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Enrique Peñalosa, Colombian politician and past mayor of Bogota, put it well: "An advanced city is not one where the poor can get around by car, but one where even the rich use public transportation."

Crime on public transit doesn't mean public transit is bad, it means that public transit is a last-resort option patronized by the most desperate members of society. If our cities were designed for more convenient public transit, more people would be willing to take the bus, and your average patron would be less likely to be one of the scaries that you and your visiting friend were worried about.

I took the BART for a year, unless it was really late, essentially nobody on the train was "scary".

It still smelled like a latrine (once I'm positive someone shit in a fast food bag and left it in the middle of the car sometime before my midday ride). BART wasn't a "last resort option" but an "only resort" if I didn't want to spend $100 a day on parking.

It's not even public transit, my neighborhood is past the point of "safe" especially at certain times of day where I don't want to subject anybody who couldn't beat me in a boxing match to walking around significant distances between sunset and 10am (lots of people getting mugged around 7 or 8 in the morning too).

Thats a really nice quote; thanks for that.

To toss you a bone, it's true that many dense areas in the US don't feel really safe.

But it doesn't have to be like this. It's very possible to build dense living spaces that are nice to live in.

But more to the point, you are free to live in the middle of nowhere if you want to. If you don't want to live in a dense area, the vast majority of residential areas in the US cater directly to you. Personally, I'd like to live in an actual city, and I'd like to pay less than $5000/month for a decent 1 bedroom apartment.

I'm living in a dense-enough area, advocating against people that want to destroy it by getting rid of parking requirements and forcing further density on an area which has reached what I feel is the limit.

I would like not to be forced out by idealists.

Arguably some of those problems would be solved by greater density, right? Density makes better public transit economical, density reduces homelessness by bringing down housing costs.

That's crazy that people are getting murdered at your bus stop though. What city do you live in?

I live near Hennepin and Lake St in Minneapolis.

People getting murdered, assaulted, and robbed isn't a homelessness problem (it is quite hard to survive winter being homeless in Minnesota) it is a gang, poverty, and policing problem. Part of it is accepting a large number of Somalian refugees, a small but significant number of whom disproportionally contribute to crime, but it's not exclusively that group.

Despite the business robberies, gun shots, assaults and murders blocks away from me, my rent is still $2000.

I'm also near that area, but outside the city and an entire house and yard and car is less than your rent. Luckily I don't need to commute into town, and it's pretty apparent that many who can leave the city are moving to areas like Stillwater and Woodbury. Too bad those cities don't have useful transit connections, though we might get something into Hudson soon.

Yes I'm paying a premium for space and location (having recently left mountain view also helped making everything seem very inexpensive), not having a family and wanting to be close to things to do contributes much to this.

However the "was that a gunshot or fireworks" question nearly daily with about a 50:50 distribution is not good for my stress levels or general sanity.

Highly recommend spending some weekends exploring the areas around MSP, there are lots of former small towns that are now basically exurbs or even part of the city, and depending on what you're looking for you may find something that fits better.

But trying to go entirely car-free is a pipe dream; but "car reduced" is possible.

Stillwater and Hudson both have park and rides (basically a parking lot stop for a bus dedicated to suburban 9-5 commuters), but unless you're willing to put up with doubling or tripling your commute time to take a bus into the cities, you're still better off just driving in and paying for parking.

What would be roughly a 30-40 minute trip by car becomes an hour and 20 minutes by bus, if you don't need to change buses too many times to get to your destination- and that's by ideal conditions (bus isn't running late, etc) (that example used stillwater park&ride to the north loop).

It’s funny and sad reading about how Minnesota - which we swedes see as “new Sweden” - is going down the exact same path as old Sweden.

I too don’t want to take the subway or bud late at night in Stockholm or Gothenburg, as in my youth. Witnessed too many car burnings and shootouts.

Higher density areas zoned for mixed use are the only areas of modern american cities that are revenue positive for the city. Suburbs and other less dense developments are massively subsidized by denser developments.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI

Density also makes services like policing cover more ground for less money. Japanese & european cities are often much denser and face lower crime rates.

Those statistical arguments I wouldn't trust until I'd seen a red team try to pick them apart, it is very easy for your biases to leak in especially in ambiguous things like claiming costs based on area. (example, how do you claim police charges, by the area or the actual number of calls? a highrise with hundreds of people has a very small footprint but likely quite a few emergency calls, vs a few suburban houses which might go decades with 0)

Yeah, I'm always highly suspicious of that "fact" thrown around, since urban areas always seem to be exceptionally expensive compared to actual rural towns (now suburbs may be a different deal) - said towns which pay for their own police, etc.

> said towns which pay for their own police, etc.

Yeah they don't. At least not the way you're implying. e.g.:

- That rural town in Maine (Passadumkeag) that basically shut down because its sole clerk couldn't survive on $13,000 annually.

- There's plenty of state and federal money in local government. Texas, for instance, will use state funds to ensure a minimum level of school funding even in rural areas.

- Some places don't have much in the way of services. For e.g. Timathy Taylor in Klamath County, Oregon. The sheriff there has three (3) officers to patrol 6,136 square miles.

This analysis wasn't from team blue, and it wasn't made to score political brownie points. It was paid for by struggling american cities in states like Louisiana to help stabilize finances & avoid bankruptcy. It measures the budgetary balance in each area of providing infrastructure & services compared to tax revenue recieved. Lafayette used the analysis to shift zoning laws towards higher density zoning across the city core and the city's finances improved.

The uniquely north american model of cities oriented around sparse car centric growth is just not sustainable in the long run. Every metre of asphalt paved & pipes placed is a metre of commitment to eternal maintenance, and when that metre connects to a tiny suburb of 15 people that can't remotely afford the bill for the infrastructure that supports them then you have a cities that grow over the long run towards massively subsidized development, soaring property taxes, & growing debt.

> tiny suburb of 15 people

That seems more like rural. Every suburb I've lived in has been on the order of 5,000-40,000 people (and that's one town, with towns not separated by anything but an invisible line).

I want this mostly because it will give a reason for people like this to care about the city around them in a real way, and act to make it better for themselves. Rather than consider its problems not their responsibility because they can avoid them by using a car.

It sucks to access things without a car because we made it that way, it's not an inherent quality of dense environments.

It's worse, because those who are rich and can afford cars don't get affected by the problems and can ignore them as they ride past in their steel chariots of doom.

But I think the correct place to do the revival is not at the city centers but at the edges; we could reduce the "land use" of suburbs by 50% or more without diminishing the quality of life, and suddenly things that don't work because the density is too low would start to make sense.

For example, it's insane that I have to have my front wall set back 40 feet from the street, which itself is 50 feet wide to allow for parking on both sides - I'd much rather have a street with no parking that was maybe 20 feet wide in total, and allow the front of the house to be right up against the sidewalk on the same lot - get more useful backyard and reduce street speed too.

Nothing you do to my city planning will make taking the bus at temperatures -20 and below a pleasant, desirable experience.

Everything where I live is accessible, but there's nothing you can do to make a bus schedule beat a car trip, and it's ridiculous that somebody a couple of miles away needs to be an hour away to justify a tiny bump in density for idealists.

It's more attractive than driving when the bus runs every ten minutes in a dedicated lane, and the car user has to pay the real cost of parking rather than have the city provide it. I know because I lived in a place like this. I used the car to leave town and for some larger shopping, everything within a few miles I accessed on foot, bike, or transit. With fewer people using cars for short trips, all of those things become a lot more pleasant.

Norway does these things, this is just defeatism talking.