[gobbluth]

Agreed with you and MJN. The US is in desperate need of investment in public transportation. Europeans have absolutely mastered the art of urban design and public transportation, and I wish we'd learn from their example.

But try telling 99% of the US that 1) their shitty sprawled real estate is effectively worthless, 2) their obese asses will have to give up their cars, and 3) we've spent 70 years of infrastructure investment supporting the dumbest possible lifestyle choice.

[briandon]

I don't disagree with you per se, but I have spent nearly a decade living in a city which has amazingly great public transport, very dense living arrangements (30-story highrises are the norm), and people walk constantly.

Are you ready to go grocery shopping pretty much every single day or every other day? Or can you manage to be at home during a 6-hour window for the grocery delivery if you want to shop once a week for that stuff?

Would you get stressed waiting, at least twice a day (leaving from your floor and returning from the lobby), for elevators in a 30-story building? Remember that people in wheelchairs, kids taking their bikes downstairs to ride, workmen w/materials/tools, people moving house, etc. are all going to be using the elevators.

If you're out somewhere and buy anything (in my case, yesterday, it was a new electric toothbrush) that's not groceries or something large, like an air conditioner, you're going to have to lug it around with you until you go home, even if you have several other stops to make or errands to do. There's no such thing as going to your car and putting something in the trunk until later.

Are you ready for even short trips to take much longer? You'll need to get out of your highrise, walk for some time until you get to the public transport pick-up point (bus stop, train platform, etc.), wait a while, ride the public transport (which usually moves slower than a car even if it weren't making a bunch of other stops between your home and ultimate destination's drop-off point), and then, finally, you'll have to walk some more to reach wherever it was that you wanted to go.

If you already live in a highrise, use public transportation exclusively, and don't own a car, then I'm glad that the experience hasn't soured you on high-density living and public transportation.

[kiwidrew]

Except that's not the only style of living that HK offers.

Some people do opt for the arrangement you've just described, living in e.g. the "Lake Silver" high rises way out at the very end of the Ma On Shan metro line. Most of them don't seem to mind it, even though it means long rides on the bus or MTR to go anywhere.

But it's just as easy to live a few stops from work, in an older neighbourhood like Sa Ying Poon or Prince Edward with smaller buildings, where you have three different supermarkets within a five-minute walk and are surrounded by shops selling everythinng imaginable.

I mean, how many cities have two overlapping and completely independent public transport networks? HK has the "official" bus and metro system, but the red minibuses are essentially a rogue invisible-hand-of-the-market creation that just sprung up organically. And unlike most American cities, where the public transport struggles to even survive, both of these HK networks are thriving...

[briandon]

The overwhelming majority of people in HK live in highrises, virtually all new housing being built here (unless your uncle is a village chief and/or you're a male who can prove that he is of villager stock and has a right to build a village house) consists of giant highrises, and most of the existing housing stock consists of the same.

So, while you're correct in saying that highrise living is not the only choice, it is the reality that most people here are living in highrises and that the small percentage of people living in smaller buildings will continue to dwindle over time.

Regarding older, low-rise, buildings, those low-rise residential buildings that do exist and which aren't out in the boonies are being gradually "redeveloped", as you may already know. The government or a developer buys a certain percentage of the flats and compels the holdouts to sell, usually at a price that won't permit the residents to buy a newer flat in the same neighborhood, demolishes the building(s), and erects a huge tower block.

Regarding the minibuses, a car or taxi is still faster than taking a minibus for the same reasons that a car or taxi are faster than the MTR: no walking/waiting/walking and you're going to your destination directly rather than following a route and making lots of stops at places that you don't want to go and then.

This is a separate issue, but haven't you noticed that most of the drivers are visibly impoverished (raggy-looking clothing, many missing/black teeth, etc.) and many are senior citizens? The minibuses, especially the red ones, also tend to speed and get into lots of accidents. Rarely does more than a day or two pass without a report of a minibus ramming into something and most of the passengers being injured, or two minibuses t-boning each other and two minibus-fulls of passengers being injured, etc.

Also, you do know that most of the red minibuses are under triad control, that the drivers have to pay a huge lump sum when they start driving and then "parking fees" every month thereafter?

[gobbluth]

I do live in an urban environment (NYC for a decade now), and you're... confused on some counts. Public transportation is radically faster than cars, at least in any city with a fraction of the same population. Have you ever tried to drive through Atlanta or Miami? And living in an urban environment doesn't demand high-rise towers -- walkable townhouses and height-restricted buildings abound, and there's no shortage of human-friendly neighborhoods in New York. (I also hate midtown Manhattan, but that's nowhere near representative of city living.)

If you absolutely need a car for big purchases, Zipcar and its competitors are easily accessible. If you're older, you have BETTER options here in the form of delivery services than you'd have in a rural setting. If you'd like to get a little further away from the city in a nice, quiet Queens neighborhood, you can hope on the express train and read a book while you're zipped to your destination.

Hong Kong is a different animal just because it's, well, Hong Kong. But nothing in the world quite compares to that, and you really shouldn't associate New York or Paris with that crazy city.

[briandon]

The walkable townhouses and height-restricted buildings you're talking about (1.) only exist so long as the aesthetic/lifestyle value of a low-risey city balances against the demand for more housing and developers' desire to make money and (2.) make public transport trips take longer because you have to walk past more of your neighbors' low-rise buildings to get to a public transport hub and the bus/train/whatever has to travel farther (past the low-rises) to get anywhere and also make more stops if more hubs/stations have been built to offset the problem of people living relatively far apart in those low-rise buildings.

[gobbluth]

You, sir, have never been to Brooklyn.

[briandon]

Please, do step into my handy dandy time machine. We'll set it for thirty years in the future and then step out for a moment and count the number of hip, low-rise brownstones that we can see and then try to pick out the Brooklyner from amongst the other highrises.

I think that you're living in Brooklyn and enjoying it, which is great, and idealizing it without thinking about how Brooklyn is actually changing right around you.

[The Brooklyner is a 51-story skyscraper recently built in Brooklyn: the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooklyner ]

[bhickey]

> Or can you manage to be at home during a 6-hour window for the grocery delivery if you want to shop once a week for that stuff?

Having left London, I really do miss Ocado. Unlike the silly timing restrictions you suggest, they delivered at any hour between about 0700 and 2300 with one hour windows.

> ...ride the public transport (which usually moves slower than a car even if it weren't making a bunch of other stops between your home and ultimate destination's drop-off point)

This is just the tragedy of the commons at work. Outside of the City there are bus lanes (shared with cabs). It isn't the job of society to subsidize drivers in congested areas. There's simply no political will to squeeze private autos.

> If you already live in a highrise

You're tilting at a straw man. Single family houses and high rises aren't the only options. Greater London, for example, is full of four story row houses.

[briandon]

> Having left London, I really do miss Ocado. Unlike the > silly timing restrictions you suggest, they delivered at > any hour between about 0700 and 2300 with one hour > windows.

We really do deal with six-hour windows here (and the delivery people tend to miss even those and come late). One-hour windows sound great, especially if they never missed them. You're still stuck waiting around for a delivery person, though, even if it is just for an hour once a week.

> This is just the tragedy of the commons at work. Outside > of the City there are bus lanes (shared with cabs). It > isn't the job of society to subsidize drivers in > congested areas. There's simply no political will to > squeeze private autos.

Sorry, I should have been more clear. I wasn't saying that driving was faster than taking a bus in my city, though it is. I was actually thinking of the local rail system, the MTR. Taking a taxi anywhere or driving yourself is almost always faster than taking the MTR.

By it's very nature, public transport, which has to run on a schedule and leave gaps between runs to allow passengers to accumulate and then make multiple stops is, is often going to be slower than an individual getting into a personal vehicle and driving themselves to their destination.

> You're tilting at a straw man. Single family houses and > high rises aren't the only options. Greater London, for > example, is full of four story row houses.

I'm not British and haven't been to London (I just live in a former British colony whose development was planned by British civil servants), but the reference to Greater London seems to refer to London plus its suburbs.

Hong Kong has a lot of three-story "village houses" in what passes for rural areas here but which in reality are more like suburbs or outer boroughs.

HK village houses don't have elevators. Do the four-story row houses in Greater London have them? If so, then great. If not, then I would imagine it must be quite unpleasant for the people on the higher floors to carry their groceries (or anything else) up to their flats.

[hollerith]

Please tell us which city you just described.

[briandon]

I live in Hong Kong.

[bane]

It's not much different than in Seoul, Manhattan and central Paris.

[hollerith]

Europeans tolerate more onerous restrictions on individual liberty than Americans do. The combination of high degrees of individual liberty and high population density tends to produce a less predictable, sometimes disheartening and sometimes dangerous environment that wealthy people in the U.S. tend to prefer not to live in (at least after their young adulthoods).

The point is that there are good reasons why most Americans with the ability to do so choose to live in areas low enough in density that cars work better than public transportation and that America cannot simply copy Europe's urban planning without also copying some of Europe's laws and attitudes regarding individual liberty. (And laws and attitudes are hard to change.)

[gobbluth]

I'm sorry, but you're associating liberty with cars, and that's just not true. If you live in Nowhere, Indiana, then you're completely dependent on your car to get ANYWHERE, including to buy food, get to work, or see your mother in the hospital. If it breaks down and you can't afford the repair? How free are you to travel now?

You're not completely incorrect, insofar as European cities (and any worthwhile city) are forced to infringe to some extent on fundamentalist interpretations of property rights for urban planning. But you might as well throw up your arms and complain about building codes and zoning restrictions anywhere else if such things are such "onerous restrictions on individual liberty."

The reason why so many Americans have settled in exurban developments is because we've artificially subsidized those lifestyle with federally-funded freeways, artificially cheap gasoline, and destructive corporate attacks on public transportation systems (especially in the 1950s, check out the GM attack in Los Angeles as an example). Exurbs didn't develop organically, nor are they in any way models of efficiency, cost, or sustainability.

[hollerith]

You have misunderstood me, so let me give you an example.

When I used to live in the Mission District of San Francisco, sometimes "poor, urban" type people would stand around on the sidewalk and street in front of my window and yell at each other for hours in the early in the morning. (My guess is it had something to do with pimping and prostitution.) If I lived in an outer suburb of San Francisco (Walnut Creek miles from a BART station for example), people like that would have a hard time getting to my street, because most of them do not have cars; and since there would be nothing near my home besides other homes, it would be a boring environment for them unless perhaps they are into jogging or walking their dog or something like that. Ditto the people who used to park across the street and play their car stereo really loud. And the guy with the pick-up truck who was helping his friend move and left his car alarm on the most sensitive setting, so that it would go off every time a car passed by it. The French and other nations on the continent of Europe are much more accepting than Americans of the use various policing, administrative and legal procedures to encourage the aforementioned individuals to stop the aforementioned behaviors and conform to a quieter or more conventional patterns of behavior. This is an example of what I meant when I said that Europeans tolerate more onerous restrictions on individual liberty than Americans do, and this is a significant part of why IMO wealthy people in France mostly consider the core of Paris a nice place to live whereas wealthy people in the U.S. mostly do not want to live in American inner cities -- at least they do not want to after they turn 30 or so.

[gobbluth]

Fair enough, but that's not really more liberty. Presumably the police would also arrest a homeless guy screaming about prostitutes if he were in your front lawn in the suburbs.

You'd just like to pay extra to be so far away from everyone that you won't see homeless people. Besides the obvious suggestion of directing the money taxpayers are forced to spend on exurban roads, water pipes, etc. towards asylums, rehab clinics, and shelters... you realize that gentrification means you can have your cake and eat it too, right? Especially in NYC, while there are still tons of bums and Jersey douchebags, the gangster element has all but died off. (Though you still have stupid assholes in the Bronx and Bed-Stuy, gangs aren't the problem you see everywhere else.) Having mixed-income, dense neighborhoods makes policing WAY easier and makes NYC the safest American city.

[briandon]

Cars really do give individuals more liberty.

Replace cars with, for example, private refrigerators and public transport with communal refrigerators and think it through.

Any time that you smoosh people together and force or nudge them into using shared or communal facilities rather than their own, personal freedom of action is being curtailed.

We can argue that whatever we're getting in return is worthwhile but we can't pretend that we're not giving anything up.

[gobbluth]

Is that really a good analogy? Do you really feel that sitting in your car on a freeway is so radically different (and liberating) than sitting in a subway car?

If you're so certain that public transportation means giving something up, what is it that you're losing?

[briandon]

No analogy is perfect but, yes, that analogy is good enough.

If every car trip really did mean sitting in a traffic for an hour, then I would love public transport more. Thankfully, that's not the case.

My wife and I take taxis a lot and, even in uber-dense HK, we rarely get stuck in traffic. When we do, it's usually just at a handful of choke points, like entrances to cross-harbor tunnels, and the traffic gets moving again once one is in the tunnel.

As to what one gives up by not owning a car, living in densely populated areas, and using public transport, I would refer you to an earlier reply: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3974910

Basically, living close together and without a car means that the pain-in-the-neck factor of practically everything is increased. Everything becomes at best just a teensy bit more of a hassle and needs to be scheduled more carefully. Convenience and the ability to be spontaneous become more of a luxury.

[WildUtah]

I don't know what you are suggesting about high degrees of personal liberty and high density being incompatible. European cities and even the denser US cities like San Francisco and New York are known for better civil liberties records than the majority of the USA.

And the USA is not reluctant to really cram down civil liberties to control crime, if that's your unstated implication. The rate of imprisonment is many times higher in the USA than in Europe. You might be suggesting that controlling crime in the USA is simply impossible with anything short of a police state but criminological research indicates the high crime rates are largely a result of poor policing policy.

[cageface]

The problem is that the U.S. is huge compared to Europe. I agree that we need more mass transit but it's a different problem here.

[gobbluth]

Just because I don't want to spam with the same message, please see my response to Spullera. The argument you're using may be intuitive, but it's very incorrect.

[spullara]

You really can't compare Europe to the US. They are tiny. For example, one of the largest countries in Europe is France: slightly less than the size of Texas. It's metropolitan population is 65m. Texas is only 28m. Other countries there are even more lopsided. Just as with cellphone networks, smaller area is easier.

[gobbluth]

That's not actually true. The US is 3,794,101 sq mi. Europe is 3,930,520 sq miles

However, Europe is almost entirely concentrated in walkable, urban areas -- even beyond the major cities, small towns are accessible by train, navigable by foot, and have excellent support in the form of public transportation. If people do have "cars," they tend to be tiny or Vespas.

There's no reason we can't have the same system here, except that we absolutely suck at infrastructure investment. It's really not that hard to build an urban environment, and it's overwhelmingly popular with people who can afford it. The exurbs of Las Vegas and Miami are completely worthless, and will be even more so in a future with higher fuel costs, water scarcity, and resettlement in urban environments.

[spullara]

It really is true.

Population of Europe: 738,199,000 Population of US: 311,591,917

If the US were double density, it would have more walkable, urban areas, etc.

[gobbluth]

I'm sorry, but that's not how urban design works. We're not forced to develop proportionate to land mass. Your argument is seriously that the existence of the Dakotas prevents us from building decent cities? Are there so many people in Wyoming that we just don't have the population to build decent subways in Seattle?

We're trapped by a car-centric lifestyle, and it's absolutely poisonous.

[spullara]

Yes, basically. Though it more like the existence of twice as many twice as small cities. It also means that we devote huge amounts of infrastructure dollars to the middle of nowhere serving virtually no one. Look at the subsidies we give to "rural phone companies" or the postal service.