If we’re fighting stroads, those have to become roads. One way to get this done is simply banish the businesses. But this strains capacity on the arterials even worse, since you now need to leave the suburb to go shopping.
The other way is to push businesses down the tree, closer to houses, more decentralized. But the residents won’t abide that either, on the theory that businesses will attract traffic to their sub-trees.
To that I say: get over it. It’s utterly insane to have a whole street for the private use of a few dozen families. It’s literally impossible to make arterials big enough to compensate. You can have your street slow, but it’s going to be part of a network and it’s going to be used by more than just the hyper local community.
But of course they don’t see this as particularly less bad than total isolation, so they won’t allow it either. The whole thing is fucked.
One of the interesting points is that there is a commonality between those suburbans and people who want walkable urban areas: few of us want to deal with the problems of lots of cars driving around us.
The busiest and most economically vibrant areas in the US are the ones that deprioritize cars (main streets, downtowns, outdoor malls, bar districts).
But if you try to change an existing area into a less car friendly area people absolutely lose their heads
People are scared of change, even when the benefits are quite obvious. At least it was obvious to me when I was handed an hyperbolic leaflet opposing the change before it was done: I knew pedestrian streets were beneficial to shops, the area has no lack of transportation being in the center of Paris, there's no parking nearby, and you don't get in a car to go buy a damn sandwich in Paris unless you're completely fucking insane.
Ironically, the city is considering expanding the pedestrian zones and shop owners are bringing forth the same arguments they did 30 years ago, as if they didn't learn anything.
I would say communities like San Mateo or Belmont on the peninsula are what's in demand. Small "cute" downtowns with trendy shops and dining, but also enough parking so you can drive, surrounded by single family homes, big parks and open spaces and mixed multi-unit apartments/condos. People can have the benefits of their own property, exclusive space and enough space for a family, while enjoying a "downtown" experience when they want to.
“California is changing because of a desire of many millions of people to have something that looks like the conventional, traditional California Dream: a house on a lot in a neighborhood of similar houses on lots,”[1]
[1]https://www.wsj.com/articles/californians-flee-the-coast-to-...
Famous examples: people wanted better horse-carriages and didn't anticipate cars. People wanted better keyboards on their blackberry-style phones, not an iPhone. Etc etc.
Nobody who experiences life in the Netherlands where biking and walking is actually safe ends up wishing they could return to stroad-style car-dependency. Everyone who says they prefer it is just saying that they don't know any better.
And any appeal to saying we have to keep making dangerous garbage sprawl because that's what people demand, that's disengenuous nonsense.
Strong Towns actually has the answer to this, the one that doesn't involve being condescending to people in sprawlville, USA. They point out that EVERYONE when you ask them about their priorities, especially for the streets where they live, they always say they care about safety, capacity, cost, and speed, basically in that order. But engineering assumptions put it more like speed, capacity, cost, safety.
(Wish I could give you the optimal link, but the one thing Strong Towns is weakest at is making it easy to find the right links in their enormous backlog of articles; the site search tool is really annoying; I know the concepts I'm mentioning are discussed multiple places, including in their two books)
I also spent some time in Singapore and it seems much closer to the Strongtowns ideal than the US - dense housing, top-notch transit (most don't have cars), carefully planned development with first-floor shops on every block, lots of greenspace and public areas.
And when I talked to my colleagues you know what their desired was? Make enough money to buy a car and get the equivalent of a single family home. They lived in dense housing and got by without a car not out of choice but out of affordability. Again, not all of them (many who could afford cars choose not to buy one), but it was a pretty common theme.
Culture also matters; in the west the city is often seen as a place for single professionals, rather than somewhere to build your life long term. This will affect perceptions, for good or ill.
Also, although you can get by without a car in many locations, I think there’s probably a relatively stark difference in how livable that is depending on how it’s implemented. If your city is filled with two lane roads through the core that’s clearly much worse than the Netherlands equivalent.
Cost is fixed by building more housing and traffic is solved by making the Bay Area less car centric (public transportation in the Bay Area isn't terrible but it can still be a lot better). I don't have great solutions for crime and homelessness but building more housing all over will definitely help reduce it and better social safety nets can help eliminate it entirely.
Additionally, you don't need to build a second SF to solve the problem. In fact, most dense housing can be built for relatively cheap. You don't need to build 20 story buildings everywhere.
Since that was the class of people with the most money and significant political power, city planning departments were heavily dominated by the idea that the people who mattered the most weren't actually residents for many decades, especially since it's always easier to continue a direction than radically reconsider the approach.
I saw a good example of that here in DC a couple of years ago when our pedestrian safety project was being led by an older traffic engineer who could not stop talking about cars per hour as his primary metric. It was very clear that this was a deeply engrained way of thinking, and that it had never been subject to much critical analysis. When he retired and a much younger replacement got the job, they treated neighborhood safety as their top priority — and since they actually ran simulations rather than relying on their gut, it turned out to have almost no impact on overall commute speeds because all the reckless drivers were doing was getting to the next backup slightly faster.
For the same amount of money they could get a 1,100 at ft home, with a yard, lots of families close by and good schools.
You cant “build more housing” if the desirable housing is a single family home with a yard. SF is out of space.
Like I said in my other reply, countries where raising a family in a 2 bed apartment is mostly due to cost - they can’t afford more space. American has plenty of space.
Sure, people want the impossible: quiet beautiful wilderness where you can also walk to school, groceries, concerts, and medical centers.
But the question at hand is actually how much of all the good things we are capable of having. And we really can do a lot better than sprawlville USA without the only alternative being San Francisco.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2021/11/3/our-self-impos...
Incidentally, car-dependent affordable space is a farce. It's not actually more affordable, it only externalizes the costs. The huge infrastructure costs to support sprawl-style development are subsidized by denser parts of town. This is laid out bluntly in the articles on https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme and that's not to mention the externalized costs of the pollution of all the car traffic and many other things we could bring up.
In short, the car-dependent suburbs are artificially more affordable. And yes, tons of people will accept car-dependency in order to get the benefits and affordability of those places as we know them.
> For the same amount of money they could get a 1,100 at ft home, with a yard, lots of families close by and good schools.
You can't build tons of detached single family homes but you certainly can build higher-density housing with public parks and playgrounds. Similarly, I'd say the lack of families and schools is more of a symptom than a cause of not having the infrastructure to support families. In the United States there's a lot of marketing, culture, and laws which mean the detached single-family suburban home model is heavily subsidized but if you look at the better U.S. cities or many examples internationally, there's no shortage of families living in smaller places using shared public space — even a small playground is going to be more fun than the average back yard.
Schools are similarly prone to this: standardized test scores closely track family socioeconomic status so if you're in an area where there's limited family-friendly housing, lack of areas for kids to exist safely without getting hit by cars, etc. the scores will go down as the most affluent parents move without any change in the quality of the school's education.
Agree. I don't understand the claims in this discussion about kids not being able to get around in suburbs on their own. I lived part of my childhood in a dense metropolis and part in a suburb. I was able to get around the suburb just fine on my own on a bicycle. This was before bike lanes (which many suburbs now have), and I would just ride on the sidewalk - this is perfectly safe and legal.
> And when I talked to my colleagues you know what their desired was? Make enough money to buy a car and get the equivalent of a single family home.
This isn't surprising to me, particularly if people know what the two different lifestyles are like (with and without a car). I am more of an advocate for different cities to have different styles of living for different people. The big issue in discussions like this, is a belief that there must be only one way to do things, and it must be forced onto every town and city through aggressive activism, which people who are older or have children or other responsibilities just don't have time to combat. That's not just disruptive but also unethical, in my opinion.
This thread also has several people with a fetishistic obsession with life in the Netherlands. Granted - the Not Just Bikes channel that many have mentioned is run by someone who moved to NL - so the bias there is expected. But lots of people who fantasize about NL would not actually like living there. To be blunt about it, most of the Dutch cities are soulless and boring. At first the immediate walk-out-the-door access to local businesses/destinations was charming. But ultimately I felt that the anti-car lifestyle led to a cultural lack of spontaneity and people implicitly had committed to a limited life that is centered around just what is nearby. Ironically, unlike the GP, I felt those living in NL who reported high levels of happiness were the ones who didn't know there were other options.
It's not just a vague grass-is-greener issue. And sure, Dutch cities can be soulless and boring by some measures, but that's the norm for American suburbia too.
It's not just a matter of self-report of happiness, the support for the Netherlands style of living is strong by a ton of measures.
Here's the thing: stuff like the eyes-on-the-street effect are HUGE. A sprawly American suburb that still has a neighborhood park where there are reliably dozens of kids who know each other… that works, because it's safe enough to let your kids go to the park with their friends without adult supervision. The fact is, other kids there means it's not bizarre to see one isolated seemingly-abandoned kid, and if they get hurt, there are other kids around to help them or to run home or call their parents etc.
It's not strictly a matter of cars. The whole issue of "stroad" vs road isn't anti-car. Roads are for cars mainly. Stroads are fundamentally dangerous. They are part of the development style that makes it unsafe for younger kids to get out on their bikes and be independent.
Given the choice of dense urban life vs car-dependent-sprawl, it's understandable why many people choose the latter. The problem is the missing-middle. Why is it illegal in most places to build moderate-dense walkable mixed-use neighborhoods that are neither densely urban nor car-dependent-sprawl? The capacity of people to choose different lifestyles along this continuum is missing. The rare places in the middle are crazy expensive because demand far outstrips supply. So, we really don't get anywhere with a conversation focused on which of the limited polarized choices people are stuck with in the USA.
While this is possible to be true, I suspect on a per-utterance basis, it’s wrong way more often than it’s right. People often do know what they want; it’s just inconveniently not the same as what the utterer prefers.
People's utterances about what they want are almost never in light of the question of what they "really want". We rarely have the space and perspectives to reflect on and learn about what we "really want" to be able to even answer that question.
Most of life is people having low-level fears about loss and acceptance and so on and expressing our wants from that position. We rarely settle into our deeper values enough to even ask what we "really want" let alone find answers.
Real estate prices for high density housing and walkable neighborhoods disproves this statement outright. As for why this type of housing is not built more frequently, there is a fairly simple explanation: they are illegal to build under zoning laws, which massively favour single-family homes.
> Some of them stick around once they have kids, but it's rare and usually reserved for the well-off who can afford private schools and family-sized homes. In SF you've got the parents who are happy to put their kids and groceries on the back of their bike, but most look to find something a bit closer to suburbia.
There's a simple explanation for this: cities in the U.S are unsafe in particular for children due to the massive infestation of cars and car-oriented infrastructure. Suburbs appear to be the only alternative, but they are pretty damn harmful to the development of children - basically being a prisoner inside your house until you are old enough to drive a car is quite frankly demeaning.
So yes, there's almost an equal amount of demand for this type of housing.
[1]https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/08/26/more-americ...
As for walkability - its utility is vastly overblown in my opinion. Your note about childless adults rings true for me, and the only parents I know who care about walk scores are the ones who are themselves urbanist activists (few in number). Even then, when it came time to purchase a home, walkability was not a decision maker for those couples. To me, that was a signal that even parents who were very anti-car in their political sentiment ultimately didn't put enough of a value on the pro-walk/bike lifestyle to prioritize it when their money was on the line.
I also think it is impractical to not have a car. If you want to live a rich life with access to diverse activities, instead of being boxed into a 15 minute radius or your metro line, then you need a car. Who wants to deny their children the memories of day trips and the thrill of exploration? And if you have a car, then you already have the vehicle you need to live in a more suburban neighborhood, where you can enjoy additional space and safety while still accessing commercial areas in a time efficient manner.
I have seen more comments and people talking about this toxic car culture than seen it in real life.
Not everyone is young, healthy and rich enough to bike. There is a historic racial divide. White folks live in more bike friendly places.
https://theconversation.com/the-unbearable-whiteness-of-cycl...
https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/ex/sustainablecitiescollecti...
Also, bikes are not the only or natural alternative to cars.
It's the money sink that is a car that's the real privilege.
In the same way curb cuts improved the well being of way more than people in wheelchair, good, grade-separated walking and biking infrastructure makes moving around much easier and safer for way more than just cyclists.
Not everyone is young, healthy, and rich enough to be able to own and operate a 2.5t vehicle at high speed. And where walkers, wheelchairs, and other assisting devices can mix with little difficulty with bike traffic, that’s not the case with high-speed road traffic.
Anyway, as to your other points - firstly, changing or building cities in a way that is not car centric doesn't mean there are no cars and nobody drives - obviously people still have to and will. Actually, building cities in a way that is not car-centric is safer for people who still drive, and there's a lot less traffic, so that's good. It's just even better for people who don't or can't drive (think of people under 16 years old, who have little independence to travel living in suburbs).
It should be noted too that non car-centric cities are much better for e.g. elderly people to live in, because everything is much closer, and good cycle and walking paths are much better to ride mobility scooters on. Things being in walkable distance also helps people age better, because the exercise means you retain your mobility longer. It's pretty scary how as people age, you get to a point where if you're not staying active, you really quickly start to lose the ability to be active, which is a unfortunate spiral.
The last thing - it's not just bikes (look up the YouTube channel with the same name, by the way - it's awesome). Improving zoning laws and building good public transport is also a key part of the puzzle, and helps solve lot of the issues as well.
Bikes are orders of magnitude cheaper than a car. Both in terms of the infrastructure needed as well as the individual cost of bicycles. Good bicycle infrastructure also improves accessibility for those using mobility scooters, and a bicycle culture has hugely beneficial health benefits to individuals and society - not to mention the awful health effects of cars.
I find it hilarious that anyone would ever try to start a debate making the standpoint that car-oriented development would be the less racist alternative, what with highways inside cities having been used to absolutely ravage areas where non-whites have lived, and suburbs basically having entirely excluded non-whites, by both economic and non-economic means. Not to mention the added economic strain of owning a car, making it even worse for those who are less well off economically.
Making biking, public transport and walking more attractive also improves the experience for the few that still need to use a car.
Cars have a really low capacity. If you reserve the fastest route for biking or public transport and force cars to take a longer route then you will still be faster by car over the longer route than you would over the shorter route if cars where allowed there.
Not just bikes did a video on just that and explains it much better than I have:
This is such an alien attitude to me. Why would you need to be young or rich to ride a bike? Then I remember that American cities are so hostile to cyclists that, of course, only the young and rich would be able to do it there. Then this inequality is somehow taken to be a problem with the _bikes themselves_ rather than the cities that made cycling so dangerous. It's maddening to see.
And cars are not cheap either, you know.
Go to a European metropolis, you will see cyclists young and old, rich and poor, black and white.
Is there a name for the following fallacy:
"X is good, we should have more of X and make X available for more people." "No we can't do that, X is only for rich white people and therefore bad."