Interchange in Houston is the same size as an entire city center in Italy
texasmonthly.com
texasmonthly.com
That's the first time I've heard this theory.
Would that have worked though? I don't know much about nuclear deterrence, but I'd imagine if the USSR already managed to evade the defenses and other obstacles and destroy the city center in a nuclear strike, it wouldn't be a lot of additional effort to send multiple rockets instead of only one and also target the suburbs.
Not to mention that fallout, breakdown of infrastructure, disease and hunger that followed a strike would affect the entire city in any case.
Any way you slice it, nuclear deterrence, missile defense, containment theory and more generally any initiative motivated by the fear of imminent nuclear holocaust and the Red Menace were huge windfalls for industrial corporations from the end of WWII onward.
It was an effective way to siphon huge amounts of money from the postwar federal coffers for corporations that had made bank during the war, but were now left to justify why the government should continue shoveling money at them.
Now, this may not be the case for Houston's interchanges in particular, but it was certainly the case for many such endeavors going forward for decades. See also: SDI ("Star Wars"). And of course, there were other factors like suburbanization/white flight and the ascendant automobile industry. But all of these potential motivators were (are?) very entangled and hard to fully extricate from one another.
It isn't change per-se that is usually the problem these days, but the rate of change, and sometimes the rate of change of the rate of change.
Legitimate complaints (e.g. this will mess up traffic) are fine. "Neighborhood feel" complaints (e.g. this building is too tall, it doesn't fit the neighborhood character) should be met with "thanks for your feedback, but that's not a good enough reason".
Of course if there is widespread consensus among voters on how they want their city to be developed, fine. But right now, the current system allows a handful of very vocal opponents to development to derail new housing.
That's why doing housing/zoning policy at a much higher level, ideally statewide, would be much better. Japan has that (for their equivalent of states) and you don't see these distortionary effects. Then you'd see the development happening where it really truly does make the most sense, and as a side effect gentrification would be lessened because not as much new construction would be happening in farther out marginal neighborhoods because the demand would be satisfied closer in. Incidentally this also has positive benefits in lower commute times and less environmental impact.
In that case, vulnerable populations in gentrifying neighborhoods were no more likely to leave than equivalent populations in non-gentrifying neighborhoods.
For me, the obvious mechanism is that, well, it's true that people who leave may often blame gentrification / increased costs for their departure. But on the other side of it, without gentrification people may still have left, but for different reasons: to get away from crime, to go somewhere with more amenities. It's possible that these two tendencies somewhat balance each other out.
The question is which of these is worse for the people living in the area.
I do think it is an effective strategy. Look at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, tokyo and kyoto were spared for different reasons but they were spared. No sense in wiping out every single city. For the US, a nuclear attack would probably be against symbolic populated cities like new york, san francisco or chicago, ideally the US would surrender after that point and if there is no surrender, military targets would make more sense (hawaii,san diego,san antonio,anapolis,etc...).
The idea is, if you have a small number of targets to defend you can defend them better. Just like with infosec, you want to reduce attack surface so you minimize exposed services or inputs.
Even if there was an effect, I’d be very surprised if the signal wasn’t wiped out first by railroads and then by cars.
The goal was to get Japan to surrender, and Emperor was considering it. His generals were fanatically opposed, and if the Emperor were to be killed by the bomb, they would fight to the last man, woman and child.
US administration could then pick it's poison - leave Japan as is, suffer and inflict massive casualties from a ground invasion, or commit nuclear holocaust.
That's what MIRVs are for.
The strategy, if it existed at all and it isn't just a post-hoc explaination, was probably designed around the time the strategic bomber was the primary, and only, method of delivery of atomic bombs.
I did not know about MIRVs, this comment thread has been educational.
Playing around on Nukemap, 5-6 800kt warheads are enough to kill the majority of people in Houston and give third-degree burns to the rest. A Russian RS-28 Sarmat ICBM should be able to carry 10-15.
Or, with a single 20 megaton warhead, it would kill 1 300 000 people immediately and injure 2 000 000 people.
This was pretty much the strategy towards the end of the war. More than 60 Japanese cities were firebombed, civilian casualties probably exceeded those killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
http://otworld.weebly.com/robert-a-heinlein-the-last-days-of...
What, you people dont believe me? You seriously think we sprawl to protect ourselves from nukes? Like the enemy isnt just going to launch more nukes, or cluster nukes?
If anything, the sprawl would just make the nuclear strike worse, because there's a greater chance you'll survive and have to live through revelation. Here's how you protect yourself if a nuke is on the way: you duck your head down, and kiss your ass goodbye.
No it's just plain ole racist, classist, corrupt government trying to use fear of Russians to drive oblivious americans who dont pay attention, to buy more cars from their rich motor company friends.
That government is mostly in the past now, but the sprawl is a monument to their philosophy, which was racist, classist and corrupt.
Yeah you'd have a good chance of having more survivors due to the nature of nuclear weapons, but I don't see that influencing choices like wanting to have a suburban home and etc.
The US Army hasn't had strategic nuclear weapons in a very long time, if ever. On the other hand, theater-level weapons like the Pershing (10s (mostly) to 100s of kt) do a pretty fair approximation.
I'm not sure what you mean by "missile command"; Army Missile Command mostly has problems, not solutions. (They build things.) (Standard Missile 3! (https://images.wisegeek.com/billboard-ad-against-blue-sky.jp...)
https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=5000&lat=29.7589&lng...
In fact big bombs were an early trend for two reasons. One was that the delivery system was expected to be bombers dropping one or a very few bombs with mediocre accuracy and so you wanted maximum destruction from each delivery. The other was that they were worried bombers wouldn't be able to get directly over some targets due to air defences, so you'd drop the bomb short of the target and use the massive area of effect to cover the remaining distance for you.
https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=9000&lat=29.7500709&...
It is true that decentralization was viewed as a major component of nuclear survivability, particularly in the earlier part of the cold war. This was the time period during which the FEMA (today's name) crisis relocation program was being devised, for example, and the high cost and complexity of crisis relocation (which, in an earlier form, was a major motivation for the Eisenhower freeway system, to the extent that it's probably fair to say that it was the main motivation with materiel movement as a second) served to highlight the inherent vulnerability of dense cities and keep it very much in the minds of government planners. Decentralized cities had an inherent advantage to planners in that money could be saved on crisis relocation efforts. Of course the crisis relocation program was never fully implemented, but the way of thinking was fairly influential.
The federal government had an enormous role in suburbanization of US cities in many, many ways, which is actually part of what makes it hard to address this point. Support for suburbanization was not coming just (or even primarily) from FEMA, all kinds of federal agencies had a hand. Much of the urban renewal work of the 20th century took the effective form of relocating poor people to the suburbs and replacing their inner-city housing with industrial/commercial/transport, for example the Model Cities program of the late '60s. This was in part a result of the general feeling that the inner city was where poor people lived and so improving their economic situation required getting them out of it, part of it was merely the practical issue that substantially improving a dense area is a lot more expensive than razing it and build something new there. I don't know if these programs were strongly influenced by crisis planning, they probably were at least in part, but it seems unlikely that crisis planning was a much bigger influence in federal advocacy of suburbanization than the more organic trends of white flight and urban decay that came out of a set of race and class relations, in a potent combination with some simple budget and timeline considerations.
My point is that nuclear planning was a factor, but the massive suburbanization of the postwar decades originated from many factors out of which nuclear crisis planning was only one, and I'm not convinced that it was one of the bigger ones in the end. Yes, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists very openly advocated for suburbanization of cities and that view was influential, but at the same time so much of suburbanization was motivated by a new vision of the American dream that came out of the peculiarities of post-war economics and demographics, racism, the radical popularity of the automobile (which not only enabled low-density areas but often required the destruction of high-density areas to provide freeway access to business districts), and probably at least a few other things.
Any claim that "urban sprawl is a result of x" where X isn't a list of things is probably pretty hard to defend. A complete change in not just urban planning but people's patterns of life tends to require a confluence of factors.
I've heard that before, but the DOT claims evacuation was a minor factor. From https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/interstate/interstatemyths.cfm#ques...
President Eisenhower supported the Interstate System because he wanted a way of evacuating cities if the United States was attacked by an atomic bomb.
President Eisenhower’s support was based largely on civilian needs—support for economic development, improved highway safety, and congestion relief, as well as reduction of motor vehicle-related lawsuits. He understood the military value of the Interstate System, as well as its use in evacuations, but they were only part of the reason for his support.
Defense was the primary reason for the Interstate System.
The primary justifications for the Interstate System were civilian in nature. In the midst of the Cold War, the Department of Defense supported the Interstate System and Congress added the words “and Defense” to its official name in 1956 (“National System of Interstate and Defense Highways”). However, the program was so popular for its civilian benefits that the legislation would have passed even if defense had not been a factor.
So I sort of suspect that evacuation was a bigger factor than the government admits, but that's purely speculative. Just like suburbanization there are definitely a lot of reasons the interstates happened.
>It is hereby declared to be essential to the national interest to provide for the early completion of the "National System of Interstate Highways", as authorized and designated in accordance with section 7 of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1944. It is the intent of the Congress that the Interstate System be completed as nearly as practicable over a thirteen-year period and that the entire System in all the States be brought to simultaneous completion. Because of its primary importance to the national defense, the name of such system is hereby changed to the "National System of Interstate and Defense Highways". Such National System of Interstate and Defense Highways is hereinafter in this Act referred to as the "Interstate System".
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/STATUTE-70/pdf/STATUTE-7...
I say that to say this- I didn’t move way out here to get away from some ethnic group or to some other insidious reason. I moved here because I have a large (blended) family and we wanted to own land. It’s a popular narrative to blame sprawl on racism or living above your means. I think the real reason is way more boring than that. Move away from a population center and things get cheaper. Gas is cheaper. Groceries are cheaper. Price per square foot is much cheaper. Those who are upper middle class can live well in the sprawl so of course they do. I have neighbors of every race religion and culture here. They all want the same thing- decent schools elbow room and some fresh air...
And what do you get when you have a huge number of people looking to buy brand-new houses? Urban sprawl, there's not really any way to avoid it.
Also kudos for not being a racist...
But you might want to take a look at history. The US government actively encouraged urban sprawl with low-cost loans and redlining starting with Roosevelt and the New Deal.
"Beginning in 1934, the Federal Housing Administration (HOLC) included in the FHA Underwriting Handbook “residential security maps” used to help the government decide which neighborhoods would make secure investments and which should be off-limits for issuing mortgages[...] Green areas were were explicitly homogenous, lacking “a single foreigner or Negro.”
SOURCES:
- https://www.thoughtco.com/redlining-definition-4157858
- https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-federal-governmen...
- https://www.businessinsider.com/how-redlining-kept-black-ame...
The problem is this is a fundamentally unsustainable proposition. The US is hitting those problems now and it's not pretty. It's not just gridlock but problem that once things stabilize, maintaining sprawl costs more than maintaining a compact city[1]. The roads and the schools in the suburbs are often good only when they're new - once they age, the problem become visible (California is harbinger for the rest of sprawl land, this state has the older sprawl, remember). Poor services can cause an area of sprawl to become undesirable and then it's hard to recover - public transit is hard to add when distances are large but you can still wind-up poor people lacking vehicles in the hinterlands.
[1] https://usa.streetsblog.org/2015/03/05/sprawl-costs-the-publ...
What could that possibly be? I don't know of anything even on the horizon. Rails and steel wheels are more energy efficient but far more costly to build and maintain. Other nations use rail well by ... not having sprawl. Suburban sprawl essentially rests on the private automobile. As the gp essentially said, the draw of sprawl is a big house and a car, which can be nice 'till your whole planet is on fire and you're choking in rubble (I live in California, can you tell - But Texas will notce climate change too, if they haven't). A road is a just a flat piece of ground, it's pretty hard to find something simpler. Freeways are cheaper to build than railways. But the cost of rebuilding gets huge.
So basically, there are not solutions to these problems. We've basically hit Decline of the Roman Empire levels here. That empire took hundred of years to fall. I'm hoping things last past my lifetime.
There were also non-government actors pushing this - banks redlining the suburbs in order to achieve soft segregation in areas without formal Jim Crow laws on the books, for example.
The legacy of this is the most segregated city in the US, Milwaukee, is in the north, and a major cause was redlining.
When people think about beautiful cities, they would mention Venice or Paris or Rome. All these cities were built for 'foot traffic' which still works perfectly fine nowadays. In those cities, the elderly and children do have an environment to move around by themselves and socialize freely.
When it comes to planning cities for people, it is worth checking out Prof. Jan Gehl: https://youtu.be/9_x5Hor2MP8
Rome is all but working perfectly fine, with commuter traffic locked almost daily by the tiniest fender bender happening on the highway around it
Venice is likewise a mess, situation was so bas they built an highway to go around the existing highway that corrected it to the nearby areas, and the lack of easy mobility in the city center is fuelling a severe living cost inflation
Rome could have invested in public transport instead of building highways. No one would be stuck in traffic. Instead, they used public space for cars. The old parts of the city though which are walkable work perfectly fine.
Venice does have great ferry service and traffic in the city is almost non-existent due to lack of cars.
there's zero chance mass transit can accommodate people's needs, even if you somehow solve the shopping issue with local markets and fixed item prices, the job<>house graph will always look like a fractal set of overlapping stars.
cars is one of the most important social equalizer of this and last century. it allows people from basically all social status to move themselves, their family and their belongings at any time in full autonomy, enabling them to find houses and jobs in the most economical and convenient places.
private cars win over public transit because it's a better product. the only way for public transit to compete is to mandate laws to make cars comparatively a worse product, which is fundamentally anticompetitive - once public transit become monopolistic, once the company owns a tract, they can abuse their position deciding pricing and timetables.
even in traffic, private cars offer a better experience: people are in their own space, under a roof from start to finish, with their preferred temperature and away from both obnoxious or influenced people.
forcing mass transit trough legislation will surely have some short term benefits, but also:
- more class divide between the richs, that will always be able to afford a car, and the poors who won't
- massive gentrification of well connected areas, while the poors get pushed out to where service is of less quality
- dependency of the poors to expensive third party services on any occasion they need to move themselves or their goods across a non serviced destination. rentals is not an option: rentals need a credit card, and guess who don't own one?
- dependency on public transit times. have an unusual work shift or need to visit parents? get prepared to wait in the open under the cold or rain. need to get your child out of school in a down hour because he's suddenly ill? too bad, transit only gives peak service at peak hours.
of course there's situation where mass transit gets convenient, like large cities where a significant percentage of the population shares the same source/destination points, at which point people will use it naturally on their own.
opposing private transit is going to destroy an important achievement of modern society, the car has been a great economical equalizer and still is. market, after all, need customer flexibility not to be captured. pollution is something to be solved with more efficient cars and better technology all around.
it'd be like discovering tomorrow that soap pollutes: some will want to force everyone to smell, some will create a better soap.
I think it's quite odd we nowadays think cars are the only possible form of transportation. We are not born with 4 wheels underneath our butt. The alternative is to build structures build for foot or bicycle traffic. Everything within 10k can easily be reached by either bicycle or foot traffic. By building infrastructure for cars, you create distances which are for cars only. They would otherwise not exist.
> enabling them to find houses and jobs in the most economical and convenient places
That's only possible due to the external costs of cars not being accounted for. Burning dinosaurs and destruction of nature is nowhere to be found in cars. If you would price cars accordingly, we would start planning differently.
> once public transit become monopolistic
We already have the same monopolistic issue just right now with cars as the only means of transportation. Without cars, you're not able to move in large parts of the U.S. This excludes about 50%+ of the U.S. population (children < 16yo, people who cannot afford cars or cannot drive themselves due to health reasons).
> private cars win over public transit because it's a better product
Why are cars a better product? Commute and travel time are a huge economical factor destroying time. They take up loads of space and require infrastructure and maintenance paid by society.
> dependency on public transit times.
That's a political issue which could be solved. Most of the money spent nowadays is spent on parking spots and car roads. If you would spend the same amount on public transport, you could probably run a train every 5 minutes.
> too bad, transit only gives peak service at peak hours. That's also how we design our roads. They need to accomodate peak traffic at peak hours. Otherwise they're an unused piece of asphalt.
> the car has been a great economical equalizer and still is
Again, not taking into account external costs. Road traffic kills ~ 1.2M people each year insuring even more which do have a massive impact on the health system.
> pollution is something to be solved
By solving pollution but still focusing on urban sprawl and keeping traffic as-is, we will do the wrong thing better. That's an achievement but not solving the issue.
Feel free to watch the interview mentioned before. It does clarify some of the points I just mentioned: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_x5Hor2MP8
[edit: formatting]
a) keep everything as is. Leave up to 80% of public space to cars (as in L.A. for example), destroy all social interactions which could otherwise happen in those places, increase commute time due to cities designed around long distances and destroy our environment.
b) buy a new bicycle and a good rain coat, use our feet, expand public transport, improve our wellbeing by doing some exercise, reduce obesity and diabetes, socialize in public space again and save tons of tax payer's money. Whilst saving the life of 1.2m people.
Which one sounds better to you?
there's a load of people, especially in big cities, that commute further than feasible with bicycle.
and no, people will not want to live within biking range from heavy industry.
A is a straw man. There’s no innovation there. We need to redesign roads so that they are invisible and uncongestible. We either have to do personal air travel, which we don’t have the power density for yet or underground which is looking more promising. All people moving cars need to be electric and self driving. A car should be like a universal elevator, just get in and push a button. That’s the best option, 0 time dedicated to piloting your body through space and you’re able to live anywhere and work anywhere.
Soviet-style housing planning is a good middle ground. There, most flats can enjoy silence (you only hear cars that belong to your neighbors and no passer-bys) and still the districts are planned for walkability and public transport.
Then came a time we handed over streets to parking spots and some folks driving at 50km/h and faster. Social aspects have been gone.
We should not build our apts for cars and align to them. If cars are loud and noisy and destroy our social life, we should focus on solving the car problem and not trying to build around cars.
Not the case in most of Europe IMO. The apartment buildings were built along very narrow streets to either fit inside perimeter of city walls or (later) because real estate was expensive. Due to narrowness of roads, these apartments are not very well lit and are depressing (you can't see the sky through the window, only the building across the street). Here in Poland, it basically wasn't until central urban planning by communists until we had cities which are livable, car or no car. This is reflected in real estate pries, where apartments in the old, historic buildings can be cheaper (despite often being right in the city centers) than in the (much denser) soviet conglomerates.
> Then came a time we handed over streets to parking spots and some folks driving at 50km/h and faster. Social aspects have been gone.
Even cars at 30 km/h make plenty of noise (when accelerating to that speed). I'm not sure what you mean by "social aspects" of streets?
well the '70s blocks in Poland do have quite some shared greenery, at least the southern part were I've been extensively, but I saw them also up north, even in the outskirts of 'special case' cities that have had their historical centers preserved or restored like Gdansk [1] or Torun [2] - that's what planner can do to encourages a local and social aspect to the local neighbors
but still it doesn't solve working places interconnection in a way that makes walking nor public transit satisfactory.
1 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Danzica,+Polonia/@54.34153...
2 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Toru%C5%84,+Polonia/@53.02...
interestingly even factual, sourced post like this were victims to trolling; I though there were protections to anti social behaviour in place, but alas, here we are.
Not to forget: streets were used that way until ~80 years ago. We just can't remember them any different any more.
I still see some of that in my dense city with car traffic. Obviously, this now happens on the sidewalk and not on the street itself. The major difference is kids not playing on the more major streets.
This sounds like some armchair theory.
The USSRs guidance computers were quite bad, and reentry would have scattered multiple payloads without those.
Having talked to people in the programs from before the iron curtain fell they got around this problem by building larger bombs so the radius of destruction was larger than the radius of uncertainty around a target, to the point that dead-reckoning was viable.
The maximum bomb size the USSR designed on top of Huston: https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=100000&lat=29.7589&l...
In short, were the USSR serious about dealing with urban sprawl it wouldn't have taken much effort to build weapons that could vaporize Huston sized cities.
More than just a theory. When we were clearing out my grandparents’ house we found a pamphlet (I think it was Civil Defence, but it could have been a different agency) which was basically the paper equivalent of a government-issued FAQ about nuclear war. From my own 2020 knowledge of what they knew then, it was remarkably good stuff, written for a general audience. I remember reading it and thinking that the mockery we have for ‘Duck & Cover’ really isn’t fair, at least with respect to this pamphlet: it didn’t claim that a desk would protect at ground zero, but did (correctly) note that the harmful effects of a bomb decrease over distance. I think it was from late-40s to early-50s.
I recall that one of its points was that tightly-packed cities had been susceptible to the conventional bombing campaigns of the Second World War and would be even more susceptible to nuclear bombs, and consequently it made sense to spread cities out.
> if the USSR already managed to evade the defenses and other obstacles and destroy the city center in a nuclear strike, it wouldn't be a lot of additional effort to send multiple rockets instead of only one and also target the suburbs.
Well, it would be superlinear: if you imagine a hex grid of blast radii, the centre radius is one, the inner ring is six (cumulative seven); the next ring is is twelve (cumulative 19); the next ring is 24 (cumulative 43), and so on. 1:7, 7:19, 19:43 — it adds up!
https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/inside-burma-s-ghost-to...
I don't think that's why Houston is the way it is, and while there is still a downtown there, imagining mass protests in Houston seems much different than Hong Kong - due to the density.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann%27s_renovation_of_Pa...
Armies during this period were all still about marching in formation, which doesn't work well in confined spaces where you can't really keep a formation.
Obviously not the same thing that you're talking about here - but just interesting to me, and vaguely related!
The Eisenhower Interstate Highway System is designed for military purposes only in the sense that it's very important to be able to quickly move your troops and materiel around to where they're needed (i.e. logistical reasons). In other words, it's important to the military for the exact same reasons that it's important to anyone else.
In contrast to oceans there's 600 km by air from St. Petersburg to Stockholm which leaves minutes to respond.
The wide boulevards did very little to prevent the Paris Commune, for instance. Napoleon III just wanted to build a second Rome, not some martial panopticon.
That "people always protest at the densest areas of the city" is just that, correlation. The targets of their protests happen to be in those areas.
Can't have protests in the capital if you don't have a capital.
Imagine a 100% remote company, except, it's not a company.
The power structures are of course not decentralized at all.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/87/March_fo...
I think generally American style suburban sprawl decreases social capital just because you're more isolated, and that includes protests. I think mask wearing is another example.
(the 101 between hollywood and DTLA is essentially a single thing, the 10 between DTLA and West Side, the 405 from culver city up to over the pass in sherman oaks...)
AKA, the "center" isn't geographic, but... transit-based? Arterial?
The great thing about people on foot or on bike is that they can easily get out of the way of emergency vehicles, vs cars and trucks which often can't.
(I’m not arguing against protesting on the freeway, to be clear, just genuinely curious how often it helps vs hinders emergency vehicles.)
The ambulance didn't let that deter them. They took the foot or two we and the other left-lane drivers could give by getting REALLY close to the car to our right, and used it to careen down the left shoulder, scraping the side of their vehicle along the concrete barrier much of the way.
Just like nobody blames normal traffic for killing people via doctor delays.
No way. You do not have the right to arbitrarily lock down traffic for some arbitrary reason.
Wait until Trump supporters lock down traffic in LA all day because they legitimately believe the 'election was stolen'.
You can protest in the park or city square or somewhere where it doesn't stop a large number of people from going about their business.
You don't get to suppress others with your ideology.
Good for them? That's a valid protest. You don't have to stay out of the way in the free speech zone. (Not to say that separation is never appropriate, but not most of the time.)
It's valid to protest things which are not true?
So we can block traffic in LA to raise awareness that 'Aliens are coming'?
No - absolutely not.
Your arbitrary definition of what you consider to be a 'valid protest' is not relevant.
You 100% do not have the right to block highways under any circumstances. Full stop.
You can of course, block highways if you use force to do it, i.e. by amassing such a large, unlawful group so that 'nobody can do anything about it' - which is of course illegal and completely trampling other people's basic rights.
You have no right to do that any more than you have a right to randomly slap people on the street to make them listen to you.
Use your vote and your voice.
The rest of us are 'not for it' - and that's why it's well enshrined into law.
Your pet ideology is no reason to obstruct others.
If you can convince LA County to shut down the highway for a 'march' over the 'weekend' - then that's fine.
Otherwise, fines or jail.
If you set the bar at "your point has to be true before you can protest", then goodbye free speech. Because who exactly gets to decide what is true, and therefore is legitimate to protest over? The government? The media? That is an insanely dangerous power to give any institution, which is why the first amendment is purposefully interpreted to put the minimum number of restrictions on what is forbidden.
This is not true at all.
These arguments are purposefully conflating 'speech and protest' with the right to block traffic and infringe on other people's rights.
You can 100% stand in front of city hall to tell us about 'Alien Invasions' if you want.
You can 100% not block traffic to do it.
You have more opportunities for expression today than at any time in history, use those 'vehicles' instead of blocking 'vehicles'.
Now you're arguing about the difference between civil disobedience (which necessarily involves breaking norms or laws) and simple protest. This is a fair distinction, but genuinely a tedious one. Yes, standing around in the street is illegal, that's the point. We're not going to work out anything new here that hasn't been discussed over the past century.
What I'm reacting to is you setting the bar based on the content of the speech. That is super dangerous territory, one that I would strongly condemn. The moment you say that tactics become legitimate or illegitimate based on the content of the speech, which is something the highlighted quote was saying, then you're heading into the land of no more free speech.
So you fully support anti-abortion protestors blocking the entrance to abortion clinics?
That's 'civil disobedience' and 'breaking the law' for the 'content of speech' (in their view) of 'saving lives'?
Seems pretty legit? Saving lives?
What about White Supremacists burning down 'desegregated schools' in protest of 'desegregation'?
Or some 'burning crosses' on the streets in front of the NAACP? I mean, hey, it's their right to 'protest'?
How about 'Anti-Vaxxer' protesters surrounding evil big corporate pharma research centres and not allowing anyone in or out (civil disobedience) because 'big pharma' is giving everyone autism?
Or a much more mild case: two days ago in Montreal a small group of protestors brought down a national monument, as police watched and refused to intervene.
So how many protestors do I need exactly to tear down monuments? What's the 'headcount' threshold for the Washington monument coming down? I mean, he did own slaves ...
It's not tedious to distinguish between what is illegal and what is not, it's literally at the heart of civilization.
And no - we generally don't care what your 'cause' is - if someone really wants to 'protests' for 'segregation' - that's totally fine, they can make nice placards and sit in the park.
It's incredibly naive to ignore the damage and harm caused to a lot of people in the wake of a lot of unfortunate protests which have turned violent, let alone the problems caused but otherwise more basic civil acts.
There are 1000 ways to protest, if you want to sit on the sidewalk and get dragged away, that's fine, just don't get in other people's way.
I don't get it, are you trying to imply that protests should have no disruptive effect? That is a good recipe for complete political dysfunction. Civil disobedience is based upon disruption. It is our right as citizens.
Besides, if an ambulance or doctor needed to go through a protest, the vast majority of the time just asking gets them through.
No - you don't.
This is illegal, and it happens only by virtue of force.
You absolutely have no right do do this - you just have he power to do it 'if you have enough people'.
So yes, if you have an aggressive mob, you can get away with illegal things, that doesn't mean it's lawful.
You also have a voice. Use it.
You have no right to undemocratically wield power over others by physical force. You have no right to force others to suffer to compel them to your will which they did not choose.
No, seriously, this is insane. You want to, functionally, ban protests. There is absolutely no way you can have a functional country if you can't even have peaceful demonstrations.
You have a misunderstanding of what is legal, what is not, and what a peaceful protest is.
Blocking traffic is already banned.
That's 100% illegal in all cases.
'Protests' which infringe on the rights of others are just another form of fascism.
'My Fascism is Worthwhile' is not a civic or moral argument.
You can protest peacefully, vote, engage in other forms of civic obedience, but you can't do it at the expense of others, full stop.
As soon as someone starts trampling on your rights for a cause you don't agree with you'll scream 'victim' and then maybe have a different perspective.
Perhaps you'd like to take a shot at actually responding to what I wrote.
It is absolutely possible to protest without hurting innocent bystanders.
The right to protest is generally accepted to mean that people are allowed to walk in the street in an effort to be heard.
I responded to what you wrote, and your arguments fall flat. Even during massive protests with millions of people ambulances get where they need to get and doctors go where they need to go.
Stop being disingenous about what you're advocating. You're advocating confining people to their cars on the highway. Including old people, little kids, sick people. To force them to listen to you.
No, the standard is potentially killing people.
That's because normal traffic jams aren't intentional.
If not, what is the point of your argument?
I'm not even going to waste my time explaining how free speech is different morally from rape, because I guarantee that this is crystal clear to everyone else except for you somehow.
You absolutely don't have a right to suppress others with your ideology.
'Freedom of expression' has nothing to do with shutting down highways.
[0]: https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/isj/1968/no03...
The experience is so decidedly wonderful that if, for example, the protest were a Black Lives Matter movement I would change from a whole hearted support to complete opposition in every objective they promote.
You do understand how what you perceive and what they intend are different things, right? And that jumping from "it is inconvenient for me" to "they only intend to cause me harm" is a serious leap.
If the protestors are utterly incapable of bridging that gap it doesn't matter what their intentions are as they are failing to win hearts and minds. That leap you speak to is only a minor baby step. If they really wanted to convince me of the value of their message they could start by not intentionally pissing me off.
This isn't rocket science. This complete lack of common sense on behalf of the protestors typically indicates youth. Everybody else has since either developed a few drops of empathy or moved on to anything more self-indulgent.
It absolutely is not a baby step. In fact it is a really big deal to jump from your own experience to assuming the intent of other people. That is actually a really fast way to anger people in my experience, because it requires that you pretend that you understand what is going on in another person's head. Saying "your actions caused X" is pretty straightforward, but "you intended to cause X" or "you intended to cause X and X alone" requires mind reading ability on your part.
Again, you can disagree with it as a tactic, I genuinely do not care about that. What bothers me is that you're unilaterally asserting that you personally understand the intention of the protestors, which is quite the assertion, and one that you have only backed up by "this is how I feel about it".
That is not correct. If you are blocking a freeway causing hours of traffic delays then I am not making assumptions about what's in somebody else's head. I don't care what their intentions are. They have made me disgruntled and digusted with their protest message completely alienating me from their cause. From that moment forward I would vote against and fund in opposition to everything they advocate.
As the audience all that matters is what's in my head, which I don't have to guess at. The inability for people to accept that reality tells me the things they are protesting about aren't important to them.
https://thehill.com/homenews/news/502267-support-for-black-l...
https://news.gallup.com/poll/317321/believe-protest-actions-...
I think you should take a step back and really consider why you're arguing so vociferously over hypothetically being caught in traffic because of a protest when there are much larger issues at play here.
As I’ve said repeatedly, the latter is an argument about the efficacy of this type of protest. You’re free to believe that, I don’t care. But understand that “it doesn’t work” is a completely unrelated argument from “its intended to do X”.
So given the protests in the U.S.recently have been about the treatment of minorities by the Police specifically the killing and abuse of black people. Are you saying that if you were to be stopped in traffic due to a such a protest you would then support, fund, and vote for more Police abuse and killing of black people? Is that really what you're saying?
So who fucking cares if some people got stuck in traffic. The protests are working, and the people who weren't even stuck in traffic but are complaining anyway because they hypothetically could have been (like this guy) should just be roundly ignored. Listening to their opinions is a terrible idea if your actual intent is to further the movement.
I don't understand what is your point here, protests are supposed to be disruptive, disparaging the audience is not by design, if you feel that way then you don't really believe in the value of the protest, no?
Assuming that’s their goal, which seems probable, it’s not clear if that strategy would be reproducible in say, Ohio.
The impression I've always gotten is that what you're permitted to do when you're doing a legal protest is to minimize the disruption it has, which is (IMO) within epsilon of "make it as ignorable as possible".
Ohio might have a more centralized city center, where LA doesn't, or have other forms of "center" the way the transit system in LA is "central" to the metropolis.
I do agree that designing cities around cars has ruined a lot of nice places though.
It's almost like wanting 50000 people with different professions nearby means you have to live next to 50000 people. Until we discover teleportation.
When full remote becomes more wide-spread, that might change things rapidly.
There is a reason we've been congregating in cities for millennia, despite having to overcome many diseases which are made worse by overcrowdedness.
The main reasons for urbanization were always economic and political. Rome was not built for the Coliseum; the Coliseum was built for Rome.
It's true that local amphitheaters may book a few good live acts every year but that selection pales in comparison to what you can get every weekend in a reasonably-sized city. There are some fun local theater groups in my suburb too. But sometimes I really want to watch something other than Shakespeare.
I know it’s not the same, and I also enjoy live entertainment and the other amenities of cities. I just don’t think these amenities are historically a prime driver for urbanization. People historically move to cities for economic reasons, providing a lucrative and competitive market for entertaining them.
It's primarily jobs though. I know quite a few people who don't care enough for the Opera or obscure African sports to pay two or three times as much in rent and taxes. It's a mixed bag, some love living in the city, but all have to live in the city if they want to work in certain jobs & have a career.
> There is a reason we've been congregating in cities for millennia, despite having to overcome many diseases which are made worse by overcrowdedness.
Yes, primarily because that's where the opportunities were, always. The colorful cultural life you describe was (and still is) enjoyed by the urban elite, that wasn't a thing for the working poor in e.g. 19th century Paris. Their entertainment would be a bottle of wine and laughter with friends after slaving away in the factories; much the same they'd have in a village, just minus having a job and some money. Today's working class might go to the movies (if they don't prefer Netflix), the theaters, opera houses, obscure sports etc are upper class things.
That might be changing, though I'm not convinced we'll see full remote work for large amounts of office jobs.
The life described is one of privilege, not of the lower classes. It's pubs vs operas.
There is a light rail line running through the suburb which connects downtown. Its a 30 minute train ride to go to the big event venue for big sports and concerts. This precludes the idea of going to the local minor league teams in the area as well which can often be just as much fun to watch and follow and far cheaper to attend.
There are club sports which participate in the park in my neighborhood. All I need to do is walk down the street and find people playing various kinds of sports. There are larger suburb-city owned sports complex on the bike trails for even more congregation.
Living in a suburb does not mean you can never go and see a show or a sports game or a concert.
The location of jobs matters because many of them require daily commute. But for major entertainment events it's sufficient to be 'close enough' for the things that haven't yet been replaced with something that's accessible remotely. For example, 30 years ago living in a small town meant that your access to cinema was limited or at least delayed, so you were 'out of the loop' of the culture in some sense. That's not an issue anymore - not because there are more cinemas, because their role has decreased.
Many suburbs elsewhere may only have Applebees as the pinnacle of culture, but that is not a given. Not every city is the same around the world. Not every suburb is the same.
There is no way in which I consider this a replacement for restaurants. Or vice versa. You can value both, one, or neither, but they aren't the same thing.
If you took everyone in the suburbs and built them dense city neighborhoods they wouldn't suddenly have great places to eat.
However I do like living 3 minutes from the next supermarket, and 20 minutes from the city center with all the shop, and 25 minutes from my work (all distances by foot).
I would love to have all the advantages without any of the disadvantages, but at least around here most people prefer living closer together over commuting longer distances.
In the East Bay you can start to approach reasonable but if you're working in the South Bay, your commute won't be reasonable and access to the city for recreation may not be great either.
When/if we finally buy, we're looking at a rural, passive self-build where we can work remotely. The cost is about the same as a town house these days.
There isn't any technical reason why you couldn't put in proper isolation between floors or walls, aside from the fact it would slow down construction and be expensive. Proper insulation (both acoustic and thermal) also makes rooms smaller in a given footprint which is an issue for marketing.
This is definitely ideal, but is it achievable (in average, not for any individual) in larger cities even if they are built for walk/public transit?
I don't have much experience in Europe, but I knew in Tokyo, which probably has the best public transit in the world, the average commute time is one hour. This is obviously an extreme example as Tokyo is a megacity, but I think majority of people cannot live 25 minutes from their work for any cities that have 1M+ populations, regardless how the city is built.
Most people use public transportation, and that's usually a 5-10 minute walk to/from the station on each side, and changing trains once or twice. Among my peers, it's usually 30-45 minutes with public transportation. Half that by car, if they don't work in the inner city.
I generally agree, though in cities like Paris you can get close. But 1M+ is very big by European standards. There are only 34 cities on the entire continent that fit that description [1], and there are multiple capitals [2] half that size (Dublin and Lisbon each have around half a million inhabitants).
Once you get down to ~300k or fewer citizens commute times drop a lot. That's really how the vast majority of the population lives.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_cities_by_pop...
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_the_European...
If you look at the population of agglomerations (some cities in Europe have ridiculously small limits - Paris is fifteen times smaller than London), you see than London (14,800,000) and Paris (11,400,000) are a bit less populated than the the biggest US cities New York (22,100,000) and Los Angeles (17,700,000) but slightly more than the third Chicago (9,750,000).
The next biggest agglomerations in Europe, Madrid (6,550,000) and Milan (6,200,000) can be compared to Houston (6,750,000), a bit less populated than San Fransisco (7,850,000).
Then you have Berlin (4,725,000) which is close to Seattle (4,425,000) or Phoenix (4,700,000).
> assumption that _everyone wants to be stacked on top of each other_
The notion of "stacked on top of each other" has unpleasant connotations, but there are many different ways to live in a dense city. Would you feel "stacked on top of each other" in a Parisian townhouse with a magnificent shared courtyard, 12 foot ceilings, and everything you could possibly want a short walk or subway ride away?
Having occupied a 120 square foot chambre de bonne, I agree with your sentiment but I'd say it depends on a few qualifications. Like for instance not having basically plumbed closets as a large percentage of available living spaces. Building height restrictions in the city lead to a large number of tiny (aforementioned) inaccessible (few and tiny elevators) apartments.
No, I wouldn't feel "stacked on top of each other" if I were a multi-millionaire in Paris.
But, in the real world, your talking about putting families into 600sqft (at very best) boxes, with audible neighbors on every side of the unit, and no way to go anywhere (no parking, no meaningful transport, because 'everything we'd let you have is a short walk away')
If you actually do what you've described, and give everyone their own townhouse, you've just reinvented the modern suburb. Because that's what modern suburbs look like, everyone in a townhouse, or a townhouse with some small strips of yard around it.
> but there are many different ways to live in a dense city
Sure, but only if you are fantastically wealthy.
It's news to me that the Paris Bus, Tram, Metro, RER, SNCF, Velib, and the venerable scooter have all suddenly vanished.
But unless you somehow gift me one million dollars USD or more (and the same to every single person I know), none of us are going to be able to afford to live anywhere in Paris that actually has close access to all of those things you've described, with the living situation described above.
If we're magically exceptionally lucky, at best we might get like one or two.
People who wish to live in neighborhoods with low crime often NIMBY off any attempts to add public transit options specifically to keep out the riffraff.
Marin County is home to over 252,000 residents, yet it is without a BART station. If you search
web content to find out why that is the case, you will not find a lot. There is minimal information
explaining why the BART doesn't connect from Marin to San Francisco and even less explaining why it
doesn't connect from the East Bay to Marin.
Marin funded a large portion of the project when BART was being planned in the 1950s. But "concerns"
over whether or not the Golden Gate Bridge could support BART suddenly arose. After San Mateo pulled
out of the plan, Marin's participation fell through as well.
It is not unfair to speculate that socio-economic discrepancies might have something to do with this
lack of transit connection. After all, Marin is the county where wealthy residents stopped George Lucas
from building affordable housing on his land. The median household income there is almost $84,000, more
than $15,000 more than San Francisco and more than twice as much as Oakland.
A similar situation in Dayton, Ohio arose where wealthy suburbanites tried to stop the local transit
authority from building three new bus stops near major employment centers.[1]
Have you ever set foot in a European city ? I currently live in Paris. Bus, metro and Vélib' are three minutes away and I am not a millionaire. It all costs me 38 euros a month for unlimited journeys.
I could afford to start a family here. Two affluent people can rent 750 square feet in Paris. I could even probably buy if I accepted to be in debt for thirty years.
I think this is the exact tradeoff that is being discussed. Some people are OK with the 750 square ft flat. Others want a 3,000 sqft home on a quarter acre with room to park a boat or RV.
You can get this within a 15 minute Drive of downtown Houston for $300k, but you wont be walking to the local grocery or civic building.
As far as I can tell, 300k will buy you a 250 sqft apartment in Paris, but you will have access to walkable civic amenities.
Ouch. My VBB-Umweltkarte for similar costs 63 EUR a month.
- Warsaw
- Glasgow
- Porto
- Lisbon
- Athens (Greece)
- Berlin
- Budapest
- Barcelona (OK, this one gets pricey but is superbly laid out)
Numbeo cost of living index has it 153rd in the world including rent and it's well below places like Houston which is probably the cheapest large top tier city in the US.
Also no one wants to walk through blighted or a high crime neighborhood. American cities have a lot more diversity than any of the cities you mention with income disparities separating various races and stocks of people. Homogeneity of the populaces involved is a factor often totally and wholly ignored in these comparisons of "walkable and affordable" cities.
Walking through even the ghetto-est part of Belfast may not be the same as walking through the same in Opa-locka, Miami-Dade County, Florida. There are no racial boundaries to overcome in Belfast or Budapest. Not even remotely close to the extent we encounter in America. Like I said this metric should be factored into these conversations.
There are plenty of very diverse races living in Europe and nobody is scared of them.
Granted I'm not an American and I have no idea how hostile race relations run in that country but I know that in most of Western Europe and in Canada most people have no issues mingling with other races and all neighborhoods are getting increasingly diverse.
I don’t know what Opa Locka is like but Belfast is not a good example to compare to.
I think you may have picked the worst possible example for articulating your point.
Budapest? Average apartment size in Hungary is 77 sq m. Average in Budapest is 57-65 m^2. You Forints go a long way: 2824 / sq m (~$10?!?). I'm in! (https://www.towerbudapest.com/en/property_management/news/an...)
If on the other hand, you have a corporate job at a branch of a western company it's extremely cheap. Software developers in Warsaw easily make 10-20K PLN per month thus having rent costs less than a quarter of their paycheck.
and since we're doing lists, these are the most expensive cities i lived in (coincidentally some of them are the best cities in the world to live in, bar none):
- sydney
- tokyo
- singapore
- hong kong
- london
all top notch, all extremely expensive.
moral of the story is: you get what you pay for.
What do you mean by don't accept?
Porto and Lisbon are quite easy to get around as an English speaker, most young people are very decent at speaking English.
Yes, small grocery stores are at every corner but for other things, like clothes or electronics you still have to go to a big shopping mall, at least 2-3 miles away. Oh, and did I mention all those are closed almost every Sunday?
As for apartment prices even for really well paid software developer the choice is basically between buying a small (500 sqft) flat close to work, or bigger (800-1000 sqft) far away from it, with the added inconvenience of jet planes waking you up in the middle of the night, because Warsaw is stupid enough to have big international airport located near the city center.
EDIT: Another thing: after more intensive rains some of the subway stations get flooded, so they are out of service for several hours. Not that there are many subway stations in Warsaw - just 34, forming one and half line
I lived on a two lane street, and no one had air conditioners. You don't know how loud air conditioners and furnaces are until you live in a place without them.
I walked to work, and lived within 1/2 mile of 8 grocery stores. When I went to German class Downtown, I walked 15 minutes to a train. I could get to the airport in 25 minutes via one bus and one S-Bahn leg.
Here in the States, I also don't have a car, but I'm surrounded by highways separating me from a park, and my apartment is much much louder because Boise, the city, doesn't control the roads within it. The state does. Thoroughput is all that matters.
I still live 0.5 mile from multiple grocery stores, but I don't have transit here. Getting to the airport from Downtown is a 40 minute bus ride (with a 15-20 minute schedule variance) for 2.5 miles. The state won't allow the city local taxing power to improve transit, and so the city limps along, unable to expand transit that matches the limited space to expand lanes.
I wouldn't be surprised to find some suburbs with some of the traits you mention, but it hasn't been my experience with them. I've lived in about 5 different suburbs in my life and a supermarket has never been more than 2 miles away - certainly not a 20 minute drive and it's even within biking distance. Parks are by schools and there's usually an elementary school fairly close if you're looking to do something with your kid. Depending upon the suburb you can also play in the street, which I regularly did growing up.
The traits you are talking about sounds more like a rural area than a suburban one.
I'd consider that far, far away.
My walk to the nearest train station is about one mile, takes about 15 minutes to get there on foot, and that's irritatingly far, too, considering the trip is two way and repeats every day. Something like a grocery shop should be accessible within decent walking distance, a five-minute walk or so.
A rule of thumb is that if something is far enough that I have to take the car in the first place I'll be incentivised to drive further away to a big supermarket/other big stores while I'm at it.
The grocery store that’s 2 miles away is a big supermarket. The US doesn’t really do small groceries in most places.
I live in one of America's few dense cities, and there are three stores I visit often, one Kroger chain with the selection you'd expect, one latin grocery, and one asian grocery where I can get all kinds of stuff that most people in the suburbs who shop at walmart and safeway have never heard of, all within a 10 minute walk.
I live in a city of about 100K people, and there are plenty. Or a few miles away is a city of ~70K people with others. As well as non-chain organic markets, whatever. The suburbs are adjacent; that's what suburbs are.
I am in the northeast, are you a Californian or Texan?
The Kroger chain you visit killed all of the above (except for the gas station convenience stores which are a smaller version of the above)
An interesting parallel is Japan; Japan doesn't require parking with its properties, and to buy a car in Japan you have to produce proof of a parking space that you have (probably by purchasing a spot either with a property or in a lot somewhere), and the market has mostly sorted itself in favor of extremely dense networks of small shops.
Living in a dense city like SF is great for somethings, but it sucks when you want to leave, and paying almost $400/month for parking isn't good either. Both lifestyles have their advantages and I think it really comes out to personal taste and choice.
Back when I lived across the street from a grocery store I'd sometimes go get food for dinner, talk a bit with guests for what we wanted for desert, then walk over and pick up whatever we'd decided on. When the grocery store is across the street it is basically an on-demand food pantry.
Check out this Canadian talking about his grocery trip in Amsterdam: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYHTzqHIngk.
In much of the USA, your produce would freeze and thus become mush.
In much of the USA, temperatures well above 90 degrees would wilt your produce. Also, all your frozen food would be ruined.
If you're carrying frozen food, we have bags with insulation and reflective foil on the inside. Put your frozen food there and even in +40C weather it will take much more than 15 minutes to thaw. Besides, buses and obviously the metros are acclimatized to a temperature of more or less 25C.
It really is just a non-issue. I assure you your produce are left outside for more than 20 minutes. There is no impact at all on freshness, and walkable cities promote smaller grocery stores that tend to have fresher food.
Food grows outside, in direct sunlight, exposed to scorching heat or near-freezing temperatures. Most of the plant based food is still living in the shelf when you purchase it, and has imune systems to fight-off bacteria and the like that would otherwise colonize it. The only concern are products of animal origin in the heat, but even the most sensitive like refrigerated fresh fish, still needs at least a few hours in hot weather before they can become problematic.
When grocery shopping frequently, you're also going for five or ten minutes instead of two hours, and the grocery is probably on your way home.
This has never been a problem for me. Many fresh fruits and vegetables will easily last for a week in your refrigerator (some for longer), and fresh fish or meat can be frozen for later use. Fruits such as berries that degrade rapidly can be eaten first, and fruits that last longer, such as apples or oranges, can be eaten later. Fruits like peaches or avocados can also be bought in varying states of ripeness, which means that different ones could achieve ripeness over the course of a week.
Do you carry your groceries, or have like a cart? I always end up with several trips to my car worth of groceries to last a week.
Driving for the bulk, walking for the random stuff we needed.
Is there more demand for high density urban housing that cities are not meeting? If so, why?
Is there a demand for more access from suburban commuters? If so, why isn't the access available?
Are these solutions mutually exclusive?
Surely you think, summer isn't that long, just tough it out a few months. Well I regularly run the A/C in the "winter months". Several years ago during the week of chistmas, I went to a late night movie, as I was walking back to my car to go home I noticed the following: at 11:30pm it was 80F (26C), the humidity was around 80-90%, and I was wearing shorts.
Are you satisfied with a few arbitrary restaurants within walking distance? or, car enabled, would you rather go 30 miles for that REALLY good place that would never be so close in a compact city?
Kids need to bring stuff. That could be hockey equipment, a drum set, or a clean playpen.
Kids wander off if not contained. A kid may get off a subway at the wrong stop, lost in the crowd, along as the rest of the family continues on down the line. A kid may fall onto the tracks.
Kids should be kept from licking public spaces. Kids should be kept from eating food found on the ground. Kids should not be able to play with hypodermic needles.
At one time, mine were these ages: 8, 6, 4, 2, 2, 0
Doing that on the subway would be nuts.
I actually know somebody who, as a kid, got off the subway at the wrong stop. That really happens. The crowd seems to be leaving, the kid goes, and before the parents can react the subway is moving again.
Activities need not revolve around consumerism. Find a less-densely populated area, and there will be wild space like forests and streams. Backyards can be pretty big too. Consumerism is more of a city thing, since there is no backyard and no forest.
I neither want nor need to be a taxi driver for my kids. From the age of seven they have been perfectly capable of getting to school, orchestra practice and sports by themselves using the subway, local trains and buses. The drum kits and equipment can be stored on location, and whatever they need to carry (the cello is heavy) builds strength or can be wheeled.
At their age, back in the day of no smartphones, if I got lost in the city I could ask any adult for help, and they would be delighted to help me.
Now with that said, there are many intelligent ways to design density so that it is not unpleasant. Paying attention to green space and the natural world, space and light in general, and careful design for both function and form can make urban density a thing that is not only sustainable but emotionally/esthetically appealing. (Unfortunately this is not necessarily how density develops in cities, current incentives often instead favoring development that prioritizes flash, affluence appeal, and short-term private economic gain.)
Care to back that up?
Public transit becomes viable and, if well managed, superior to driving a car.
People tend to walk more instead of relying on vehicles for everything.
Buildings and roads can serve more people per material used.
I could go on, but having things close to each other makes using and bringing those things together cheaper.
Also, you'll be hard pressed to find anything that everyone wants. It's almost a tautology, so it's not really useful to make such statements without more context/clarification about...
You can have density that supports public transit and walkable retail without having to build like HK or Manhattan. This is in the middle of a Toronto neighbourhood that was build in the 1910s (use street view to poke around):
* https://www.google.com/maps/place/150+Westminster+Ave,+Toron...
Currently these houses/land are very expensive because living 'downtown' is fashionable again, but up until the 1990s they were reasonably priced because... who would want to live downtown when you could live in the suburbs?
Some smaller sized houses on the next street over:
* https://www.google.com/maps/place/50+Geoffrey+St,+Toronto,+O...
Most have lane way garages. They're generally 3-4 bedrooms.
Everyone can have a front yard, everyone can have a backyard (with an accessible garage), and no one is really "stacked" on each other.
Automobile mobility results in sprawl: many/most people don't want to be stacked if they don't have to. What many here may not realize is how incredibly wide and flat Texas is; driving another mile takes less than a minute, and there's a whole lotta miles to get you some space from neighbors.
Every time I am made aware of just how young the US is, it blows me away. I've never been to Europe, I would really love to go some day, but I can only imagine the feeling of actually seeing these really old places/structures in person.
European cities are also relatively young. If you want to see old cities, you should visit the Middle East or China.
Damas, Luxor, Erbil, Jaffa, Jericho, are also older than Rome, Athens and Istanbul.
At least a lot of the famous stuff around Xi'an and Luoyang seems to be monumental works outside city. Maybe various parts of the grand canal and stuff surrounding is a better example than that?
I think that is highly controversial to say the least. I think the accepted consensus is Jericho is the oldest continuously inhabited city.
Jericho: "late 1st millennium BC"
Athens: 5th–4th millennia BC
Mind you I had a picnic yesterday at a village that was settled c. 1000 BC, and has evidence of people living there before then. It's nothing particularly special.
And no, the great wall of China isn't ancient. The parts we see today were built in the 14th century, the parts that are millennia old are no longer there so you can only see traces of it in the ground.
Europe on the other hand has impressive structures 2 millenia old like this:
The most common thing would be more 17th 18th 19th century buildings (in increasing frequency), and if you go to parts of Massachusetts (and maybe Virginia) you can get at least some 18th and 19th century stuff. Go to Havana, San Juan, Salvador (in Brazil) or other old colonial capitals and get more old buildings in sturdier materials than in Massechusetts.
Don't get me wrong, there are more old building in Europe, but colonial US is quite old, and there's more continuity than you might think. The real issue is that the US replaced more old stuff, being in growth mode, which was alright until cars came along and now most thing we build are absolutely terrible.
Boston and Santa Fe are very nice, but it really feels quite a bit different.
I've been in 500 year old cottages that weren't anything special. It's just that they were made out of stone, and so it just doesn't fall down. (Lots did fall down, but they did so centuries ago, and the ones that made it this far will do continue to.) People live there, and it's just their house. They've often put up modern interior walls so that they can have insulation and hide the wires that power their TVs -- connected to satellite dishes outside.
I've even seen a few castles with satellite dishes. Small castles dot the landscape and can be had cheap (because they require expensive maintenance). People just live in them, too.
There's a joke that in the US they think a hundred years is a long time, and in Europe they think a hundred miles is a long way. It really rings true. If the crisis ever subsides, I do recommend it.
The oldest part of the closest church to my childhood home was built in the “early 13th century”, according to its website. The cottages next to it (now a pub) seem to date to about the same time as the first British colonies in America.
Then there’s Cambridge university, which celebrated 800 years since its foundation in 2009: https://www.cam.ac.uk/about-the-university/history/800th-ann...
[1] Not from an actual renovation show, but: https://youtu.be/B3C2TN-Vp4c
That said it's not uncommon, especially in suburbs, where people build single-family homes, just like in the US.
Come to Europe and see very different styles within a short distance.
I don’t think I’ve even seen a water tower outside the states, and if I have they are disguised as other things. (Unless you count the tanks on top of literally every Cypriot building, but even those are nothing like the American/SimCity type).
Obligatory edit: After COVID, please.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_San_Jose,_Californi...
In America 100 years is a long time ago.
https://www.homegate.ch/buy/real-estate/country-switzerland/... for real estate currently to buy in Switzerland built before 1801 (according to the seller).
(You can change "buy" to "rent" and 1801 for any other integer in the URL).
Houston didn’t really grow with much rapidity until the mid 20th century.
Europeans find it strange that Americans think 100 years is a long time. Americans find it strange that Europeans think 100 miles is a long distance.
There really is dichotomy here: Americans are used to a vast geography but don't really have any internalization of just how vast history can be, while Europeans understand their long history but don't have the internalization of just how vast a country can be.
To put a finer point on the latter bit: the distance between Chicago and New York is roughly the same as between Copenhagen, Denmark and Bern, Switzerland (i.e., longer than any two points in Germany). The distance between LA and Boston is longer than the distance between Gibraltar and Moscow or between Edinburgh, UK to Jerusalem, Israel.
Dakar is about 4000 miles from the North Carolina coast. If you move the destination up the longitude of that point, you have to go 1000 miles north from the coast (in Quebec, in fact!) to get 4100 miles away from Dakar. The fact that Canada is much further north than Africa doesn't add all that much distance, but Newfoundland jutting out so far to the east reduces the distance quite spectacularly.
Over longer distances, the spherical effects are even more screwy. The shortest way to get to Mecca from Seattle is to actually start flying north along I-5, and Thule, Greenland and Minsk, Belarus are natural pitstops along this route.
That's the first time I've heard that. Interesting, if true.
Besides, the USSR and USA had (have) enough nukes that a spread out city is irrelevant.
They also considered jobs availability. I wasn’t able to find good enough sources on the policies of the era, but many articles on the Internets say the sprawl of industries was caused in part by federal policies: https://www.jstor.org/stable/44250919
But the bigger issue is that you can't live inside of a 401k. Since housing is a requirement you might as well build wealth while you live in it. Assuming no massive disparity in monthly payments it doesn't make much sense to rent.
(Stamped from the Beginning by Ibrim X Kendi)
Throughout Robert Cairo's 1344 page biography of Moses, the reader sees how Moses' racism and clasism impacted the massive influence he had on transportation and sprawl in America.
+1 for Stamped.
In addition, Redlining is a well researched and documented practice in America [0]
I know nothing about Moses, but if the accusations are true, the above would not absolve it in any way.
A man like that doesn't work alone. You need massive public support to build a portfolio like he had. People blame him personally because that's easier than looking in the mirror.
Siena seems to have a very mild climate. Its average high temperature[1] in August is 28.3°C (82.9°F).
Compare that to Houston's monthly high for August, which is 35°C (95°F). Houston is also very humid[3].
Most people don't want to take a 10-minute walk when it's 95°F and humid. You arrive at your destination panting and very sweaty. It's more comfortable to take a 10-minute drive in an air conditioned car. To some people, it's preferable even if the drive takes 30 minutes due to traffic.
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[1] https://en.climate-data.org/europe/italy/tuscany/siena-1089/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_Houston
[3] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/america-most-humid-cities-090...
Houston has a July average high temperature of 34,7 degrees C with an average relative humidity of 74,4. The same data for Taipei is 34,3 degrees C with a humidity of 73.
Yet Houston has a population density of 1398,76/km2 whereas Taipei 9700/km2, almost 7 times as high.
Data from Wikipedia.
Actually, perhaps this map says it best: https://www.dropbox.com/s/tkoekp0or12ppjc/Screenshot%202020-...
(If anything, building densely can create a lot of shade, which can be quite beneficial.)
The population of Taiwan[1] is 23.78 million, and its land area is 35,808 km^2. The population of Texas[2] is 29 million, and its land area is 676,587 km^2.
So Taiwan has nearly (82%) as many people but 1/20th the land.
Also, Taipei is boxed in by large mountains and the ocean, so there are lots of natural barriers discouraging sprawl.
Houston is near the ocean, but aside from that there are no natural barriers. The land around it is super flat in every direction. The closest hill of any size is probably 150 miles away.
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The reason is largely that they just scaled up traffic patterns which are fine for 2 lanes to 6-7 lanes. It's absurd. The local legend in Austin is that the highway designer later committed suicide. I bike to work.
Kind sir I call your attention to the condensation on the outside of your car windows.
It's partially a collective action problem. Since everyone has pretty much committed to doing nearly everything via car the marginal cost at either the individual or system level of adding one more car (side) trip is very low.
I think a lot of these country to country comparisons bank off the fact that people presume they're dealing with an oranges to oranges comparison like two sporting teams or something equally sized. Evaluating two comparands on some single concept they both happen share in common without looking to the specifics is grossly inadequate.
Concepts like city, country, state, hospital system, etc, can indeed both be shared between two countries at a conceptual level. However those concepts can take drastically different forms with their reality on the ground. The two comparands' actualizations of these concepts can be huge simply looking at scale alone. As far as I can tell the US dwarfs pretty much any EU country in terms of population, land mass/area, and a bunch of other stuff too I'd imagine.
I'm awakening more to the fact that without highlighting from the outset any known differences in scale one can be lead to strange conclusions in the results of comparison. There's that common software architecture analogy regarding the techniques to build a single family detached house being woefully inadequate at building a skyscraper.
It would be nice to have some normalized terminology of city and country etc that speaks more directly to the population scale at hand.
The fact is that- unless scarce- space is valued- no, wait, it's defined- by what it contains and by your relation to it, not by its size. When traveling on a motorway you cross multiple times per second the entire length of your living room, a space where a centimetre-sized stain can give you nightmares. This beauty in the Netherlands ( https://www.spoorpro.nl/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/maasvlakt... ) is more or less the size of Manhattan. The Mona Lisa painting is smaller than the patch in your backyard where you keep your garbage cans. And so?
Yes, it's one of the weirdest pet-peeve trends over the past 5-10 years. No, I do not like it, thanks for asking.
Wait, you didn't ask me? You mean nobody was asking me, it's just something I decided to couch in a response to a conversation that wasn't going on?
But seriously, I wonder what's going on when we do this. My theory is that it originally caught on to lend credence to what we're saying when we pretend our statement is actually a response to an open question, though now it's just subconscious rhetorical device to emphasize a point, I would imagine.
As for the article, growing up 45min outside of Houston, that interchange is all I think about when I entertain the idea of moving to Houston or DFW. There's something grotesque about it and the feeling it gives me. Cars, traffic, and this need to slave away in a commute.
Austin keeps voting down highway extension proposals. I'm sure anyone who has to sit in Austin traffic daily hates that, but we can't have every damn city in Texas becoming a concrete metropolis.
Regardless, the odds of COVID-19 transmission between two people standing together without masks must be at least 1000X higher than the odds that a nuclear attack will happen while they're standing there. That's enough for me to consider the two risks "different" shall we say, and guess which one I'm more likely to prepare for.
Nobody prepares for every contingency. Most people look for some value of risk reduction divided by cost. If I decide to protect my house from school-bus-sized meteorites, the chance I will bankrupt myself trying to construct an adequate shield is near 100%, whereas the chance of such a meteorite hitting the house is pretty small. Given how much more likely plain old thievery is, and how cheap locks are, I should probably prioritize just buying a lock for the front door and remembering to lock it. Just like people prone to die from heart disease or just slowly waste their lives away in traffic should probably prioritize a simpler lifestyle above nuclear war prep.
However and nonetheless, note that even with the small purchase of a door lock, I've already agreed to take on a (more than zero) costly and (to some degree) onerous preparation for something that may never happen. Who knows what the chance of a burglary is; you could estimate based on crime rates. But with 100% certainty, locking the door will be a small chore every day and will ruin some number of minutes of my life. Whether it was ultimately worth it would largely be determined by the value I place on certainty.
Speaking of values, they're subjective. Let's say the school-bus-sized meteorite is confirmed to be coming right for my house, with 100% probability. But let's also say that I don't care whatsoever about the house. So I will still not do anything to mitigate. That's how I feel about a nuclear attack. The chance of a nuclear attack is (some number), but the chance of a nuclear attack happening, and my giving a shit about anything whatsoever afterward, is near zero. "Will I survive?" My answer is somewhere between "Who cares" and "I hope not." So obviously I'm not willing to undertake mitigations or live in Houston. But I will wear a mask during the pandemic for example because it's cheap and easy, temporary, and it works to reduce a risk that is pretty high.
I grew up here and I’ve read many articles trying to explain why Houston is the way that it is. The truth is incredibly human and boring and wouldn’t sell display ads. Thus, the logical arguments that follow articles like this are complete nonsense.
If you want to know why Houston is the way that it is, fly down here and I’ll drive you around and show you. You’ll be completely underwhelmed, but the tacos will more than make up for the trip.
The subway system is unbelievable. They don't try to build huge line extensions every few years or decades the way we do, they are constantly expanding and improving it all the time. It's absolutely amazing what they have built there, and at the same time remained incredibly polite and gracious.
Many European cities keep them largely outside (in a ring).
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
SF is only 1 million people and the dense, downtown core is not that big. Outside of the downtown cores of SF and Oakland, it's all just suburbs wrapped around the bay. And plenty of people have absolutely brutal commutes due to the sprawl.
The only difference is they commute from "another city".
How was a city allowed to develop with almost no green space?
Siena, like other Tuscan hill towns, was first settled in the time of the Etruscans (c. 900–400 BC)
Siena was built on a hill surrounded by some of the greenest valleys in Tuscany, the most notable one being the Chianti valley, home of the popular wine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chianti
Trivia: the movie "The Gladiator" was shot in Pienza, in Val D'orcia, in Siena province.
This is a shot of the famous Cypress trees road.
Decently fun city, interesting history, cool people.
The road and traffic situation is nightmarish. I slowly came to this realization in college when I went abroad a couple of times. I found out that didn't have to be How Things Are.
The university of houston has a problem where students aren't attending classes because parking isn't available. Stories of trying to find a parking space for 40 minutes abound. There's lines of cars offering an air conditioned ride to parking spaces outside of classrooms, in return for their parking spot.
If you miss an exit near the i45/i10 merge, you've added 20 minutes to your drive, minimum, as the next local exit will be a good five miles away, and then after that the next on ramp for your give freeway could well be on the other side of downtown.
For some reason they built a light rail that criss crosses main street. For a great form of entertainment, search youtube for "Houston light rail accident." They're rarely really bad, more just stupid looking, some giant pick-up truck failing to see the train and getting booped.
There's no zoning (kinda) so the industrial zones are mixed right in with residential, budding up against UH. So about 1/10 of the time I bicycled to school, I would be blocked by a mile long train that decided to simply park and block every road crossing I could take to the university. I made a habit of throwing my bike between the nonmoving cars and clambering over until my dad sent me a video of someone getting cut in half doing that.
Growing up in the suburbs you'd have balls of steel to bicycle to a friend's house. Pickup trucks make a sport of fucking with bicyclists. Better to just wait for your parents to get home from work so they can drive you.
Lord forbid you have a friend in the woodlands or something. Thought it was obnoxious to visit your friends in San Jose when you live in the bay area? The woodlands is like a trip to Sacramento, but only because of traffic and a 610 loop as wide as a continent.
Public transit, lol. That's for poor people. I remember hosting a luncheon for our engineers (was a recruiter) and this old fart was talking about his 50 minute one way commute. It was a point of pride for these o&g engineers for some reason to measure their commutes. Then this engineer we brought in from mexico was like "oh, I live in that same neighborhood, why not take the bus? It gets on the HOV and gets me here in 30m." Old fart was flabbergasted. He didn't even know there was a bus. I don't blame him, they pick up at these huge ride share parking lots and it's not easy to figure out their schedule, or even how to pay.
Anyway Houston traffic sucks and my conspiracy theory is it's because Shell and Chevron have downtown offices and the CEOs sit at the top of the tower where they can see a clogged i45, i10, 610, and 59, and cackle maniacally at the hordes of people trying to justify their 1 hour one way commutes to eachother and the choking fog of smog clouding around the city.
Going from one urban core to another can take some time, indeed an hour in some cases from one close-in area to another. (Close in meaning ~20 - 40 miles). It's very much like the East Bay in that regard.
Living in an urban area like Med Center / West U, or Galleria, energy corridor on the west side, most folks don't suffer, everything is nearby in those communities.
Houston does have a good park and ride bus system for the outer burbs, and it's been successful. They've added a light rail in town connecting downtown entertainment with the medical center and convention areas, and just launched BRT services that connect hubs in the Galleria to some of the park-n-ride depots in the city.
Lots of problems, lots of opportunities to improve, but for the price, the great airports (which I miss thee days with COVID), and these massive freeways to move us over great distance quickly, I'm still a fan.
https://www.google.com/maps/@41.8177773,12.3911127,17z
And you can most likely find small cities with 30K people in the US too (though I had trouble finding one of this size near Houston when scrolling through Google maps because the cities there look less dense and don't appear to have a discernible center at least from the look of the grid pattern of the streets).
And this city (Houston) has so many problems I don't know where to start... Highways are one of them because nothing is dense, but its a brutally self reinforcing problem in a city that refuses to invest in any other kind of infrastructure.
What size, exactly? Is it a really big interchange, or a really small city?
I'll list out what I view as the two dominant views towards the development of a metropolitan region (I loosely define metropolitan region as a city and all the places around that city which can plausibly commute to a job inside the city. Or in other words, all land housing the people you may see every day). Let me know if you think I've got the two sides nailed down correctly.
The urban mindset to developing a metropolitan region:
* Cars are a luxury (and often a nuisance) and should not be required for essential, everyday travel.
* The region expands both outwards (by adding high speed transit to surrounding neighborhoods), and upwards (replacing existing development with higher density development)
* Key transportation infrastructure: public transit (bus, tram, train, subway), in addition to feet and bikes
* (some amount of) Density is a key pattern: Having enough people per square mile to bring workers and customers, sustaining local businesses, as well as maintainable a taxable base large enough to pay for transit and other infrastructure
* Multi use zoning is king: local storefronts and restaurants are considered beneficial for quality of life. Sufficiently dense streets thrive off the mixture of people and business.
* "porous" neighborhoods (e.g. grid street layout) are a pattern: porous neighborhoods are more efficient on a mile-per-mile basis, helping to enable low-speed travel (read: foot & bike). This increases the amount of business-capable space within a neighborhood, which is beneficial to the local economy and quality of life of residents
* Suburban mindset seen as harmful: suburban mindset seeks to expand outwards. This adds people who consume local infrastructure (e.g. driving on local roads, creating noise and pollution) but who might not live in city jurisdiction (i.e. can't be taxes in a straightforward manner), and aren't interested in contributing to the well-being of the city. Suburban mindset seeks to limit legal expansion of density, mandate parking minimums, cut urban spending for necessary infrastructure like transit, reduce quality of life by widening roads, building highways, and increasing speed limits, and continue an outward suburban expansion that will just accentuate existing problems with traffic and with car noises
The suburban mindset to developing a metropolitan region:
* Cars are the key mode of travel for the vast majority of destinations, and as such are a necessity
* The region expands outwards by purchasing and developing surrounding farmland, and connecting this land to the city with high speed roads. This keeps land absurdly cheap.
* Key transportation infrastructure: roads (with sufficiently high speeds and capacity), parking lots
* Density is a key antipattern: More people per square mile brings congestion and noise, consume available parking, but offer little communal benefits as residents generally don't need to work or shop locally (no need to sustain local businesses)
* Single use zoning is king: businesses want to locate on large roads with lots of traffic, people want to locate on small subdivisions with little traffic. Zoning enforces this to maintain everybody's quality of life.
* "porous" neighborhoods are an antipattern: stores are not on local streets, so any porous neighborhoods mostly bring in through-traffic (which gives noise and pollution but no economic benefit). Thus a tiered freeway/highway/boulevard -> neighborhood -> subdivision pattern to residential space, in place of a city grid
* Mandatory parking minimums useful, as parking is a valuable public good
* Urban mindset seen as harmful: urban mindset seeks to build higher density housing in centralized places that already have bad traffic during rush hour, which will just make it worse. Urban mindset seeks to make more use of urban space with less parking, which offers a worse quality of life to suburbanites who wish to drive into the city. Urban mindset seeks to limit legal restrictions on density, which threatens to see multifamilies or apartment buildings in quiet neighborhoods that currently have low traffic and low noise (but won't when population density goes up). Urban mindset looks to spend on public transit, which is not useful at all to all the many people who live in the suburbs (but suburbanites may face state taxes or consumption taxes to fund transit, as well as increases in traffic due to construction)
Also, a lot of the land there is used by businesses like UPS, Fed-Ex, etc.
0. I'm sure someone was, but not very many people.
It’s interesting trivia but it doesn’t mean much. A well packed slum could fit 10x that amount in that land. Or you could have a vineyard or you could have a train station.
It’s an arbitrary comparison.
Land gets used in many different ways that make sense for the local people. Some seem “better” but that requires certain “assumptions “. Is arid desert “wasted”?
Climate change is arguably a more pressing threat to Houston than thermonuclear war, but the city doesn’t have many other options than to continue sprawling.
I don't believe it is very easy to drive in Siena, Italy. I also don't believe it is very easy to live under a highway interchange. To each space its own.
There is no reason to judge space in one place by the use patterns of a totally different place.
Your immediate best interest might be bad for the community.
> I prefer to have a car.
> I like being able to use a telescope and not hear cars.
So I am not sure s/he cares much about the commons. :D
I'm honestly confused, how are these things not possible in the city? My earbuds worked perfectly fine on the bus and train pre-covid, and my apartment has its own thermostat (and indeed its own HVAC system)
FWIW though, listening on headphones works perfectly well while walking or on mass transit. Scheduling isn't too big of a deal when the bus or train or whatever runs every 5 minutes or so.
I think the real reason though is more that I just really like standing and walking, and dislike sitting still for long periods. I also kind of dislike the stress and responsibility of having a car.
Imagine judging Siena based on the ease of driving. That would be equally as arbitrary as judging Houston by its space allocation to roadway interchanges.
Hendrix pulled this eye-opening comparison from a report compiled by the U.K.’s Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission, which sternly suggests that housing 30,000 Italians is less wasteful and more sustainable than using the same amount of acreage to simply move cars around. There’s truth to that, of course [...]
There's no truth to that, of course. Houston is a gigantic port city and population center, in a region of the USA where automobiles are almost essential to life because everything is spread out and public transportation is sparse. Even if you only focus on designing for people, there are people commuting in those automobiles and their quality of life goes up when their daily commute doesn't include a series of congested off-ramps and on-ramps in bumper-to-bumper traffic.
In Houston, the user drives. Just because Tuscany is nice doesn't mean there is any reason why space in places where the use case is different should be judged with Tuscany in mind as an ideal.
To take it to the extreme, this article is akin to a comparison between the ISS and a soccer field. The author decided that the soccer field is a better use of space because it accommodates multiple times as many participants as the ISS.
The problem would lie in this report [0], which is cited by the article and by the person tweeting about it.
Happy to be proven wrong; but I know the area quite well (I grew up in Italy), and I immediately thought that the satellite picture of Siena depicted in the article, and in the tweet, does not contain 30,000 people.
The entire "Comune" of Siena (roughly equivalent to a "County" in the UK or US) is ~53,000 people [1].
However, I would be surprised if the part of Siena depicted in the article, the city center, houses 30,000 people.
See for yourself. Here's Assisi, roughly with a similar density as Siena, which has ~4,500 people living in the city center [2].
Here's Siena [3]. Just by approximation, I'd say that Siena's city center is in the range of maybe 15k? Not more than that.
Also, it would be unfair to consider the fact that Siena's city center is also house for students, which live in different conditions than normal people. In that sense, even Harvard's dormitories have a high density, compared to any road structure in Texas.
Anyway, just trying to make you reflect on the numbers - I hope my calculations are correct; or at least, the reasoning behind it should be good enough. As said, happy to be proven wrong.
[0]: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
[1]: https://www.comune.siena.it/Il-Comune/Servizi/Statistica/Pop...
[2]: https://www.google.com/maps/place/53100+Siena,+Province+of+S...
[3]: https://www.google.com/maps/place/53100+Siena,+Province+of+S...
Huston pop 2.3mil
Sure, incentivize a dense urban area if that’s what you want. But you should realize a lot of people want a suburban environment.
And as a bonus you have zero chance of getting sick commuting alone in you Prius. Compare that to being packed shoulder to shoulder and hip to hip with 1000 other people. You are breathing on the back of some strangers neck that is inches away from your mouth and some other stranger is breathing on your neck. People are sneezing, coughing, hacking all around you. It’s pretty disgusting. Give me my Prius with my filtered AC, sound system and adjustable seat anytime.
https://theicct.org/blogs/staff/planes-trains-and-automobile...
https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa-615.pd...
Houston, Texas = ~$500B/yr
Siena, Tuscany = ~$11B/yr
Edit: From your own happiness survey link - "The U.S. GNI per capita income is actually higher than in most of the countries ahead of the U.S. in the global ranking of happiness. There are about 130 countries that showed up as less happy than the U.S. in 2013. Despite our outstanding technological and economic progress over the past half-century, we are without significant achievements in life satisfaction and the subjective happiness of our population. In contrast, uncertainties and anxieties are high, social and economic inequalities have widened considerably and social trust is in decline. There is an impression that the U.S. has not been very effective at turning its great business capacities, human resources, productivity and natural wealth to the best aim: increased happiness."
Don't give a damn about GDP.
I'm not from the US. I live in latin america where people think like you do and feel everyone is entitled to a bunch of "essential" things by the state using public money, and here I am watching Argentina from the other side of the river as it beats its poverty high score every day right after Venezuela did the same thing with the same exact steps. Just now they socialized the Internet, cable and telcos, wonder what else is going to be "essential".
> From your own happiness survey link
That is not my link. It's not even in the same comment subtree.
> Don't give a damn about GDP.
Well, pick a country around here from the ones that share your line of thought and just move. If you can get me one of them unhappy green cards on your way please let me know.
FYI, if you're a porteño from Av Rivadavia or further up north in the city, your infrastructure is just as good as, if not better, than most American cities. And I've lived in quite a few.
Really? Because it's GDP that funds all those government services and social programs.
I'm always confused when people don't give a damn about economics (i.e. during the Covid shutdown debate) when without economics you wouldn't have a functioning society.
Estonia GDP is measured in billions and yet their infant mortality rate is half than US despite their trillions of dollars of GDP
Not to mention Estonia's lower infant mortality doesn't actually disprove my comment.
I cherry picked infant mortality rate because I didn't want to pick the most embarrassing US stats, like life expectancy (lowest in the west despite the highest healthcare spending per capita) and homicide rate (4 times the Nigeria, 6 times China, 10 times Europe)
The fact that even little Estonia can handle infant mortality rate better than a superpower like USA it's kinda revealing
I'm also quite sure that if I picked China and its almost double infant mortality rate you wouldn't have though I was cherry picking
US is good at making money, but it's not a good indicator that they know how to spend them the right way
> The numbers in the U.S. are partly driven by gun deaths. From 2001 to 2010, 15-to-19-year-olds were 82 times more likely to die from gun violence in the U.S. than in other wealthy countries. Thakrar also attributes the higher U.S. child and infant mortality rates to a lack of preventative care.
Thakrar is Ashish Thakrar, medical resident at the Johns Hopkins Hospital and Health System.
Regardless, let's get back to my original comment.
GDP is important. It's what pays for government services, you may not agree that the US does enough, but that doesn't change the fact GDP pays for it.
USA ranks 34th on 36 countries
> GDP is important. It's what pays for government services
It depends on what you buy with it and how much of it goes back to society in the form of government services for the public
For rich countries in the G20 it shouldn't matter as much as how you redistribute it
I'll repeat myself, despite the highest GDP in the World USA can't even pay for the citizens' right to not be shot in the streets
What is it good for then?
No they don't. They collect the same stats, but they aren't necessarily comparable.
The richest country in the World is 34th
I think you have a problem there, no matter how much you try to find excuses for it
> Metodology Membership in the OECD was used as a proxy for similar nations to the U.S. The group was narrowed to OECD members with 50 years of high-quality data, minus the U.S. It includes: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
Yup! GDP doesn't help at all! Only Bezos.
As someone living in a third world country in a city where (cheap) public transit is the norm, I can tell you that faster than private cars/taxis it is not; hell, Uber arriving here was a nice uplift to my lifestyle at a price I could justify ponying up for.
I don't understand why you are protesting.
Romans already had interchangeable parts.
Evidence of the use of interchangeable parts can be traced back over two thousand years to Carthage in the First Punic War. Carthaginian ships had standardized, interchangeable parts that even came with assembly instructions akin to "tab A into slot B" marked on them.
> why early industry did not need rail or waterway to carry heavy logistics
you are conflating two arguments.
Ancient civilizations became large empires without railways.
Some of them built giant pyramids in the middle of the desert...
Houston: 2.3 million
Siena: 50k
What's the use of these pointless comparisons?
And not so for a city of 50K like Siena, right?
The whole thing is pointless, that's my point.
Nigeria homicide rate: 4.5 murders per 100,000 population
Siena homicide rate: < 0.5 murders per 100,000 population
It all depends on how you spend that money...
https://books.google.ca/books?id=YtwSz2A12e8C&q=153&redir_es...
But.... so what?
That they are an undeveloped society
Are you comparing US to undeveloped countries?
Do you understand that the richest country in the World has a worse homicide rate than Nigeria?
If I have to chose, i prefer living where they don't shoot me rather than where the city produces a very high GDP...
Beijing has a GDP 517.876 billion dollars.
So, according to the original post, it must be like living in Houston.
Are you sure Nigeria is as reliable as the US for those stats?
You should check out the concept of Ergodicty. In your examples the ensemble average does not = the time-series average. You're saying something like "4 out of 5 Russian Roulette players had a great time playing, so I should as well".