No discussion of Mass transit or "giving up your car" is completely without discussing the walk-ability of cities.
You've spread your infrastructure out so wide in some places that walking becomes more like a hike. It's little wonder that you end up driving for anything beyond going next door. :)
The challenge is that the most walkable areas I've been to are the ones that are thoroughly inaccessible by cars. Building a city to be accessible by cars (and trucks) inherently sacrifices walkability due to the lost density created by larger roads.
I'm curious what a modern city would look like where we were willing to drop the hard requirement of being navigable by Land Rover -- if we were to build something akin to historic Rome or Barcelona using modern technology.
San Diego was not intended to have pedestrians at all as far as I could figure. Most striking was how much space it took up when flying in compared to population. Then you'd see minor residential streets with road an pavement wide enough to be a 4 lane highway.
I don't know how zoning works in the US, but I guess that's the explanation for all the shops and bars being miles away from where people live? Or is that another car-related choice?
I don't know too much about zoning processes, aside from that in the mid-to-late 20th century, mixed use zoning wasn't in fashion. My grandfather was a suburban mayor in the '60s, and when he talked about zoning process, he said it was: "Well, we drew a box and put the residential here, and the commercial district here" -- and San Diego was built up at a similar time, so I expect a similar process existed. A decent representation of this process is SimCity -- that the entire notion of mixed-use zoning was absent is certainly a reflection of 20th-century urban planning.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largest_cities_in_the_United_S...
[2] http://www.sandiegohistory.org/links/sandiegopopulation.htm
from http://humantransit.org/2013/05/how-sim-city-greenwashes-par...
"Librande: Yes, definitely. I think the biggest one was the parking lots. When I started measuring out our local grocery store, which I don’t think of as being that big, I was blown away by how much more space was parking lot rather than actual store. That was kind of a problem, because we were originally just going to model real cities, but we quickly realized there were way too many parking lots in the real world and that our game was going to be really boring if it was proportional in terms of parking lots.
Manaugh: You would be making SimParkingLot, rather than SimCity."
(Edit: the streetcar is long gone, though there's a bar called Station nearby and a few other hints of its former existence).
It's not bad for SD, but the streets are wide and drivers blow through stop signs constantly. I can, at least, walk to several great bars, a small Target Express, and a few other amenities.
It's low to moderate density because the homeowners fight all new construction tooth and nail (I go to the planning meetings). There isn't a single bike lane in my community. Any time someone suggests building something they are told they have to build massive amounts of parking, so nothing gets built.
Of course, their charming cottage homes (which would be illegal to build now) are $700k to ~$1.1million, so it's great for the landowners. Not so much everyone else.
The people who live and vote here are mostly owners, so they have a very strong interest to fight any new construction, increasing the scarcity of their asset, and its value. I can't see how this changes so long as any area which is composed primarily of landowners can vote to make sure nobody else is allowed to build there.
For myself, I use a car, and a bike every day. I drive my vehicle into the city, and park where I legally can. It seems like it's shrinking monthly? I then take my bike out and peddle to a job I detest. A job site that changes monthly.
I don't have an answer, but bicyclists should be given some perks. One--don't require a motorized vehicle as a job requirement, unless the job requires driving. I've seen too many employers slip that one in casually. It's usually some guy exploiting the minimum wage.
Two--If your riding a bike to work, lay off the strict dress code. A little?
Three--Give the bicyclist a credit on their taxes, if they don't have any motorized vechicle. (Guys like me wouldn't qualify. I'm not giving up my driving privilege until they pry the wheel from my cold, dead hand.)
Walking to get your mail in 105+ heat and back would have taken(no exaggeration) almost all day.
San Francisco has neighborhoods with a WalkScore of 100, but the baristas and cooks and other laborers in those neighborhoods, including construction workers who build the homes, largely drive and transit in.
IMO it basically carries that you worsen the Effective WalkScore of other people's lives, even if they live in neighborhoods that are walkable to desk-sitting professionals, because the wage-paying jobs in those areas (e.g. Oakland / East Bay) doesn't pay as well as the wage-paying jobs in neighboring cities with stronger economies (e.g. SF).
This is absolutely happening right now and the reverse impact is that SF's cost of living is creeping over Oakland's and driving the folks who live in Oakland and work in SF to further reaches of the bay as people, giving up on walkable life in SF, try it out in Oakland.
Bicycles help this, but I'm here to tell you that nobody has any fucking sympathy that you've chosen a car-free life and it's El Nino and why are you late because your coworker who drives an SUV 100 miles is already here and how is your life possibly harder?
Anyway .. it's complex AF. Believing another world is possible is for sure a great first step.
I used to live in a downtown area and it was nice being able to walk 6 blocks to work. But I would never want to raise a family in an apartment or with those terrible schools.
a school in a rural area isn't automatically better than a school in an urban area because its rural.
If less people commuted into the city from the burbs urban schools would get better for the exact same reasons the schools are often better in the burbs now.
Most urban areas have a mix of terrible and excellent schools. The excellent ones rival or exceed the best of the surrounding suburban schools (except with more in-school variance in terms of quality of instruction and background of students), while the terrible ones are truly toxic. Conversely, rural schools are more uniformly "meh" -- generally not toxic, but also pretty underwhelming in terms of instructional quality and available learning opportunities/resources.
Also, IMO, test scores are not great indicators of school quality. Even if you could perfectly control for all confounding factors, test scores probably still wouldn't be great indicators. They're simply, de facto, measuring the wrong things.
Or better yet, say something constructive.
If rich people move into the cities, and form little neighborhood clusters to exclude poor families, the schools will become more attractive by all standard measures.
Now, the trick is that it's much easier to build out segregated wealthy communities in the suburbs, than it is in cities, since tight geography works against the informal segregation of suburban development projects.
I guess that system is designed in part to account for the effect you're describing - if one school starts to become known as a better school, the kids in the poor parts of town are just as likely to be able to get in as anyone else. I have no idea if it actually works that way, but I do know it's a pain for my sister who now has to drive her kids to school several miles away when they could easily walk to the closer one. Can't please everyone, I guess.
Be careful there at teasing out the real motivation. If you want "wealthy students" because poor people are icky, then you're a jerk. If you want "wealthy students" because you want schools to be well-funded, that means you do in fact want good schools.
How to tell the difference? Maybe by putting the person somewhere where all schools in a very large area are funded at the exact same level. I don't know. But assuming it's a dog whistle isn't a good idea.
What's your definition of "good schools"?
In many cities, poverty is highly concentrated not only in urban areas but also in some of the surrounding suburbs. So the suburban schools -- or at least some of them -- end up as bad or worse than the worst of the urban schools.
So the old surburb/urban school quality divide is slowly breaking down. As a result, affluent urban areas often have high quality schools while impoverished suburbs often have terrible schools.
That said, it's generally true that living in the "good" suburbs is cheaper than living in the "good" parts of urban areas.
Rent/Housing does indeed cost more in walk-able areas. That's a great signal telling us that there's a lot of demand for walk-able neighborhoods, and urban planning should allow a lot more of them.
So if you live 45 minutes by train from where you're working and there is an actual train there, public transit helps you a lot.
I live in SoCal, and I can't get my head around the car culture mentality. Of all the places that should be walkable, one that is 80 degrees and sunny 90% of the entire year should rank very high on the list. But nooo.... the walkable cities are in places that get run over by a glacier every six months. Go figure.
I'm all for public transportation and LA used to have the best in the world 80 years ago. But, a large city as large as LA is never really going to be completely walkable unless everyone always moves close to their job. That would mean moving away from friends and family because of a job change rather than just commuting a little further. I suspect most people would chose to stay near their friends and family rather than move closer to their job.
You can compare Tokyo which is large like LA but which has excellent mass transit and yet the average commute is 80 minutes each way. Why? People can't or won't uproot their families for new jobs. Also housing close to a job is probably also often either too expensive (downtown) or undesirable (industrial area).
In the valleys, walkability runs into the heat problems in the summer. Walking in 100F+ is no fun and can be dangerous to some.
There definitely is a very strong desire still for wider spaces, bigger yards, etc. As the result, walking in most of inland sprawl take a lot more time and effort.
Big cities on the east coast are older, so didn't develop in the age of the automobile and have to conform to its needs. Except cities in the SE, which again, grew due to modern appliances like the air conditioner.
This implies that walking has a hard limit on desirability, which is easily topped by driving, even with the worst traffic. You have to make driving worse to tip the preference toward walking, even if the conditions simultaneously make walking less desirable.
If driving 5 miles is likely to put your car in a ditch, you may opt for a 200m walk, which may only plant your ass on the concrete once or twice. If you have to shovel snow for 20 minutes to drive anywhere at all, you may prefer to just pull on some wellies and hoof it through the drifts. If every mile you drive is rusting away your vehicle's underbody due to road salt, you may prefer to wear away your boot soles instead.
If you could wave a magic wand to install a roof over ever road and highway, the residents would squeal with glee, toss out their tire chains, shovels, and boots, and get right back into their cars.
That's Stockholm Syndrome, is what that is.
Except freezing rain. That stuff is the worst.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Electric
[2] - https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2e/Los_Ange...