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by superuser2
3549 days ago
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I don't think there's much doubt about how awesome it is to live a trivial distance from everything you need. This much is clear from the extreme premium that housing in such places commands compared to freeway-connected suburbs of US cities. It's not surprising that abundance of public space and a lack of through traffic would make them even better. Cars and their infrastructure are indeed ugly and dangerous, but we have them because they so drastically increase the quality of life available to those who can't or won't pay the rent in the same superblocks as their jobs (or move to tenements). Increasing the luxuriousness of this kind of premium housing would seem to come at the cost of extracting yet more free time from those who need to come into or through these areas but can't live in them, or yet more money from those who decide to stretch their housing budgets. It'd be entirely appropriate coupled with a massive increase in rail infrastructure or something, but on its own is concerning. I'll be very interested to see whether US cities that adopt this model can add supply faster than people who used to commute can bid up the price of close-to-everything housing. My guess is no, not even close, a few elites get great lives and everyone else is driven to exurbs. |
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Center of large city (i. e. new York, Paris):
Above a certain density, public transport becomes the norm across all income levels (cf. bankers in New York).
Suburb of large city down to towns:
For commuters coming in from the suburbs, there are hundreds of cities that show that rail is an option that's affordable and it usually takes 1/2h to the city center.
What motivates people to buy cars seems to be mostly daily life within the suburbs: shopping, getting children to school etc. This is a failure of city planning, because it's perfectly feasible to combine the density of a suburb with local subcenters that provide all daily needs (schools, shopping, medical etc.) within walking distance (let's say 1.5 miles).
Taking the worst as an example, the density of Atlanta's suburbs is about 1000/sq mile (http://www.city-data.com/forum/attachments/city-vs-city/6570...). Meaning there are 7074 people within a mile of any given point. That's plenty to sustain the infrastructure to provide for daily needs, although it may mean a need for more, but somewhat smaller schools/shops etc. (If this isn't convincing, consider that Atlanta is the worst of the worst in terms of waste of space. You can easily fit 10000 people within a mile^2 and still have backyards for everyone).
It's only rural living that requires a car. The quality of live in large cities will dramatically increase in the next few years, if only because self-driving cars and car sharing require far fewer parking spots. These make up about half of the space required for cars right now, meaning their abolition could double the space available for pedestrians.