People who can afford to do so usually avoid public transportation. Instead of posting a new edition of the same self-righteous HN thread bewailing other peoples' choices practically every single day of the week, it might be interesting to examine the apparent dissonance between the way amateur urban planners think things should work, and the way they actually do.
It's one of the few with passable public transportation, and the in the others with passable public transportation (e.g. NYC, DC, Boston), many people who could afford to drive take public transportation.
I take transit to work. I make a good living. I could chose to drive but where I live (Montreal) has good public transit. It takes me 20-25 minutes to get to work by subway (door to door.)
Mostly it's that I work downtown and chose to buy my condo in a neighbourhood with good transit. As a result, driving would "save" me 5 to 10 minutes but require 300$/month parking spot to actually save any time.
If I worked out in an industrial park (where my employer also has an office) driving would be a no-brainer however. Parking out there is free and transit is annoying (bus every 15-30 minutes during rush hour only, multiple connections.) At that office, from my house driving saves 10-15 minutes of commute during rush hour and 15-45 minutes outside of it. In extreme cases (our support staff working the graveyard shift) driving saves 2+ hours or a very expensive taxi ride.
> People who can afford to do so usually avoid public transportation.
There are a number of factors at play here. To pretend that just because people act a certain way that the decision is based in fact and logic ignores reality.
People don't use public transit because:
1. They don't want to mingle with the "lower classes."
2. Driving a car for a long time was a status symbol. It's less of a status symbol today, but the effects of this are still embedded in American culture. Those "with money" can afford a car. If you take transit, then you are "poor."
So if you take transit you are signalling to others that you are "poor." Or you are afraid that you might have to sit across from someone that is "poor" and that would make you feel uncomfortable.
3. Buying a car for a long time was also "supporting America" (cue people chanting 'USA! USA!') because you were supporting the Big 3.
4. People get annoyed at having to wait for things like the bus. Even of the bus runs every 10 minutes, the fact that you might have to wait 10 minutes for something is enough for people to get upset about it.
There are a number of factors at play here. To pretend that just because people act a certain way that the decision is based in fact and logic ignores reality.
Which is my whole point: we should find out what the actual basis for their decision is, and take it into consideration.
But it's much more fun to adopt an air of superiority on HN as you settle into your comfy seat on the bus to the Facebook campus, where your worst immediate problem is that your attractive and personable seatmate has spilled a bit of his latte on your armrest. This is not most peoples' lives, but you'd never know it from reading all of the "B... b... but SF!" comments in these threads.
Nimbys are causing havoc in Austin. My old VP bought a giant house on the west side of town and now wants to prohibit building there so as to keep up land values. There are also lots of groups that dont want high rises, etc. Property prices are shooting up now.
Suburbs are horribly designed, case in point Irvine CA. Worst place I have ever been too. Giant 8 lane surface streets but still endless traffic. No useful public transit so everyone is sitting in a car.
The future looks bleak for socal unless population normalizes.
My favourite part of suburbs is the grid of street maximally designed to make driving over them less efficient than avoiding them.
Intuitively one would think this decreases traffic but instead it turns the neighbourhood into a kind of watershed where all traffic quickly converges to the same few progressively broader street.
The harder the grid planner tried to inhibit through-traffic, the worse the effect.
We have a perfect (pathetic) example of this phenomenon.
Most of the older buildings in the downtown core rest along brickpave streets that are awful to drive on. Horrible for the suspension, tires, the works. I believe the insistence on keeping them is an attempt to limit through traffic from a nearby East/West interchange with the notorious Interstate-4 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_4#Orlando_area).
Through traffic is still a huge issue, and in addition, the poor brickpave road is constantly riddled with pot holes from the heavy trucks and sheer number of vehicles that detour through. I can't imagine what the maintenance must cost relative to regular asphalt.
>case in point Irvine CA. Worst place I have ever been too.
Ha, no way. If it's the worst place you've been to, then I can only imagine you have not been to many places. Admittedly it lacks good mass transit, but that's true of most of California (I personally would say all, because SF mass transit isn't great either, it just happens to make the rest of California look barbaric - I say this as a proud Californian). And the car culture is especially strong in SoCal. Not to mention Irvine was originally intended to be a suburban community, not a metropolis. A measure was put forth to add light rail a few years ago, but the "not in my backyard" folks voted it down.
It has 8 lane surface streets precisely because of forethought (it's a planned city, btw). Most of the north-south roads have 65 mph speed limits. You don't get that without proper planning and zoning. It operates its own shuttle service independent of the county. Then there's the high ratio of parks, green belts, wildlife reserves, and dedicated bike lanes relative to its neighbors. Demand to live there is outstripping supply, which leads to traffic, which admittedly sucks and hopefully Californians will realize you can't keep throwing more lanes at the problem. I'm in Manhattan now, and sure, Irvine can seem like a quaint provincial town in comparison, but the worst place you've ever been to? Horribly designed? Cue eye-rolling.
Thank you! As an Irvine resident (after living in both SV and NYC, I chose to put down roots in Irvine), you are spot on. Irvine is paradise for me, and traffic is one thing Irvine gets better than most SoCal cities. Great points.
Irvine is the business hub of Orange County - more people commute into Irvine than out of Irvine. It has giant, well designed surface streets and very little traffic (compared to the rest of SoCal, especially cities the same size). Irvine is one of the nicest, most well designed cities in America.
An individual with the choice of living in the city or in suburbia is faced with a conundrum. Although you would think that by living in the city the individual will save money by expending significantly less natural resources and dramatically lowering his carbon footprint, it ironically costs him less money to do the exact opposite by living in the suburbs. This is because if the individual chooses to live in the city he must pay an extraordinarily high commission in the form of capital gains or rent to land lords. From a financial standpoint living in the suburbs is the only rational choice.
This type of counterintuitive behavior only occurs because we live in an era where oil is dirt cheap. This is the only time in human history where living farther away from the city is actually cheaper then living closer to it. Before the advent of the automobile, urban infrastructure centered around walkable cities as you will see throughout Europe. One day, as we start running out of oil, the suburbs will become the new ghettos.
Think about the lifestyle we have today. If I live on the farm and work on the farm then yes it's cheaper. But I'm talking about suburbia, in which most people live outside the city but drive into the city to work everyday. That's a huge energy cost that can only be paid for through oil.
Perhaps this statement is more clear: Due to cheap oil this is the only time in history where living outside the city and driving miles and miles to work everyday is cheaper then living in the city right next to work.
Sorry shouldn't have wrote that. Capital gains represents income a person gains simply from owning an asset. No GDP or work is produced by that person yet by simply owning assets he gets money. Rent is a form of this.
Shifting power consumption away from gasoline onto the grid is definitely more efficient. However a significant amount of our grid is still powered by fossil fuels. It will depend on whether or not renewable sources have the capacity to support a car economy.
Only short-term. Once you factor in gas, ownership of multiple cars, etc it's cheaper to live in the city. Doubly so if your time isn't worthless (time sitting in traffic is working for free)
As an American who prefers rural living, I prefer not living in a city because my time is valuable. I like being able to go from A to B at 60 miles and hour and not worry about parking. I don't like waiting for busses or subways.
I think suburban living is generally going to be less time-consuming than urban living unless you're doing something dumb, like communting into Los Angles or Washington, D.C.
I'd love rural living, but I've opted for a walkable suburb on the coast. My current job allows me to work at home full time unless I am traveling, and my wife commutes but has a flexible schedule and gets to work at home regularly.
There are times where the diversity of a city would be great, but I don't like the noise, traffic, or public transportation.
In the bay area, BART is ok, Caltrain isn't bad, but Muni? Oy.
Just coming back from a business trip to Tokyo (my first time here), I can see how public transport can be very efficient. That said, even here, I got to over hear some google employees whining about their offices being moved to an area that was mostly business park and not wanting to commute.
No matter where you choose to live, there are personal choices that are part of the calculus.
It doesn't sound to me like you know urban living all that well at all. In Somerville, MA, I can get anywhere I want to go--stores, work, play, downtown Boston--in thirty minutes by foot or bus or train. I do not worry about places to park, nor do I worry about traffic.
I can, on the other hand, speak to suburban living being as alienating as anything I've ever encountered. Sitting in a car, alone, for an hour a day to go to and from work--time I couldn't spend doing anything of use, be it reading or working or talking to a friend--was the most soul-killing time of my life.
It depends. I think this is true when you don't factor in cost per square footage of property. Imagine taking the immense square footage of suburban houses and plopping it in the middle of Manhattan, then living there. Unaffordable.
However if living space isn't as a big of an issue, there is definitely a sweet spot where you can find smaller spaces that make living in the city cheaper then suburban life.
We're not going to run out entirely, but we are going to exhaust the purest and most accessible sources. As a result, extraction and refinement costs are expected to rise as a proportion of the production cost, forcing up the price of the end product.
In the last decade, that's exactly what's happened in NYC. young college graduates have flooded the city, pushing poorer people to the outskirts, and unlike their parents have not chosen to retreat to the suburbs to raise kids.
One time inner city ghettos like Bushwick, Bed-Stuy, and Crown Heights are gradually being gentrified into middle class neighborhoods. Property values are even rising in what were once the most entrenched slums, like East New York.
Meanwhile, the inner suburbs are beginning to decay as middle class professionals no longer move there to raise families. Low income residents displaced from the inner city are being pushed into these areas where rent is low - but still not saving money because they have to buy a car and pay for gas just to get groceries, and if they take transit to work it's now the 3-10x more expensive commuter rail rather than the affordable subway.
The outer suburbs where McMansions dominate are still thriving, but a few years ago I drove around the middle ring suburb where my dad grew up. In his childhood and even in mine it had been a solidly middle class Levittown clone. Tidy homes and yards, well-kept strip malls, and all. Now it's a textbook example of suburban decay. Entire blocks of houses that desperately need paint jobs and repairs. Deserted parking lots in strip malls with half the storefronts empty and the pavement cracked so badly a small child could get lost in the gaps. Independent businesses boarded up. Old people pushing grocery carts along nearly deserted sidewalks -- probably two or three miles each way to the supermarket. Not a pretty sight.
You see the same in Detroit, among other places. A suburb populated by wealthy or even middle class taxpayers can afford to keep up the infrastructure and economic engine to make it a pleasant place to live. One populated by low income people can't -- it soon becomes unlivable. That's going to be a conundrum for us to solve in this century. I hope we address it by building upwards and expanding public transit to make city-style living affordable again for everyone (which would also be a more efficient use of taxpayer dollars than repaving thousands of miles of roads and keeping up sprawling electric and water/sewer lines in suburbs where people wouldn't live if they could afford the city), but fear we haven't the political will to do so.
I'm from Glasgow, Scotland myself and I've never been to US but I've done a fair amount of research. Our societies differ a lot if it goes to moving around. I can normally walk around the whole town(600k people). I take the public transportation when I'm lazy.
I am always amazed when I hear from my US friends "you have to have a car otherwise you can't get anywhere" or "there are no sidewalks". Wow. In Europe most of the cities are a lot more densely populated than in the US which cuts costs, but even though there is more people packed in the same space(lots of people live in flats), they don't mind bacause everything is close and they save their time. And green areas? Why have a back yard when you have a park 5 mins away.
It's interesting how the standards of living differ between us. It seems to me that a lot of people crave a suburbian house in the US. I'd love to live there for a while to get a feel of the society and why it thinks in this way.
There's a TED talk I stumbled upon some time ago - only 5mins but perfectly approaches part of the problem we are discussing here ;) "How to reinvent the apartment building" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-KnaYZJg48
Berlin is a bit like a US city in term of sheer surface area. But the individual neighbourhoods are much more livable and self-contained and the S-Bahn (suburban trains) efficiently connect all the sprawl. The individual neighbourhoods also have fairly efficient grids compared to US suburbs and usually higher densities (taller buildings, more multiple-tenancies).
If you want to compare to a similar city in the US look at Portland, Oregon. The city proper has 500k ~ 600k (~2.5m if you count the 'metro area' -- for comparison Toronto Canada has ~2.7m people in the city proper).
Comparaison made on municipality size is flawed in general, because the boundaries of a specific jurisdiction depends on political circumstances, not on urban growth. Take San Francisco: it has only 800k inhabitants for 8M in the Bay Area, 10%. Whereas San Antonio TX has 1.4M. Is it bigger? Well, San Antonio metro has only 2.3M. What matters is the size of the metro area, because metro areas are a measure of job markets, not political contingencies.
I remember the first time I came to San Jose how surprised I was. This was the Silicon Valley of lore, and it basically looked like every other boring, nondescript suburb in America.
I've not been to Scotland specifically, but I've been to other parts of the U.K. and Ireland and most of Western Europe and I've observed this difference, in most of Europe, the cities tend to have an ancient core, often surrounded by a pre-car secondary core, surrounded by an post-car/post-war dreary apartment ring on the outskirts.
The two inner cores are pedestrian dreams, for obvious historic reasons, but automotive nightmares. The wealthier parts of town tend to be in these inner cores, and the low-end workers tend to live in the outskirts.
The outskirts areas of European cities are generally pretty abysmal by American standards. Unkempt, graffiti-filled, feel dangerous. This is where all the train yards are. They remind an American of what we call "inner-city" projects, only they surround their home city.
Because of the income levels that live there, and being tightly wrapped around the more prosperous inner cores, they are however, better informed by the pedestrian friendly natures of those inner cores. So they usually have great integrated bus service and passable mass-transit (if the city has it).
The reasons for this outer ring are numerous, but it's usually a mix of rapid construction after the war (people needed houses, FAST), mid-century social experiments (public housing projects), and the inertia created by those two things.
What's outside this ring? Generally farmland, dotted with small towns and villages. I've never seen density drop off in the states as quickly as I do in Europe. You're in a city and then you're immediately in the countryside -- there's very little transition. It's not true everywhere in Europe. But it's fairly consistent.
Cities in Europe are also pretty close, Glasgow to Edinburgh is ~1hr driving. Glasgow to Manchester is ~3.5hrs, to London in 6.5, and Paris in 11. If they weren't so close, inter-city transport would be unbearable. But because they're so close, national rail ends up working like commuter rail and you can hop a train from Glasgow to London in 4 hours.
Heck, Glasgow to Kiev is 31 hours, or about 4 days of driving.
Or here's a trip I did once in Ireland. Dublin to Belfast to Dublin to Galway. It crosses the entire country a couple time and the whole thing takes around 6 hours.
Virginia has 3 major urban areas, the North (near Washington D.C.), the Capital at Richmond, and the South Eastern Coast around Norfolk.
The North of Virginia is a bit like London, a continuous conglomeration of several adjacent areas and small towns and cities. It has about 3 million people in it, but it's worth looking at a piece at a time:
Arlington, VA has about the density of Glasgow, has several interesting neighborhoods, is highly walkable, has subway service, buses, is bikable.
A walk from Celtic Park to Ibrox Stadium in Glasgow will take you about 1.5hrs. While a similar length walk in Arlington from the Potomac Overlook Park to the National Cemetery takes you about 1.5 hrs. Here's what the core looks like from the air (the circles are areas around the subway stations) https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3d/Arlingto...
It only has about 1/3 of the population of Glasgow, but most purposes it's a fair approximation of a place like Glasgow in the U.S. If you figure in Neighboring Alexandria, VA (also part of the North), you get even closer to an American Glasgow. It's every bit as reasonable a place as most European cities.
But Arlington and Alexandria aren't particularly i...
This is not something I see in a city like Chicago. Even with a thinning population in the city proper, there are a wide variety of jobs reaching out from the city to the suburbs and more than adequate transportation with plenty of "walkable" neighborhoods. This is an interesting idea to explore, and I definitely have seen some more sprawling areas in this country (L.A., San Jose), but New York and Chicago don't fit under this umbrella from my point of view.
The article is also a little thin without concrete examples. Looking at other countries, parts of Japan are almost completely connected but this somehow works with the large amount of natural resources they have while also supporting a huge population. Economic measures have to look at more than just the monetary value of things. I know this looks at social and environmental factors, but there are network effects to consider too.
Chicago also has, for the most part, segregated neighborhoods for work and living. If you're wealthy, you can afford to live within walking distance of white collar jobs, if not you're stuck.
Also, Chicago is a bit of an abnormality in the US for paying some attention to cycling infrastructure.
I disagree. If you live in, say Westmont or Downer's Grove and want to get to O'Hare or Midway by public transport, you might as well give up before you start. It's a minimum two hour train journey that involves going all the way to Union station and then to the airport.
It's not just the airports. My wife works at ANL. There are exactly two buses a day which go from our place to the lab. And this is after a ten minute walk. If you miss those, you either have to drive or take a taxi. There are no other options whatsoever.
Maybe public transport works well in the city, but good luck surviving in the suburbs without a car.
Is this a new problem? The article talks about growing cities creating "endless commutes, growing pollution, and unwalkable neighborhoods." For someone trying to commute to the airport regularly, it's best to live in the NW suburbs. But Downer's Grove was established in 1873 so it's not as if this is a new problem. Additionally, I agree that it is not entirely convenient to travel between satellite areas of the city, but there are a number of opportunities local to any one part of the city/metro area.
I live in a suburb and recently spent a large amount of time looking for a new job, after living in a small part of California with limited opportunities, and while I didn't have the best time looking for a position as a Software Engineer, it's not as if there weren't jobs in any suburb or downtown that I couldn't achieve. I'm not someone who would look to regularly commute downtown but there are both Metra and L-stations that I could access and it's not as if we don't have roads.
This sort of sprawl as an issue seems to be targeted towards growing cities and suburbs that are undeveloped in terms of resources and infrastructure. Many of Chicago's suburbs and surrounding areas have really deep histories and local roots. In this sense they become their own neighborhoods, cities, towns, and villages instead of just rows of houses without sidewalks or an endless stretch of strip malls.
I think it's also easy to carpool or work around bus schedules if that's really an issue to a commute, or buying an electric car for short journeys like that.
The second city is also in a much better position than many other cities in the midwest. Indianapolis and Minneapolis-St. Paul are a lot harder to get around from outside the city, especially if you don't have a car, so I could understand how moving further and further out could be a detriment.
Suburbs cannot compete with cities for fresh talent. Most businesses I know are opening city offices to Broaden their candidat pool. Its worth noting that sprawl legends like the Dc Metro area, San Fran and Boston lead the nation in job openings. Suburbs are demographically and geographically disadvantaged.
I kinda have mixed feelings about it (and I plan to move out even further, since my job allows remoting.)
The thing is, money "lost" are spend on wages for people building roads, infrastructure, houses, etc. And this type of work more often done by local workforce, not some international company with bank accounts in caymans.
So... how exactly money are "lost"? Lost by whom exactly? People found jobs, which otherwise would not exists, and more infrastructure is built. Which in turn bring more people to live there, which in turn brings more local jobs (i.e. mom-n-pop AC/plumbing/electric company, Homedepot, etc)
And built roads are not quite wasteful too - as far as I know roads drive economy, not subdue it.
The other thing that this article ignores is that not everybody wants to live in an urban setting. Indeed, I suspect that to the people who live in the suburban sprawl, the money doesn't appear "lost" at all - in fact, they probably see it as money well spent for what they consider to be an improved standard of living. Personally, I live on 11 acres about 15 miles and a 17 minute drive from work. Although I could have a 5 minute, 3 mile drive if I felt like living in the 'burbs (my employer is located in the suburban part of town), to me the additional cost and time that I spend on transportation is well worth it (I don't particularly enjoy having neighbors any closer than a few hundred meters/yards, and my wife enjoys keeping a couple of horses). I suspect that those people who live in the suburbs enjoy their 3/4 acre lots with enough space to put in a swimming pool and a McMansion (say what you want about them, but McMansions are nice places to live ... although I live in a relatively modest 1500sqft/140 m^2 house). "Different strokes for different folks" really seems to apply here.
The point you miss is that governments spend far more on roads/services/infrastructure to benefit each mcmansion dweller than they do on roads/services/infrastrucutre to benefit each apartment dweller. So its not a 'free market' of choice - apartment dwellers effectively subsidise house dwellers. A real economic zero-sum choice would be the house dweller paying more tax or with worse services and the apartment dweller enjoying better public transport or similar. I agree some people will still prefer their mcmansion, but far fewer than now when the decision making is skewed.
I suspect that most families living in a half million dollar McMansions actually do pay far more in tax than the typical apartment dweller. In my area, the flow of capital is definitely the opposite of what you describe: without question, the individuals living in the suburbs heavily subsidize the lives of those living in the more urban areas and apartments, at least those who live in a tax district that has a combination of the two.
More typically, the tax districts for the areas with McMansions are entirely separate from those with a high concentration of apartments and urban housing. In this situation, the residents in a particular area bear the tax burden for the services that they consume. My particular metropolitan area is divided into several "cities" (I put it in quotes because they really all run together) that serve to ensure that each area's residents bear the cost of their services. Even in this situation, due to taxes levied by the state government, the flow of capital still tends to go from the suburbs to the urban areas.
In fact, I suspect that most house dwellers would be hugely in favor of further segregating the tax system so that funds paid by a group of individuals are used for services desired by that same group. In my area this would, however, result in the defunding of most public transportation (which is largely financed by people who do not use it), urban schools, the community college (which is funded by the whole county, but mostly used by lower income residents), etc. As an example, the public bus system recently appropriated lanes on many busy streets that were paid for by gas taxes. Since those with longer commutes pay more in gas tax, it stands to reason that these lanes were originally paid for by suburban commuters, and are now being used by the apartment dwellers and urban residents who are the primary clientele of the bus system (use fees make up only a small part of the funding for public transit in my area).
I am not stating that the existence of any of these things is bad, but simply that your belief that apartment dwellers are subsidizing the lives of McMansion residents is entirely incorrect.
This dilemma is solved (at least in some states) with townships and neighborhoods seceding from the major city and incorporating their own.
This way "most families living in a half million dollar McMansions" get their own road-heavy city budget, and a "typical apartment dweller" gets his parks/libraries/schools/transportation fix.
This is exactly what has been done in my area. It has unquestionably benefited those living in the 'burbs moreso than those that live closer to the urban center. The major motivation for it was schools, though. That's actually why everybody in this area moved out of the official city limits in the first place, and it's what keeps those who can't afford private schools from moving back now.
With a developed and dense downtown, the revenue collected per square mile should be higher than revenue per square mile out of suburbs. True, suburban single-family houses are typically more expensive than condos, but as you keep stacking those condos on top of one another, you gain property tax revenue at no loss to square footage.
That's a grand theory, of course. In reality, outside of a few cities, most American urban downtowns are proverbial dumps.
All the man-hours and natural resources spent building all those roads and paying for all that gas to move around on them could have instead gone to expanding production.
For instance, funding new companies, scientific research, and so on.
That is the point of the article.
Of course, the article is fallacious in that expanding production is not inherently better than consumption, so consumption is not necessarily "wasteful."
If people had preferred to live in an apartment and invest their money, they would have. Other things being equal, suburban sprawl reflects peoples' economic preferences. People are willing to pay for all the resources to make suburban sprawl possible.
new companies needs to be built somewhere, not all companies are virtual server instance in the "cloud". Having infrasture in place makes it much easier to build (both because you can actually deliver something, and also because you can hire local people)
Like with everything, there must be a balance (we need scientific research,) but having suburbia and infrasture is not automatically bad in my opinion.
> People are willing to pay for all the resources to make suburban sprawl possible.
Except for the massive externalities involved, sure, they're willing to pay for it. Urban dwellers largely subsidize your suburbia, and have since its inception.
Once it's built out, a portion of society is forced to dedicate their careers and extract public funding just to maintain the existing status quo of the infrastructure.
Consider what a large city budget could be spent on if a large portion of it didn't go towards maintaining the roads, maintaining the streetlights and accompanying infrastructure, and hiring extra police force to properly cover the expanded driving area.
What exactly you would expect city budget to be spent on, if city would eliminate needs for supporting infrastructure? Also, why having more infrastructure is automatically bad?
This is the matter of personal preference, but parks, libraries, schools, playgrounds, beautification projects, public transport, water quality, the list goes on. If nothing else, property tax reduction.
> Also, why having more infrastructure is automatically bad?
Don't think it's that absolute.
Think about tax dollars collected from a given square mile vs tax dollars spent on a given square mile. Suburbs tend to decrease the former and increase the latter, high-density projects tend to move the money in the opposite direction.
I live in NYC, but I grew up in the Florida panhandle, a mile down a road from the main highway, at the beginning of which had no houses in sight, and passed about 5 visible houses on the way home. There was one house visible from our ranch-style house. To the side and back was swamp. To the front was all woods. I walked in the woods, stepped on ant hills and got bitten, and found rattle snakes, cotton mouths, mocassins, and garter snakes. Mosquitos, yellow flies, biting gnats, and horse flies combined to ensure that I would always have a few red splotches and bumps on my body when I came in. We even found gators once in a while.
We made long-time friends with a family a mile away by road, but I could get there in a quarter of a mile or so by woods and swamp. The trick to walking through the swamp was to try to step on clumps of grass sticking out of the muck. I would come across rotting tree trunks and knock them over to watch the termites. Sometimes our outdoors cats would join me and follow from a distance.
My dad drove 30 minutes to work, about 25 miles away, where he struggled to run a discount auto-parts distributorship employing too many people to be profitable. My mom stayed at home with me and my little brother.
My friends loved coming over. If we walked far enough past the swamp, we would be on the bay, which smelled kind of funky for being fresh-water, too far from the sea water to be even brackish though. It was just us, and maybe our neighbors who mostly stayed indoors. We didn't worry about break-ins. We left our door open a lot.
I currently pay a lot of money for a doorman for that kind of sense of security in NYC. As for being able to walk in the woods by myself, that's just about impossible, and you can't put a price tag on it. Unless I'm home alone, there's almost always someone in my field of view. I'm kind-of used to it, but a lot of people have a visceral distaste for it. Seems like I can't even get to work without getting into a subway car that smells like something died in it.
An economist might not have a direct way to measure the value we created for ourselves, but you might say we created a lot of value for ourselves by living where we did.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 136 ms ] threadBecause the "real" solution is for every single person to own and drive a car that seats 4, but 99% of the time only has 1 person in it?
But do they take public transportation? Or do they use a car service?
They're paying to avoid public transportation exactly like the OP said.
John Paulson, architect of the largest trade in Wall Street history, takes public transit to work every day.
This particular story is about surburban sprawl, which means that anything happening in SF, NYC, DC, or Boston is completely irrelevant.
Mostly it's that I work downtown and chose to buy my condo in a neighbourhood with good transit. As a result, driving would "save" me 5 to 10 minutes but require 300$/month parking spot to actually save any time.
If I worked out in an industrial park (where my employer also has an office) driving would be a no-brainer however. Parking out there is free and transit is annoying (bus every 15-30 minutes during rush hour only, multiple connections.) At that office, from my house driving saves 10-15 minutes of commute during rush hour and 15-45 minutes outside of it. In extreme cases (our support staff working the graveyard shift) driving saves 2+ hours or a very expensive taxi ride.
There are a number of factors at play here. To pretend that just because people act a certain way that the decision is based in fact and logic ignores reality.
People don't use public transit because:
1. They don't want to mingle with the "lower classes."
2. Driving a car for a long time was a status symbol. It's less of a status symbol today, but the effects of this are still embedded in American culture. Those "with money" can afford a car. If you take transit, then you are "poor."
So if you take transit you are signalling to others that you are "poor." Or you are afraid that you might have to sit across from someone that is "poor" and that would make you feel uncomfortable.
3. Buying a car for a long time was also "supporting America" (cue people chanting 'USA! USA!') because you were supporting the Big 3.
4. People get annoyed at having to wait for things like the bus. Even of the bus runs every 10 minutes, the fact that you might have to wait 10 minutes for something is enough for people to get upset about it.
Which is my whole point: we should find out what the actual basis for their decision is, and take it into consideration.
But it's much more fun to adopt an air of superiority on HN as you settle into your comfy seat on the bus to the Facebook campus, where your worst immediate problem is that your attractive and personable seatmate has spilled a bit of his latte on your armrest. This is not most peoples' lives, but you'd never know it from reading all of the "B... b... but SF!" comments in these threads.
The future looks bleak for socal unless population normalizes.
Intuitively one would think this decreases traffic but instead it turns the neighbourhood into a kind of watershed where all traffic quickly converges to the same few progressively broader street.
The harder the grid planner tried to inhibit through-traffic, the worse the effect.
We have a perfect (pathetic) example of this phenomenon.
Most of the older buildings in the downtown core rest along brickpave streets that are awful to drive on. Horrible for the suspension, tires, the works. I believe the insistence on keeping them is an attempt to limit through traffic from a nearby East/West interchange with the notorious Interstate-4 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_4#Orlando_area).
Through traffic is still a huge issue, and in addition, the poor brickpave road is constantly riddled with pot holes from the heavy trucks and sheer number of vehicles that detour through. I can't imagine what the maintenance must cost relative to regular asphalt.
Ha, no way. If it's the worst place you've been to, then I can only imagine you have not been to many places. Admittedly it lacks good mass transit, but that's true of most of California (I personally would say all, because SF mass transit isn't great either, it just happens to make the rest of California look barbaric - I say this as a proud Californian). And the car culture is especially strong in SoCal. Not to mention Irvine was originally intended to be a suburban community, not a metropolis. A measure was put forth to add light rail a few years ago, but the "not in my backyard" folks voted it down.
It has 8 lane surface streets precisely because of forethought (it's a planned city, btw). Most of the north-south roads have 65 mph speed limits. You don't get that without proper planning and zoning. It operates its own shuttle service independent of the county. Then there's the high ratio of parks, green belts, wildlife reserves, and dedicated bike lanes relative to its neighbors. Demand to live there is outstripping supply, which leads to traffic, which admittedly sucks and hopefully Californians will realize you can't keep throwing more lanes at the problem. I'm in Manhattan now, and sure, Irvine can seem like a quaint provincial town in comparison, but the worst place you've ever been to? Horribly designed? Cue eye-rolling.
This type of counterintuitive behavior only occurs because we live in an era where oil is dirt cheap. This is the only time in human history where living farther away from the city is actually cheaper then living closer to it. Before the advent of the automobile, urban infrastructure centered around walkable cities as you will see throughout Europe. One day, as we start running out of oil, the suburbs will become the new ghettos.
That is not in the slightest true. Your thing about oil is a red herring.
Urban areas (farms back then) were ALWAYS cheaper than cities.
Perhaps this statement is more clear: Due to cheap oil this is the only time in history where living outside the city and driving miles and miles to work everyday is cheaper then living in the city right next to work.
then you can separate the source of energy from the consumer of energy.
I think suburban living is generally going to be less time-consuming than urban living unless you're doing something dumb, like communting into Los Angles or Washington, D.C.
There are times where the diversity of a city would be great, but I don't like the noise, traffic, or public transportation.
In the bay area, BART is ok, Caltrain isn't bad, but Muni? Oy.
Just coming back from a business trip to Tokyo (my first time here), I can see how public transport can be very efficient. That said, even here, I got to over hear some google employees whining about their offices being moved to an area that was mostly business park and not wanting to commute.
No matter where you choose to live, there are personal choices that are part of the calculus.
I can, on the other hand, speak to suburban living being as alienating as anything I've ever encountered. Sitting in a car, alone, for an hour a day to go to and from work--time I couldn't spend doing anything of use, be it reading or working or talking to a friend--was the most soul-killing time of my life.
However if living space isn't as a big of an issue, there is definitely a sweet spot where you can find smaller spaces that make living in the city cheaper then suburban life.
One time inner city ghettos like Bushwick, Bed-Stuy, and Crown Heights are gradually being gentrified into middle class neighborhoods. Property values are even rising in what were once the most entrenched slums, like East New York.
Meanwhile, the inner suburbs are beginning to decay as middle class professionals no longer move there to raise families. Low income residents displaced from the inner city are being pushed into these areas where rent is low - but still not saving money because they have to buy a car and pay for gas just to get groceries, and if they take transit to work it's now the 3-10x more expensive commuter rail rather than the affordable subway.
The outer suburbs where McMansions dominate are still thriving, but a few years ago I drove around the middle ring suburb where my dad grew up. In his childhood and even in mine it had been a solidly middle class Levittown clone. Tidy homes and yards, well-kept strip malls, and all. Now it's a textbook example of suburban decay. Entire blocks of houses that desperately need paint jobs and repairs. Deserted parking lots in strip malls with half the storefronts empty and the pavement cracked so badly a small child could get lost in the gaps. Independent businesses boarded up. Old people pushing grocery carts along nearly deserted sidewalks -- probably two or three miles each way to the supermarket. Not a pretty sight.
You see the same in Detroit, among other places. A suburb populated by wealthy or even middle class taxpayers can afford to keep up the infrastructure and economic engine to make it a pleasant place to live. One populated by low income people can't -- it soon becomes unlivable. That's going to be a conundrum for us to solve in this century. I hope we address it by building upwards and expanding public transit to make city-style living affordable again for everyone (which would also be a more efficient use of taxpayer dollars than repaving thousands of miles of roads and keeping up sprawling electric and water/sewer lines in suburbs where people wouldn't live if they could afford the city), but fear we haven't the political will to do so.
It's interesting how the standards of living differ between us. It seems to me that a lot of people crave a suburbian house in the US. I'd love to live there for a while to get a feel of the society and why it thinks in this way.
There's a TED talk I stumbled upon some time ago - only 5mins but perfectly approaches part of the problem we are discussing here ;) "How to reinvent the apartment building" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-KnaYZJg48
If you want to compare to a similar city in the US look at Portland, Oregon. The city proper has 500k ~ 600k (~2.5m if you count the 'metro area' -- for comparison Toronto Canada has ~2.7m people in the city proper).
Straight roads, boring 'architecture', giant parking lots between the sidewalk and the retail buildings.
Compare Atherton, UK - nice, homely "typical UK" town with busy high-street.
https://www.google.com/maps/@53.523623,-2.491372,3a,75y,92.9...
Now, San Jose, CA, USA suburbia: https://www.google.com/maps/@37.323192,-121.972195,3a,75y,25...
Boring. Thankfully planners seem to have recognized this, and now the trend is to build high-density housing, and right out to the street.
James Howard Kunstler has a FANTASTIC Ted talk about this subject, which cracks me up every time. Highly recommended:
http://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_subu...
The two inner cores are pedestrian dreams, for obvious historic reasons, but automotive nightmares. The wealthier parts of town tend to be in these inner cores, and the low-end workers tend to live in the outskirts.
The outskirts areas of European cities are generally pretty abysmal by American standards. Unkempt, graffiti-filled, feel dangerous. This is where all the train yards are. They remind an American of what we call "inner-city" projects, only they surround their home city.
Because of the income levels that live there, and being tightly wrapped around the more prosperous inner cores, they are however, better informed by the pedestrian friendly natures of those inner cores. So they usually have great integrated bus service and passable mass-transit (if the city has it).
The reasons for this outer ring are numerous, but it's usually a mix of rapid construction after the war (people needed houses, FAST), mid-century social experiments (public housing projects), and the inertia created by those two things.
What's outside this ring? Generally farmland, dotted with small towns and villages. I've never seen density drop off in the states as quickly as I do in Europe. You're in a city and then you're immediately in the countryside -- there's very little transition. It's not true everywhere in Europe. But it's fairly consistent.
Cities in Europe are also pretty close, Glasgow to Edinburgh is ~1hr driving. Glasgow to Manchester is ~3.5hrs, to London in 6.5, and Paris in 11. If they weren't so close, inter-city transport would be unbearable. But because they're so close, national rail ends up working like commuter rail and you can hop a train from Glasgow to London in 4 hours.
Heck, Glasgow to Kiev is 31 hours, or about 4 days of driving.
Or here's a trip I did once in Ireland. Dublin to Belfast to Dublin to Galway. It crosses the entire country a couple time and the whole thing takes around 6 hours.
Here's a comparison of Scotland vs. a state in the U.S., Virginia. https://mapfight.appspot.com/scotland-vs-us.va/scotland-virg...
Virginia has 3 major urban areas, the North (near Washington D.C.), the Capital at Richmond, and the South Eastern Coast around Norfolk.
The North of Virginia is a bit like London, a continuous conglomeration of several adjacent areas and small towns and cities. It has about 3 million people in it, but it's worth looking at a piece at a time:
Arlington, VA has about the density of Glasgow, has several interesting neighborhoods, is highly walkable, has subway service, buses, is bikable.
A walk from Celtic Park to Ibrox Stadium in Glasgow will take you about 1.5hrs. While a similar length walk in Arlington from the Potomac Overlook Park to the National Cemetery takes you about 1.5 hrs. Here's what the core looks like from the air (the circles are areas around the subway stations) https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3d/Arlingto...
It only has about 1/3 of the population of Glasgow, but most purposes it's a fair approximation of a place like Glasgow in the U.S. If you figure in Neighboring Alexandria, VA (also part of the North), you get even closer to an American Glasgow. It's every bit as reasonable a place as most European cities.
But Arlington and Alexandria aren't particularly i...
The article is also a little thin without concrete examples. Looking at other countries, parts of Japan are almost completely connected but this somehow works with the large amount of natural resources they have while also supporting a huge population. Economic measures have to look at more than just the monetary value of things. I know this looks at social and environmental factors, but there are network effects to consider too.
Chicago also has, for the most part, segregated neighborhoods for work and living. If you're wealthy, you can afford to live within walking distance of white collar jobs, if not you're stuck.
Also, Chicago is a bit of an abnormality in the US for paying some attention to cycling infrastructure.
It's not just the airports. My wife works at ANL. There are exactly two buses a day which go from our place to the lab. And this is after a ten minute walk. If you miss those, you either have to drive or take a taxi. There are no other options whatsoever.
Maybe public transport works well in the city, but good luck surviving in the suburbs without a car.
I live in a suburb and recently spent a large amount of time looking for a new job, after living in a small part of California with limited opportunities, and while I didn't have the best time looking for a position as a Software Engineer, it's not as if there weren't jobs in any suburb or downtown that I couldn't achieve. I'm not someone who would look to regularly commute downtown but there are both Metra and L-stations that I could access and it's not as if we don't have roads.
This sort of sprawl as an issue seems to be targeted towards growing cities and suburbs that are undeveloped in terms of resources and infrastructure. Many of Chicago's suburbs and surrounding areas have really deep histories and local roots. In this sense they become their own neighborhoods, cities, towns, and villages instead of just rows of houses without sidewalks or an endless stretch of strip malls.
I think it's also easy to carpool or work around bus schedules if that's really an issue to a commute, or buying an electric car for short journeys like that.
The second city is also in a much better position than many other cities in the midwest. Indianapolis and Minneapolis-St. Paul are a lot harder to get around from outside the city, especially if you don't have a car, so I could understand how moving further and further out could be a detriment.
The thing is, money "lost" are spend on wages for people building roads, infrastructure, houses, etc. And this type of work more often done by local workforce, not some international company with bank accounts in caymans.
So... how exactly money are "lost"? Lost by whom exactly? People found jobs, which otherwise would not exists, and more infrastructure is built. Which in turn bring more people to live there, which in turn brings more local jobs (i.e. mom-n-pop AC/plumbing/electric company, Homedepot, etc)
And built roads are not quite wasteful too - as far as I know roads drive economy, not subdue it.
More typically, the tax districts for the areas with McMansions are entirely separate from those with a high concentration of apartments and urban housing. In this situation, the residents in a particular area bear the tax burden for the services that they consume. My particular metropolitan area is divided into several "cities" (I put it in quotes because they really all run together) that serve to ensure that each area's residents bear the cost of their services. Even in this situation, due to taxes levied by the state government, the flow of capital still tends to go from the suburbs to the urban areas.
In fact, I suspect that most house dwellers would be hugely in favor of further segregating the tax system so that funds paid by a group of individuals are used for services desired by that same group. In my area this would, however, result in the defunding of most public transportation (which is largely financed by people who do not use it), urban schools, the community college (which is funded by the whole county, but mostly used by lower income residents), etc. As an example, the public bus system recently appropriated lanes on many busy streets that were paid for by gas taxes. Since those with longer commutes pay more in gas tax, it stands to reason that these lanes were originally paid for by suburban commuters, and are now being used by the apartment dwellers and urban residents who are the primary clientele of the bus system (use fees make up only a small part of the funding for public transit in my area).
I am not stating that the existence of any of these things is bad, but simply that your belief that apartment dwellers are subsidizing the lives of McMansion residents is entirely incorrect.
This way "most families living in a half million dollar McMansions" get their own road-heavy city budget, and a "typical apartment dweller" gets his parks/libraries/schools/transportation fix.
That's a grand theory, of course. In reality, outside of a few cities, most American urban downtowns are proverbial dumps.
https://www.google.com.au/url?q=http://newclimateeconomy.rep...
All the man-hours and natural resources spent building all those roads and paying for all that gas to move around on them could have instead gone to expanding production.
For instance, funding new companies, scientific research, and so on.
That is the point of the article.
Of course, the article is fallacious in that expanding production is not inherently better than consumption, so consumption is not necessarily "wasteful."
If people had preferred to live in an apartment and invest their money, they would have. Other things being equal, suburban sprawl reflects peoples' economic preferences. People are willing to pay for all the resources to make suburban sprawl possible.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
edit: though living in an apartment will be more expensive, so that wasn't a great example.
Like with everything, there must be a balance (we need scientific research,) but having suburbia and infrasture is not automatically bad in my opinion.
Except for the massive externalities involved, sure, they're willing to pay for it. Urban dwellers largely subsidize your suburbia, and have since its inception.
Consider what a large city budget could be spent on if a large portion of it didn't go towards maintaining the roads, maintaining the streetlights and accompanying infrastructure, and hiring extra police force to properly cover the expanded driving area.
> Also, why having more infrastructure is automatically bad?
Don't think it's that absolute.
Think about tax dollars collected from a given square mile vs tax dollars spent on a given square mile. Suburbs tend to decrease the former and increase the latter, high-density projects tend to move the money in the opposite direction.
We made long-time friends with a family a mile away by road, but I could get there in a quarter of a mile or so by woods and swamp. The trick to walking through the swamp was to try to step on clumps of grass sticking out of the muck. I would come across rotting tree trunks and knock them over to watch the termites. Sometimes our outdoors cats would join me and follow from a distance.
My dad drove 30 minutes to work, about 25 miles away, where he struggled to run a discount auto-parts distributorship employing too many people to be profitable. My mom stayed at home with me and my little brother.
My friends loved coming over. If we walked far enough past the swamp, we would be on the bay, which smelled kind of funky for being fresh-water, too far from the sea water to be even brackish though. It was just us, and maybe our neighbors who mostly stayed indoors. We didn't worry about break-ins. We left our door open a lot.
I currently pay a lot of money for a doorman for that kind of sense of security in NYC. As for being able to walk in the woods by myself, that's just about impossible, and you can't put a price tag on it. Unless I'm home alone, there's almost always someone in my field of view. I'm kind-of used to it, but a lot of people have a visceral distaste for it. Seems like I can't even get to work without getting into a subway car that smells like something died in it.
An economist might not have a direct way to measure the value we created for ourselves, but you might say we created a lot of value for ourselves by living where we did.