Since its so big, it had to be built outside the city limits. Now imagine if she's in my situation. She would have to take a car, drive for at least 20 mins, then another 20 back, all the while dealing with the disgusting feeling of unbrushed teeth.
Or perhaps, she has a kid. He's very young, let's say 10. If the shop was right outside, he would be able to go and buy the toothpaste. Now with the whole driving problem in between, he can't do anything other than complain about the lack of toothpaste.
> Controlling the commons becomes much easier when they are densely packed into singular locations.
Please explain what kind of control you are talking about here. In my opinion, it would easier to control them when they are so spread out. You can easily target one single house when it has its section of the road, its own utility connections, etc. It would be a lot harder to single out a single dissident when it would mean harming many other neutrals and turning them into dissidents as well.
But yes, living spacious with a private garden and not to close to your neighbors is very nice. I would love to have both.
And?
> it requires a lot more energy
This is the _only_ problem, and it's being solved by switching to EVs. They are more effective than buses and are competitive with rail.
And the household energy use can be offset by solar energy (individual houses are great for it!).
> and it makes using healthier transportation like walking and cycling a lot more difficult.
I can get my 10k a day steps in a nice sprawl with shady tree lanes much easier than in Manhattan.
Are you allowed to have shady trees on road sides? I would think that they would be disallowed since they block visibility and force drivers to slow down.
To give you a perspective, one mile of NYC subway now costs about as much as 1000 miles of 6-lane freeway. One mile of new light rail in Seattle will be enough to maintain all roads in Washington state for half a year.
The same story for water, sewer, and electricity. Dense cities are _incredibly_ expensive to maintain because projects become extremely complicated, with lots of project management overhead (more people-hours). And people are EXPENSIVE, compared to raw materials.
The amortized cost of a commuter journey on the subway is a tiny fraction of the cost of and on roads, for all parties.
(This is true even when the subway is obscenely expensive to construct, as the 2nd Avenue line is. But treating deep-tunnel construction under some of the densest and most expensive real estate in the US as the norm is essentially dishonest.)
It's not.
> The amortized cost of a commuter journey on the subway is a tiny fraction of the cost of and on roads, for all parties.
Nope. Roads in sparse cities are cheaper on per-commute and the building cost.
> But treating deep-tunnel construction under some of the densest and most expensive real estate in the US as the norm is essentially dishonest.
Why? Ever-rising costs is the inevitable result of densification.
Roads are cheap on paper, and expensive per commuter-mile. Mass transit is expensive on paper, and cheap per commuter-mile, especially in dense cities.
Well, Houston carries about the same number of commuters. At a fraction of the cost.
I genuinely don’t believe that Houston carries “about the same number of commuters” as the NYC subway. It has a quarter as many people; you should cite a source. I can’t find one for that.
1.8 billion rides per year for a 8-million city works out to less than 0.7 rides per day per capita. I can guarantee that Houston has more road trips.
> Scale matters, and mass transit is the definition of scale.
Yes, and multi-dozen billion dollar corruption on public projects is also the definition of scale.
> I genuinely don’t believe that Houston carries “about the same number of commuters” as the NYC subway. It has a quarter as many people; you should cite a source. I can’t find one for that.
I'm using the data for the Greater Houston Area (pop: 7.2 million), which matches what people think when they say "Houston".
That's just the subway. Add another 100 million for MNRR and LIRR, plus another 100 million for PATH and NJT. And those are all post-COVID numbers; you can roughly double each to get an actual picture for the volume of mass transit needed to run NYC.
> I'm using the data for the Greater Houston Area (pop: 7.2 million), which matches what people think when they say "Houston".
The NYC Combined Statistical area has 23 million people in it[1]. Nearly as many people commute into just Manhattan as live in the actual city of Houston[2]. You simply do not get those numbers with road-based transit.
It doesn't matter how you cut this: Houston is operating at a fractional scale, and will continue to do so as long as roads dominate its development patterns. Houston's government appears to be aware of this[3].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area
[2]: https://wagner.nyu.edu/files/rudincenter/dynamic_pop_manhatt...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/METRORail
Is that freeway going through the middle of the city? I think not. Any construction in a dense city becomes expensive. But you need to divide that by the number of people using it as well. Everyone in the city can use a subway. Only that one house on top of the hill is using this pretty expensive road that goes to the top of the hill in the middle of nowhere.
Dude, that's literally the point I'm trying to make. Thank you.
Dense cities are common around the world. In most of them, the infrastructure is not particularly expensive.
Finland is tiny. Even Helsinki is a bit less dense than Seattle, and almost 10 times less dense than Manhattan.
So yep, sparse cities are much cheaper and efficient than dense cities. That's exactly my point. The sparser, the better.
Typical Helsinki consists of medium-density residential areas separated by large parks and forested areas. The urban core is dense but not particularly tall. The kind of suburban sprawl you often see in American cities, with massive areas with a low population density but little undeveloped land, is largely missing.
"Urban areas" are poorly defined in many cases. In some cases (e.g. "Greater Houston Area") they match what people think about "Houston", Seattle metro area does not.
> The kind of suburban sprawl you often see in American cities, with massive areas with a low population density but little undeveloped land, is largely missing.
Yes, and? Helsinki is still sparsely populated, so new infrastructure is cheap enough. The costs go up, once the density increases.
Population density figures should be reported as averages over people rather than averages over land. They are usually not, because it's difficult to calculate them that way. If you have a residential area with 20k people in a square mile next to an undeveloped square mile, the population density is usually reported as 10k people / square mile. But from the perspective of the people living there, as well as for the purposes of infrastructure construction, the actual population density is closer to 20k people / square mile.
At some scale we aggregate processing and trade latency for bandwidth (busy poll versus hardware interrupts). We trade the ability for everyone to start their journey _right now_ for the ability for lots more of us to get to our destination via a common carriage (be this packets or people the pattern is the same).
Where land is cheap and commuter traffic isn't an issue maybe roads make sense but that doesn't mean sprawl is cheap in time-spent.
Think about children! They are stripped of the independence of move, because they can not drive a car. And everything is so far away (school, after-school activities, friends places) so it takes forever to go there by foot/public transit.
And self-driving cars seem nowhere near the production-ready deployment. It's very strange to rely on a solution which may be probably somewhere in the future. Why don't you mention a teleport then?
Self-driving cars will solve that with this decade.
No we don't. Taxis are not a solution because they are INCREDIBLY dirty. You might as well be riding on train-cars worth of coal.
And public transit is worse, because it's inevitably slow and inflexible.
Edit: taxis are expensive not because they are cars, but because they need dedicated drivers. And here in the US even taxi drivers earn a somewhat liveable salary, and as a result they have a huge carbon footprint. But if you're OK with semi-slave labor, then it can work, agreed.
Public transit is excellent when you design for it. It can be fast and flexible. The problem is when the implementation is half hearted. Transit systems are things that become better with scale. The more you invest in them, they better they get.
When you say that "they are trying to push people into dense cities". One should read as "I want the govt to continue subsidizing construction of roads and suburbs.". Because can you really afford that lifestyle without making the ends meet, if you will have to fully pay for all of that?
And will you be able to easily afford a self-driving car, if that will ever come to existence?
And don't you think that you will fully own your self-driving car with open-source firmware running onboard? Most likely you won't. Think more of a subscription-based self-driving feature, which will have unpredictable pricing, and mandatory always-online. Do you really want that "freedom"?
Put another way: car-driven development induces desire for sprawl, but living patterns reveal actual preferences here.
That's true. I would rather live in a house that's more spacious than not. But more than that, I would rather live in a house that allows me to buy an ice cream if I have 5 minutes of free time than in one that makes that ice cream buying an hour long trip filled with smoke and noise.
You can have spacious houses without having to live all alone.
> There are some problems with cars: gasoline use and general unsafety due to human drivers.
You missed another problem with cars: they are space inefficient. I don't have the exact numbers but you can fit way more people in a bus than you can a car. And of course, you can fit even more people on the street if they are walking on their own feet.
> EVs are solving the first one
They may solve the gasoline problem but they aren't solving the space one.
> self-driving will solve the second one
I am not gonna hold my breath.
There is another way that could solve both of those problems, you know. Make cities more compact. With compact cities, you don't need to drive that much. And if all your destinations are close by, there is no need to allow cars to go to 100 KMpH. In fact, limiting intra-city driving to be under 60 (or lower) KMpH would be safer, fuel efficient, and less noisy (I think). You could even make the roads thinner then since everyone is moving at a slow speed, which opens up more space inside the city.
But that's not true even for most of the very dense Manhattan!
But if you relax your 5 minutes requirement to 15 minutes, then you can do that _anywhere_ in Salt Lake City.
> You missed another problem with cars: they are space inefficient.
Again, so what?
> With compact cities, you don't need to drive that much.
Sorry, but that's a total :facepalm:
You simply can not drive efficiently in dense cities, because of everybody else!
I do not know Manhattan. I do not live in Manhattan. I live in India. I have lived in my hometown, and in Delhi and Hyderabad (two very big cities). I can only talk about the specific areas within those cities. I can definitely buy ice cream within 5 minutes of walking. And not even fast walking.
If you are in a dense city, you don't need to drive at all. If my workplace and my house were separated by an hour of driving and no transit means other than a road, then I would have to drive. Along with the thousands of others who also have to live so far away from their offices. I live a 10 minute walk from my office. I don't even own a car (or any vehicle, for that matter)! Neither do at least half of the other people who live nearby. While the rest of the people are stuck in 10 minutes of traffic jam, I can walk through them and relax in my air conditioned cubicle.
That's fine in an ideal world when you have a low population density and consistent or declining population.
The reality is sprawl in the US coincides with population growth or migration quite often. Person 1 moves to a place where they can be far from people, have a nice forest behind their home, and have open roads. While the distance from their home to their destination is long, the roads are empty so it's stress free driving.
Persons 2 through 300000 think that sounds great, so they move there as well. They all want to be far from people and have empty roads, so they abandon their 30 minute train commute for free living in the city.
The forest behind Person 1's home gets chopped down and replaced by a packed suburb. The main road Person 1 took is now packed with traffic from the other people that moved there dreaming of his lifestyle. His 25 minute smooth commute is now 80 minutes. Construction is constantly ongoing to widen the roads to handle more traffic, instead of reduce the source of the traffic, and this makes traffic worse due to lanes being shut down. Roads quickly become full after construction ends, resulting in more traffic.
This is the story of basically any city in America since the 1950s. People want more space and the freedom to drive to work, and end up in a packed neighborhood and whining about traffic when everyone else follows them. Someone who gets their first taste of it thinks "wow, this is great!" But it's becoming a nightmare for people who moved there 10 years prior. And it'll transition into a nightmare 10 years later for those who are loving it now. The nice nature gets knocked down and you're back to living in a space with too many people, but with none of the benefits of a proper city. You can't walk 2 minutes to a dozen different restaurants, relax by the river, or sit down on transport and read a book while going somewhere. You're stuck in traffic while every tree around you is being chopped down.
And because HN is mostly programmers, most people here probably love the sprawl because they work from home and don't need to wake up at 6 AM to sit in traffic and huff car exhaust from 7 AM to 8:25 AM and arrive at the office at 8:30. But millions in the US are trapped in that loop.
In what universe has it failed? Certainly not this one.
Go and do that.
> even this activity adds more mileage to your car.
Why should you care about that?
Things like: going grocery shopping, going to sports/hobbies activities, entertainment, going out to restaurants and bars, meeting friends at parks, etc.
So I did something else: dropped random points inside the cities and plotted routes between them using biking, transit, or cars. In every city I tested (even Berlin!), cars win. And often by 3-5 _times_.
It's understandable, transit is optimized towards traveling to a small number of destinations (typically Downtowns) and lateral travel is often hard.
To try it out I just plotted a simple route from Schöneberg to Mauerpark, it takes ~42 min with transit, ~28 min with a car. With a car you need to find parking (and pay for parking). The same route is ~32 min on a bike.
From Charlottenburg to Lichtenberg (cross city) it's around ~42 min on a car, ~1h10m with transit + walk, or ~1h on a bike. Again, without factoring in times for parking, etc.
Those car trips are estimates with no traffic on a Saturday noon, any other time with more traffic and these estimates should get ~20-30% longer.
"Stroads" are roads for all users, not just bike bros. And roads are absolutely beautiful, they allow people to move. As a result, well-designed car-oriented American cities are _far_ more efficient than nicely-looking but horrible-to-live European cities.
If you want to use pejorative names, then I propose: "slumhive" ("slum beehive") for any high-rise building and "broads" ("bike bro roads") for bicycle lanes.
Moreover, removing "stroads" does NOT reduce fatalities! Boston's accident rate went up from 16 vehicular deaths in 2016 (before they drank the KoolAid) to 26 this year.
The attacks on surface roads by groups with an agenda (push people into dense cities) is predictable. They want traffic to become untenable, so they just lie and insinuate.
The latter _can_ be a solution for some roads, but it necessarily lengthens the trip and significantly increases its time because you have to make 3 right turns instead of one left turn.
Sure, hyper-dense cities are not ideal, but neither are spread-out asphalt wastelands where cars are the only means of getting around. This is terrible for anyone who can’t drive (children, people with impaired vision, people who can’t afford cars). I have also lived in Houston (without a car) and I found getting around absolutely miserable. Even when I had friends pick me up with their cars, the distances were huge and a lot of the time, this would be because of parking lots creating gigantic empty space everywhere. (At least, this was my impression.)
This is the only rational argument against cars. I especially want children to have more autonomy.
Yet it'll be far better solved by self-driving vehicles. They already exist, and they work.
But having been in the us only once it was very obvious the us has a problem with safety for drivers. There were cars at the side of the highway (Orlando to Tampa) everywhere, presumably from accidents. Of course traffic wasn't moving. I wasn't driving on holiday and I was glad about it.
It's possibly to do with the fact that Americans all need to drive, ensuring lax standards for driver tests. Maybe if you guys would embrace bike lanes you could also embrace real driver certification. Just dump people who can't drive on second tier transportation like bikes, ebikes, escooters and trains and ensure everyone else gets proper training.
Maybe there is more common ground between you and Strong Towns than you'd think? They don't just advocate for "bike bros." Here everyone bikes from kids in elementary school to their grandparents. The key is having separate car infrastructure (roads, highways) and biking/pedestrian infrastructure (streets, bike lanes, pedestrian-only areas).
The net effect is that many people here choose non-car transport (public transport, biking, walking), which reduces traffic. This also makes getting around by car more efficient, for destinations where you need to use a car, because there is less traffic.
If you want to live in a single-family home in the suburbs and own a car, you can do that here too. It's fine because there are roads to get around the country. Not stroads though, so no need to worry about pedestrians or cyclists when you're on a road, so they allow moving faster.
If you want to live in an apartment in the city without owning a car, you can do that here too. It's fine because there is public transport, proper bike lanes and streets to get around the city. Not straods though, so no need to worry about cars.
I'd say it's both nicely looking and quite efficient. Not sure by what metric would an American city be more efficient, but generally I wouldn't want to trade places.
> Maybe there is more common ground between you and Strong Towns than you'd think? They don't just advocate for "bike bros."
Yes, they do. They literally do. All their "solutions" just accidentally ALWAYS make traffic worse and push people into dense cities.
"Stroads" are roads for cars. They are terrible for everyone else.
Personally, I hate them. They're chaotic, prone to accidents, ugly and well, everything TFA talks about. Well built infrastructure makes it better for everybody.
I grew up in rural California and dirt roads were quite common not far out of town, it's a different way of driving and one that'll make you wonder why you aren't using a mountain bike, if you aren't hauling a bunch of kids or gear.
This all said I am beyond biased, I escaped the bay area to London at least partially because I don't want driving to be a part of my daily life. But I understand opinions vary and people back home love their cars and TV ;)
This has been shown repeatedly to be false, but folks who blindly believe it.