[closeparen]

Warning: speculation. Suppose that a city’s value and economy descend in large part from connectivity.

A transit system is extremely useful at a few very specific points, but your connectedness drops off sharply as you get even a few blocks away from it, due to the extreme inefficiency of walking or (worse) waiting for a connecting bus.

A road network’s utility is broad and diffuse, with gentle gradients of utility from place to place, as an extra few miles means little. Two points have to be very far apart indeed before they are noticeable different in terms of access/connectedness.

So it makes complete sense to me that transit-oriented cities should be higher-maximum-value, higher-variance, while car oriented cities should be lower—maximum-value but much more equal. Exactly what the article finds.

[bunderbunder]

Related anecdote: I was recently looking at home prices in Chicago, and it seems that people place an enormous value on easy access to the train system. Just eyeballing it, it looked like a house that's less than 1 mile from the nearest train station commands about a $150-$200,000 premium over one that's more than 2 miles from the L.

[moorhosj]

Yea, Chicago is an older city by US standards and it’s clear when you compare it to cities built after the car was widely adopted (mostly Sun Belt cities). I think it’s one of the reasons Europeans tend to enjoy Chicago when they visit, it has much of the walkability they are used to. Cities like Atlanta, Houston and LA seem built around the idea of everyone driving a car.

[kevindong]

Driving in downtown Chicago during rush hour is awful. I remember it taking something like 15 minutes just to move a handful of city blocks due to how backed up the on-ramp onto the highway was.

Also, are you controlling for the housing type? Condos in high rises (which are much more expensive than detached single family detached) tend to be concentrated near the trains.

[paulie_a]

I am going to generalize your statement: driving in Chicago is awful.

Ive consistently had it take an hour to move ten miles regardless of the day of week to visit family in Milwaukee. At least a third of the drive I could see the Sears tower in the rear view mirror. Amtrak/metra is far superior to car ownership. Uber for local travel and is quite frankly cheaper with less aggravation because I don't have to deal with it. apparently honking your horn and not using a blinker is standard. Also just generally driving like a complete asshole. And don't get me started on the taxis. That entire industry in Chicago should go out of business. And cyclists seem to vary. Some are very respectful and will quickly stop for a j walker and politely say they shouldn't do that. Others run red lights and get pissed when you call them out for riding on the sidewalk.

Some startup should come with a device that is required for Chicago drivers... every time you honk your horn it costs 5-50 dollars. What are you fucking honking for there is 25-100 cars ahead of you not moving.

[bunderbunder]

I don't know that that's where I was going.

These sorts of land desirability drop-offs happen very quickly in Chicago, but that could just be a function of density. Commutes in Chicagoland aren't necessarily any worse (in terms of commuting time) than they are in other places I've been - you just end up with the pattern spreading over a much wider geographic area because cars spread everything out so much.

For example, Milwaukee's rough equivalent of Chicago's West Rogers Park is probably Menomonee Falls, which isn't even in the same county. But you've got a similar pattern where it's kind of off the beaten path, transportation-wise, which makes it relatively inexpensive compared to a more well-connected area like Tosa or Whitefish Bay.

I've noticed similar patterns in North Carolina, too - plenty of people I know in the Triangle have commutes that are well over an hour, and the communities from which it's easy to get to the major employers command a premium.

If anything, I feel like this is more argument about Chicago needing a less hub-and-spoke design to its rail transit. Out on the periphery, it's possible to get very far away from the rail lines. In a city this size, it's a major failing that anyone ends up living more than 2 miles away from rapid transit.

[moorhosj]

==And don't get me started on the taxis. That entire industry in Chicago should go out of business.==

This would lead to even more Uber/Lyft drivers which already make traffic considerably worse in my experience.

[Fins]

It's bad, but compared to SV, for example, it's a breeze. Manhattan's worse, too, and let's not talk about what Boston drivers are called...

[bunderbunder]

Yeah, this was just comparing within a specific kind of housing. So I didn't even compare 2 and 3-flat condos to high rise condos.

I would not drive to work just because the train isn't within walking distance, because, yeah, not worth the time and stress and expense. Having to take a bus or ride a bike to get to the nearest train station doesn't add that much time to a commute.

[nkrisc]

You can see this effect pretty drastically along the Blue Line where many of the neighborhoods it passes through do have a relatively large inventory of single family homes and as you get further Northwest you have fewer good transit options to downtown and the Loop. It applies to renting as well. Rentals close to transit command noticeably higher rent as well.

There's so many factors that it's hard to make direct comparisons, but for example you can look at homes near the Irving Park blue line stop (which also next to a Metra stop) and then similar home just a few miles West where there are fewer transit options. It's a pretty drastic drop off in home prices for relatively comparable neighborhoods.

[jacobolus]

More realistically: being able to live without a car is desirable for enough people and rare enough in the US that places where it is possible have their rents driven up by demand, pricing out the people who were living there before.

[chabons]

The phenomenon you're describing gives rise to the last mile transport problem, which is notoriously hard to solve. You either want something which is compact enough to fit on existing transit systems or exists in a sufficient quantity at transit nodes to augment human mobility and smooth out the gradients between transit nodes. I'm hoping that as battery and motor technology advance we'll be able to miniaturize personal transit technology enough to make such devices ubiquitous.

[WrtCdEvrydy]

> miniaturize personal transit technology

This was the segway model.

[bobthepanda]

This is also now the e-scooter and e-bike model, which seems to be faring better.

[village-idiot]

Ironically, some are actually made by Segway.

[perennate]

Doesn't a transit system complement a road network?

Rapid transit serves the most trips when either the source or destination (or both) are in the urban center. The road network is typically most congested in the urban center. Thus, transit reduces congestion in the areas that would otherwise be most congested, making the road network more useful.

Perhaps "car-oriented cities" simply haven't yet reached the density (and size of the high-density area) where transit becomes necessary.

[the_gastropod]

This is kind of a chicken-egg situation. You can't reach the high-density requirement when cars are the primary means of transportation. Cars are an extraordinarily low-density means of transportation. And some evidence, based on city age, seems to suggest that cities built with cars in mind (e.g., non-east coast cities in the U.S.) tend to sprawl quite a bit.

[perennate]

That's true, I guess that ties back into a counterargument to the parent's point, that the connectedness issue with transit would be mitigated had the city been planned differently.

[njarboe]

Isn't it wonderful how the car allowed a large number of families to own a home with a piece of land, yet have access to the amenities of a city? Nice and spread out living spaces with concentration for work and culture. Now we just need some tunnels or something to deal with the problems that fast above ground car transport causes (mostly noise, pollution, and using up precious surface land).

[so33]

>Isn't it wonderful how the car allowed a large number of families to own a home with a piece of land, yet have access to the amenities of a city?

That was an illusion. House prices are soaring in the inner suburbs (case in point: the Bay Area) to the point of complete unaffordability, forcing people out further and further from where they work and, consequently, creating situations where commuters drive for hours every day because there is no other choice.

To drive to the city, you have to find a place to park your car. As more people want to drive to access the amenities of a city (and they have to, because they might live more than an hour away as they can’t afford anything closer), they will need to pay more and more to park, because of the costs of real estate.

And tunnels are no panacea. The congestion created by single occupancy trips created by people who might be living an hour or more away from their destination will persist.

Density would go a long way to solving some of these problems. Simple things from lowering minimum lot sizes, to mid size apartments and condos, would increase access to home ownership. But we can’t have anything lowering those property prices, can we?

[njarboe]

A tunnel can have any kind of transport running in it as you want. Cars, buses, and trains at the same time. A toll tunnel that is run full will be wildly profitable and would inspire others to build them. "The Boring Company" already has the tech, we just need to work out the regulatory system so that they can build across the multiple small cities in the LA basin. Below a certain depth you can't even tell the tunnel is there.

A controlled tunnel system would be easily driven by today's automatic cars. It pick you up and goes back home (no parking problem), runs on electricity from your sunny California rooftop solar array, and works as a peaker power source for the grid when you aren't using it. Bring me a future that is better than the past please.

[TheCoelacanth]

The problem is that digging a tunnel is expensive even when amortized over the 30,000 passengers per hour that a subway line can carry. When you amortize it over the 2,000 passengers per hour that a lane of single-occupancy vehicles maxes out at, the expense is completely outrageous.

[the_gastropod]

Is that true? The U.S. doesn't have a particularly high percentage of home ownership (64.5%) compared to other countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_home_owne...

[TylerE]

I don't have numbers to back it up, but home RENTAL rates are quite high in many places. A home with a decent sized lawn, say, a dozen blocks from downtown will often rent for about the same (or even cheaper) than a smaller downtown apartment.

[benj111]

The problem is, is that car orientated cities tend to grow out, rather than densify. So you never get the critical mass, where transit becomes required.

[Kerrick]

There are major exceptions to this, usually involving the city's potential expansion zone being bounded by water on multiple sides. Manhattan, San Francisco, and Seattle all have this feature -- and they've all developed into critical mass, where transit becomes required.

[benj111]

Manhattan and San Francisco at least, developed before the car, so may well have already had the critical mass before the car came along.

[bluGill]

You cannot actually say that. non car oriented cities have been growing for hundreds of years, while car oriented cities only for about 80. You could well be right, but we will all be dead before we can actually state it with confidence.

[benj111]

Look at a 1900 city that was 80 years old, you will find it significantly denser, you can't have a 50 mile wide city, when the main mode of transport is a horse.

Northern British industrial cities fit into that age bracket at the turn of the century. Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle weren't spread out at that time.

[benj111]

That makes sense.

Cities are basically gathering places. Shops, jobs, accommodation all gather there in a self reinforcing manner.

It follows that transport connections would influence that.