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Comment by kevinstubbs | Hacker News Reader

Is there any merit to the argument that increasing population density will make bad traffic exponentially worse?

Density should enable walking which changes everything.

A farmer in the middle of nowhere (US or Canada - other countries have different situations that I cannot comment on) is looking at more than 30 minutes to the nearest grocery store if he drives. To walk would be 10 hours each way.

As we go down we hit the suburbs - 10 minutes to the store, but still 2 hours to walk. (if you took the same route as the car it would be about an hour, but that means walking on a busy road with no sidewalks, so you end up having to take a much longer route)

High density allows stores and restaurants to exist just to serve the people within a couple blocks. You take the elevator downstairs, and within a couple blocks is everything you need to buy, and the job you need to earn money to buy it with. When this is the world you rarely drive anywhere so you are not adding to congestion.

Now there is still congestion all those stores/business need to be provided with goods to sell. However a truck that takes up 4 cars worth of space is bringing enough goods to last 400 people for the day, where the cars in the other examples where for 1 person (all facts in this sentence were made up - they seem reasonable but I don't know how to find the right ones). This limits how dense we can get with just surface streets.

Note that the above is a should. Zoning laws often put high density far enough away from stores that you have to drive anyway - this makes congestion worse.

Ideally you get to mixed use buildings. Ground and maybe first floor dedicated to businesses (shops, offices, gyms, etc.), everything above is residences. Not for every building, you'll still have highrise office buildings (because you need that density of workspaces still, and their ground and first floor will be their local restaurants and gyms and such). But now the average person can get to a small grocery within 100-200m, and a larger one within 500m. Busses can be more effective for transporting people between regions of high residential density to areas of higher office/industrial or shopping density (primarily used by shops carrying non-daily purchase items or requiring more space).

Grocery store is an interesting example.

I've never lived in a dense city so I don't know how this is done.

I doubt I could carry a week of groceries for my modest family (2 adults, 2 children) 1 block, let alone several. Do you maybe use personal carts or what?

Getting groceries for a whole week is an artifact of the suburbs.

And long lines at the grocery store are an artifact of the city.

The walk to my grocery store is under 5 minutes. I shop every other day because I can shop before 7AM. But if I had to shop later than 7AM, I would only go once a week, because the lines grow too long.

> And long lines at the grocery store are an artifact of the city.

NYC is the only place I've seen bouncers outside of grocery stores to control the entrance (I'm looking at you 72 street Trader Joe's).

Well, to be honest, unless I forget something, it's often more like 2 weeks :)

Father of family of three here who regularly walks; I use a large backpack and a pair of large reusable bags that I throw over each shoulder. Heavy stuff (milk, canned goods, bags of apples, etc.) go in the backpack.

Invariably, I forget something so I usually have a smaller midweek trip for things I forgot. The walk to Trader Joe's is about 20min each way.

Edit: more like a 20min walk; not 30.

In New York, many grocery stores delivery to you. Personally, I just order on FreshDirect and don't bother going into grocery stores.

I used to live a couple blocks from the grocery store. I would walk every day or over other day. I liked it.

When the grocery store is just five minutes away on foot, you don't have to shop for the whole week. It essentially acts as an extension of your cupboard/fridge/pantry.

Family of 3, our supermarket was in the groundfloor of our apartment so it was sometimes easier to just run downstairs and grab it then to search through the pantry. You'd be amazed what you can carry once you start doing it regularly. I also, proudly, walked around with those little carts you see little old ladies carry. Damn things are super useful even with a car. Carries 2 cases of beer and produce on top ;-)

The other grocer in our neighbordhood does deliveries. Go shopping as you normally do, at checkout groceries are loaded into a big plastic tote instead of a grocery bag. It's delivered to your door within the hour.

I grew up outside the cities (denser, working class suburbs, not mcmansion-style suburbs) and after city living most of my adult life I can't realistically go back.

Short answer, you don't make weekly trips because the grocery store is down the street. I walked by two good grocery stores on my way home from the subway when I lived in NYC, I'd just buy what I needed for that night.

Or you buy your own cart, you see them all over in NYC, for groceries and laundry.

It's a different perspective if you've never had to do it; I used to live across the street from a small grocery (Fresh & Easy). When the grocery store is across the street, you don't bother with a week's worth of groceries.

You just run over to get some things for dinner or for a couple of days. You can fit a surprising amount of food in a single grocery bag.

It's also the case (though less true of families) that a lot of New Yorkers basically don't cook. Kitchens are generally tiny and there are a ton of restaurant/takeout options. (Plus lots of activities that many would prefer to spend their time doing rather than cooking.)

> Density should enable walking which changes everything.

That's pipe dream. There is a problem in NY and SF because people want to go the same place. That's the appeal of big cities: lot of job or activities in a limited space.

I have all of that in the shit area I live in London. I have a variety of restaurant, a street market 3 times a week, loads of shops ( food mostly ) all within 5 min walk. All good, except for work. That's all in the City or Canary Warf, you still need to get there. Despite being shit, the area is still expensive because the connection to the City is not bad.

You can get all of that in a lot of place but the price only become affordable once you can't commute with the City anymore.

No. Because increased density goes with less reliance on individual cars. The majority of people (by far) in NY or SF don't have a car already. Traffic is not bad in the densest cities of the western world, because we have much more efficient ways of moving people around: public transit.

But you also need density to sustain public transit. So you have sour spot where there's not enough density to have good public transit, but enough to create bad traffic.

Edit: see below, it's actually the majority of new households that don't have a car in many large American cities, except for NYC, in majority car-free.

About 30% of households in San Francisco do not own cars.[1] That's not the majority "by far." NYC is the only city in the US where the majority of households do not own a car (~56%). But "by far" still only really applies to Manhattan.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_most_...

In the most dense part of NYC, Manhattan, 73% of people don't have access to a car[1], which supports the idea that with more density comes less car dependence/ownership.

[1] https://factfinder.census.gov/bkmk/table/1.0/en/ACS/15_5YR/S...

But this is true only if there's enough public infrastructure to support that kind of living.

I'm in the East Village and I have these subways in a 10 min walk radius:

4|5|6|N|Q|R|B|D|F|M|L

I can make a no transfer trip to anywhere in Manhattan and most parts of Brooklyn and Queens.

If I lived in a part of Manhattan or NYC that didn't have these levels of access, I'd be very tempted to get a car.

I lived on a block just about the furthest from any subway in manhattan: 81st and York[0]. A car never crossed my mind.

http://iquantny.tumblr.com/post/99544282749/found-the-manhat...

To be fair, of those in the outer boroughs of NY that do have a car, (anecdotally) they don't commute with it. From what I've seen, the car is for trips out of the city or occasionally getting something big home, or used as part of their job (Taxi, Contractor truck/van, etc).

You're right. I mixed up my stats. Most of the new households come in these cities without owning a car.

Sources: http://sf.streetsblog.org/2014/08/15/car-free-households-are... https://ggwash.org/view/35905/88-of-new-dc-households-are-ca... http://www.betterinstitutions.com/blog/2013/07/almost-all-of...

That doesn't surprise me much. A disproportionate percentage of new grads moving to Cambridge or Boston to live probably have a job there. Someone working out at 495 would maybe prefer to live in the city but they'd just as soon not have an hour commute each way every day.

Furthermore, recent students are used to dealing with not having cars in many cases--even if it can be inconvenient at times. In addition, Zipcar and Uber/Lyft/etc. absolutely make a difference at the margins if you don't need a car on a day-to-day basis.

Having a car and using a car two different things. I live in a city and own a car, but bike almost everywhere I go.

But the biggest cities in the world have problems with foot traffic and subway traffic.

I'm not sure that they still employ "pushers" in Tokyo but they very well might.

And that's with the benefit of Japanese culture where people are generally clean and polite. Japanese density plus American social problems sounds hellish.

Yeah all this pro density hype comes off as coming from newbies to big dense cities. High density sucks for quality of life really quickly. Especially peak hours on the subway! I've learned I prefer medium density: walk to a shopping precinct for a commuter train to CBD and essential amenities. Weekends a small car to get about to social stuff, run errands, larger shopping trips, etc. You can have this even in suburban settings by planning well and keeping lot sizes smaller. Hardly exists in the US though.

Long commutes and rush hour also sucks in low density suburban america too. I think a lot of the bad sides of high density living for people are unwanted solicitors, bad/old non-soundproofed housing and insecure shipping receiving.

> Long commutes and rush hour also sucks in low density suburban america too.

Depends on where you want to live. I lived in Dallas for just over 14 years and never had a commute that was over 30 minutes each way. Half the time I was there it was 15 minutes door-to-desk.

Now that I'm in the NYC area it's 1+ hour each way and I'm beholden to a bus or train schedule. I could cut it at the expense of increased rent and less space, but that is not a trade-off my wife and I are willing to make.

I guess your wealthier in Dallas than you are in NYC in a way? A short commute usually costs more than a long one.

I don't follow. We don't need two cars here, but my monthly public transit outlay is a small car payment in itself. Were it not for the significant drop in car insurance rates, I would still be paying more for transportation than I did in Dallas (since the car I sold had been paid off for close to seven years).

Lived in Japan for a few. Would gladly take being stuffed into a train than ever stepping foot into a car again.

I'm going to guess that you are male. Being female and stuffed into trains like that carries disadvantages when males feel free to pinch your rear. Females learn to hold their briefcase behind them while standing on the train.

I'm male, but I know it happens, regularly. When we were in a group, we always tried to put the females in the middle.

As a male who has been constantly harassed by other men, I don't understand why people love to make this about gender.

To each their own I guess. I find being crammed in like that horribly uncomfortable and claustrophobic, to the point where I would rather walk than take a subway I know is going to be a sardine can.

Walking is great too, so long as it isn't a car

I wouldn't project your preferences onto everyone. For instance, I vastly prefer being able to do stuff on my phone, even standing in a crowded bus, to driving behind the wheel not being able to do anything.

As I said,I prefer commuting by rail on weekdays, not driving. It doesn't have to be one extreme or the other.

I can't imagine there wouldn't be, which is why a sane transit policy is also required. It's a slightly over-simplified but fairly-explanatory model to say that every mile traveled in a car is a failure of transit policy.

No because the size of roads in urban areas is fixed. Traffic will reach the carrying capacity of the roads and the incentives to drive get worse and worse and people will choose alternatives to driving.

If roads and highways are expanded then traffic will increase.

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