[ctkhn]

Surely the top way to avoid traffic congestion would be communities where it's possible to live near where you work, shop, go out, etc. and not doing everything else exactly the same but taking a slightly different highway in your car

[Aurornis]

This is possible if you’re not picky about where you live, where you work, your career options, how crowded your local vicinity is, or how much you pay for your residence.

The more your preferences or financial constraints come into play, the more you have to give up.

Most people settle in for driving because it allows them to pick from more job options than those that happen to be located near their house and more housing options than what happens to be near your job.

This didn’t matter as much 200 years ago when most people’s job options were limited to farming or something in service of farming.

It got much harder when the range of people’s jobs exploded and finding a company hiring in your specialty meant traveling some distance from home.

It gets even harder when there are two earners in a household trying to find two jobs.

[throw0101a]

> This is possible if you’re not picky about where you live, where you work, your career options, how crowded your local vicinity is, or how much you pay for your residence.

Perhaps the problem is the lack of options for those people that want human-centric (versus car-centric) communities. Maybe if we let The Market™ decide, versus forcing low-density sprawl via zoning, more options would be available.

Right now, if you look on any real estate web site, you'll probably find walkable neighbourhoods have higher prices non-walkable ones: there is demand for them, but a fixed supply since they're not being made anymore, and so they get bid up. Perhaps if there were more of them, especially around commuter rail stations, it would help.

[quantumwannabe]

We already tried that experiment. The result was Houston.

[throw0101a]

The City Beautiful channel goes over the restrictions that Houston has:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaU1UH_3B5k

For example deed restrictions, where, when a sub-division is created, the use case of the lots can never be changed. See also "residential buffering ordinance", parking requirement ordinance, historic districts, etc.

[HEmanZ]

Houston is not a free market for housing at all. They don’t have “zoning” because they call it “land use covenants” and “parking requirements” instead, and it ends up amounting to the same thing as “zoning” in other cities.

And the market doesn’t build the streets, sidewalks, or set up public transport routes.

I remember visiting my friend in an 400+ unit apartment complex in Houston. When I got up in the morning I was like “hey I’m going to walk down and get coffee.” My friend said to just Uber Eats it, I was like that’s insane. So I went down to the ground floor and found out there was literaly no way to walk to the coffee shop that was 0.1 miles away less than 30 minutes because of the absolute nightmare that is Huston streets and sidewalks.

[psd1]

I don't think we can learn much about pedestrianisation from Texas.

[lucumo]

> This is possible if you’re not picky about where you live, where you work, your career options,

Yup.

And even if you arent't picky. The amount of surface area you can cover scales quadratically with the distance you can commute (either by traveling longer, or by going faster). So as a first approximation, the amount of competition for your labour also goes up quadratically.

Job-hopping is one of the best ways to get better jobs. And it is a LOT easier if you can commute further.

[lwansbrough]

This is like, a post-hoc rationalization.

Most jobs, not all, can take place inside a city. If you build your cities densely, people can live and work within the city and have all their needs met without the need for a car (see: the great cities of the world)

If you design economic hubs properly, businesses can be located within reach of homes without the need for cars.

If you instead prioritize the need for, I don’t know, a monoculture lawn and separation from lower class people, then you’re choosing to build suburbs. Once a city has built enough suburbs, businesses become out of reach without the use of a car.

[rwyinuse]

What if I want my own garden and not monoculture lawn? What if I want my children to be able to walk in nature near their home? Neither is possible in a densely built city where there are only apartments.

Then there are all the social problems, bad neighbours that become more common in densely built areas. I don't want to deal with that. Suburbs are popular because they provide a superior quality of life for many people.

Of course in an ideal world everyone would be allowed to do fully remote work if possible, and people like me could move to countryside.

[lucumo]

Since I've moved to my current home, I've had jobs in about 6 different towns and cities. I think for all of them I had colleagues that cycled to work and colleagues that drove for an hour or more.

All these jobs had homes and shops within walking distance. But they are not within walking distance of each other.

[Aurornis]

> Most jobs, not all, can take place inside a city. If you build your cities densely, people can live and work within the city and have all their needs met without the need for a car (see: the great cities of the world)

Most people do not want to live in dense cities in high rises.

The number of jobs which cannot be moved into dense city high rises is much higher than you’re thinking. It might seem that way if your world is office jobs and email jobs, but there’s much more to the world of work than that.

Dense cities also have very high turnover as people grow up and want families.

It’s not about having lawns and staying away from “lower class people”. This feels like a poor attempt to cast moral shade on people who choose not to live in a high rise.

[HEmanZ]

Most people who live in dense cities don’t live in high rises…

It is very clear you have never lived in a well functioning city before, and just have no idea what you are talking about. Take the L and admit you just don’t have experience with it. North Americans often don’t because North American cities are extremely bad in this regard.

[ryandrake]

I'm sure there are plenty of people, who, regardless of how well functioning a city is, don't want to live in one. Myself included.

[HEmanZ]

Absolutely. It’s just the very anti city people never ever seem to use excuses that are actually valid.

Like if “the things that brings me most joy in life require owning lots of land” or “I don’t like people and every day I have to be near them drains me”, those are really valid reasons and there are many more.

What that tells me is either they have a caricature of cities in their head, or (more likely) being anti city is an identity and not based on anything actually about cities per-say.

[asdff]

The explosion was also due to the car not only spreading low density housing out that would have been a tough sell previously, but also job sprawl to suburban and exurban greenfield.

There used to be natural agglomeration to central well connected nodes before the car. Many cities enacted height limits in the early 1900s with the specific aim to spread out development that was dense enough to make serving basic infrastructure, such as water, power, transit, and cleaning the mounting horseshit off the roads, increasingly expensive and difficult. Early real estate barons would buy marginal land and develop a streetcar line that ran into the job center, and sell plots off that line now that it finally had some utility in the form of a connection to jobs. Even if you worked in something specialized back then, chances are it was close to where most other people were working. Offices were downtown. Government buildings were downtown. Hospitals were downtown. Manufacturing was downtown. Ports and railheads were downtown. All of that snowballing enjoyed by cities exploded with the car.

[HEmanZ]

I am liking the term “car brained” more and more for this type of attitude.

Have you ever heard of trains, busses, bikes? The options for transportation are not binary car or no car. Maybe in North America where they refuse to provide even crappy public transport in most cities it feels this way, but in the rest of the world they are smart enough to build trains and don’t have this problem.

[mayneack]

The relative price of those cramped urban centers where this is true suggests that at least a few more people would choose this path if it were cheaper.

[dsl]

Here is your easy solution:

Per employee tax = $0.20 * commute_miles * 2 * (commute_miles / 10)^2 * mandated_office_days_per_year * (1 + 2 * share_of_workforce_over_10_miles)^2

Tech companies can have more distributed offices and assign employees based on geography instead of teams, go back to WFH, pay employees enough to live close to their mega campuses, or pay out the ass into adding more lanes.

[a2dam]

And the easiest way to do this is to lift restrictions on being able to build housing near workplaces (i.e. anywhere housing might reasonably and gainfully be built). Most traffic is caused by building restrictions.

[baggy_trough]

If you don't have a community like that, then the best way is congestion pricing.

[antiframe]

The best way is to change our communities, even if that takes time and money.

[collabs]

It is difficult for me to admit I'm an idiot but when I was younger and living in an apartment, I loved the idea of a single family home. And now that I'm living in a single family home, I feel like I was wrong all along. Not that I want to go back to the apartment I was in before. Dear lord no but the idea of a mixed use building not too tall only like first floor with high ceilings for business or shops with two or at the most three floors above for residential units feels like the ideal sweet spot. Ideally with a lot of these close together to have everything I need within a walking distance but also a subway station within a walking distance if I need to go farther.

[segfaltnh]

I wasted a decade trying to live in single family homes. Now at 40 my wife and I are living in a small city in a condo and couldn't be happier. Neither of us enjoyed the workload of managing a SFH. Dont force yourself to stay if you aren't happy, you'll wish you moved sooner (I do).

[SilverElfin]

Do you have kids? I feel like apartment living as a family is worse than a spacious single family home and yard and all that. I suspect that preference holds true for most people.

[asdff]

Most kids are only into playing in the yard for a couple years really. Before long they are preteens living in their room, probably seething at the fact they need a ride from a parent to hang out with any of their friends.

Apartments can also have stuff you could never afford that a kid would like, such as a massive pool (try pricing out a new build pool these days).

[fragmede]

Community shared parks can serve the purpose that a SFH yard serves for kids, but you have to interact with other people and we can't have that.

[breezybottom]

Lmao what? Everything about this comment is nuts.

[throw0101a]

> I feel like apartment living as a family is worse than a spacious single family home and yard and all that. I suspect that preference holds true for most people.

And families do it in NYC, and Hong Kong, and Germany, and Spain (AFAICT, 65%), and…

[inigyou]

They manage, but it's not a good experience. The apartments are usually too small for families and the ones that are big enough are too expensive. This is solvable, but has not been solved.

Think about having to share a bedroom with your child, and when they're old enough to need their own one, putting up a partition wall and having each be less than half the size of a normal bedroom, very cramped. And you don't get a living room. (If you did have a living room, now it's your bedroom while the child gets the actual bedroom)

[matwood]

People also change and want different things at different parts of their life. Young and single - living in an apartment is amazing. Once someone is coupled up, has kids, and some animals, a SFH also looks much more appealing. Once the kids are gone, then an apartment/condo starts to look pretty attractive again.

[breezybottom]

Never in my life has living in an apartment seemed appealing. But I suppose that depends on the apartments you can afford.

[ctkhn]

Depending on where you are, there are nice middle class apartments that can be family friendly. I have friends not in tech in my same neighborhood with a three bedroom place for 1500. Granted this is the midwest and not SF but their place is near the train to get downtown for work and surrounded with a lot of parks for baseball, soccer etc for kids

[bluGill]

A not top tall building doesn't have enough people to be mixed use. Cities often cheat their with several side streets of residential (it might be zoned mix use but it isn't) only for every street of mixed use. People on the non mixed use streets travel to the mixed use one.

[adrianN]

There is little hope for that as long as driving is heavily subsidized.

[xnx]

How is driving subsidized?

[oblio]

By providing free or cheap parking for people that don't live there. Urban land is extremely expensive and parking generally doesn't cost what it should, other land uses would provide a lot more revenue. Parking in US cities is greatly over provisioned to make life easy for suburbanites, destroying urban fabric.

[asdff]

Massive ongoing investment into roads. EV incentives that would pay for 3-4 ebikes outright. Big 3 bailout. Cash for clunkers. Impact fees from developers towards roads. As others said parking requirements. There is so much beyond that too.

[ErroneousBosh]

> Massive ongoing investment into roads

Okay, let's stop spending money on roads then.

How are you at riding your bike through mud? Pretty good? Got nice chunky tyres?

[adrianN]

One example is the requirement to have parking spaces.

[denkmoon]

Like everything else community construction responds to incentives. So we need to structurally incentivise short distance commute communities. Congestion pricing seems like a reasonable first step.

[baggy_trough]

What if you don't want to live in a dense community?

[slyall]

Well just live somewhere that is so lacking in density there is no congestion.

Or a small town that is surrounded by farms.

Just avoid suburban housing as far as the eye can see with a limited number of roads everyone gets funneled on to.

[SilverElfin]

I’ve done that and those areas change over time. A town becomes more like a small city. A small city becomes more dense. Etc. Then all the urbanists move the goal posts and ask why you didn’t live somewhere else.

[asdff]

Just move to the rust belt. If you are going to move to a growing job market don’t be surprised when the job market grows and triggers demand for development.

[cman1444]

Very case dependent of course. There are loads of small towns that have stagnant or shrinking populations all across the US.

[denkmoon]

God forbid society grows around you. How dare all those productive aspiring people build things near you. Did they not know you had exclusive right of refusal on nearby development?

[david-gpu]

Then you don't. But don't expect people who live in urban centers to cater to your needs when you don't live there.

[clickety_clack]

This sounds simple, but many people are already living further away because they can’t afford to live downtown near where they work. Add kids into the equation, and many people who could live there without them are also forced out.

Congestion pricing is a regressive tax.

[7jjjjjjj]

The most regressive tax imaginable is a flat fee for every person with no consideration of income. That is exactly the effect of requiring everyone to own a car.

[asdff]

It isn’t a flat fee per se, if only because wealthier people are too prideful. Rich man buys a 100k mercedes. Poor man buys that mercedes 15 or 20 years later for 3k. It still does what it did when it cost 100k.

[inigyou]

It's a 3k tax, the other 97k wasn't part of the tax.

Used car prices are more like 10k now anyway. Used Mercedes, probably 40k.

[asdff]

I can tell you don’t check used car prices

[refurb]

That seems like an impossible task in today’s world of layoffs and needing to jump jobs to get pay raises.

You could live where you work and suddenly your next job is a 30 min drive away.

How could you ensure that enough companies existing within a 10 mile radius to provided varied employment to all the residents?

[mcdeltat]

B-b-bb-b-bbb-but then how will I have my 3 storey house with a 100 acre backyard, 2 pools, and 14 cars??? Don't you know it's LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE to live without these basics?? What are you, a communist or something??????

[protocolture]

>Surely the top way to avoid traffic congestion would be communities where it's possible to live near where you work, shop, go out, etc. and not doing everything else exactly the same but taking a slightly different highway in your car

I dont even know what this would look like in practice. It feels like an inner city thing, lifestyle priced accordingly.

What Socialists/Communists/Liberals/Conservatives/Local and State Governments/Weird Internet Tech Bros all seem to forget is that people have different priorities, and you cant build 1 house that suits every priority.

I am house hunting at the moment, and houses optimised for walking to shops are at the low end, when what I need is a big yard for my kid to run around in and a shed for my blacksmithing tools (and ideally neighbors far enough away that they dont mind metal being banged on in the morning) while also being within reasonable driving distance of a few of the sites I work at.

[ctkhn]

It looks like a lot of neighborhoods in American cities that are adjacent or outside the downtown business district or even suburbs on the commuter rail lines. A main commercial street surrounded by 1900-1950s houses and apartments, probably with new built mixed use buildings too. Most smaller cities and even big towns have neighborhoods like this based on my last 10 years of road trips across the US so it's not just NY SF etc where this is possible. This is for the the largest cities like NY DC Chicago etc or even smaller ones like Sacramento or Louisville. Not sure we can work out housing policy to be blacksmith friendly and it seems like a pain even out in the suburbs