Not every complaint needs to have a goddamn essay attached describing some utopia. Sometimes you just need to kvetch, and I'm sick of getting tone policed otherwise about it.
Lmao sure. Every comment I make about unions gets downvoted, and every comment about "maybe it's okay to destroy the planet for one more solid quarter" shoots into the stratosphere.
More projection here than a drive-in movie theatre... This website sucks, but not because of any (incorrectly) perceived leftwing bias.
I don't know when this retcon happened, but this was never actually a site for hackers. People here complain because they like the modern web, because it pays their salaries. They get fabulously rich because of the steady enshittification of the web.
>Wait until you hear about the true costs of transit. A transit ride in a large city is typically MORE expensive than a car ride. Even when you take into account the cost of depreciation, insurance, financing and other related expenses.
Meanwhile, we're barreling toward 2-3 C of warming above pre-industrial levels by 2100. Oh, sorry, that doesn't have a line item on the toll receipt, silly me.
>It's THE real reason we have a failing democracy. Thoughtless social experiments with subsidizing transit have led to distorted housing and job markets. You can't just subsidize one facet of life and hope for it to work.
No the most eco (and financially) friendly model is high density areas where you can walk and bike to school and work. The transportation costs under this model are effectively nil.
Land aside, building a single story house is much cheaper per sq ft than a tower.
Medium density streets, like UK terraces can have enough density to support commerce nearby etc. but also low enough density to use a lot of solar to power houses directly.
Land may be the constraint given the population of the world.
I'm essentially parroting the (settled and not at all controversial) consensus view of the urban design profession so there's no real end of citation.
Though there are few clear cut real world examples to point to because land use is one of the most highly politicized things and it is rarely exposed to real market forces.
It's a great thing to have arguments about because whenever you can point some examples, people will always nitpick at why it's not real (eg. Tokyo is affordable and dense thanks to low regulation and the market, but people will point at the relatively poor Japanese economy etc).
But from basic geometric principles it makes sense that automobile oriented infrastructure is ultimately unsustainable and more expensive because of the constraints of the real world.
Ultimately the issue one runs into is that a car is a box several feet wide by several feet long (6.7x17.4) for an F150. That's a lot of space both parked and on the road. So if everyone buys one (and largely drives around themselves) it's clear that one quickly fills up the size of the road. The cost of expanding roads is very expensive, disruptive, and occasionally impossible. And then it doesn't even really work in remarkably improving traffic because due to Induced Demand, it reprices driving cheaper, which encourages more people to drive, which refills the road again. Everyone's time is being wasted sitting in these large boxes that cost tens of thousands of dollars.
So the core problem is that cars are enormously space inefficient. The system simply doesn't scale and eventually reaches break down.
You simply have to give up and can't grow the city any further. So you have to push people out to other cities.
But if we think of moving people instead of cars, there's a lot more space efficient opportunities since people are very small.
So you look at things like a bicycle, whose costs are relatively near nil, a protected bike lane that is also effectively near nil (put some jersey barriers on an existing road) and you can move that same person for much less. Obviously the problem is that they can't go very far but a combination of different modes for different uses and you have a system that can actually scale.
Build compact mixed use neighbourhoods that one can walk and bike to for local needs, buses for inter neighbourhood, and trains for intra and inter city long distance travel.
Only with this approach can you can continue to scale a city and continue to have a large city that is functional.
Houston is able to scale even with the space inefficiencies of the car by leveraging sprawl. It is remarkably larger than NYC and has room to grow.
This is the relief valve I mentioned here:
> You simply have to give up and can't grow the city any further. So you have to push people out to other cities.
So a city that can sprawl like Houston, does so, and it grows outward, adding more cities on the edge and becomes effectively a loose federation of many cities, which aids in the transportation issue.
That is a solution that some cities on a plain can make use of to kick out the runway further, but it's unavailable to others with more constrained geography.
Nothing I'm saying is actually scientifically controversial. I'm literally citing facts from urbanist textbooks. It's just that the way I'm telling them is unsettling for the people who have never questioned the social-engineered "consensus".
The CO2 footprint question is a tricky one. The vehicle _itself_ is not the main source of pollution. Even if you compare the vehicles, the answer is not straightforward: https://ourworldindata.org/travel-carbon-footprint The main source of pollution for transit are _drivers_. E.g. each bus needs around 3 drivers to function, resulting in driver-to-passenger ratio of just around 1:7.
So when computing true CO2 footprint, you need to look at a counter-factual scenario where bus drivers are doing something else. But this becomes extremely tricky extremely fast, as you can move into fantasyland where bus drivers are building CO2 scrubbers instead of driving CO2-emitting vehicles. Or where drivers are working on chopping forests for agricultural lands, resulting in huge CO2 increases.
The next best option is to look at different regions and compare them. E.g. Houston, TX with EVs would have smaller CO2 emissions than the current NYC, with climate corrections.
The article you cited doesn't support that assertion. Its thesis is that upzoning alone — i.e. relaxing regulations such that it is legal to build higher-density housing, without further interventions — may not be sufficient to create enough vacancies to lower rents.
The cited article alone simply admits that upzoning won't result in cheaper housing. Because the market is broken (and only socialized housing can fix it), but we must do upzoning anyway.
That article also doesn't support your assertion. For example, they specifically call out parking minimums and minimum lot sizes (both density-lowering regulations) as major drivers of high housing costs.
> No the most eco (and financially) friendly model is high density areas where you can walk and bike to school and work
No, it's not. Because for that to work, you'll need a large underclass that has to waste 2-3 hours a day in commutes and subsist on groceries from state-run stores.
But yeah, the elites will be able to live in nice walkable areas. I know, I lived in an apartment overlooking the Union Square in Manhattan.
No, it was in a friend's apartment that he bought as an investment property. Apparently, the rent in this building is about $30k a month.
The area is great and walkable, with tons of restaurants around. But of course, nobody working in these restaurants can afford to live anywhere close to it.
Idk, man, Europe and like... half of Asia seem to have figured this out, and their healthcare outcomes are better. But sure, this contrived pro-car scenario is why trains don't work.
A solid 50% of this entire thread is people arguing about inflation and bikeshedding the concept of money. Amazing. (COVID gets an honorable mention. Six years on now, but hey. Stay mad.)
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