Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by kqr 1638 days ago
Have you considered that the causation might be going the other way around?

It seems like you're saying that "My town has to be built for cars because we live so far away from everything. Obviously the Netherlands can afford to build for people because they live so close together."

It could also be the case that people in your town live so far away from everything because it is built for cars, whereas since the Netherlands is built for people they can live close together.
1 comments
maxerickson 1638 days ago
We don't live far away from everything, we just have less actual benefit from public infrastructure because there are less of us using anything we build. And I mean anything, because there are ~1/35 as many of us using it.
link
kqr 1638 days ago
It still seems you're taking the density as a given, as the independent variable, and deriving some image of appropriate infrastructure based on that.

It might be the case that density is not independent at all, and indeed is changed when you change the type of infrastructure.

(Not to mention that bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure is far, far cheaper than that for heavier vehicles.)

link
maxerickson 1638 days ago
Do you think if we built bike paths that 3 billion people would move to the US?
link
malermeister 1638 days ago
You could have dense cities and high speed rail in between, it doesn't need to be all populated.
link
maxerickson 1638 days ago
Right, the overall density is a coarse measure of the resources available for infrastructure (presuming that they will at least correlate with population and distance). If you have higher density, it is very likely there will be relatively more resources to deploy in a given area.
link
kqr 1638 days ago
Density works also locally.
link
ragebol 1638 days ago
That is the same argument. The Netherlands is denser, so it makes more sense to put in public infrastructure, which makes the place with that infra being more attractive. And I guess there's a switch-over point for population density where being less dense also reinforces itself and vice versa.

The point is: sub-urban US could be designed to be more dense to be on the other side of that switch over point.

link