Hacker News Reader

Comment by kblev | Hacker News Reader

Great channel, have been following it for some time, a few takeaways from there:

- It's the cars that make the cities undesirable

- I was shocked how the historical center of London, ON was demolished to the ground and replaced with shacks

- Kids should be able to walk to school alone in safety

- I live in Europe and I was baffled to learn that multi-purpose developments are disallowed in most of North America. This alone makes me reconsider my plans to move to the States. I love how I can just jump on a bike here and be at a large supermarket in 5 minutes

View on HN

I love how I can just jump on a bike here and be at a large supermarket in 5 minutes

And even when the supermarket/mall is close by in the US, you still can't necessarily walk/bike there. I was visiting a friend who lived in the Midwest and his house was less than a mile from the mall. I asked him how to walk over there, and he admitted he'd never tried. So I set out to try, and the only way I found was by running across a busy 4 lane street without any crossings.

America is _very_ big. Bigger than Europe even. That means that there are lots of different development patterns all across the country. While it is true that most places are car dependent, there are also cities where the majority of people who live there don't even own a car. I lived in Boston/Cambridge Massachusetts for 10 years and New York for 8, and I have never owned a car (or bike). Walking and taking the subway/metro are the most convenient modes of travel in those cities, and you get all the benefits of vibrance that comes with that. For the past 18 years, I've had about 2-3 big grocery stores and too many smaller shops and fruit stands to count within a 10 minute walking radius. The same goes for bars, restaurants, book stores, coffee shops, music/dancing venues, etc. All without even needing to get on the subway.

The "low density" of the US is deceptive. It's true that there are vast expanses of desert, and even that New York has a forest in it the size of the Netherlands, but when you compare the density of individual US states to European countries, you see it is no excuse for us not building broadband infrastructure and otherwise being sensible about things.

California, in particular, has a population density of about 100 people per square kilometer which is about the same as France. Most of California is either uninhabitable, factory farms, or military reservations. The population is highly concentrated near the coast.

People who haven't been there imagine that Los Angeles is "sprawl" but the truth it is very high density that is "sprawling" over a large plain that is boxed in by mountains. Millions of people have a line of sight to the Hollywood sign.

(I grew up in Southern New Hampshire which is based on Buckminister Fuller's diabolical geometry of airports and subdvisions -- where getting from one subdivision to the next is like going from the right side of your left lung to the right side of your left lung all the way up to the fork in your trachea. That is a self-inflicted wound that has nothing to do with how dense the population is.)

The population-weighed density - the density experienced by the typical American - is also much higher than you’d think. For example California is expansive and empty-seeming on paper, but half of the state lives in L.A. Population-weighting makes more sense than dividing the gross population by the gross area.

I've wondered for a while how you would do that.

One approach is scale-dependent (divide the area into a grid of square kilometers, sort by population, pick the square kilometer where the median person lives.) but you would get different answers if you picked different scales.

The median of "How far away is your nearest neighbor?" seems parameter free at first but it is absurd if you live in an apartment. (e.g. ignores all the space around your apartment.) I guess you could look for the median (or other decile) of "What is radius in which N people live?" where N might be 100-10,000 but then you're back to having a spectrum instead of a single number again.

Maybe you can't avoid that.

There's a bunch of literature on this if you start with a search for population-weighted density. There isn't one true way to do it, and scale matters greatly.

My comment about how big America was had nothing to do with density. I only mentioned the size of the country to highlight that there are a lot of different jurisdictions with lots of different development patterns.

Boston/Cambridge and NYC were initially built during colonial times, before cars and railroads, so were originally built for navigation by foot or horse.

You're right that there are places like that in the US, but we haven't been building like that for nearly 100 years at this point. Those places are historical curiosities, and not at all representative of the United States.

And before anyone says I should just live in places that are like that, It's not so easy to just pick up my life and move somewhere else.

The US may be big, but the majority of people live in the same small set of metropolitan areas.

That's true but it's also true that the transportation to parts of Boston sucks and outside of it it quickly becomes impossible to get around without a car.

> I was shocked how the historical center of London, ON was demolished to the ground and replaced with shacks

Does anyone have more details on this in written form? It's annoyingly difficult to google for because it's the other London.

Various British cities have been guilty of this; Bradford had a "hole" for about a decade due to an unbuilt shopping centre. https://www.bbc.co.uk/bradford/content/articles/2009/08/27/b...

Everything about this channel is great except the way he leans into London so hard. It’s his hometown and as a life long Londoner… I get it.

That said, I drive this mess everyday and my 25 min cross town commute makes Torontonians cry. I don’t bike or bus though, so I do ultimately agree with him.

Regarding downtown. You won’t find more information on that shack thing because it’s not real. Besides a couple historic floods and fires I can’t think of what he means.

It's fair because London is a horrible city. (Rant alert)

It's not just bike and transit unfriendly, it's bad for cars too. There's no easy way to get from one side to the other in less than an hour during the day, short of taking a helicopter.

Compare London to nearby Kitchener/Waterloo. They essentially have a ring road (hwy 85), PLUS a light rail + bus rapid transit system. It's still absolutely full of stroads, but at least it's more accessible and things actually move around.

In London, Oxford is essentially a 10 KM long parking lot every day at 9 AM, and Adelaide spends about two hours a day blocked by freight trains. Every attempt to fix the city frankly makes it worse. I don't know if it's because of poor planning, inept council, the lack of geographical constraints, or some other factor, but this city is the absolute show piece for failed urban design.

So yeah, I think it's completely reasonable to lean into London ON, it's the perfect case study in bad north american cities.

> I love how I can just jump on a bike here and be at a large supermarket in 5 minutes

If you live in a large US city, this can still be very manageable. There are two large grocery stores and a small one as well as a Target and a metro line within a 5 minute walk of my house. Apart from the metro line, we didn't really prioritize the grocery stores, etc when looking for a house. That said, there are many downsides to living in big US cities as well.

Those places tend to be unafordable longterm for anyone making even twice the median salary.

Not in the Midwest.

What are some nice, livable and affordable cities you can recommend in the Midwest where you don't need a car?

As someone who has lived in the Midwest for the past ten years I think you’ll be hard pressed to find this. In Lincoln NE, for example, all new housing for at least the past 30 years has been in car-dependent suburban developments which has resulted in all but the Haymarket district of downtown being car dependent.

That district has been mostly livable without a car for the past couple years after a grocery store was built there. I say “mostly” because as soon as you want to do anything outside of The dozen or so blocks of the Haymarket a car quickly becomes required again.

This is a common theme of walkable areas in the US and Canada. They do still exist but because of the development patterns of the past 30+ years they are small islands in an ocean of cars. Their scarcity also drives up prices and makes them less affordable than surrounding areas.

I’m in Milwaukee, WI. Houses in my neighborhood are a bit expensive - starting around $300k for a SFH - but you can live a very full life without a car. For myself: we have a car for visiting people outside the city and going to the lumberyard, but groceries, schools, parks, hospital, etc are all in walking distance and downtown is about 10 minutes away on the bus

Chicago

Any college town, to a fair approximation.

Also Carmel, IN for some reason.

That is ultimately a problem of scarcity. No one is building walkable communities, so the only remaining walkable communities are the "historic" ones that, surprise, everyone wants to live in because the alternative sucks. Elastic demand, inelastic supply.

The channel mentions regularly that this isn't because of a lack of demand, but because of restrictive zoning laws and building codes that forbid it.

Jobs in those places also tend to pay a lot higher than the median salary.

Doesn't sound like a lot to be honest. This is what I'm used to in Germany, say around 1km radius, everything walkable:

* 1x big REWE, 3x small REWE, 1x Real, 1x Netto, 2x ALDI, 3x LIDL, 1x Turkish grocery store, 1x Asian grocery store

* Too many kiosks too count (tobacco, drinks, snacks, maybe like a convinience store)

* Too many bakeries to count

* 2 tram/metro stations, soon to be 3

* 5 bus stations (not counting the weird ones)

What they probably meant was they can hop on a bike and be in /any/ supermarket they fancy in this time.

Your city seems pretty good compared to what we're usually seeing from city planning in the US though.

That does sound like the Ruhrpott if I had to guess!

I feel like it could be an elaborate social engineering attack, but yes bingo :)

The Kiosks gave it away! I've never seen such density of them anywhere, incl. Berlin. And definitely not Bavaria! They are pretty cool, so!

Oh, that wasn’t an exhaustive list, just the places my wife and I go. We also have various american, african, asian, and middle eastern corner stores and a dozen restaurants, Dollar Store type shops, liquor stores, and some other things I’m forgetting. But I also live between a large park and a body of water so there’s presumably less area in my “1km radius” than yours. Either way, my point wasn’t that my US city is better than European cities, but rather that it’s more walkable than most American cities.

Move to an older part of an urban city or small town and your experience is totally doable in the states. Just don’t move to a suburb with million dollar McMansions.

Right, move to a city center with million-dollar studio apartments instead.

The not sure about the multi purpose thing- it might be prohibited by zoning in a lot of spaces by master plans, but it’s been actively encouraged for the last 10-20 years most places I’ve been, at least in infill areas. Also, the lack of “multi-purpose” development can be misleading, as “good” zoning does mix in commercial lots with housing, but they end up developed separately on different lots. The suburban development I live is walking distance to a shopping center with a grocery store, several restaurants, a services, and a park. That’s not 100% common here, but it wasn’t hard to find. The cost was reasonable to, at least until 2020 made the entire market go crazy, regardless of walkability.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com