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Comment by bbarn | Hacker News Reader

You've just nearly described my exact working environment. Only, on one side I have a highway. I have a friend who works across the road from me. If we met up for lunch on foot one of us is taking a 30 minute walk because it's impassible on foot. I'm stuck driving for the bulk of the winter because it's just unsafe (after biking to work year round in Chicago for the last ten years, this commute broke me).

Fortunately (for them and me) the company is moving downtown this spring, or I wouldn't have taken an otherwise great job.

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Every time I visit America I'm surprised by how unwalkable most of metropolitan America is. I always wondered if roads are unwalkable because most Americans wouldn't walk anyway or if Americans don't walk, because roads are unwalkable.

Probably it has something to do with the long walking distances; even if the roads were walkable with proper sidewalks and pedestrian crossings installed, it would take half an hour just to walk to the nearest corner store.

> Probably it has something to do with the long walking distances;

oh ya think? I think you should just continue to assume it's just because Americans are too lazy to walk.

Why are you so hostile? I did not imply in any way that "Americans are too lazy to walk".

Indeed, it's not so much that americans are too lazy to walk, but they've been conditioned to not walk.

When I was a child, I road a big yellow school bus to my elementary school, at the time it seemed very far away, when my parents had to go to the school for any reason, they drove their car.

But now, looking at a map, I see that it was literally only a half mile from my house, but I never walked because it meant walking along some streets with heavy car traffic and no sidewalks, just an ungraded shoulder with no curb or other separation from the roadway.

It wasn't until I moved to San Francisco that I realized that walking (or biking) is a far nicer way to get around.

A couple of weeks ago we returned a rental car to San Diego, after a one way trip. We checked into the hotel, then were going to go to the airport for the return. We asked the clerk how to get back from the rental car return. "Taxi or Uber is your best bet, though I think there's a bus."

We looked on the map. The rental return was a mile away from the hotel, with sidewalks the whole way. We walked.

Pretty bad clerk you had there, I can't believe the suggestion to take taxi from a rental car return to a terminal. But the comparison that the average traveler is ready to walk a mile from their parking spot to the terminal with all their luggage is a bit far-out.

Sorry, I didn't explain that right. We drove from San Francisco to San Diego, with several stops on the way. We were tourists in San Diego for a couple of days. Our hotel was walking distance from nearly everywhere we wanted go, so we figured to not pay for a car for those extra couple of days. We checked into the hotel, moved our bags into the room, dropped off the car at the San Diego airport, the returned to the hotel for the rest of our visit.

So the walk was from the rental car return to the hotel, not the rental car return to the terminal.

> most Americans wouldn't walk anyway

I'm hostile because the whole "look how shitty america is" narrative gets old after a while.

The USA has enough land to (still) let the car be king, even in many cities, and has enough wealth to let even the "poor" to own a car, and you think that's a case of "look how shitty america is"?

There are many people in the world who would literally kill for such a lifestyle, and you think it's a symbol of how "shitty" America is?

Why do you think that America's car culture could be perceived as a bad thing? And if you can understand why others think it's bad, why do you take such offense when they point it out?

Basically in the 50's, we started building cities at automobile scale, instead of at human scale like we used to, and the design goal for roads was simply to move as many cars through as quickly as possible. Things like 12' wide travel lanes instead of 10', ridiculously huge building setbacks, right turn arcs, 140' wide lots instead of 70', wide neighborhood roads (encourages speeding), no street parking (drivers slow down on roads with parked cars and on roads with no marked centerline), etc. Also, everybody wants to live in a cul-de-sac, which greatly limits how far you can walk (https://www.walkscore.com/walkable-neighborhoods.shtml) versus a standard grid layout. (But if you look at real estate pricing, the data show people want to live in walkable areas; a home in a walkable area will often command a 1.5x to 2x price premium over a similar home in a typical car-centric suburb.)

All those details add up to create a poor and dangerous pedestrian experience. Now, most towns in America have realized that was extremely bone-headed, possibly unsustainable (it costs a lot of money to run all those electrical wires, plumbing, and roads), and we are trying to undo the past 70 years of engineering. Oh, and this was all mandated by building codes (law) so even if one wanted to build a walkable suburban business park, it was not possible.

There is a entertaining talk about all this by James Kuntsler at https://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_sub...

>a home in a walkable area will often command a 1.5x to 2x price premium over a similar home in a typical car-centric suburb.

I suspect this has more to do with fact that walkable areas are much more likely to be located in city centers with higher overall real estate prices than with the desirability of walkable neighborhoods.

A city centre, in order to be a centre, has to be denser. Density and walkability go hand in hand.

But sure, the real test would be non-walkable neighbourhoods next to city centres.

One also has to consider that new families with young children are high on the list of demographics looking for suburban homes, and are likely to have less money, so suburban homes are cheaper by necessity.

Cul-de-sacs wouldn't be so bad if they had well-maintained pedestrian lanes that cut between them and neighborhood shops instead of big box stores.

What's so great about "neighborhood shops" over big box stores? Higher prices and smaller selection?

We need both, but by neighborhood shops I mean little cafes, restaurants, galleries, markets, etc. that you can walk to for day to day needs, while still leaving the big box store for long-term and bulk purchases. The reduced density of suburbs wouldn't support very many of these shops, but if they're spaced well, they could serve as walkable gathering points for the community.

If you're counting little cafes, restaurants, galleries and markets among your day-to-day needs, you've already gentrified yourself out of the range of 90% of the population.

1. So what if he wants to live in a nice neighbourhood? 2. Those things are not exclusive to expensive places. Even the poor parts of town in far away countries have those things.

No, he hasn't, except for the galleries.

In England at least, a poor area still has little cafés [1]. The menu is similar enough — fried breakfast etc — but it will be served on an actual plate, rather than a chopping board or slate. The choice of restaurant might be a larger pub, or a place that also/only offers take-away (McDonalds or a small Cantonese place, for example). The market probably has less promotion of organic produce, and will sell produce as well as cheap clothes and household goods.

I used to live in a poor area of London, which I think was built in the 1960s. There were cul-de-sac roads, but most of them continued with footpaths so journeys wouldn't take too long. On the main road there was a school, church, doctor's office, dentist, library, small grocery store, beer/wine shop, bakery, cheap café, pizza take-away, Chinese take-away, Indian take-away, fish and chip shop, pharmacy, newsagent, youth club and 'village' green including play equipment. The pub-with-dining had recently closed, I'm not sure if that's still the case. All of this is within 5-10 minutes walk of most people, beyond that distance and they are close to the next cluster of shops.

There wasn't a market, but there was a market selling fruit and veg in the nearest 'town', which was about 5-10 minutes by bicycle, or 10-20 by walk+bus.

[1] http://www.constructionphotography.com/Details.aspx?ID=11957... — "builder's caf" or just "caf" is a slang term for them.

Yes, this has been my experience in the UK too (and probably everybody's). It may be a cultural difference but rows of local shops are not the preserve of gentrified areas. Anywhere people live, you will find these sorts of shops, because people will buy stuff from shops that are within walking distance. If anything, they seem to be slightly more likely in the poorer areas, presumably because there are more people who will want shops within walking distance.

How so? Even the poorest and 'shittiest' parts of most cities have plenty of cafes, restaurants and markets.

Try actually driving though the shitty part of any us city, there are no cafes. They don't even have big box stores.

Most of my low EUR / year earning friends (in that 90%) would disagree.

All of these things end up being plentiful, cost-sensitive, and profitable when the space you live in supports and encourages plentiful foot traffic.

In the US, you don't see European style communities like this much outside of the fu-fu hipstery gentrified urban areas, or places like the coast of Maine, where they roll out the welcome mat in the summer for the tourists and their wallets, but don't actually go to such places themselves.

Most places, the closest thing you're going to find to a little cafe is your local 7-11 or Dunkin Donuts. Or the local package store. Generally, people go to the supermarket once a week, and they stock up enough that they don't have to go to the market every single day - when I spent a few months in Germany, this was one of the differences that struck me most oddly. Art is generally... not held in great esteem.

You don't have to take the car.

No doubt city centres are walkable but this comment begs the question though - why are city centres 2x as expensive as suburbs? If the density and land scarcity is the reason then why do developers want to build on more expensive ground in the city than in the suburbs? Why are people willing to pay 2x to live in cities than in suburbs? I think the real reason is that walkability (and hence city centres) are desirable which makes them cost more, and not because city centres are ipso facto expensive.

Let's say that BigCity has a residential capacity of 1 million people, but 3 million people want to live there. Meanwhile, its suburbs have a capacity for 5 million people, and 6 million want to live in the suburbs. Even though more people want to live in the suburbs, prices will probably be higher in the city.

Bone-headed? I dunno. The cost to upgrade cities is beyond absurd. Installing a subway or light rail into an existing city is comically expensive.

Lots of European cities built these systems after WW2. Lots of Chinese cities have been doing it since the 2000s. Apparently it makes sense. When I see that a city like Seattle is not able to build mass transit between west and east side, and instead is maintaining gridlocked 10 lane "free"-ways and wider bridges I find that very comical. It is one of the main reasons I feel alienated every time I visit the area.

The #1 reason why cities are not built to human scale and why chain businesses with slim margins survive and local businesses do not is 100% civil politics. It's parking minimums. Eliminate parking minimums and commercial real estate becomes cheaper, building setbacks get smaller, and walking becomes the rational way to get around because stuff is closer together & driving short distances becomes more difficult.

I'd argue that trying to build widespread mass transit in America today is what's bone-headed. The road infrastructure already exists and connects just about every town in the US. Electric cars will solve the fuel efficiency issue to a large degree, and self-driving cars will fix congestion and safety.

I can't believe some of the outrageous stuff this Kuntsler guy says:

>We have about, you know, 38,000 places that are not worth caring about in the United States today. When we have enough of them, we're going to have a nation that's not worth defending. And I want you to think about that when you think about those young men and women who are over in places like Iraq, spilling their blood in the sand, and ask yourself, "What is their last thought of home?" I hope it's not the curb cut between the Chuck E. Cheese and the Target store because that's not good enough for Americans to be spilling their blood for. (Applause) We need better places in this country.

Really? We have a lot worth fighting for, and it's not any physical city, nor should it be. Rather, it's the 300 million people that call this place home, your family and friends among them. It's the idea--the reality--of mankind living in freedom, of opportunity for all, of equal justice before the law, of the dignity of the individual.

>We are entering an epochal period of change in the world, and -- certainly in America -- the period that will be characterized by the end of the cheap oil era. It is going to change absolutely everything. [...] We're not going to be rescued by the hyper-car; we're not going to be rescued by alternative fuels. No amount or combination of alternative fuels is going to allow us to continue running what we're running, the way we're running it.

This guy is just plain wrong. There's no reason why plug-in electrics, and a power grid running on nuclear & renewables, can't replace our current reliance on oil and internal combustion engines.

I've lived in suburbs and in cities, and my take is that the current zeitgeist (that suburbs are evil) is way off the mark. In suburbia, I had boundless privacy and freedom in my home. In the city, I can't play my speakers loud without getting a noise complaint. In suburbia, I could hop in my car and go wherever I want whenever I want. In the city, parking is expensive and public transit is not fun. I have to take several buses, at particular bus stops, at particular times. My door to door morning commute is twice as long by bus as by car. In suburbia, I might have heard a few cars passing by at night, or the occasional loud outdoor party. In the city, I have to choose between burning alive and trying to sleep to the tune of my neighbors' loud conversation on their balcony. There's a lot of great things about the city too--I choose to live in one! Different strokes for different folks. Or even the same folks at different points in their lives.

Try driving in rush hour traffic in the SF Bay Area, then imagine what it'll be like in a few decades when there are 40% more people in the area.

You can replace gasoline powered cars with electrics, but you can't build enough roads to handle the traffic -- there's going to have to be improvements in public transportation and smart planning to let people live closer to where they work and play.

Retrofitting cities with pub transit is expensive today, but it will be even more expensive tomorrow.

Traffic is a compression wave. You brake, then the person behind you brakes, then the person behind them, etc. You accelerate, then the person behind you...

Highways that become automated-only will not have this problem. The cars can communicate with each other and change speed in unison. You don't even need to convert a whole highway, you can just reserve a single lane for automated cars and get most of the same benefits.

The near gridlock on SOMA streets every rush hour isn't because of a compression wave - there are simply too many people trying to drive out of the city at once. Even if magical cars could erase congestion on freeways, there's still the problem of not enough parking for everyone that would have to drive without public transit.

And don't say "But self driving cars will fix everything! They don't even need to park, they can drop you off at work and drive away". If the cars aren't parked, they are contributing to congestion. And since commutes aren't generally balanced, it's not like the self-driving car will leave Walnut Creek at 8am, drop you off in SF at 9am and then pick up a new passenger to head back to the East Bay - that car is going to be loitering around SF somewhere, waiting to take someone back home to the East Bay.

SF Muni carries 600,000 passengers/day. BART carries 400K (though not all to SF). Caltrain contributes another 50K. How could you possible accomodate all of these people without transit?

Like I said, building effective transit in existing cities is very expensive -- the BART system cost around $1.5B when it was built (around $20B today), but few would argue that SF would be better off without it.

>If the cars aren't parked, they are contributing to congestion. And since commutes aren't generally balanced[...] that car is going to be loitering around SF somewhere

You're right, traffic patterns are not balanced, so the cars returning to the hot areas for pickups will not be contributing to the traffic in the most-congested direction.

Also, SF already has BART, Caltrain, and SF Muni. I'm not familiar with the specific history here, but transit and housing are the limiting factors for where people live in the first place, so the number of commuters will expand when capacity increases. The better question is, what if SF didn't build those systems? It wouldn't be San Francisco today minus the trains, it'd be a totally different San Francisco. So you can't really take the ridership numbers from today as evidence that city couldn't cope without trains.

Also, this was all happening when self-driving cars were not around the corner. It's a different story today.

>You're right, traffic patterns are not balanced, so the cars returning to the hot areas for pickups will not be contributing to the traffic in the most-congested direction.

Except that in a city, all traffic contributes to congestion,there is no single "commute direction".

>Also, this was all happening when self-driving cars were not around the corner. It's a different story today.

That "corner" is decades away, meanwhile, people need to get to work today -- and you still haven't explained how self-driving cars can replace a million+ trips/day on city streets that are already at capacity during rush hour. They may be self-driving, but they still drive on roads.

Self-driving cars can optimize limited road infrastructure. Of course, this means ALL cars would have to be in on it, but that isn't infeasible for 10 or 20 years from now.

So I kind of agree with parent. Doing something today might be outdated given tomorrow's technology enabling better solutions. But that is always a risk in infrastructure investment.

Why not just never improve anything, ever? I mean we might have self-driving cars in 20 years, but another 20 after that there will be something even better than self-driving cars, and who wants to own something that will be obsolete in 20 years, anyway?

We will have self driving cars in 3 to 5 years at this point...the writing is on the wall. We will have pervasive self driving cars in 10 or 20 years.

So to ignore something that is pretty much a sure bet to redesign your city over 20 years, when what you are building is meant to last 50-100 years, is kind of stupid. You do what you can with all information available.

I think you're overly optimistic with that estimate -- we'll have "driver assist" cars in 3 - 5 years that can navigate most roads in normal conditions, but will still need the driver to step in from time to time to help with unexpected conditions.

10 - 20 years is more likely for true self-driving cars that can operate completely without human control.

Traffic congestion is also a question of person density. If there were ways to increase people density per sq ft on those roads, with buses or, heck, some weird quadruple-stacked short-distance car transports, you can reduce traffic and commute loads as well.

Kunstler has been writing about peak oil for ages, and is something of an expert in this area, despite being "crazy" - I mean, he definitely sounds crazy, but then again, there's a reasonable chance he could be right about the pending apocalypse, it's not like we're below the carrying capacity of the planet (given our resource usage) or anything.

There is no pending apocalypse. We'll hit peak oil around mid-century, and it's not like all of the oil just runs out at that point. We're investing heavily in research into renewables, and I figure that the politics of nuclear will improve in the next couple of decades.

Traffic is bad in general. The average SFite gets around on train, bike, walking and uber. To drive your own car is pretty hellish. If you try to drive a car over the bay bridge whenever there is traffic, it can take an hour. When there is no traffic, it takes 8 minutes. With the BART, if there is 'traffic', then your standing for 8 minutes in a somewhat cramped car as you go through the transbay tube. If there is no 'traffic', then your sitting for 8 minutes instead. Traffic is not an issue with a subway.

I hate suburbia. It's isolating and bland. It's always a 10 minute car production to go fetch something quick from a 7-11 or equivalent. It encourages obesity and a lack of walking because you always have to get in a car. It encourages long commutes and rush hour hell on the highway. With a long train commute, I can read a book or do something productive with my time.

If I want to play my music loudly at 11pm, then I will get a unit that was constructed with soundproofing. If a city is hampered by inept NIMBYs that prevent new construction with soundproofing being made, then that has nothing to do with urban vs suburban.

I think you haven't experienced a proper metro system by saying public transit is a bus. Go to new york, and see how there is no 'traffic' delays in taking the subway. Where everything is avialable 24/7 and the city is alive.

That I can remember right now, I've taken the subway/train in New York, Boston, Chicago, London, San Francisco, and DC. Some of them are really great, others are not (looking at you, Green Line on the Boston T). Building these systems was almost certainly a great idea at the time.

My main point is that technology is now changing and I think that de-centralized mass-transit through fleets of automated cars is close at hand. And it can use the infrastructure that we already have. So building super-expensive fixed-line transit infrastructure within cities is not a good investment anymore. Even more so when you consider the turnaround time from initial planning to opening to the public is probably a decade.

Private transport takes up way too much space and is also inefficient. Why spend the energy and resources to build a 1-2 ton car for transporting 1-2 people? It seems like an odd idea.

1. You wouldn't need a car per person, only enough to comfortably serve peak demand. There's never a single point of time at which everyone in a city is on the road. (Except evacuations, but see point 3).

2. There is already about one car per person in the US.

3. Automated car fleets would presumably have a cheaper carpooling option, where the car picks up other passengers on the way to the destination. Like UberPool today.

4. Fixed-line transit costs millions to billions of dollars per mile, and easily takes a decade from planning to completion. Building roads takes a fraction of the time and money. And the roads already exist.

Automated car fleets work well for suburbs. But past a certain point, heavy rail train subways have far more throughput than the equivalent amount of cars.

Look at this image for example: http://imgur.com/gallery/v3ff7FY

Building & maintaining roads and highways does take a lot of money too. Building new roads vs building new railroad track on new land isn't that much different cost wise.

I think it's simply that most American cities are relatively young, and a good portion of the growth occurred after cars became abundant. Older cities aren't as car-centric, because cars didn't exist when they were built.

I guess it started with "roads are unwalkable" and then slowly morphed into "Americans wouldn't walk anyway", and you can see it in the comments here.

Most people can't even come up with a sane rationalization of their environmentally hazardous laziness. Instead it's "America is such a big place", which is like saying you can't bike because Russia is the biggest country on earth while you live in Moscow.

A bit of both. The history of suburban sprawl is pretty well documented elsewhere, but at this point, it's hard to undo. People have committed to a car-based, suburban lifestyle.

Heck, I don't much care of the suburbs, but being a software developer outside DC means the best job prospects are along the Dulles corridor (Tyson's Corner through Dulles Airport) or other suburban areas. So, like many others, I bought a house in the 'burbs, where the public schools are good, jobs are bountiful, and traffic makes me feel like kicking puppies.

Now that I'm here, I'm pretty ambivalent about it. I'd move downtown, but I'm not convinced the pay would be high enough to offset the increased cost of real-estate ($400k for a 3-bed row houe in the outer 'burbs, $700k+ for the same downtown).

They don't have large apartments downtown?

The real estate is much more expensive downtown in most cases and, like many urban cores for a variety of historical reasons, you're probably stuck paying for expensive private schools if you have kids and want them to have a good education.

I live in the city, pay outrageous taxes (ie. taxes are about equal to my mortgage), and now my son is 4. So I'm faced with sending him to a school district with lousy outcomes and no budget, sending him to Catholic school, or moving to the burbs where they have sponsored robot teams and some of the best schools in the state.

You can't send your son to school in the 'burbs without moving there?

Not in the US. Public schools are funded and managed by the local governments (usually county or city). So, only residents of those locales get to attend.

You could send a child to a private school in the suburbs, but that's doesn't gain you anything over sending the kid to a private school closer to home. Plus, it costs an additional $6000+/year. That's tuition at my local Catholic high school; it's an average school, no better than the publics in the same area.

<outsider's shrug> From a policy perspective it seems to be a no-brainer then to move school financing to the state level, at least for a part of the schools.

It really needs to be all or nothing, otherwise you're just giving the districts more spending power.

State budgets are abstract, and it's easy for school boards to ask for more money over time.

You can in my state, but we'd have to politick to do it, and the cost is more than private school. And the private school is a better investment (smaller class size, less common core) at that price.

I see this as a serious gap in most places. They are building loads of apartments near me- all one or two bedrooms. It's very rare to see a three bedroom, and almost never four.

That's because the customary cultural expectation in America seems to be that by the time you have any use for 3+ bedrooms, you'll buy a freestanding house in the suburbs. Accordingly, there's little demand for large apartments.

3+ BR apartments are fairly table stakes in central and Eastern Europe. It's still a culture shock to me to be unable to find one here in the US, and I've lived here since I was six!

Yes, but not many, and they sell for premium prices. They are often sold a "penthouse" units, only on the top few floors.

They are frequently aimed at retirees downsizing from even larger free-standing homes. Or, wealthy buyers looking for an urban crash-pad, in addition to their mansion outside the city center.

edit - a quick search of Washington DC shows 14 units available with 3+ bedrooms and <$700,000. Of those, about half are in really rough neighborhoods, where no professional likely to move.

I wish more people would talk about this.

I'd love to live downtown, and am actively trying to do so. But it's the worst decision I could possibly make in every measurable metric.

Living downtown triples my housing costs. Even if I downsize 50% of my current living space, moving downtown would still double my housing costs. Working downtown cuts my salary by ~15%, and I'd loose my good health insurance for some fake HSA. I'd love to raise my child downtown, but the school systems are significantly worse in every metric.

Yes, I could give up a car. That would save me about $350/month in total expenses. But to live downtown would cost me an extra $1000/month in housing costs, and cut my income by about $900/month (pay cut + benefits reduction + increased taxes). Loosing $1,900/month to save $350/month is insane.

And taking public transit, while slightly cheaper and healthier than driving, would increase my commute time by 2 hours every single workday. (How much is an hour of your time worth? How much is 40 hours per month of your time worth?)

---

I'm still trying to live in an urban area -- it's been a goal of mine for my entire life. But it feels like all of society is working against me for trying to do this.

Our perverse incentives are setup in such a way that suburban sprawl is the most rational choice for non-subsidized individual households to make in the vast majority of the US, despite all of the problems associated with it.

You'd love to live downtown in (I'm assuming) an urban area that is in extremely high demand. There are tons of downtown cores that are less expensive but presumably you don't want to live in those and the jobs aren't available there. It's not so much about perverse incentives as that high demand areas are expensive because a lot of people have the same preferences as you do.

>I'm still trying to live in an urban area -- it's been a goal of mine for my entire life. But it feels like all of society is working against me for trying to do this.

Do this. Even if temporarily. I've lived in the suburbs all of my life (and currently still do). The year I spent in a real city gave me great perspective. I quite enjoyed some parts and hated other parts. If anything it made me really understand myself more (and appreciate the suburbs!)

> 'burbs

is that supposed to sound like burp?

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