[quadrangle]

It's mostly a case of people not knowing what they really want. Demand-driven economy has a place, but it's definitely not something to accept simplistically.

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)

[refurb]

I'm not convinced. It's not like your "better horse-carriage" example because the option already exists and people reject it. My colleagues in the Bay Area all lived in SF, then quickly moved to the subrurbs when they got older. Sure, there is no pedestrian/biking utopia in the US, but there are places where you can pretty much get by without a car. And many people don't choose to live there.

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.

[xmprt]

What were the reasons your friend gave for not wanting to live in SF? The common reasons I see are often that it's too expensive, there's too much crime and homeless people, and it's noisy and full of traffic. All of these are solvable problems.

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.

[zip1234]

Yes, the funny thing is that because cities allow so many cars in the city center, congestion, pollution, and noise are everywhere, which makes people want to move to the suburbs, which means they have to drive to get anywhere, which makes congestion, pollution, and noise everywhere in the suburbs, which makes them want to move further out...

[acdha]

It makes a lot more sense when you look at the history. American suburbs exploded in popularity after the successes of the civil rights movement started cutting into the ability of white people to live in a city without having to share public spaces with black people. Public pools were closed around the country, tons of people moved into suburbs which had barriers of various levels of subtlety where they could create a de facto segregated school system, etc.

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.

[refurb]

Their reason often came down to “raising a family of four in 700 sq ft 2 bed kinda sucks”.

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.

[acdha]

> Their reason often came down to “raising a family of four in 700 sq ft 2 bed kinda sucks”.

> 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.

[quadrangle]

Seems we're talking past one another. The point isn't that people can afford whatever they want, the point is that people don't directly want car-dependent suburban sprawl.

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...

[refurb]

People want the impossible, but if they can't have it they will make trade-offs. And it's pretty apparent the trade off is "I'll put up with having to get a car in order to get more space at an affordable price".

[quadrangle]

Yes, but that's not an argument for anyone wanting car-dependent life. It's an argument for people being willing to tolerate car-dependent life (in order to have some benefits like affordability and more space), and that was never a disputed claim.

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.

[Panzer04]

I suspect this will also suffer from the “grass is greener” problem. Those who live in cities will romanticise suburban living, and vice versa in suburbs.

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.

[throwawaysea]

> My colleagues in the Bay Area all lived in SF, then quickly moved to the subrurbs when they got older. Sure, there is no pedestrian/biking utopia in the US, but there are places where you can pretty much get by without a car. And many people don't choose to live there.

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.

[quadrangle]

The issues are well-discussed in NotJustBikes specifically: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ul_xzyCDT98

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.

[sokoloff]

> It's mostly a case of people not knowing what they really want

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.

[quadrangle]

"really want" is a poor phrase, but it was intended to mean not "what people sincerely/honestly want" but instead "what people would choose if they really had deeply informed understanding of the options".

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.