Hacker News Reader

Comment by noobermin | Hacker News Reader

I really wish the rest of the US would take note, both conditions as well as climate change really need reduction of sprawl but it really won't matter if OR legalizes this while FL puts up five times more exhurbs.

View on HN

Except for some coastal areas and larger cities housing density is way down the list of priorities because it's simply not a problem.

It might not be seen as a problem, but it is a problem. It makes forms of transportation other than cars non-viable, which is awful for the environment. Cheap electric cars will happen eventually, but we don't exactly have time to waste.

I'm all for raising density, but cheap electric cars will happen a LOT faster than rebuilding all of America with higher density housing and infrastructure, besides the carbon emission that that refactoring entails. Cement and steel emit way more co2 than individual transport.

"Cheap electric cars" will have range problems for a long time. Electric transport (not just "cars", either) works very well with increased density, and not so well with the low-density status quo.

Range doesn't matter. People tend to have a half hour commute range. Electric cars have long been able to replace gas for commute for nearly everybody already. (range anxiety has been about the exceptions - once a month I do X and the electric car can't do that...)

Care are problematic in more ways than just fossil fuels.

They're the leading cause of death among young people, and they take up massive amounts of space in our cities.

Is this really true? Transportation is the top producer of GHGs according to the EPA.

https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...

All large cities are boxed in by their suburbs which are cities in their own right. The only way for the city to grow is dense. A city needs to maintain the existing infrastructure, and people hate paying taxes so the only sane option is to grow denser so that the taxes are spread among more people. It doesn't help the city either that poor people with less money to tax have moved in - at least in many cases. Most of the roads in a city are not busy and can well take 10x the amount of traffic without needing any upgrades (the exceptions are often highways which the state not city pays for)

Note that there are competing concerns and incentives here. Cities have other pressures which run other ways.

It is a problem, or rather, becoming denser is the best tool cities have to tackling THE problem of our time, which is climate change.

One of the best ways that cities can contribute to lowering CO2 emissions is to make it so that the city is designed in such a way that a car is not a mandatory requirement for travel.

Creating reasonably dense residential/commercial communities that are traversable by walking and active transportation instead of sprawling out to the horizon is how to achieve this.

Couldn't increasing density create induced demand for more space in a driveable distance? Let's say we create policies to promote a manhattan-like density, and have lots of space nearby; don't you think manhattan would expand were it not bounded by water? This seems to offer at least some support for the idea:

http://spacing.ca/toronto/2016/05/26/induced-demand-housing/

Other concern: what are the effects of super-dense cities on mental health? Spread-out cities often have a lot more green, which I know has positive effects mentally:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/does-exposure-gree....

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5663018/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com