I disagree. And I’m thinking of California in particular here. There is FAR too much reliance on personal transportation. It has little capacity to support “just increasing density”. There’s nothing natural about it. It will take a very serious planning effort to transform the state.
> Increasing density will naturally decrease reliance on personal motor-vehicles because more journeys become walkable.
Only if you don't need to go to work. Which is working wonderfully in pandemic era. I can pretty much walk anywhere I could need in terms of stores and services.
But jobs, unless you work in one of those stores or services, are of course far away, not in the middle of denser housing. Tech company campus won't be between housing rows.
My town has built tons of housing over the last two decades. Offices are still in the industrial campuses farther away and all that new housing means tons of new local traffic. Uncomfortable but true.
It used to be 2 minutes and one stoplight to get to the highway. Now it is 7 stoplights and up to 15 minutes to get to the highway (from the same house).
It would be wonderful if for every new housing block there was an adjacent office complex block, so most people can walk to work, but that's not how it goes. So in practice, yes, increased housing density just means tons new traffic to fight through.
Hopefully I can just remain work from home forever!
This is probably more true than any time in the last 30 years iff remote work takes hold. Previously, it wasn’t near as likely that all workers in a household could for a 40 year career live within an easy walk of their work.
Now it’s possible (maybe) for many more people (although they’ll need larger housing units).
Forcing low density housing causes sprawl. Look at European cities which generally have cores 5-10x denser than Cali. Most of them have no such traffic problems because you don't have the whole population travelling 30 miles on roads every day
Yes. But California isn’t Europe. There’s a million factors that led to California, or America as a whole, sprawl. Probably, primarily, land is plentiful and cheap. When it is no longer possible to get cheap land then density will naturally follow.
Take New York as an example. Limited land area. Lots of money. Drove up density and has a low reliance on cars and has an ok public transportation system.
Everywhere else it’s just cheap as hell to buy land and build. California is getting to the point now that some areas are expensive and density is increasing. But its also easy for people to just move somewhere else still
Dense housing is only dense housing, if people still need to commute half an hour or more to their workplaces dense housing is only creating traffic issues.
Transport infrastructure (roads, buses, railroads, trams), housing, everyday service infrastructure (supermarkets, medical services, restaurants, haircutters) and employment infrastructure needs to be planned holistically or you're just shifting between problems - in the case of only going for denser housing, you'll lower homelessness a bit but get traffic issues in return.
And on top of that, city planning needs to take entrenched interests into account. Often enough NIMBYist complaints are founded in real fears of exploding traffic or a loss in property value - but these can be counteracted and compensated, if one is willing to.
> Why can’t you have dense office, retail and housing space (can even be in the same building)?
I'd love that too, but it's not happening. FAANG isn't building their new HQ campus into the first floor of a new apartment complex. It'll be where it'll be and we'll have to fight through ever increasing traffic to get there.
Dense housing naturally causes businesses to move closer. I don't know of any cities where a dense urban core isn't also filled with businesses and very walkable. It will naturally happen if they allow dense housing
Certainly just increasing density with no other controls just increases traffic congestion.
The best approach would be increasing density while decreasing reliance on personal transportation.
https://www.transformca.org/transform-blog-post/our-take-gre...