[HN Gopher] Interchange in Houston is the same size as an entire...
___________________________________________________________________
Interchange in Houston is the same size as an entire city center in
Italy
Author : pseudolus
Score : 260 points
Date : 2020-08-31 14:20 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.texasmonthly.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.texasmonthly.com)
| totalZero wrote:
| I disagree with the notion that space is better used if it
| exhibits greater density of population.
|
| I don't believe it is very easy to drive in Siena, Italy. I also
| don't believe it is very easy to live under a highway
| interchange. To each space its own.
| tssva wrote:
| I also disagree but let's assume it is true. Houston would
| overall be a better user of space than Siena. The population
| density of the entire city of Siena is around 1200 per square
| mile. For Houston it is over 3600 per square mile.
| dia80 wrote:
| In Siena, you walk.
| totalZero wrote:
| In Houston, you drive.
|
| There is no reason to judge space in one place by the use
| patterns of a totally different place.
| kaesar14 wrote:
| Walking sounds less dangerous, less polluting, and better
| for overall health
| leetcrew wrote:
| it is also slower and you cannot bring nearly as much
| with you. I love walking to restaurants, but I prefer to
| drive to the furniture store.
| j8014 wrote:
| Do you shower at the place you are walking or riding your
| bike? Just sweat your ass off all day long and hope
| everyone around you doesn't mind? You have about 1-2
| minutes before your sweating through your clothing in
| Houston. It's 95F and ONLY 60% humidity right now.
| kaesar14 wrote:
| Sounds like the kind of place humanity shouldn't be
| living
| crmrc114 wrote:
| I have lived in walking cities, I prefer to have a car. I
| can enjoy my own music or podcast- my own schedule in the
| case of mass transit. I can also enjoy my own aircon and
| heat settings. I know lots of people want to bike/walk
| everywhere- that is just not for me. I think this comes up
| everytime someone talks about urban planning here. Some
| people just have no interest in living within high density
| areas- I am one of them. I like being able to use a
| telescope and not hear cars.
| ChickeNES wrote:
| > I can enjoy my own music or podcast- my own schedule in
| the case of mass transit. I can also enjoy my own aircon
| and heat settings.
|
| I'm honestly confused, how are these things not possible
| in the city? My earbuds worked perfectly fine on the bus
| and train pre-covid, and my apartment has its own
| thermostat (and indeed its own HVAC system)
| ufmace wrote:
| I lean the other way, but to each their own. Dunno why
| you're getting downvoted so hard for not being like
| everyone else.
|
| FWIW though, listening on headphones works perfectly well
| while walking or on mass transit. Scheduling isn't too
| big of a deal when the bus or train or whatever runs
| every 5 minutes or so.
|
| I think the real reason though is more that I just really
| like standing and walking, and dislike sitting still for
| long periods. I also kind of dislike the stress and
| responsibility of having a car.
| [deleted]
| oblio wrote:
| Tragedy of the commons, though.
|
| Your immediate best interest might be bad for the
| community.
| johnisgood wrote:
| Well, in all fairness, s/he did say:
|
| > I prefer to have a car.
|
| > I like being able to use a telescope and not hear cars.
|
| So I am not sure s/he cares much about the commons. :D
| crmrc114 wrote:
| I mean, like I also have bees and livestock. Not sure why
| my parent comment here is getting downvoted like crazy.
| But yeah some people just don't like the cosmopolitanism.
| Then again I enjoy Walden and nature. This is getting a
| bit meta and off topic. It does seem like any mention of
| cars on HN will get a slew of automobile haters and
| lovers in a flamewar. Not my goal here. Just saying
| different strokes, the common good depends on your
| optics.
| [deleted]
| kfarr wrote:
| One causes destruction of our shared planet and personal
| debt
| naringas wrote:
| I bet it's also not necessary to drive in Siena, Italy
| totalZero wrote:
| And yet it's necessary to drive in Houston.
|
| Imagine judging Siena based on the ease of driving. That
| would be equally as arbitrary as judging Houston by its space
| allocation to roadway interchanges.
| register wrote:
| In Siena it's just a pleasure to walk. And if you have the luck
| to live in the city center you just walk to the main square and
| spend your time there sipping a glass of Montepulciano at a
| local bar.
| nend wrote:
| I think the argument is that space is better used by designing
| for people, not for cars. Sometimes that means population
| density, but sometimes it means open plazas, pedestrian only
| streets, parks, etc.
| totalZero wrote:
| This is the part that got a few nanometers underneath my
| skin:
|
| _Hendrix pulled this eye-opening comparison from a report
| compiled by the U.K.'s Building Better, Building Beautiful
| Commission, which sternly suggests that housing 30,000
| Italians is less wasteful and more sustainable than using the
| same amount of acreage to simply move cars around. There's
| truth to that, of course [...]_
|
| There's no truth to that, of course. Houston is a gigantic
| port city and population center, in a region of the USA where
| automobiles are almost essential to life because everything
| is spread out and public transportation is sparse. Even if
| you only focus on designing for people, there are people
| commuting in those automobiles and their quality of life goes
| up when their daily commute doesn't include a series of
| congested off-ramps and on-ramps in bumper-to-bumper traffic.
|
| In Houston, the user drives. Just because Tuscany is nice
| doesn't mean there is any reason why space in places where
| the use case is different should be judged with Tuscany in
| mind as an ideal.
|
| To take it to the extreme, this article is akin to a
| comparison between the ISS and a soccer field. The author
| decided that the soccer field is a better use of space
| because it accommodates multiple times as many participants
| as the ISS.
| abstractbarista wrote:
| Now let's compare the GDP each supports.
| mc32 wrote:
| Ok? And?
|
| It's interesting trivia but it doesn't mean much. A well packed
| slum could fit 10x that amount in that land. Or you could have a
| vineyard or you could have a train station.
|
| It's an arbitrary comparison.
|
| Land gets used in many different ways that make sense for the
| local people. Some seem "better" but that requires certain
| "assumptions ". Is arid desert "wasted"?
| save_ferris wrote:
| The article goes on to discuss the issue of sprawl and how
| cities like Houston are building themselves into a corner by
| constantly expanding infrastructure like this. The ironic part
| of this comparison is that Siena is a much older community than
| Houston, which, like most of America, embraced a sprawl
| mentality in the 50's as a Cold War risk mitigation strategy.
|
| Climate change is arguably a more pressing threat to Houston
| than thermonuclear war, but the city doesn't have many other
| options than to continue sprawling.
| criddell wrote:
| There are lots of options for Houston to evolve. The city is
| mostly how the electorate wants it.
| vidanay wrote:
| Kowloon Walled City was 50k population in a surface area of
| only 6.4 acres (2.6 hectare).
| postingawayonhn wrote:
| Now compare Manhattan.
| apocalyptic0n3 wrote:
| DFW Airport alone has 80% of the total land area that Manhattan
| does, which is always an interesting little bit of trivia.
| csours wrote:
| Well, no one was using the land at the time[0]. Everything
| has grown to touch DFW airport - I lived literally across the
| street from it in Euless.
|
| Also, a lot of the land there is used by businesses like UPS,
| Fed-Ex, etc.
|
| 0. I'm sure someone was, but not very many people.
| apocalyptic0n3 wrote:
| I'm not saying it's a waste of space or anything. Just
| that's it's interesting how large it is in comparison to
| Manhattan. It's about as useful a comparison as the one
| made in the article, frankly.
| exabrial wrote:
| The elephant in the room is the assumption that _everyone wants
| to be stacked on top of each other_.
|
| I do agree that designing cities around cars has ruined a lot of
| nice places though.
| oblio wrote:
| They don't want to be stacked, but they do want jobs, they want
| Chinese/Indian/French/... restaurants, they want daycares, they
| want schools, they want high-schools, they want notaries, and
| hospitals and clinics, they want shopping malls and delis, they
| want pharmacies and pawn shops, ...
|
| It's almost like wanting 50000 people with different
| professions nearby means you have to live next to 50000 people.
| Until we discover teleportation.
| johnbrodie wrote:
| I'm confused as to whether you're describing urban living or
| suburban living. Both have everything mentioned, the latter
| without being stacked on top of your neighbors.
| matchbok wrote:
| In no way do the suburbs have the quality and diversity of
| food that any urban core does. 0%. I've been in both, they
| simple do not compare.
| rhino369 wrote:
| True, but that's mostly about the class of the people in
| those areas. Working class neighborhoods in dense urban
| areas aren't filled with a variety of great restaurants.
|
| If you took everyone in the suburbs and built them dense
| city neighborhoods they wouldn't suddenly have great
| places to eat.
| bluGill wrote:
| My house has equal or better diversity of food than
| whatever city you live in. I cook it myself. If course my
| house needs to have a nice kitchen because I spend a lot
| of time there. Is the compromise worth it? I think so,
| but you may be different.
| NationalPark wrote:
| Well, most people don't have a family member who is an
| expert chef in hundreds of different cuisines and willing
| to cook up meals to order on a whim.
| ska wrote:
| I love cooking also and primarily rely on it to feed
| myself and others. And I'll at least try to cook nearly
| anything. Guests routinely praise the results highly; so
| far as I can tell this is genuine.
|
| There is no way in which I consider this a replacement
| for restaurants. Or vice versa. You can value both, one,
| or neither, but they aren't the same thing.
| vel0city wrote:
| There's little reason why it would be impossible to have
| though. I live in a suburb. You'd be hard pressed to
| think of a type of food that I couldn't get within a
| 15min drive. Rotating sushi restaurant? Check. Lebanese
| bakery? Check. Canadian poutine? Check. Noodle restaurant
| - you want Japanese, Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese? Which of
| the half dozen hot pot restaurants would you want to go
| to? Don't forget to pick up some borscht from the Russian
| restaurant. Meanwhile I go downtown and there's less
| choice of restaurants than the suburb I live in. Turns
| out you don't have to live in San Fransisco or Manhattan
| to have more than just a McDonalds to eat at in the US.
|
| Many suburbs elsewhere may only have Applebees as the
| pinnacle of culture, but that is not a given. Not every
| city is the same around the world. Not every suburb is
| the same.
| Dahoon wrote:
| A 10 minute walk is more realistic to compare the two.
| Jumping to a _15 minute drive_ makes it very apparent you
| are an American.
| oblio wrote:
| It's in the name. You only have "sub-urban living" because
| there is an "urban" nearby.
| luckylion wrote:
| You don't have to go to the urban center for everyday
| things though, you go there because that's where the jobs
| are.
|
| When full remote becomes more wide-spread, that might
| change things rapidly.
| oblio wrote:
| It's not only jobs. Do you want to watch theater? Opera?
| Concerts? Major sports events? Do you want to join a club
| for an obscure African sport? I could go on and on.
|
| There is a reason we've been congregating in cities for
| millennia, despite having to overcome many diseases which
| are made worse by overcrowdedness.
| vel0city wrote:
| You can live in the suburbs and still enjoy theater,
| concerts, opera, etc. I live in a suburb. There is a
| performing arts center a bicycle ride away which outside
| of these Covid times had some kind of opera or symphony
| or ballet or something along those lines going on. The
| university nearby often had shows well. If you wanted to
| see a live show you could probably find one within 15min
| any given weekend.
|
| There is a light rail line running through the suburb
| which connects downtown. Its a 30 minute train ride to go
| to the big event venue for big sports and concerts. This
| precludes the idea of going to the local minor league
| teams in the area as well which can often be just as much
| fun to watch and follow and far cheaper to attend.
|
| There are club sports which participate in the park in my
| neighborhood. All I need to do is walk down the street
| and find people playing various kinds of sports. There
| are larger suburb-city owned sports complex on the bike
| trails for even more congregation.
|
| Living in a suburb does not mean you can never go and see
| a show or a sports game or a concert.
| philwelch wrote:
| Much of that has been largely replaced with electronic
| media, and what remains is a "once in a while" occasion
| that people are willing to travel to. These days, much of
| the time, city-dwellers are the ones who have to travel
| to suburban venues.
|
| The main reasons for urbanization were always economic
| and political. Rome was not built for the Coliseum; the
| Coliseum was built for Rome.
| jschwartzi wrote:
| There are still a lot of us who really enjoy theater,
| opera, concerts, shows, and the like. And those things
| can only be had in a city.
|
| It's true that local amphitheaters may book a few good
| live acts every year but that selection pales in
| comparison to what you can get every weekend in a
| reasonably-sized city. There are some fun local theater
| groups in my suburb too. But sometimes I really want to
| watch something other than Shakespeare.
| philwelch wrote:
| That's true. But since the mid-20th century, most people
| enjoy music, "dramatic productions" (for lack of a better
| generic term), and live sports electronically rather than
| in person.
|
| I know it's not the same, and I also enjoy live
| entertainment and the other amenities of cities. I just
| don't think these amenities are historically a prime
| driver for urbanization. People historically move to
| cities for economic reasons, providing a lucrative and
| competitive market for entertaining them.
| luckylion wrote:
| > It's not only jobs. Do you want to watch theater?
| Opera? Concerts? Major sports events? Do you want to join
| a club for an obscure African sport? I could go on and
| on.
|
| It's primarily jobs though. I know quite a few people who
| don't care enough for the Opera or obscure African sports
| to pay two or three times as much in rent and taxes. It's
| a mixed bag, some love living in the city, but all _have
| to_ live in the city if they want to work in certain jobs
| & have a career.
|
| > There is a reason we've been congregating in cities for
| millennia, despite having to overcome many diseases which
| are made worse by overcrowdedness.
|
| Yes, primarily because that's where the opportunities
| were, always. The colorful cultural life you describe was
| (and still is) enjoyed by the urban elite, that wasn't a
| thing for the working poor in e.g. 19th century Paris.
| Their entertainment would be a bottle of wine and
| laughter with friends after slaving away in the
| factories; much the same they'd have in a village, just
| minus having a job and some money. Today's working class
| might go to the movies (if they don't prefer Netflix),
| the theaters, opera houses, obscure sports etc are upper
| class things.
|
| That might be changing, though I'm not convinced we'll
| see full remote work for large amounts of office jobs.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| The urban poor in the 19th century went to see the
| performing arts, too. Yes, some theaters and operas were
| strictly for the bourgeoisie, but there were theaters for
| the proletariat too (and whole genres of plays written to
| appeal to them), and vaudeville/music-hall type venues. I
| don't know where you got this idea that the masses could
| only make their own entertainment at home.
| luckylion wrote:
| It's not that they "could only" do that, it's that their
| primary life wasn't full of cultural entertainment as the
| comment made it sound. They came to the cities looking
| for work and and opportunity, not from a late-20th-
| century sense of "small town life isn't interesting
| enough".
|
| The life described is one of privilege, not of the lower
| classes. It's pubs vs operas.
| ghaff wrote:
| Some jobs. There are more than there used to be in some
| cities but most technology jobs are still in suburban
| campuses and industrial parks.
| [deleted]
| pif wrote:
| I agree with you, and I expressed the same point four years
| ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11908567
| graeme wrote:
| You can still buy seclusion and low density in Europe! But in
| the USA it's your only option in new cities.
| wongarsu wrote:
| As a European, I don't like living in the same house as 5 other
| families, whose sleep schedule doesn't necessarily align with
| mine. The acoustic isolation is probably a lot better than in
| typical US houses, but not perfect either.
|
| However I do like living 3 minutes from the next supermarket,
| and 20 minutes from the city center with all the shop, and 25
| minutes from my work (all distances by foot).
|
| I would love to have all the advantages without any of the
| disadvantages, but at least around here most people prefer
| living closer together over commuting longer distances.
| fireattack wrote:
| >25 minutes from my work
|
| This is definitely ideal, but is it achievable (in _average_
| , not for any individual) in larger cities even if they are
| built for walk/public transit?
|
| I don't have much experience in Europe, but I knew in Tokyo,
| which probably has the best public transit in the world, the
| average commute time is one hour. This is obviously an
| extreme example as Tokyo is a megacity, but I think majority
| of people cannot live 25 minutes from their work for any
| cities that have 1M+ populations, regardless how the city is
| built.
| wongarsu wrote:
| > I think majority of people cannot live 25 minutes from
| their work for any cities that have 1M+ populations
|
| I generally agree, though in cities like Paris you can get
| close. But 1M+ is very big by European standards. There are
| only 34 cities on the entire continent that fit that
| description [1], and there are multiple capitals [2] half
| that size (Dublin and Lisbon each have around half a
| million inhabitants).
|
| Once you get down to ~300k or fewer citizens commute times
| drop a lot. That's really how the vast majority of the
| population lives.
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_cities_by
| _pop...
|
| 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_the_Euro
| pean...
| luckylion wrote:
| The parent comment said their 25 minutes was "by foot".
| I've grown up and lived for most of my life in a large
| German city. I know very few people who can walk 25 minutes
| or less to get to their work.
|
| Most people use public transportation, and that's usually a
| 5-10 minute walk to/from the station on each side, and
| changing trains once or twice. Among my peers, it's usually
| 30-45 minutes with public transportation. Half that by car,
| if they don't work in the inner city.
| occamrazor wrote:
| For a reasonable price one can have _either_ a single-family
| house, _or_ an apartment close to the city centre in most
| European towns. Having both usually is possible for an
| exorbitant price.
| mcguire wrote:
| "Reasonable" by San Francisco standards, or normal human
| beings'?
| ghaff wrote:
| The Bay Area is mostly an outlier compared to most other
| places. (And the Bay Area is a bit unusual in that, if
| you're commuting, it's hard to reasonably commute out of
| expensive housing because the South Bay, Marin, Berkeley,
| are also hugely expensive not just the city.
|
| In the East Bay you can start to approach reasonable but
| if you're working in the South Bay, your commute won't be
| reasonable and access to the city for recreation may not
| be great either.
| joshvm wrote:
| I feel like this is more an issue with cheap construction
| (and what people will pay for) than anything else. I've
| stayed in people's apartments in the UK where the light
| fittings rattle if upstairs is running a wash. These flats
| aren't cheap either, in the South East they're eye-wateringly
| expensive for the build quality (eg 250k for an "entry" two
| bed flat in a commuter town). Having lived up north for a few
| years in a detached house with a garden, it would be
| extremely difficult to go back to a flat (especially one in
| London that costs double the price for half the space). There
| is a massive supermarket five minutes down the road from our
| house and town is 15 mins drive. These places absolutely
| exist for reasonable prices.
|
| When/if we finally buy, we're looking at a rural, passive
| self-build where we can work remotely. The cost is about the
| same as a town house these days.
|
| There isn't any technical reason why you couldn't put in
| proper isolation between floors or walls, aside from the fact
| it would slow down construction and be expensive. Proper
| insulation (both acoustic and thermal) also makes rooms
| smaller in a given footprint which is an issue for marketing.
| crispyambulance wrote:
| > assumption that _everyone wants to be stacked on top of each
| other_
|
| It's also an assumption that everyone wants to begin and end
| every trip, no matter how trivial, with a parking spot. It's an
| assumption that people will want to drive in traffic for 20
| minutes minimum to get to a supermarket, do anything with their
| kids, or anything outside their property line.
|
| The notion of "stacked on top of each other" has unpleasant
| connotations, but there are many different ways to live in a
| dense city. Would you feel "stacked on top of each other" in a
| Parisian townhouse with a magnificent shared courtyard, 12 foot
| ceilings, and everything you could possibly want a short walk
| or subway ride away?
| maxsilver wrote:
| > Would you feel "stacked on top of each other" in a Parisian
| townhouse with a magnificent shared courtyard, 12 foot
| ceilings, and everything you could possibly want a short walk
| or subway ride away?
|
| No, I wouldn't feel "stacked on top of each other" if I were
| a _multi-millionaire_ in Paris.
|
| But, in the real world, your talking about putting families
| into 600sqft (at very best) boxes, with audible neighbors on
| every side of the unit, and no way to go anywhere (no
| parking, no meaningful transport, because 'everything we'd
| let you have is a short walk away')
|
| If you actually do what you've described, and give everyone
| their own townhouse, you've just reinvented the modern
| suburb. Because that's what modern suburbs look like,
| everyone in a townhouse, or a townhouse with some small
| strips of yard around it.
|
| > but there are many different ways to live in a dense city
|
| Sure, but only if you are fantastically wealthy.
| abraxas wrote:
| Nonsense. There are very walkable and _affordable_ cities
| with pleasant neighborhoods that don 't break the bank in
| all parts of the world (sans North America). Off the top of
| my head and from first hand experience:
|
| - Warsaw
|
| - Glasgow
|
| - Porto
|
| - Lisbon
|
| - Athens (Greece)
|
| - Berlin
|
| - Budapest
|
| - Barcelona (OK, this one gets pricey but is superbly laid
| out)
| smerdyakov wrote:
| To be fair at least some of these cities aren't described
| as affordable by locals. Berliners are constantly
| complaining about the rent prices.
| abraxas wrote:
| I also heard that lately. But up until the recent run up
| in prices it was quite the bargain for what you were
| getting.
| siliconvalley1 wrote:
| Probably true of locals of every city in the world but
| Berlin in particular is still very cheap relative to many
| western EU cities.
|
| Numbeo cost of living index has it 153rd in the world
| including rent and it's well below places like Houston
| which is probably the cheapest large top tier city in the
| US.
| kmlx wrote:
| two issues with that list: most of those cities are poor,
| or at least not as affluent as others. and except
| glasgow, none accept english speakers.
|
| and since we're doing lists, these are the most expensive
| cities i lived in (coincidentally some of them are the
| best cities in the world to live in, bar none):
|
| - sydney
|
| - tokyo
|
| - singapore
|
| - hong kong
|
| - london
|
| all top notch, all extremely expensive.
|
| moral of the story is: you get what you pay for.
| mamon wrote:
| Warsaw is TERRIBLE place to live. The city is ugly and
| dirty and always stuck in traffic (and yes, busses get
| stuck in traffic too), most office jobs are located in
| two main hubs, and it typically takes at least 30 minutes
| to get there by car (but then there's usually no place to
| park) or 45 by public transport. I'm very glad that the
| pandemic forced my company to go all-remote, because I
| was wasting a lot of time on my commute.
|
| Yes, small grocery stores are at every corner but for
| other things, like clothes or electronics you still have
| to go to a big shopping mall, at least 2-3 miles away.
| Oh, and did I mention all those are closed almost every
| Sunday?
|
| As for apartment prices even for really well paid
| software developer the choice is basically between buying
| a small (500 sqft) flat close to work, or bigger
| (800-1000 sqft) far away from it, with the added
| inconvenience of jet planes waking you up in the middle
| of the night, because Warsaw is stupid enough to have big
| international airport located near the city center.
|
| EDIT: Another thing: after more intensive rains some of
| the subway stations get flooded, so they are out of
| service for several hours. Not that there are many subway
| stations in Warsaw - just 34, forming one and half line
| mcguire wrote:
| Upside: an apartment in Warsaw is 2114 Zloty (about
| $600). Downside: it's 38 sq m (410 sq ft). On the other
| hand, 650-1000 sq ft apartments go for 4500 Zloty
| ($1200), so go pack your bags now!
| (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109102/poland-
| average-r...) Want to buy? 2000 Euro / sq m.
| (https://www.globalpropertyguide.com/Europe/Poland/Price-
| Hist...)
|
| Budapest? Average apartment size in Hungary is 77 sq m.
| Average in Budapest is 57-65 m^2. You Forints go a long
| way: 2824 / sq m (~$10?!?). I'm in! (https://www.towerbud
| apest.com/en/property_management/news/an...)
| betaby wrote:
| I would say those are very expensive for the local
| salaries.
| abraxas wrote:
| In those countries it _really_ depends what your job is.
| If you're a teacher or a bus driver then yes rent is too
| damn high.
|
| If on the other hand, you have a corporate job at a
| branch of a western company it's extremely cheap.
| Software developers in Warsaw easily make 10-20K PLN per
| month thus having rent costs less than a quarter of their
| paycheck.
| betaby wrote:
| Still wouldn't call that cheap percentage wise. Software
| developer in Montreal pays about 25-30% of the salary for
| 100m2 as well.
| abraxas wrote:
| Yeah but Monteral is frigid for 8 months in a year and
| has so so public transit IMO. It is in Canada though
| which I dearly love (but not for its weather or its
| cities).
| wozniacki wrote:
| The cities you list are not exactly diverse economic
| powerhouses in the same way even Houston is. A comparison
| of the "GDPs" of those cities would show that much.
|
| Also no one wants to walk through blighted or a high
| crime neighborhood. American cities have a lot more
| diversity than any of the cities you mention with income
| disparities separating various races and stocks of
| people. Homogeneity of the populaces involved is a factor
| often totally and wholly ignored in these comparisons of
| "walkable and affordable" cities.
|
| Walking through even the ghetto-est part of Belfast may
| not be the same as walking through the same in Opa-locka,
| Miami-Dade County, Florida. There are no racial
| boundaries to overcome in Belfast or Budapest. Not even
| remotely close to the extent we encounter in America.
| Like I said this metric should be factored into these
| conversations.
| crispyporkbites wrote:
| > Walking through even the ghetto-est part of Belfast may
| not be the same as walking through the same in Opa-locka,
| Miami-Dade County, Florida. There are no racial
| boundaries to overcome in Belfast or Budapest. Not even
| remotely close to the extent we encounter in America.
|
| I don't know what Opa Locka is like but Belfast is not a
| good example to compare to.
| rgblambda wrote:
| >>Walking through even the ghetto-est part of Belfast may
| not be the same as walking through the same in Opa-locka,
| Miami-Dade County, Florida. There are no racial
| boundaries to overcome in Belfast or Budapest.
|
| I think you may have picked the worst possible example
| for articulating your point.
| abraxas wrote:
| Is this your long winded way of saying "I'm scared of
| black people"?
|
| There are plenty of very diverse races living in Europe
| and nobody is scared of them.
| pueblito wrote:
| That is completely not what he said and you know it. You
| should be ashamed of yourself for taking a sincere and
| thoughtful reply and twisting it to call him a racist.
| abraxas wrote:
| I did not call him racist so don't put words in my mouth.
| I said that he sounded like he was scared of Black
| Americans which I think is rather obvious from what he
| wrote.
|
| Granted I'm not an American and I have no idea how
| hostile race relations run in that country but I know
| that in most of Western Europe and in Canada most people
| have no issues mingling with other races and all
| neighborhoods are getting increasingly diverse.
| ebg13 wrote:
| > _no way to go anywhere (no parking, no meaningful
| transport, because 'everything we'd let you have is a short
| walk away')_
|
| It's news to me that the Paris Bus, Tram, Metro, RER, SNCF,
| Velib, and the venerable scooter have all suddenly
| vanished.
| maxsilver wrote:
| Obviously they haven't, and they remain great options for
| people wealthy enough to afford Parisian Townhouses.
|
| But unless you somehow gift me one million dollars USD or
| more (and the same to every single person I know), none
| of us are going to be able to afford to live anywhere in
| Paris that actually has close access to all of those
| things you've described, with the living situation
| described above.
|
| If we're magically exceptionally lucky, at best we might
| get like one or two.
| [deleted]
| pirocks wrote:
| I don't know about Paris, but London public transport
| reaches almost every corner of the city. I'm making some
| assumptions here, but I assume you've only ever lived in
| an American city. You often see Americans thinking that
| the terrible public transit they see is what public
| transit is everywhere. This is very much not the case.
| jeffasinger wrote:
| If the problem is that there aren't enough acceptable
| quality housing with good public transit access, it seems
| like building more transportation and housing would be a
| good solution rather than building similarly expensive
| suburban sprawl.
| ebg13 wrote:
| I lived in the center of Paris for years on a few
| Altairian dollars per day, and you're being ridiculous.
| Rental prices in Paris proper, not even the banlieue, are
| about the same per foot as Cambridge/Somerville/Boston
| while being an overall nicer place to live.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Scooters, the RER, the SNCF, the bus, the Velib and the
| metro, are very cheap and service even poor parts of
| Paris and the Banlieue pretty well.
| wozniacki wrote:
| There's also this assumption that people in relatively
| segregated rich areas want to be connected to poorer
| areas via public transit - the opposite is more often
| true.
|
| People who wish to live in neighborhoods with low crime
| often NIMBY off any attempts to add public transit
| options specifically to keep out the riffraff.
| Marin County is home to over 252,000 residents, yet it is
| without a BART station. If you search web content
| to find out why that is the case, you will not find a
| lot. There is minimal information explaining why
| the BART doesn't connect from Marin to San Francisco and
| even less explaining why it doesn't connect from
| the East Bay to Marin. Marin funded a large
| portion of the project when BART was being planned in the
| 1950s. But "concerns" over whether or not the
| Golden Gate Bridge could support BART suddenly arose.
| After San Mateo pulled out of the plan, Marin's
| participation fell through as well. It is not
| unfair to speculate that socio-economic discrepancies
| might have something to do with this lack of
| transit connection. After all, Marin is the county where
| wealthy residents stopped George Lucas from
| building affordable housing on his land. The median
| household income there is almost $84,000, more
| than $15,000 more than San Francisco and more than twice
| as much as Oakland. A similar situation in
| Dayton, Ohio arose where wealthy suburbanites tried to
| stop the local transit authority from building
| three new bus stops near major employment centers.[1]
|
| [1] https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/ex/sustainablecitiesc
| ollecti...
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Agreed, though I don't think we should, as a society,
| allow this kind of class-based segregation. It causes
| nothing but pain in the long term.
| brmgb wrote:
| > But unless you somehow gift me one million dollars USD
| or more (and the same to every single person I know),
| none of us are going to be able to afford to live
| anywhere in Paris that actually has close access to all
| of those things you've described, with the living
| situation described above.
|
| Have you ever set foot in a European city ? I currently
| live in Paris. Bus, metro and Velib' are three minutes
| away and I am not a millionaire. It all costs me 38 euros
| a month for unlimited journeys.
|
| I could afford to start a family here. Two affluent
| people can rent 750 square feet in Paris. I could even
| probably buy if I accepted to be in debt for thirty
| years.
| amaccuish wrote:
| > It all costs me 38 euros a month for unlimited
| journeys.
|
| Ouch. My VBB-Umweltkarte for similar costs 63 EUR a
| month.
| brmgb wrote:
| Well, the actual cost is 73 euros per month but in
| typical French fashion my employer has to pay for half of
| my metro pass (also I have the cheapest bike rental plan
| and trips are only free if they last less than 30
| minutes).
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| >I could afford to start a family here. Two affluent
| people can rent 750 square feet in Paris. I could even
| probably buy if I accepted to be in debt for thirty
| years.
|
| I think this is the exact tradeoff that is being
| discussed. Some people are OK with the 750 square ft
| flat. Others want a 3,000 sqft home on a quarter acre
| with room to park a boat or RV.
|
| You can get this within a 15 minute _Drive_ of downtown
| Houston for $300k, but you wont be walking to the local
| grocery or civic building.
|
| As far as I can tell, 300k will buy you a 250 sqft
| apartment in Paris, but you will have access to walkable
| civic amenities.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| > It's also an assumption that everyone wants to begin and
| end every trip, no matter how trivial, with a parking spot.
| It's an assumption that people will want to drive in traffic
| for 20 minutes minimum to get to a supermarket, do anything
| with their kids, or anything outside their property line.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised to find some suburbs with some of the
| traits you mention, but it hasn't been my experience with
| them. I've lived in about 5 different suburbs in my life and
| a supermarket has never been more than 2 miles away -
| certainly not a 20 minute drive and it's even within biking
| distance. Parks are by schools and there's usually an
| elementary school fairly close if you're looking to do
| something with your kid. Depending upon the suburb you can
| also play in the street, which I regularly did growing up.
|
| The traits you are talking about sounds more like a rural
| area than a suburban one.
| beambot wrote:
| Do you _predominantly_ walk, bike, or drive to your sub-2mi
| supermarket?
| yason wrote:
| _supermarket has never been more than 2 miles away -
| certainly not a 20 minute drive and it 's even within
| biking distance_
|
| I'd consider that far, far away.
|
| My walk to the nearest train station is about one mile,
| takes about 15 minutes to get there on foot, and that's
| irritatingly far, too, considering the trip is two way and
| repeats every day. Something like a grocery shop should be
| accessible within decent walking distance, a five-minute
| walk or so.
|
| A rule of thumb is that if something is far enough that I
| have to take the car in the first place I'll be
| incentivised to drive further away to a big
| supermarket/other big stores while I'm at it.
| binarytox1n wrote:
| American in Texas here - maybe this is a behavior
| encouraged by the very thing we're discussing, but going
| to the grocery store _every day_ is a big yikes to me. I
| go once a week and get everything I need for that week.
| Because I take my car, I can carry that amount of stuff.
| noirbot wrote:
| Which has turned out to be a really great habit to have
| now that going to the grocery store regularly is pretty
| unsafe.
| [deleted]
| ip26 wrote:
| Going once a week is efficient, but a little difficult to
| match up to a diet full of fresh fish, fruits, &
| vegetables.
|
| When grocery shopping frequently, you're also going for
| five or ten minutes instead of two hours, and the grocery
| is probably on your way home.
| greenyoda wrote:
| > Going once a week is efficient, but a little difficult
| to match up to a diet full of fresh fish, fruits, &
| vegetables.
|
| This has never been a problem for me. Many fresh fruits
| and vegetables will easily last for a week in your
| refrigerator (some for longer), and fresh fish or meat
| can be frozen for later use. Fruits such as berries that
| degrade rapidly can be eaten first, and fruits that last
| longer, such as apples or oranges, can be eaten later.
| Fruits like peaches or avocados can also be bought in
| varying states of ripeness, which means that different
| ones could achieve ripeness over the course of a week.
| trophycase wrote:
| It all just ties together. Going to the grocery store
| every day is a big yikes because you can't walk around
| the block to pick up fresh produce for dinner
| trthomps wrote:
| Yeah, I live a block from my grocery store in SF, and I
| still only go 1-2 times a week unless I need something
| fresh for today / missing ingredient, which is rare since
| I plan ahead and only buy things that will last at least
| a few days.
|
| Living in a dense city like SF is great for somethings,
| but it sucks when you want to leave, and paying almost
| $400/month for parking isn't good either. Both lifestyles
| have their advantages and I think it really comes out to
| personal taste and choice.
| refurb wrote:
| I live a 2 min walk from a grocery store and no way in
| hell I'd want to go there everyday.
| com2kid wrote:
| pre-covid I stopped by the grocery store almost every day
| to pick up whatever I wanted for dinner.
|
| Back when I lived across the street from a grocery store
| I'd sometimes go get food for dinner, talk a bit with
| guests for what we wanted for desert, then walk over and
| pick up whatever we'd decided on. When the grocery store
| is across the street it is basically an on-demand food
| pantry.
| Flobin wrote:
| When a grocery store is very nearby and you go to the
| grocery store, you can get your produce fresher. And you
| don't have to plan your meals, which may or may not be a
| positive side (it is for me).
|
| Check out this Canadian talking about his grocery trip in
| Amsterdam: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYHTzqHIngk.
| philwelch wrote:
| > A rule of thumb is that if something is far enough that
| I have to take the car in the first place I'll be
| incentivised to drive further away to a big
| supermarket/other big stores while I'm at it.
|
| The grocery store that's 2 miles away _is_ a big
| supermarket. The US doesn't really do small groceries in
| most places.
| hannasanarion wrote:
| The US used to have tons of small groceries everywhere.
| The legislative mandate for free parking everywhere has
| put them out of business, and many were demolished to
| build freeways.
| philwelch wrote:
| Yes, but now the US has tons of supermarkets everywhere.
| ghaff wrote:
| In the nearby major city I'm most familiar with, most of
| the grocery shopping you'd do would be in supermarkets--
| often Whole Foods some of which on the smaller side.
| Other than convenience stores, there are also some
| bakeries, produce stands, and butchers. But most of your
| shopping is probably going to be at supermarkets (which
| have parking).
| bluGill wrote:
| Yeah, like most small stores they paid their staff less
| than the big supermarket, had worse selection and charged
| a lot more. The supermarket took over because they had
| better prices on better selection. It was nice to walk to
| the store for something you were missing that was common,
| but if you wanted to cook something exotic odds are they
| didn't have it, and so you switched most of your shopping
| elsewhere and mostly don't miss them.
| adrianN wrote:
| Everywhere I've lived so far, I could reach several
| supermarkets in a 10 minute walk. 2 miles is _much_ too far
| for elderly people to walk.
| pmontra wrote:
| Milan, Italy, here. I can reach 4 supermarkets in at most
| 10 minutes, walking from my home. Of course I never go
| there by car, it would take more time. Probably it's the
| same in many areas of NYC or SF (been there some 20 years
| ago.) But if you move into the suburbs or away from the
| largest cities even Italy it's a cars only country. Sure,
| every small town has its elementary school, parks and play
| areas but you can't live without a car.
| ebg13 wrote:
| > _in a Parisian..._
|
| Having occupied a 120 square foot chambre de bonne, I agree
| with your sentiment but I'd say it depends on a few
| qualifications. Like for instance not having basically
| plumbed closets as a large percentage of available living
| spaces. Building height restrictions in the city lead to a
| large number of tiny (aforementioned) inaccessible (few and
| tiny elevators) apartments.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Assumptions aside, I think this raises a valid question of
| how we balance high density urban housing and suburban
| housing in american cities. Can a city have both options as
| workable solutions?
|
| Is there more demand for high density urban housing that
| cities are not meeting? If so, why?
|
| Is there a demand for more access from suburban commuters? If
| so, why isn't the access available?
|
| Are these solutions mutually exclusive?
| asciimov wrote:
| I assume you have never lived in Houston. Right now at 5:30pm
| (17:30) it's 95F (35C). I don't wanna walk 20 mins anywhere
| in this heat, I don't wanna stand and wait on the bus in the
| heat, I can't go pick up ice cream from the store and walk it
| home in this heat.
|
| Surely you think, summer isn't that long, just tough it out a
| few months. Well I regularly run the A/C in the "winter
| months". Several years ago during the week of chistmas, I
| went to a late night movie, as I was walking back to my car
| to go home I noticed the following: at 11:30pm it was 80F
| (26C), the humidity was around 80-90%, and I was wearing
| shorts.
| xenocyon wrote:
| I think the bigger elephant in all of our rooms is climate
| change. Density is by far more climate-sustainable (as well as
| more environmentally sustainable in other ways) than sprawl. In
| addition, global economic forces are creating a mass move to
| cities around the world anyway. So no matter what we think we
| want right now, we will at some point in the present or future
| be forced to reckon with density either pleasantly or
| unpleasantly.
|
| Now with that said, there are many intelligent ways to design
| density so that it is not unpleasant. Paying attention to green
| space and the natural world, space and light in general, and
| careful design for both function and form can make urban
| density a thing that is not only sustainable but
| emotionally/esthetically appealing. (Unfortunately this is not
| necessarily how density develops in cities, current incentives
| often instead favoring development that prioritizes flash,
| affluence appeal, and short-term private economic gain.)
| EricE wrote:
| "Density is by far more climate-sustainable (as well as more
| environmentally sustainable in other ways) than sprawl."
|
| Care to back that up?
| [deleted]
| mcguire wrote:
| Well, certainly bacteria and viruses have an easier time
| getting around.
| robrenaud wrote:
| Yeah, but there is not going to be a vaccine for global
| warming.
| xenocyon wrote:
| It is quite a well-established and uncontroversial fact;
| here is one article of many that discuss this:
| https://phys.org/news/2014-01-carbon-footprint-reveal-
| urban-...
| dfxm12 wrote:
| I'm not sure if you mean this literally as in huge apartment
| towers, literally as in something like a duplex/garden style
| apartment, or figuratively as in row homes. These are all very
| different housing situations.
|
| Also, you'll be hard pressed to find anything that _everyone_
| wants. It 's almost a tautology, so it's not really useful to
| make such statements without more context/clarification
| about...
| rdiddly wrote:
| I wouldn't mind being stacked on top of my workplace which is
| stacked on top of my local organic grocery store. I don't need
| to spend more time getting around.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _The elephant in the room is the assumption that _everyone
| wants to be stacked on top of each other_._
|
| You can have density that supports public transit and walkable
| retail without having to build like HK or Manhattan. This is in
| the middle of a Toronto neighbourhood that was build in the
| 1910s (use street view to poke around):
|
| *
| https://www.google.com/maps/place/150+Westminster+Ave,+Toron...
|
| Currently these houses/land are very expensive because living
| 'downtown' is fashionable again, but up until the 1990s they
| were reasonably priced because... who would want to live
| downtown when you could live in the suburbs?
|
| Some smaller sized houses on the next street over:
|
| *
| https://www.google.com/maps/place/50+Geoffrey+St,+Toronto,+O...
|
| Most have lane way garages. They're generally 3-4 bedrooms.
|
| Everyone can have a front yard, everyone can have a backyard
| (with an accessible garage), and no one is really "stacked" on
| each other.
| larrydag wrote:
| I live in Texas. This assertion is true of most cities in Texas
| also. Houston is the largest population center in Texas with 6M+
| in the city. Also Houston is a busy center for interstate and
| international commerce especially for trucking.
| tssva wrote:
| There are almost 7M in the Houston metro area. The city of
| Houston itself has a population of around 2.3M.
| refurb wrote:
| I'm sure I'll get down voted, but I don't find the Bay Area all
| that different. In the Bay Area it's just different towns all
| interconnected, while in Houston, all those towns were
| consolidated into one massive city (like LA).
|
| SF is only 1 million people and the dense, downtown core is not
| that big. Outside of the downtown cores of SF and Oakland, it's
| all just suburbs wrapped around the bay. And _plenty_ of people
| have absolutely brutal commutes due to the sprawl.
|
| The only difference is they commute from "another city".
| dhd415 wrote:
| The Dallas-Ft Worth metro area is more populous than the
| Houston metro area by about 500k people.
| rdiddly wrote:
| So Houstonians have to live every single day (probability of
| occurrence of "a day": 100%) with an infrastructure optimized for
| a nuclear attack that happens effectively never. Well, it was
| somebody's best guess at the right thing to do 65 years ago. But
| that's the sticky issue with large-scale infrastructure like
| this. If you get it wrong, or if you get it right but conditions
| later change, the costs associated with it start to balloon &
| become astronomical. But the short-term costs of changing it are
| even greater, so nobody wants to tear the band-aid off, and
| you're stuck bleeding money and productivity forever. _(contrary
| mixture of metaphors there... heh)_
| bluGill wrote:
| If they are right and there are a nuclear attack they survive,
| will your city? You fall for the same falicy as those who are
| saying covid isn't dangerous. (not that I disagree with you,
| but you haven't made a good argument)
| pansa2 wrote:
| > _is the same size_
|
| What size, exactly? Is it a really big interchange, or a really
| small city?
| apacheCamel wrote:
| >Siena's history dates back millennia. Houston, meanwhile, was
| founded in 1836.
|
| Every time I am made aware of just how _young_ the US is, it
| blows me away. I 've never been to Europe, I would really love to
| go some day, but I can only imagine the feeling of actually
| seeing these really old places/structures in person.
| iso1631 wrote:
| My local cafe/bookshop was 300 years old when Houston was
| founded (probably not a cafe then mind). I've lived in houses
| older than Houston. The nearest church, where my kids do carol
| services and nativities, has parts of its structure dating back
| 250 years before Columbus set out on his voyage.
| ainiriand wrote:
| When I was a kid we used to play football using the wall of a
| s.XI church as goal. That might be an extreme case but gives
| some perspective about european cities.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| There are cities in the US that are older than the US, by a
| large margin. Come to New Mexico and you'll see.
|
| Obligatory edit: After COVID, please.
| 205guy wrote:
| I always found it to be a fun coincidence that San Jose, CA,
| now the heart of Silicon Valley, was founded in 1777--a year
| after the US Declaration of Independence. And that was right
| at the beginning of the colonization of "Upper" California by
| parties from New Spain (Mexico).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_San_Jose,_Californi.
| ..
| apacheCamel wrote:
| I actually took a trip to New Mexico when I was younger, the
| parts that we visited were awesome. All the people were
| amazingly friendly. I grew up in the Northeast so it was a
| pretty big culture shock. I believe it was in Albuquerque. We
| visited the Nuclear Museum and a couple little local shops
| and even a local reptile zoo. I would love to go back for the
| hot air balloon festival someday.
| refurb wrote:
| Agreed. Did a road trip to New Mexico (in the winter!) and
| it was well worth the trip. Went to Santa Fe, Taos, Los
| Alamos, Pecos and some of the pueblo sites (which are
| incredible and you get amazing access to them). Super
| interesting place! I'm surprised it's not more of a tourist
| destination.
| naringas wrote:
| In Europe 100 km is far away.
|
| In America 100 years is a long time ago.
| ryanmarsh wrote:
| Founded, and floundered, as it was merely a swampy step in
| between the port of Galveston and places further inland.
|
| Houston didn't really grow with much rapidity until the mid
| 20th century.
| jcranmer wrote:
| I'm reminded of this joke:
|
| Europeans find it strange that Americans think 100 years is a
| long time. Americans find it strange that Europeans think 100
| miles is a long distance.
|
| There really is dichotomy here: Americans are used to a vast
| geography but don't really have any internalization of just how
| vast history can be, while Europeans understand their long
| history but don't have the internalization of just how vast a
| country can be.
|
| To put a finer point on the latter bit: the distance between
| Chicago and New York is roughly the same as between Copenhagen,
| Denmark and Bern, Switzerland (i.e., longer than any two points
| in Germany). The distance between LA and Boston is _longer_
| than the distance between Gibraltar and Moscow or between
| Edinburgh, UK to Jerusalem, Israel.
| crispyporkbites wrote:
| Moving further afield, Senegal is closer to Canada than it is
| to Somalia. I had to look that one up on a map when I first
| heard it.
| jcranmer wrote:
| That is a paradox more of spherical geometry.
|
| Dakar is about 4000 miles from the North Carolina coast. If
| you move the destination up the longitude of that point,
| you have to go 1000 miles north from the coast (in Quebec,
| in fact!) to get 4100 miles away from Dakar. The fact that
| Canada is much further north than Africa doesn't add all
| that much distance, but Newfoundland jutting out so far to
| the east reduces the distance quite spectacularly.
|
| Over longer distances, the spherical effects are even more
| screwy. The shortest way to get to Mecca from Seattle is to
| actually start flying north along I-5, and Thule, Greenland
| and Minsk, Belarus are natural pitstops along this route.
| [deleted]
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| > I've never been to Europe, I would really love to go some
| day, but I can only imagine the feeling of actually seeing
| these really old places/structures in person.
|
| European cities are also relatively young. If you want to see
| old cities, you should visit the Middle East or China.
| namdnay wrote:
| I think they mean the actual buildings and layouts, rather
| than the fact that people lived there 500 years ago. It's
| quite normal in Italy or Southern France for example to walk
| past churches that are 500-1000 years old
| immigrantsheep wrote:
| I come from a very small town on the Adriatic coast and the
| church there is from the 6th century. The town itself was
| founded sometimes BC.
| docdeek wrote:
| The city I live in here in France is about 2000 years old.
| That might not be as old as some of the cities in the Middle
| East but relative to most cities it is doing pretty well,
| non?
| reddog wrote:
| Thats 10x older than the city I live in (Austin). But
| Jericho is 6x older than yours.
| oblio wrote:
| Most Chinese cities are younger than Rome or Istanbul or
| Athens.
| williamdclt wrote:
| I suppose it's not a fair comparison, "most" chinese cities
| against the oldest european ones. How old are the oldest
| chinese cities? I'd love to know more about these
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Most European cities are younger than Rome or Istanbul or
| Athens. Shanghai and Beijing are older than Rome and
| Istanbul, Luoyang and Xi'an were inhabited since the
| neolithic.
|
| Damas, Luxor, Erbil, Jaffa, Jericho, are also older than
| Rome, Athens and Istanbul.
| iso1631 wrote:
| Athens dates back before cities like Damascus and Jehrico,
| and probably even before Luxor. Not aware of any cities in
| China older than about 2000BC.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| > Athens dates back before cities like Damascus and
| Jehrico,
|
| I think that is highly controversial to say the least. I
| think the accepted consensus is Jericho is the oldest
| continuously inhabited city.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| How much old stuff is in Chinese cities vs countryside
| though? My understanding is since the capitals moved many
| times (often with city destruction at dynasty end) that
| there's less old stuff in the cities (and a lot of 19th
| century less historical stuff has been raised.)
|
| At least a lot of the famous stuff around Xi'an and Luoyang
| seems to be monumental works outside city. Maybe various
| parts of the grand canal and stuff surrounding is a better
| example than that?
| username90 wrote:
| China doesn't have a lot of old intact structures though
| since they used worse building materials than Romans. Age of
| the city doesn't matter much if all structures are new.
|
| And no, the great wall of China isn't ancient. The parts we
| see today were built in the 14th century, the parts that are
| millennia old are no longer there so you can only see traces
| of it in the ground.
|
| Europe on the other hand has impressive structures 2 millenia
| old like this:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqueduct_of_Segovia
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Just so you aren't in for a shock, "millennia" is including all
| sorts of neolithic stuff in the ground that could probably well
| be said of places in the US too. In terms of street layout,
| little is per-roman, and in terms of buildings, little is >
| 1000 years old.
|
| The most common thing would be more 17th 18th 19th century
| buildings (in increasing frequency), and if you go to parts of
| Massachusetts (and maybe Virginia) you can get at least some
| 18th and 19th century stuff. Go to Havana, San Juan, Salvador
| (in Brazil) or other old colonial capitals and get more old
| buildings in sturdier materials than in Massechusetts.
|
| Don't get me wrong, there are more old building in Europe, but
| colonial US is quite old, and there's more continuity than you
| might think. The real issue is that the US replaced more old
| stuff, being in growth mode, which was alright until cars came
| along and now most thing we build are absolutely terrible.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Colonial architecture is still pretty recent in the grand
| scheme of things. Native construction is far older and some
| of it is still standing. Oraibi, Taos, and Acoma are all
| close to a millennia old and there are structures in the US
| going back another couple thousand years like las capas or
| poverty point. If you head south into Mexico, you can find
| structures even older than that. There's nothing like gobekli
| tepe, but that's okay.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Right that's true, but little of that stuff is part of the
| fabric of an intact, living city right? Either because it
| was raised by colonizers (e.g. Just a few things from
| technocratic remain, which are largely dug up rather than
| continuous, right?) or abandoned first (like Mayan cities).
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| That depends on what you mean by part of an intact,
| living city. Oraibi, Taos, and Acoma are all continuously
| inhabited places, so obviously they count. Las Capas is a
| continuously inhabited region with small periods of
| interruption in certain specific areas, just like any
| city in the UK.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Sorry, I completely forgot about the Pueblos. Good point.
| kergonath wrote:
| It's not uncommon to have city walls from the Middle Ages,
| and Roman buildings and monuments around here (not all of
| them still in use, true). Plus a whole bunch of castles and
| churches from the 11th century onwards.
|
| Boston and Santa Fe are very nice, but it really feels quite
| a bit different.
| jfengel wrote:
| What really strikes me is just how many ordinary buildings are
| older than our country. The monuments and palaces are one
| thing, but it's very common to eat in a restaurant or pub that
| dates to the 17th century. Not as a tourist trap or
| destination, but just as a perfectly ordinary building that has
| been retrofitted (sometimes awkwardly) with bathrooms and
| lights and such.
|
| I've been in 500 year old cottages that weren't anything
| special. It's just that they were made out of stone, and so it
| just doesn't fall down. (Lots did fall down, but they did so
| centuries ago, and the ones that made it this far will do
| continue to.) People live there, and it's just their house.
| They've often put up modern interior walls so that they can
| have insulation and hide the wires that power their TVs --
| connected to satellite dishes outside.
|
| I've even seen a few castles with satellite dishes. Small
| castles dot the landscape and can be had cheap (because they
| require expensive maintenance). People just live in them, too.
|
| There's a joke that in the US they think a hundred years is a
| long time, and in Europe they think a hundred miles is a long
| way. It really rings true. If the crisis ever subsides, I do
| recommend it.
| philwelch wrote:
| One thing I wonder is, how frequently are _new_ European
| buildings made of stone? I occasionally encounter comments
| from people confused by American home renovation shows where
| people literally burst through walls Kool-Aid Man style[1]
| when demolishing them, but most of our walls (even exterior)
| are wood-framed and mostly hollow, and once you take out the
| framing there's just drywall.
|
| [1] Not from an actual renovation show, but:
| https://youtu.be/B3C2TN-Vp4c
| Flobin wrote:
| Depends on where in Europe. There is a lot of wood
| construction in Scandinavia and the Baltic countries. The
| Netherlands, for instance, uses a lot of brick (for
| facades, and sand-lime bricks on the inside). Places near
| the Mediterranean, often use thick stone walls and/or
| concrete.
| philwelch wrote:
| That sounds a lot like people just use whatever materials
| are locally convenient. Which also explains the
| popularity of wood framing in the US.
| dougmwne wrote:
| Cinder block and metal roofs seem to be very commonly used
| in single family homes for new construction in several
| European countries I've been to. They're generally seen to
| be a sturdy materials for a house built to last.
| pas wrote:
| Concrete is king. Brick is best. Wood is for furniture! And
| for small cottages, and used as beams to hold the roof on
| brick houses.
|
| That said it's not uncommon, especially in suburbs, where
| people build single-family homes, just like in the US.
| ben_w wrote:
| Anecdotes like this abound in the UK.
|
| The oldest part of the closest church to my childhood home
| was built in the "early 13th century", according to its
| website. The cottages next to it (now a pub) seem to date to
| about the same time as the first British colonies in America.
|
| Then there's Cambridge university, which celebrated 800 years
| since its foundation in 2009: https://www.cam.ac.uk/about-
| the-university/history/800th-ann...
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Same when I lived in Morocco. In Fes, there is a university
| that is 1161 years old, which is simply staggering.
| dghughes wrote:
| Like the 1,100 year-old Sean's Bar which is often given as a
| good example of old buildings.
|
| https://www.seansbar.ie/home
| ThePadawan wrote:
| For a fun excursion, check out
|
| https://www.homegate.ch/buy/real-estate/country-switzerland/...
| for real estate currently to buy in Switzerland built before
| 1801 (according to the seller).
|
| (You can change "buy" to "rent" and 1801 for any other integer
| in the URL).
| lordnacho wrote:
| As a European, it's not the age that matters so much as the
| uniformity of American cities. A lot of places between the
| coasts seem to be the same simcity arranged slightly
| differently.
|
| Come to Europe and see very different styles within a short
| distance.
| rhino369 wrote:
| It's the result of a lot of growth and development by a
| common culture with high degrees of communication and trade
| in a very short amount of time.
| ben_w wrote:
| So much so, that I didn't really understand SimCity until I
| visited the USA.
|
| I don't think I've even seen a water tower outside the
| states, and if I have they are disguised as other things.
| (Unless you count the tanks on top of literally every Cypriot
| building, but even those are nothing like the
| American/SimCity type).
| iso1631 wrote:
| There's a few water towers around Norfolk - and a
| particularly brutalist one near Lowestoft not far from the
| furthest East point of the UK
| [deleted]
| pas wrote:
| They were quite popular in Hungary in the socialist era:
|
| https://viztorony.hu/acelszerkezet.html
| blakesterz wrote:
| "Rather, Cold War-era urban design philosophy in the U.S.
| prioritized sprawl because older cities that had urbanized pre-
| World War II--New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Detroit--were
| seen as being susceptible to nuclear strikes. Less-dense cities
| such as Los Angeles and Houston were less likely to be targeted
| for a nuclear attack. Sprawl was a deterrent against Soviet
| aggression."
|
| That's the first time I've heard that. Interesting, if true.
| pkulak wrote:
| That sounds like a new "lost cause" myth to explain white
| flight.
| sithadmin wrote:
| I'm not sure I buy it; it sounds like a 'just-so' story. Sprawl
| is popular because it allows for larger properties at lower
| prices relative to dense urban development. The vast majority
| of real estate developers have likely never seriously
| considered factors like probability of a nuclear strike as a
| criteria for selecting land for development.
| guyzero wrote:
| I'm sure someone discussed it once, but Pentagon war planners
| don't set urban planning policy. People like single family
| homes, people like yards, people want racist neighbourhood
| segregation, people really hated urban centers for a long
| time in the US. All much better explanations.
| jandrese wrote:
| Also people wanted to start building equity in their home
| and you largely can't do that in the city because all
| available properties are rentals.
| vidanay wrote:
| I don't buy it at all. Population centers are secondary
| targets after military targets.
|
| Besides, the USSR and USA had (have) enough nukes that a
| spread out city is irrelevant.
| tikhonj wrote:
| I'm not sure whether the story is true, but it's worth
| noticing that developers are _not_ the only drivers here--
| changes zoning laws and federal funding both played a major
| role, and it seems plausible for the government to take
| nuclear strikes into account when charting a high-level
| policy for the country as a whole.
| Const-me wrote:
| They considered transportation infrastructure. See National
| Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956: https://en.wikip
| edia.org/wiki/Federal_Aid_Highway_Act_of_195...
|
| They also considered jobs availability. I wasn't able to find
| good enough sources on the policies of the era, but many
| articles on the Internets say the sprawl of industries was
| caused in part by federal policies:
| https://www.jstor.org/stable/44250919
| ghaff wrote:
| That's true although the history I've read suggests that
| Eisenhower wanted to do the Interstate Highway system
| anyway and framing it as being at least partly about
| defense made it easier to get the funding approved.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| The timing doesn't really work out either. Automobile
| suburbs, the beginning of what we'd call sprawl, started in
| the early 1920s, and really picked up speed in the 1940s and
| 1950s in Detroit. Detroit really hurts the narrative of
| nuclear strike resistance, as it's buried pretty deep inside
| US air space; it wouldn't be until the proliferation of ICBMs
| that Detroit would face significant nuclear strike risk. If
| sprawl provides any protection against nuclear weapons (which
| I doubt), then that is clearly a post-hoc rationalization.
| flexie wrote:
| This article just shows American exceptionalism in it's true
| form:
|
| Whenever Americans are confronted by foreigners with the fact
| that they under perform or do less well in some area, they find
| some good excuse why they are actually not under performing.
| The sprawl is not just a side effect of car culture, or zoning
| laws, or whites not wanting to live next to colored people, or
| the land being cheaper far from city centers.
|
| No, it was actually a feature designed to prevent a nuclear
| attack.
| swasheck wrote:
| I've also read that it was the byproduct of post war migration
| of whites who wanted access to the city but were afraid of the
| concentration of black people who resided in the city interior.
|
| (Stamped from the Beginning by Ibrim X Kendi)
| heymijo wrote:
| No discussion of sprawl is complete without talking about
| Robert Moses. American highways, and highways around the
| world sprawl as they do because of Robert Moses.
|
| Throughout Robert Cairo's 1344 page biography of Moses, the
| reader sees how Moses' racism and clasism impacted the
| massive influence he had on transportation and sprawl in
| America.
|
| +1 for Stamped.
|
| In addition, Redlining is a well researched and documented
| practice in America [0]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining#History
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Robert Moses designed public amenities to be inaccessible
| to public transit specifically to exclude poor residents
| from reaching them. He went as far as designing some
| bridges to be impassable to buses, so that only those who
| could afford a personal automobile could reach the
| amenities on the other side of said bridge.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| Vilifying Moses is a great way to earn some virtue points
| and pat yourself on the back for being enlightened but the
| fact of the matter is that he gave the people what they
| wanted. While the implementations have changed a great many
| of the underlying desires that motivated his ideas as still
| alive and well today. Laying the blame all on one person or
| a few people is an easy out. Designing things to keep out
| people of certain classes is still alive and well today and
| we should remain vigilant.
| gpderetta wrote:
| > the fact of the matter is that he gave the people what
| they wanted.
|
| I know nothing about Moses, but if the accusations are
| true, the above would not absolve it in any way.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| It doesn't matter if it's "absolved"
|
| A man like that doesn't work alone. You need massive
| public support to build a portfolio like he had. People
| blame him personally because that's easier than looking
| in the mirror.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Suburbs had been expanding quickly prior to this, but city
| centers actually start truly declining around the '60s and
| '70s after _Brown vs. Board of Ed_ resulted in unpopular
| busing programs to desegregate schools, as well as the riots
| that proceeded MLK 's death.
| jp555 wrote:
| GDP:
|
| Houston, Texas = ~$500B/yr
|
| Siena, Tuscany = ~$11B/yr
| luckylion wrote:
| ... and that's for Siena, the province, not Siena the city
| (which is the regional capital of the province). Siena the
| province has a population of 268k.
| romanoderoma wrote:
| Houston homicide rate: 12.1 murders per 100,000 population
|
| Nigeria homicide rate: 4.5 murders per 100,000 population
|
| Siena homicide rate: < 0.5 murders per 100,000 population
|
| It all depends on how you spend that money...
| kaesar14 wrote:
| Is that the GDP of this highway interchange?
| tomrod wrote:
| Possibly, as the interchange allows a sizable fraction to
| more quickly get to work.
| kaesar14 wrote:
| Public transit would've done the same in a much more
| equitable and environmentally friendly way. Probably faster
| too.
| mixedCase wrote:
| High quality, super-expensive (think quality,
| cleanliness, secure) public transit that requires higher
| taxation and therefore reduces the incentive to do
| business there, maybe. If you want to burn some public
| money you could subsidize electric cars for a long time
| at a fraction of the cost of the kind of stuff you need.
|
| As someone living in a third world country in a city
| where (cheap) public transit is the norm, I can tell you
| that faster than private cars/taxis it is not; hell, Uber
| arriving here was a nice uplift to my lifestyle at a
| price I could justify ponying up for.
| mixedCase wrote:
| While I don't think this direct comparison is valid (at least
| let's also have the per capita numbers, which I believe is
| around 60% higher in Houston if Google snippets are to be
| believed) one could argue that a portion of that GDP is
| enabled by road infrastructure such as this interchange.
| kaesar14 wrote:
| America is the richest country on earth. It's such a
| kneejerk reaction of our countrymen to defend our insane
| way of life by bringing up GDP numbers instead of stuff
| like life expectancy, quality of life, access to equitable
| transportation. America being rich is known fact already.
|
| Edit: From your own happiness survey link - "The U.S. GNI
| per capita income is actually higher than in most of the
| countries ahead of the U.S. in the global ranking of
| happiness. There are about 130 countries that showed up as
| less happy than the U.S. in 2013. Despite our outstanding
| technological and economic progress over the past half-
| century, we are without significant achievements in life
| satisfaction and the subjective happiness of our
| population. In contrast, uncertainties and anxieties are
| high, social and economic inequalities have widened
| considerably and social trust is in decline. There is an
| impression that the U.S. has not been very effective at
| turning its great business capacities, human resources,
| productivity and natural wealth to the best aim: increased
| happiness."
|
| Don't give a damn about GDP.
| refurb wrote:
| _Don 't give a damn about GDP._
|
| Really? Because it's GDP that funds all those government
| services and social programs.
|
| I'm always confused when people don't give a damn about
| economics (i.e. during the Covid shutdown debate) when
| without economics you wouldn't have a functioning
| society.
| romanoderoma wrote:
| Is US society working according to their very high GDP
| though?
|
| Estonia GDP is measured in billions and yet their infant
| mortality rate is half than US despite their trillions of
| dollars of GDP
| kaesar14 wrote:
| That GDP makes men like Bezos richer and leaves the
| working class to beg for scraps
| mixedCase wrote:
| > It's such a kneejerk reaction of our countrymen to
| defend our insane way of life by bringing up GDP numbers
|
| I'm not from the US. I live in latin america where people
| think like you do and feel everyone is entitled to a
| bunch of "essential" things by the state using public
| money, and here I am watching Argentina from the other
| side of the river as it beats its poverty high score
| every day right after Venezuela did the same thing with
| the same exact steps. Just now they socialized the
| Internet, cable and telcos, wonder what else is going to
| be "essential".
|
| > From your own happiness survey link
|
| That is not my link. It's not even in the same comment
| subtree.
|
| > Don't give a damn about GDP.
|
| Well, pick a country around here from the ones that share
| your line of thought and just move. If you can get me one
| of them unhappy green cards on your way please let me
| know.
| oblio wrote:
| Population:
|
| Houston: 2.3 million
|
| Siena: 50k
|
| What's the use of these pointless comparisons?
| cmrx64 wrote:
| 197k per capita in siena vs 83k per capita in houston, pathetic
| cmrx64 wrote:
| (looking at better data, these numbers are wrong)
| crmrc114 wrote:
| I think the point being made here is that manufacturing and
| distribution require roads. People can live in sardine cans
| however manufacturing / industrial sectors cannot. Zooming in
| on a engineering marvel for traffic handling and comparing it
| to high density mixed use housing is a tad non sequitur. Albeit
| an interesting photo and thought exercise.
| dublinben wrote:
| The manufacturing and industrial sectors existed before
| automobiles, as did cities.
| crmrc114 wrote:
| Right, next to waterways and railroads.
| romanoderoma wrote:
| Not exactly
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_aqueduct
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_roads
| kaesar14 wrote:
| What an incredible waste of space, fuel, and human time. Driving
| is the bane of American prosperity.
| sp332 wrote:
| And yet not only is Houston quite rich (on average anyway), but
| it consistently ranks #2 for happiness among major metro areas
| in Harris Happiness polls. http://www.city-
| data.com/blog/646-satisfaction-life-happines...
| kaesar14 wrote:
| And? Can't aspire to a better future where we don't sit in
| traffic for hours to get across the city, choking our skies
| with car smog and carbon dioxide that'll ruin the environment
| for future generations? Our design philosophy around cities
| are the biggest mistake made of 20th century American
| politics, and I'll die on that hill.
| refurb wrote:
| Don't live there if you don't like it?
| kaesar14 wrote:
| We all live in an interconnected world. The choices made
| around the country to prioritize cars have led to
| negative externalities for all of us.
| refurb wrote:
| The world is fully of negative externalities caused by
| others. That alone is not a good enough reason to force
| them to change their behavior.
|
| Sure, incentivize a dense urban area if that's what you
| want. But you should realize a lot of people want a
| suburban environment.
| reddog wrote:
| Would it surprise you to learn that there are only two mass
| transit systems in the country more efficient (in cost,
| energy and carbon) than driving the average American car?
| And none are even close to being as efficient as driving a
| Prius.
|
| And as a bonus you have zero chance of getting sick
| commuting alone in you Prius. Compare that to being packed
| shoulder to shoulder and hip to hip with 1000 other people.
| You are breathing on the back of some strangers neck that
| is inches away from your mouth and some other stranger is
| breathing on your neck. People are sneezing, coughing,
| hacking all around you. It's pretty disgusting. Give me my
| Prius with my filtered AC, sound system and adjustable seat
| anytime.
|
| https://theicct.org/blogs/staff/planes-trains-and-
| automobile...
|
| https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa-615.p
| d...
| [deleted]
| helen___keller wrote:
| Most of these threads tend to devolve into attacking assumptions
| about how people want to live (high density vs low density,
| parking vs no parking, cars for every trip vs walking/transit
| most trips)
|
| I'll list out what I view as the two dominant views towards the
| development of a metropolitan region (I loosely define
| metropolitan region as a city and all the places around that city
| which can plausibly commute to a job inside the city. Or in other
| words, all land housing the people you may see every day). Let me
| know if you think I've got the two sides nailed down correctly.
|
| The urban mindset to developing a metropolitan region:
|
| * Cars are a luxury (and often a nuisance) and should not be
| required for essential, everyday travel.
|
| * The region expands both outwards (by adding high speed transit
| to surrounding neighborhoods), and upwards (replacing existing
| development with higher density development)
|
| * Key transportation infrastructure: public transit (bus, tram,
| train, subway), in addition to feet and bikes
|
| * (some amount of) Density is a key pattern: Having enough people
| per square mile to bring workers and customers, sustaining local
| businesses, as well as maintainable a taxable base large enough
| to pay for transit and other infrastructure
|
| * Multi use zoning is king: local storefronts and restaurants are
| considered beneficial for quality of life. Sufficiently dense
| streets thrive off the mixture of people and business.
|
| * "porous" neighborhoods (e.g. grid street layout) are a pattern:
| porous neighborhoods are more efficient on a mile-per-mile basis,
| helping to enable low-speed travel (read: foot & bike). This
| increases the amount of business-capable space within a
| neighborhood, which is beneficial to the local economy and
| quality of life of residents
|
| * Suburban mindset seen as harmful: suburban mindset seeks to
| expand outwards. This adds people who consume local
| infrastructure (e.g. driving on local roads, creating noise and
| pollution) but who might not live in city jurisdiction (i.e.
| can't be taxes in a straightforward manner), and aren't
| interested in contributing to the well-being of the city.
| Suburban mindset seeks to limit legal expansion of density,
| mandate parking minimums, cut urban spending for necessary
| infrastructure like transit, reduce quality of life by widening
| roads, building highways, and increasing speed limits, and
| continue an outward suburban expansion that will just accentuate
| existing problems with traffic and with car noises
|
| The suburban mindset to developing a metropolitan region:
|
| * Cars are _the_ key mode of travel for the vast majority of
| destinations, and as such are a necessity
|
| * The region expands outwards by purchasing and developing
| surrounding farmland, and connecting this land to the city with
| high speed roads. This keeps land absurdly cheap.
|
| * Key transportation infrastructure: roads (with sufficiently
| high speeds and capacity), parking lots
|
| * Density is a key antipattern: More people per square mile
| brings congestion and noise, consume available parking, but offer
| little communal benefits as residents generally don't need to
| work or shop locally (no need to sustain local businesses)
|
| * Single use zoning is king: businesses want to locate on large
| roads with lots of traffic, people want to locate on small
| subdivisions with little traffic. Zoning enforces this to
| maintain everybody's quality of life.
|
| * "porous" neighborhoods are an antipattern: stores are not on
| local streets, so any porous neighborhoods mostly bring in
| through-traffic (which gives noise and pollution but no economic
| benefit). Thus a tiered freeway/highway/boulevard -> neighborhood
| -> subdivision pattern to residential space, in place of a city
| grid
|
| * Mandatory parking minimums useful, as parking is a valuable
| public good
|
| * Urban mindset seen as harmful: urban mindset seeks to build
| higher density housing in centralized places that already have
| bad traffic during rush hour, which will just make it worse.
| Urban mindset seeks to make more use of urban space with less
| parking, which offers a worse quality of life to suburbanites who
| wish to drive into the city. Urban mindset seeks to limit legal
| restrictions on density, which threatens to see multifamilies or
| apartment buildings in quiet neighborhoods that currently have
| low traffic and low noise (but won't when population density goes
| up). Urban mindset looks to spend on public transit, which is not
| useful at all to all the many people who live in the suburbs (but
| suburbanites may face state taxes or consumption taxes to fund
| transit, as well as increases in traffic due to construction)
| smcl wrote:
| A lot of people seem to be reading the headline, getting upset
| and immediately heading here to complain and getting on the
| defensive. The article is actually pretty interesting and isn't
| just trying to attack Houston, Texas, the USA or you personally.
| mcguire wrote:
| Out of curiosity, how much traffic does the SS674 and SS223 see
| per day? That interchange appears to be the eastern connection
| between I10 and the 610 loop around central Houston. I10 is one
| of the major arteries between the east and west coasts.
|
| https://goo.gl/maps/CyoAESVtEQFRa4zb7
| tuna-piano wrote:
| It's interesting that protests generally happen in dense parts of
| cities. Now imagine a city without a dense part - protesting
| becomes more difficult. Myanmar's non-democratic military
| government actually moved their capital from a dense city to a
| new city so spread out and with no downtown area - potentially to
| prevent the ability to protest the government.
|
| https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/inside-burma-s-ghost-to...
|
| I don't think that's why Houston is the way it is, and while
| there is still a downtown there, imagining mass protests in
| Houston seems much different than Hong Kong - due to the density.
| saint-loup wrote:
| This article is specifically about the specific tactics BLM
| protest used in the suburbs and small towns.
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-06-19/protests-...
| xg15 wrote:
| Now that we have the ability to decouple most administrative
| work from location thanks to remote working, I wonder how long
| it will take for the first fully decentralised authoritarian
| government to appear.
|
| Can't have protests in the capital if you don't have a capital.
| omosubi wrote:
| I guess authoritarians have risen to power over the internet
| but it's hard to imagine someone exerting that much influence
| over zoom
| emteycz wrote:
| The police force would still be centralized. The population
| would be forced to decentralize.
| dylan604 wrote:
| We'll just have an executive order banning the use of Zoom.
| If you don't like something, make it illegal. Problem
| solved!!
| philwelch wrote:
| Decentralized authoritarianism is an inherently weird
| concept. Sounds more like a vicious type of mob rule to me.
| abstractbarista wrote:
| That's one of the reasons I chose not to live in a city center.
| RangerScience wrote:
| IMO this is part of why why protests started marching down
| freeways. In LA, if you protest by marching down basically any
| freeway, you snarl up that freeway (and likely more) for tens
| of miles, at least (AFAIK).
|
| (the 101 between hollywood and DTLA is essentially a single
| thing, the 10 between DTLA and West Side, the 405 from culver
| city up to over the pass in sherman oaks...)
|
| AKA, the "center" isn't geographic, but... transit-based?
| Arterial?
| CydeWeys wrote:
| It also gives a great sense of your own power (which is very
| important to protest movements) in marching along and
| shutting down a freeway, which you could never in any other
| situation just calmly walk down the middle of. Critical Mass
| is invigorating for the same reasons.
| cousin_it wrote:
| (Deleted: not worth it)
| CydeWeys wrote:
| What a horrid comparison to make between those crimes and
| a constitutionally-guaranteed right.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Would the moral status of rape, or, say, slavery be any
| greater if it was written into the Constitution? (Note
| that one of those _was_ , extensively, written into the
| Constitution.)
|
| If not, what is the point of your argument?
| [deleted]
| EarthIsHome wrote:
| For those curious about power and mass protests, John
| Berger's piece from 1968[0] provides an excellent overview
| on mass demonstrations.
|
| [0]: https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/isj/196
| 8/no03...
| msla wrote:
| And people who need to get somewhere to save lives are
| suitably invigorated, I'm sure.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| Yeah, actually. I saw a huge fucking grin on the face of
| the guy riding shotgun in the ambulance as the crowd of
| cyclists parted like magic in front of them and they had
| a personal escort of two vested corkers. Guy was even
| filming. They got where they were going faster than if
| the usual stop and go car traffic had been there.
|
| The great thing about people on foot or on bike is that
| they can easily get out of the way of emergency vehicles,
| vs cars and trucks which often can't.
| macintux wrote:
| If you've created a logjam however, how does the
| ambulance get through the stopped traffic?
|
| (I'm not arguing against protesting on the freeway, to be
| clear, just genuinely curious how often it helps vs
| hinders emergency vehicles.)
| Kerrick wrote:
| I've experienced this outside of protests. My wife and I
| were driving somewhere near downtown St. Louis, on a part
| of the interstate where there are tall concrete barriers
| between the directions of traffic. There was a complete
| log jam due to an accident ahead, and we heard sirens
| coming up from behind us to the left. We were in the left
| of two lanes. The right shoulder was either filled up or
| too small (can't remember), so people couldn't really
| pull right more than a foot or two to allow the ambulance
| through.
|
| The ambulance didn't let that deter them. They took the
| foot or two we and the other left-lane drivers could give
| by getting REALLY close to the car to our right, and used
| it to careen down the left shoulder, scraping the side of
| their vehicle along the concrete barrier much of the way.
| msla wrote:
| I'm not talking about emergency vehicles or people who
| get escorts. I'm talking about the doctors who have to
| make their own way in their own vehicles.
| adolph wrote:
| "Some of Haussmann's critics said that the real purpose of
| Haussmann's boulevards was to make it easier for the army to
| maneuver and suppress armed uprisings; Paris had experienced
| six such uprisings between 1830 and 1848, all in the narrow,
| crowded streets in the center and east of Paris and on the left
| bank around the Pantheon. These critics argued that a small
| number of large, open intersections allowed easy control by a
| small force."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann%27s_renovation_of_Pa...
| ucarion wrote:
| This is pretty widely thrown around, but it should be noted
| that the central purpose of Haussmannization was public
| health and beautification: tearing down the slums, building
| proper infrastructure like sewers and aqueducts, and pretty
| parks and streets. The article you link to emphasizes this.
|
| The wide boulevards did very little to prevent the Paris
| Commune, for instance. Napoleon III just wanted to build a
| second Rome, not some martial panopticon.
| paganel wrote:
| The wide boulevards certainly helped the French Army in
| drowning the Commune in blood soon afterwards, though.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| The Commune was also fairly unique among French revolts
| as it did not begin in Paris, rather it was Paris
| reacting to their emperor getting captured in battle.
| throw_away wrote:
| There was a bit more than just Napoleon III getting
| captured. Paris was subsequently sieged and captured by
| the Prussians. Afterwards, the Prussian troops were kept
| nearby and occasionally paraded through the streets. The
| Commune arose also due to power disagreements with the
| new Third Republic and an attempted seizure of cannons in
| Paris.
| drewbug01 wrote:
| Not directly related, but the US Interstate Highway system
| was at least partially designed with military concerns in
| mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System
| #Hist... . I'm reminded of it every time I see military
| vehicles on the highway.
|
| Obviously not the same thing that you're talking about here -
| but just interesting to me, and vaguely related!
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| There's a reason why the Eisenhower Interstate System signs
| have the 5 stars of a general.
| mikece wrote:
| If I'm not mistaken, the 5-star logo only applies to
| sections of interstate highway that have at least one
| mile of level and straight road in any given 5-mile
| stretch. The idea was that an "Eisenhower Freeway" could
| be used as an impromptu landing spot for Air Force
| planes. While I'm sure this ability was tested at the
| beginning I don't know if there are regular drills and
| exercises making use of this feature.
| xxxtentachyon wrote:
| I would love to see a plane try to decelerate from 200+
| mph with the surface quality changing every 200 yards and
| with 18-inch-deep potholes every so often. I wonder what
| sort of maintenance budget the original interstate plan
| envisioned
| laurent92 wrote:
| Several planes land on highways per year, I don't find
| the source but it was from AVWeb and the order of
| magnitude is ~10 per year. It's actually much safer han
| fields. But those are Cessnas at 80mph, not Boeings.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| This is an urban legend debunked in the linked Wikipedia
| article: "According to urban legend, early regulations
| required that one out of every five miles of the
| Interstate Highway System must be built straight and
| flat, so as to be usable by aircraft during times of war.
| There is no evidence of this rule being included in any
| Interstate legislation."
|
| The Eisenhower Interstate Highway System is designed for
| military purposes only in the sense that it's very
| important to be able to quickly move your troops and
| materiel around to where they're needed (i.e. logistical
| reasons). In other words, it's important to the military
| for the exact same reasons that it's important to anyone
| else.
| Gwypaas wrote:
| It has some merit. Sweden built an entire system based on
| road bases to deter any invasion attempts from the
| Soviets, including aircraft able to operate out of them.
| Still happen upon them to this day, just notice the road
| get straighter and a tiny bit wider.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bas_90
| oliv__ wrote:
| Thanks for the link, very interesting! I love the US
| leetcrew wrote:
| is there any further explanation of this? it strikes me that
| narrow chokepoints would be more advantageous to the
| numerically inferior but better-equipped/trained force.
| [deleted]
| bobthepanda wrote:
| more advantageous to the numerically inferior who know the
| lay of the land, because it's much easier to conduct urban
| guerilla warfare in such instances.
|
| Armies during this period were all still about marching in
| formation, which doesn't work well in confined spaces where
| you can't really keep a formation.
| throw_away wrote:
| It was also in the context of a long history of
| barricades being put up by popular uprisings and stymying
| and trapping troop formations.
| leetcrew wrote:
| I guess I'm thinking too much in terms of modern times,
| where police are mostly aiming to contain a larger crowd.
| didn't consider that demonstrators might actually intend
| to trap security forces.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| You're thinking about modern protests that are relatively
| peaceful and in which deaths are rare. The Paris riots
| looked a lot more like outright urban guerrilla warfare
| with _lots_ of deaths, in a manner that is more similar
| to actual declared wars here in the US (e.g. the
| Revolutionary War, War of 1812, and Civil War), not mere
| urban unrest.
| julesqs wrote:
| yeah I live in New York and I definitely went to more protests
| this summer because they were happening literally right outside
| my apartment than I would have if I had to deal with driving
| and finding parking (probably hard if it's a big protest).
|
| I think generally American style suburban sprawl decreases
| social capital just because you're more isolated, and that
| includes protests. I think mask wearing is another example.
| badrabbit wrote:
| People can drive to the location of the protest. Less dense
| means more transportation, protests could also mean blocking
| off major freeways.
| username90 wrote:
| Where would you find parking for a hundred thousand cars? You
| can't really get protests like this without a dense city:
|
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/87/March_fo.
| ..
| badrabbit wrote:
| You'd be surprised. Most of cities like this is parking
| lots. But yeah, in a protest situation they may not be
| available. Big marathons and marches happen just fine.
| scruple wrote:
| Reminds me of Brasilia.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Where people have no problem protesting in front of
| government buildings.
|
| That "people always protest at the densest areas of the city"
| is just that, correlation. The targets of their protests
| happen to be in those areas.
| [deleted]
| Aardwolf wrote:
| You can find as big highway interchanges in Italy too, e.g.:
|
| https://www.google.com/maps/@41.8177773,12.3911127,17z
|
| And you can most likely find small cities with 30K people in the
| US too (though I had trouble finding one of this size near
| Houston when scrolling through Google maps because the cities
| there look less dense and don't appear to have a discernible
| center at least from the look of the grid pattern of the
| streets).
| bmitc wrote:
| Your link only shows a simple cloverleaf design, typically used
| at the intersection of only two highways or as an exit from a
| highway. Those are everywhere in U.S. cities, in certain
| regions as not everyone uses the cloverleaf. They are not super
| common in Texas though, which uses different designs. But
| either way, it is not close to the same size and complexity as
| the exchange, of which Houston has many, in the original post.
| xg15 wrote:
| > _But it wasn't strictly an "everything is bigger in Texas"
| ethos that caused Houston to sprawl the way that it does. Rather,
| Cold War-era urban design philosophy in the U.S. prioritized
| sprawl because older cities that had urbanized pre-World War II--
| New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Detroit--were seen as being
| susceptible to nuclear strikes. Less-dense cities such as Los
| Angeles and Houston were less likely to be targeted for a nuclear
| attack. Sprawl was a deterrent against Soviet aggression._
|
| That's the first time I've heard this theory.
|
| Would that have worked though? I don't know much about nuclear
| deterrence, but I'd imagine if the USSR already managed to evade
| the defenses and other obstacles and destroy the city center in a
| nuclear strike, it wouldn't be a lot of additional effort to send
| multiple rockets instead of only one and also target the suburbs.
|
| Not to mention that fallout, breakdown of infrastructure, disease
| and hunger that followed a strike would affect the entire city in
| any case.
| duxup wrote:
| I don't doubt someone thought of / would like that idea... but
| I have trouble believing sprawl really was influenced by some
| plan involving nuclear strikes.
|
| Yeah you'd have a good chance of having more survivors due to
| the nature of nuclear weapons, but I don't see that influencing
| choices like wanting to have a suburban home and etc.
| mcguire wrote:
| 9MT W53 (Titan II warhead): Fireball covers downtown Houston,
| moderate damage out to the borders of Houston proper, 50%
| chance of 3rd degree burns as far as Sugar Land or Humble.
|
| https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=9000&lat=29.7500709&...
| sudosysgen wrote:
| I'm very doubtful it would have worked. The USSR had thousands
| of warheads, they could turn the entirety of every city into
| glass. I'm even quite doubtful this was a consideration.
| teachrdan wrote:
| Part of this is brinkmanship. Even if there was no practical
| way this would improve even short-term survivability, if the
| Soviets believed that the US believed this would work, that
| would be enough to show the US would not be cowed by their
| nuclear arsenal. It was also a way to reassure US citizens that
| we were not completely vulnerable to nuclear annihilation. Same
| with backyard fallout shelters and teaching schoolchildren to
| hide from nuclear explosions under their school desks--the
| original school shooter drills.
| r00fus wrote:
| Brinkmanship or security theatre?
| 1propionyl wrote:
| Or option C: greed.
|
| Any way you slice it, nuclear deterrence, missile defense,
| containment theory and more generally any initiative
| motivated by the fear of imminent nuclear holocaust and the
| Red Menace were huge windfalls for industrial corporations
| from the end of WWII onward.
|
| It was an effective way to siphon huge amounts of money
| from the postwar federal coffers for corporations that had
| made bank during the war, but were now left to justify why
| the government should continue shoveling money at them.
|
| Now, this may not be the case for Houston's interchanges in
| particular, but it was certainly the case for many such
| endeavors going forward for decades. See also: SDI ("Star
| Wars"). And of course, there were other factors like
| suburbanization/white flight and the ascendant automobile
| industry. But all of these potential motivators were (are?)
| very entangled and hard to fully extricate from one
| another.
| csomar wrote:
| A typical nuclear bomb has a wipe-out radius of 1-2 Km. At
| 10-15Km radius, you are looking at damages/injuries but not a
| complete wipe-out. Also residential houses are less susceptible
| to infrastructure breakdown vs. a high-res building.
| gambiting wrote:
| It wouldn't have. In case of an all out war each side would
| send dozens if not hundreds of rockets at each target. US in
| particular had the problem where each arm of the
| military(airforce, army, navy and missile command) had their
| own and completely independent launch plans. So each one would
| launch their own compliment of nukes at Russian cities.
| Destruction of your own missiles by the already exploding
| weapons was actually seen as a significant issue that would
| lead to loss of many if not majority of weapons. Eric
| Schlosser's Command and Control is, as always, a great read
| about this.
| mcguire wrote:
| U.S. Strategic Nuclear Forces: Background,Developments, and
| Issues (https://fas.org/sgp/crs/nuke/RL33640.pdf).
|
| The US Army hasn't had strategic nuclear weapons in a very
| long time, if ever. On the other hand, theater-level weapons
| like the Pershing (10s (mostly) to 100s of kt) do a pretty
| fair approximation.
|
| I'm not sure what you mean by "missile command"; Army Missile
| Command mostly has problems, not solutions. (They build
| things.) (Standard Missile 3!
| (https://images.wisegeek.com/billboard-ad-against-blue-
| sky.jp...)
| rtkwe wrote:
| In the beginning stages of the Cold War and the start of
| urban sprawl the threat wasn't rockets but bombers. ICBMs
| weren't created till '57 and took over the strategic setup
| for killing everyone in the years after that, so there's a
| window there for sprawl to be a legit(ish)
| survival/mitigation strategy.
| rsynnott wrote:
| This sounds fairly dubious. There was a period between sub-
| megatonne pure fission warheads being standard and multi-
| megatonne 'hydrogen' ones, but it was under a decade. That
| seems like a very narrow window to change how cities were
| planned.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Urban sprawl happened because people were tired of living on
| top of each other, and cities that had the room to expand
| used it. There was also another name used for that sprawl,
| white flight. I think we're seeing some of the results of
| that today.
| reddog wrote:
| I've always thought it was funny how whites moving from the
| city to the suburbs is bad (white flight) and whites moving
| from the suburbs to the city is also bad (gentrification).
| eplanit wrote:
| That's the core narrative: whites are bad.
| dboshardy wrote:
| That's a pretty generous interpretation of white flight.
| You leave out the redlining and segregation that were
| huge factors in white flight and subsequently reverse
| white flight and gentrification.
| smileysteve wrote:
| It's surprising that sudden drastic changes in demand
| have sudden drastic effects on supply?
| coryrc wrote:
| Supply is not increasing and that's just another self-
| induced injury by the USA.
| adventured wrote:
| Entirely depends on where you're at. Overall the US added
| nine million new housing units from 2010-2019, while
| adding only about 19 million people. For housing that's
| somewhere between keeping pace with and exceeding
| population expansion. Obviously not all of that supply
| expansion goes to family housing, however not all of it
| needs to either, given that's only a two to one ratio.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| Location location location. A lot of that new housing is
| not where it's actually needed most. If you need it
| somewhere within commuting range of your job, but instead
| it's 18 hours away and several states over, it's really
| not doing you any good.
| narrator wrote:
| There's nothing stopping you from moving to Detroit or
| Baltimore or East St. Louis. Why wouldn't all the
| progressive people move there if the housing is such a
| bargain?
| rsynnott wrote:
| I think you have to detach the idea of _personal_ blame
| from it. They're both phenomena which cause problems.
| refurb wrote:
| Seems like one could find problems with anything people
| do.
| xvedejas wrote:
| I've always seen gentrification as more a symptom of a
| problem, rather than a problem itself. After all, it's
| not the appearance of a higher economic class that's bad;
| it's the forceful displacement of the lower economic
| class, which may or may not follow. I've seen both
| scenarios play out in both urban and suburban areas,
| depending a ton on willingness to allow new construction
| and pre-existing home ownership rates.
| matthewowen wrote:
| The displacement effect of gentrification is potentially
| overstated:
| https://www.philadelphiafed.org/-/media/community-
| developmen... is an interesting study.
|
| In that case, vulnerable populations in gentrifying
| neighborhoods were no more likely to leave than
| equivalent populations in non-gentrifying neighborhoods.
|
| For me, the obvious mechanism is that, well, it's true
| that people who leave may often blame gentrification /
| increased costs for their departure. But on the other
| side of it, without gentrification people may still have
| left, but for different reasons: to get away from crime,
| to go somewhere with more amenities. It's possible that
| these two tendencies somewhat balance each other out.
| rtkwe wrote:
| Seems like the way to disentangle the two is to look a
| the people replacing those that move out. If they're
| roughly the same economically then it's the churn of
| being a poor person in a capitalist society if the income
| is going up particularly if it's a sharp increase and
| rents are rising then it's gentrification.
| nickff wrote:
| The harmful displacement effects of gentrification are
| really a symptom of unresponsive city planning and
| zoning. If governments were more flexible and faster to
| adapt to changing circumstances, gentrification could
| have been positive-sum.
| pessimizer wrote:
| The appearance of a higher economic class leads to
| lopsided political power. It's the lopsided political
| power that then leads to the displacement of the lower
| economic class from any desirable area.
| refurb wrote:
| Really? Look at the Mission in SF. You can't build
| anything without Calle 24's approval. Projects aren't
| getting shutdown by the wealthy.
| jonsno56 wrote:
| Well yes, it goes to show that you can find an abundance
| of systemic racism against black people in all kinds of
| housing policy.
| [deleted]
| CydeWeys wrote:
| It makes logical sense. You cause problem A by leaving,
| and then in coming back you cause problem B. The same
| thing happened with the Iraq War -- we caused lots of
| problems with the unnecessary invasion, then caused more
| problems by leaving. It's lose/lose. The only winning
| move was never to play. In the white flight analogy, the
| only winning move was never to seek segregation from
| moving out of the cities in the first place.
| dmurray wrote:
| In the same way, global warming is bad, but global
| cooling would be much worse. It's climate change that's
| the problem, disrupting human patterns that we've got
| used to.
| wolco wrote:
| If the problem is change then you will always have
| problems.
| dylan604 wrote:
| When an area is ceded by one group, the vacuum will
| always be filled by another group. When the people that
| left try to reclaim that territory, friction will always
| happen. If the current occupants of that territory have
| no desire to relocate , or have no where else to relocate
| to, or have no means of relocating if it were possible
| then there will always be friction. It's repeated over
| and over through out history.
| refurb wrote:
| Right. One way to solve this is moving away from the
| identity politics (why is that group moving here) and
| tell people who want to "maintain their neighborhood
| character" to pound sand.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| What does "pounding sand" actually mean in this context
| though? Considering that the people in question are
| complaining because it's already happening to them? You
| can't just tell people to stop complaining about
| grievances.
| refurb wrote:
| People are free to complain. But the challenge is (at
| least in CA) is that the most minor complaints will hold
| up desperately needed housing projects.
|
| Legitimate complaints (e.g. this will mess up traffic)
| are fine. "Neighborhood feel" complaints (e.g. this
| building is too tall, it doesn't fit the neighborhood
| character) should be met with "thanks for your feedback,
| but that's not a good enough reason".
|
| Of course if there is widespread consensus among voters
| on how they want their city to be developed, fine. But
| right now, the current system allows a handful of very
| vocal opponents to development to derail new housing.
| badrabbit wrote:
| That would be a lot of ICBMs. The city center is not
| residential. Most people that work in the city center for
| city's like houston or LA commute from one of many different
| cities. Just to wipe out half of houston you would need to
| simultaneously strike at least a dozen different locations. The
| idea was, if there is a missile on the way or if other cities
| are being attacked, the sprawl would allow evacuating a lot of
| people.
|
| I do think it is an effective strategy. Look at Hiroshima and
| Nagasaki, tokyo and kyoto were spared for different reasons but
| they were spared. No sense in wiping out every single city. For
| the US, a nuclear attack would probably be against symbolic
| populated cities like new york, san francisco or chicago,
| ideally the US would surrender after that point and if there is
| no surrender, military targets would make more sense
| (hawaii,san diego,san antonio,anapolis,etc...).
|
| The idea is, if you have a small number of targets to defend
| you can defend them better. Just like with infosec, you want to
| reduce attack surface so you minimize exposed services or
| inputs.
| cgriswald wrote:
| Sparing Tokyo worked because Japan didn't have the capability
| to retaliate. Any launching during the mid-to-late Cold War
| would have been a massive first strike and possibly a
| retaliation at the same scale. In the early Cold War it may
| have been a reasonable strategy, but as another poster notes
| that's a very narrow window for changing how a city grows.
|
| Even if there was an effect, I'd be very surprised if the
| signal wasn't wiped out first by railroads and then by cars.
| gpderetta wrote:
| Also Japan was hit by bombs in the low tens of kilotons.
| Modern bombs are in the megaton range.
| andi999 wrote:
| Tsar Bomb has around 50 Megatons. Radius of total
| destruction 35km.
| leetcrew wrote:
| scary, but not entirely relevant. most modern launch
| systems carry (sometimes multiple) warheads with a much
| lower yield: 500 kt or less.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Tokyo and other Japanese cities were burned to the ground
| with mass firebombing, not spared.
|
| The goal was to get Japan to surrender, and Emperor was
| considering it. His generals were fanatically opposed, and
| if the Emperor were to be killed by the bomb, they would
| fight to the last man, woman and child.
|
| US administration could then pick it's poison - leave Japan
| as is, suffer and inflict massive casualties from a ground
| invasion, or commit nuclear holocaust.
| gpderetta wrote:
| > That would be a lot of ICBMs
|
| That's what MIRVs are for.
|
| The strategy, if it existed at all and it isn't just a post-
| hoc explaination, was probably designed around the time the
| strategic bomber was the primary, and only, method of
| delivery of atomic bombs.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Every single city that was targeted had multiple rockets
| assigned to them. Each rocket was just a launch vehicle
| similar to SpaceX launching Falcon9s with multiple Starlink
| satellite, each nuclear rocket was equipped with MIRVs
| (multiple independent re-entry vehicles). So one rocket
| launched would result in multiple targets. You could target
| each MIRV at different parts of the suburban sprawl. Pretty
| damn effective.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| It wouldn't be a lot of ICBMs, actually. In reality, it
| wouldn't even take a single ICBM.
|
| Playing around on Nukemap, 5-6 800kt warheads are enough to
| kill the majority of people in Houston and give third-degree
| burns to the rest. A Russian RS-28 Sarmat ICBM should be able
| to carry 10-15.
|
| Or, with a single 20 megaton warhead, it would kill 1 300 000
| people immediately and injure 2 000 000 people.
| adrianN wrote:
| MAD did not allow for "surrender". You either wipe out your
| enemies military _completely_ before they manage to launch
| most of their rockets, or you both die. There is no targeting
| of symbolic locations and then calling it quits.
| birdyrooster wrote:
| Have you ever seen East Tokyo? The destruction from the
| firebombing in WW2 is still quite obvious even today even
| looking at a map.
| nilpunning wrote:
| Tokyo was not spared. On March 9-10th 1945 it endured the
| most destructive and deadly air attack in human history,
| killing somewhere between 90-100,000 people (https://en.wikip
| edia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo_(10_March_194...). Perhaps by
| August 6th when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, the
| major targets in Tokyo had already been destroyed.
| BucketsMcG wrote:
| For what it's worth, the same thinking was behind the new
| capital of Myanmar, Naypyidaw. Paranoid military leadership who
| thought Yangon was too vulnerable to attack, so built a new
| capital way inland which is massively spread out to make it
| harder to bomb.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Such a weak argument as we (as humans) just got better at
| bombing things. More planes + more bombs = problem solved.
| "You build a bigger shield, we just build a bigger bomb"
| mentality has to be a core tenet of the military industrial
| complex.
| imtringued wrote:
| Actually, modern warframe is all about completing missions
| while using less bombs and planes. Killing residents may
| cripple the economy of your enemy but finding the high
| value targets and only bombing those is cheaper and more
| effective.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| It's one of those hackneyed theories that has a grain of truth
| in it, but nothing more. Yes, perhaps fear of being nuked drove
| some people from the cities, but what actually drove a lot more
| people from the cities was racism, plain and simple. See
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight That, a lot more
| than fear of nuclear war, is what drove suburbanization, along
| with the rising spending power of the middle class that made a
| detached home in the suburbs and a car achievable on a single
| salary.
| jackpirate wrote:
| I've also never heard this claim before despite quite a bit of
| work on nuclear weapons policy. I've asked a question about it
| on /r/AskHistorians to get more clarification:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ik1v9q/a_rec...
| ctoth wrote:
| I remember Heinlein talking a lot about the decentralization of
| cities concept. A bit of googling leads me to Sumner Spaulding,
| who was apparently a large proponent of decentralization to
| avoid nuclear disaster.
|
| http://otworld.weebly.com/robert-a-heinlein-the-last-days-of...
| MrMorden wrote:
| Also _City_ by Clifford Simak.
| kiliantics wrote:
| I think it's more likely the combined factors of automotive
| industry lobbying and redlining/white flight that led to the
| level of urban sprawl you see in the US
| 7952 wrote:
| There is also the risk of fire storms being started that
| destroy a wider area than the initial blast.
| siliconvalley1 wrote:
| With that advent of MIRVs it makes most of this moot. A single
| missile could have a dozen warheads and you can blanket target
| massive areas.
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| As a decidedly amateur historian with interest in this area, I
| think that claim is true on its own but also does not tell the
| entire story.
|
| It is true that decentralization was viewed as a major
| component of nuclear survivability, particularly in the earlier
| part of the cold war. This was the time period during which the
| FEMA (today's name) crisis relocation program was being
| devised, for example, and the high cost and complexity of
| crisis relocation (which, in an earlier form, was a major
| motivation for the Eisenhower freeway system, to the extent
| that it's probably fair to say that it was the main motivation
| with materiel movement as a second) served to highlight the
| inherent vulnerability of dense cities and keep it very much in
| the minds of government planners. Decentralized cities had an
| inherent advantage to planners in that money could be saved on
| crisis relocation efforts. Of course the crisis relocation
| program was never fully implemented, but the way of thinking
| was fairly influential.
|
| The federal government had an enormous role in suburbanization
| of US cities in many, many ways, which is actually part of what
| makes it hard to address this point. Support for
| suburbanization was not coming just (or even primarily) from
| FEMA, all kinds of federal agencies had a hand. Much of the
| urban renewal work of the 20th century took the effective form
| of relocating poor people to the suburbs and replacing their
| inner-city housing with industrial/commercial/transport, for
| example the Model Cities program of the late '60s. This was in
| part a result of the general feeling that the inner city was
| where poor people lived and so improving their economic
| situation required getting them out of it, part of it was
| merely the practical issue that substantially improving a dense
| area is a lot more expensive than razing it and build something
| new there. I don't know if these programs were strongly
| influenced by crisis planning, they probably were at least in
| part, but it seems unlikely that crisis planning was a much
| bigger influence in federal advocacy of suburbanization than
| the more organic trends of white flight and urban decay that
| came out of a set of race and class relations, in a potent
| combination with some simple budget and timeline
| considerations.
|
| My point is that nuclear planning _was_ a factor, but the
| massive suburbanization of the postwar decades originated from
| many factors out of which nuclear crisis planning was only one,
| and I 'm not convinced that it was one of the bigger ones in
| the end. Yes, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists very openly
| advocated for suburbanization of cities and that view was
| influential, but at the same time so much of suburbanization
| was motivated by a new vision of the American dream that came
| out of the peculiarities of post-war economics and
| demographics, racism, the radical popularity of the automobile
| (which not only enabled low-density areas but often required
| the destruction of high-density areas to provide freeway access
| to business districts), and probably at least a few other
| things.
|
| Any claim that "urban sprawl is a result of x" where X isn't a
| list of things is probably pretty hard to defend. A complete
| change in not just urban planning but people's patterns of life
| tends to require a confluence of factors.
| an_opabinia wrote:
| Well, nowadays, designing a city around defense would seem
| ridiculous.
| trhway wrote:
| different times, different threat models. I think we may as
| well see a city design emerging which would be taking into
| account aerial viral spread, remote work/study, etc. which
| would affect density, transportation, etc. Deepening
| stratification of society will naturally generate even
| higher social tension gradients which may present a
| potential threat to social stability, and thus it may
| require even more intentional measures in the future city
| designs to support social stability in the face of such
| gradients. I think we can see city designs addressing such
| emerging trends as autonomous delivery/transportation
| (which naturally plays well with the stratification),
| policing and public safety in general - i.e. more
| conductive to total surveillance, robot based policing (how
| about that one at Shoreline Cinema 16 or even those
| Starships crawling on Castro - today delivering pizza it'd
| politely wait for you to let him pass, yet i'm sure that
| while waiting it dreams about tomorrow when painted with
| police insignia it'd be forcing its way though the crowd by
| throwing tear gas and delivering taser jolts :) and making
| it easier for containment of protest and terrorist
| activity.
| js2 wrote:
| > crisis relocation (which, in an earlier form, was a major
| motivation for the Eisenhower freeway system, to the extent
| that it's probably fair to say that it was the main
| motivation with materiel movement as a second)
|
| I've heard that before, but the DOT claims evacuation was a
| minor factor. From https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/interstate/inters
| tatemyths.cfm#ques...
|
| _President Eisenhower supported the Interstate System
| because he wanted a way of evacuating cities if the United
| States was attacked by an atomic bomb._
|
| President Eisenhower's support was based largely on civilian
| needs--support for economic development, improved highway
| safety, and congestion relief, as well as reduction of motor
| vehicle-related lawsuits. He understood the military value of
| the Interstate System, as well as its use in evacuations, but
| they were only part of the reason for his support.
|
| _Defense was the primary reason for the Interstate System._
|
| The primary justifications for the Interstate System were
| civilian in nature. In the midst of the Cold War, the
| Department of Defense supported the Interstate System and
| Congress added the words "and Defense" to its official name
| in 1956 ("National System of Interstate and Defense
| Highways"). However, the program was so popular for its
| civilian benefits that the legislation would have passed even
| if defense had not been a factor.
| Animats wrote:
| It was real enough that IBM moved their corporate HQ from
| Manhattan to Armonk, NY. HQ is still there.
| jacobwilliamroy wrote:
| Nope. Sprawl happens in places where the oil industry runs city
| planning. Plus, if people cant survive in your city without a
| car, then that kills off the poor too and drives them away. So
| cities sprawl to serve oil companies and to exacerbate wealth
| inequality.
|
| What, you people dont believe me? You seriously think we sprawl
| to protect ourselves from nukes? Like the enemy isnt just going
| to launch more nukes, or cluster nukes?
|
| If anything, the sprawl would just make the nuclear strike
| worse, because there's a greater chance you'll _survive_ and
| have to live through revelation. Here 's how you protect
| yourself if a nuke is on the way: you duck your head down, and
| kiss your ass goodbye.
|
| No it's just plain ole racist, classist, corrupt government
| trying to use fear of Russians to drive oblivious americans who
| dont pay attention, to buy more cars from their rich motor
| company friends.
|
| That government is mostly in the past now, but the sprawl is a
| monument to their philosophy, which was racist, classist and
| corrupt.
| djsumdog wrote:
| Let's take a look at Houston on a Nuke Map:
|
| https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=5000&lat=29.7589&lng...
| [deleted]
| hannasanarion wrote:
| That's a modern bomb, in the 50s and early 60s, when Hobby
| Airport (the one in the southeast of downtown) was considered
| to be in the boonies, the nuclear threat looked like this: ht
| tps://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=20&lat=29.7589&lng=-...
| simonh wrote:
| 5 Mt is huge, and far bigger than the warheads of most
| modern nuclear weapons. The one you show is fairly
| representative of a single modern warhead. Nowadays, and
| for many decades if you want a large area of effect, you
| use a MIRV vehicle and pepper the target area. This gives
| you wide coverage for fewer total megatons and a more
| compact and flexible weapon system, and hedges your bets in
| case any of the warheads fails or is intercepted.
|
| In fact big bombs were an early trend for two reasons. One
| was that the delivery system was expected to be bombers
| dropping one or a very few bombs with mediocre accuracy and
| so you wanted maximum destruction from each delivery. The
| other was that they were worried bombers wouldn't be able
| to get directly over some targets due to air defences, so
| you'd drop the bomb short of the target and use the massive
| area of effect to cover the remaining distance for you.
| donjoe wrote:
| Quite interestingly, the social aspects of urban sprawl was
| completely left out when designing post WW2 cities.
|
| When people think about beautiful cities, they would mention
| Venice or Paris or Rome. All these cities were built for 'foot
| traffic' which still works perfectly fine nowadays. In those
| cities, the elderly and children do have an environment to move
| around by themselves and socialize freely.
|
| When it comes to planning cities for people, it is worth
| checking out Prof. Jan Gehl: https://youtu.be/9_x5Hor2MP8
| rexgallorum2 wrote:
| I would argue the bomb was only part of it though--the other
| hazard was area bombing. All of those planners had seen (or
| participated in) the aerial bombardment of Europe and Japan
| during the war, and one take-away was that areas with different
| uses should be separated (like in the sim game Cities
| Skylines), e.g. industrial zones should be separate from
| residential zones, and all of the above should be as sprawling
| and low-density as possible to minimise damage from the air, be
| it nuclear or conventional. And yes the US highway system
| started out as a civil defense project as well, modelled on the
| German 'Autobahnen'.
| ryanmarsh wrote:
| The assertion that Houston's layout is the result of Cold War
| nuke risk mitigation is a new one on me. The beltway opened in
| 1988.
|
| I grew up here and I've read many articles trying to explain why
| Houston is the way that it is. The truth is incredibly human and
| boring and wouldn't sell display ads. Thus, the logical arguments
| that follow articles like this are complete nonsense.
|
| If you want to know why Houston is the way that it is, fly down
| here and I'll drive you around and show you. You'll be completely
| underwhelmed, but the tacos will more than make up for the trip.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| May come by soon looking for jobs; any taco leads?
| stergios wrote:
| Did anyone notice how little green space Siena has? The Houston
| interchange appears to have 100x the amount of green space as the
| entire city of Siena! Quite ironic!
|
| How was a city allowed to develop with almost no green space?
| romanoderoma wrote:
| > How was a city allowed to develop with almost no green space?
|
| Siena, like other Tuscan hill towns, was first settled in the
| time of the Etruscans (c. 900-400 BC)
|
| Siena was built on a hill surrounded by some of the greenest
| valleys in Tuscany, the most notable one being the Chianti
| valley, home of the popular wine.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chianti
|
| Trivia: the movie "The Gladiator" was shot in Pienza, in Val
| D'orcia, in Siena province.
|
| This is a shot of the famous Cypress trees road.
|
| http://www.clickalps.com/stock/blocks/image.php?id=81499
| severine wrote:
| Expand your view: https://goo.gl/maps/dnKTT771b5mVcLzo8
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Thanks for taking the obnoxious "Yes, this" off the title.
|
| Yes, it's one of the weirdest pet-peeve trends over the past 5-10
| years. No, I do not like it, thanks for asking.
|
| Wait, you didn't ask me? You mean _nobody_ was asking me, it 's
| just something I decided to couch in a response to a conversation
| that wasn't going on?
|
| But seriously, I wonder what's going on when we do this. My
| theory is that it originally caught on to lend credence to what
| we're saying when we pretend our statement is actually a response
| to an open question, though now it's just subconscious rhetorical
| device to emphasize a point, I would imagine.
|
| As for the article, growing up 45min outside of Houston, that
| interchange is all I think about when I entertain the idea of
| moving to Houston or DFW. There's something grotesque about it
| and the feeling it gives me. Cars, traffic, and this need to
| slave away in a commute.
|
| Austin keeps voting down highway extension proposals. I'm sure
| anyone who has to sit in Austin traffic daily hates that, but we
| can't have every damn city in Texas becoming a concrete
| metropolis.
| timbit42 wrote:
| I mean, "Yes, this" isn't as bad as starting with, "I mean".
| komali2 wrote:
| Ex houstonian here, university of houston and everything.
|
| Decently fun city, interesting history, cool people.
|
| The road and traffic situation is nightmarish. I slowly came to
| this realization in college when I went abroad a couple of times.
| I found out that didn't have to be How Things Are.
|
| The university of houston has a problem where students aren't
| attending classes because parking isn't available. Stories of
| trying to find a parking space for 40 minutes abound. There's
| lines of cars offering an air conditioned ride to parking spaces
| outside of classrooms, in return for their parking spot.
|
| If you miss an exit near the i45/i10 merge, you've added 20
| minutes to your drive, minimum, as the next local exit will be a
| good five miles away, and then after that the next on ramp for
| your give freeway could well be on the other side of downtown.
|
| For some reason they built a light rail that criss crosses main
| street. For a great form of entertainment, search youtube for
| "Houston light rail accident." They're rarely really bad, more
| just stupid looking, some giant pick-up truck failing to see the
| train and getting booped.
|
| There's no zoning (kinda) so the industrial zones are mixed right
| in with residential, budding up against UH. So about 1/10 of the
| time I bicycled to school, I would be blocked by a mile long
| train that decided to simply park and block every road crossing I
| could take to the university. I made a habit of throwing my bike
| between the nonmoving cars and clambering over until my dad sent
| me a video of someone getting cut in half doing that.
|
| Growing up in the suburbs you'd have balls of steel to bicycle to
| a friend's house. Pickup trucks make a sport of fucking with
| bicyclists. Better to just wait for your parents to get home from
| work so they can drive you.
|
| Lord forbid you have a friend in the woodlands or something.
| Thought it was obnoxious to visit your friends in San Jose when
| you live in the bay area? The woodlands is like a trip to
| Sacramento, but only because of traffic and a 610 loop as wide as
| a continent.
|
| Public transit, lol. That's for poor people. I remember hosting a
| luncheon for our engineers (was a recruiter) and this old fart
| was talking about his 50 minute one way commute. It was a point
| of pride for these o&g engineers for some reason to measure their
| commutes. Then this engineer we brought in from mexico was like
| "oh, I live in that same neighborhood, why not take the bus? It
| gets on the HOV and gets me here in 30m." Old fart was
| flabbergasted. He didn't even know there was a bus. I don't blame
| him, they pick up at these huge ride share parking lots and it's
| not easy to figure out their schedule, or even how to pay.
|
| Anyway Houston traffic sucks and my conspiracy theory is it's
| because Shell and Chevron have downtown offices and the CEOs sit
| at the top of the tower where they can see a clogged i45, i10,
| 610, and 59, and cackle maniacally at the hordes of people trying
| to justify their 1 hour one way commutes to eachother and the
| choking fog of smog clouding around the city.
| criddell wrote:
| How did you manage to ride a bicycle in Houston without getting
| sweaty and gross?
| komali2 wrote:
| I didn't, lol. I was just always sweaty and gross.
| teepo wrote:
| Current resident here! I can relate to some of your
| experiences. I will say though that Houston, like a lot of the
| sunbelt cities has multiple urban cores, the sprawl kind of
| connects them.
|
| Going from one urban core to another can take some time, indeed
| an hour in some cases from one close-in area to another. (Close
| in meaning ~20 - 40 miles). It's very much like the East Bay in
| that regard.
|
| Living in an urban area like Med Center / West U, or Galleria,
| energy corridor on the west side, most folks don't suffer,
| everything is nearby in those communities.
|
| Houston does have a good park and ride bus system for the outer
| burbs, and it's been successful. They've added a light rail in
| town connecting downtown entertainment with the medical center
| and convention areas, and just launched BRT services that
| connect hubs in the Galleria to some of the park-n-ride depots
| in the city.
|
| Lots of problems, lots of opportunities to improve, but for the
| price, the great airports (which I miss thee days with COVID),
| and these massive freeways to move us over great distance
| quickly, I'm still a fan.
| jupp0r wrote:
| So a city of 30k people requires less infrastructure than a city
| of 6M people? Where are the examples of major metropolitan areas
| without big freeway intersections?
| jankassens wrote:
| Just looking around Tokio on satellite view: there are a few
| highways, but nothing compared to the many-layered
| intersections you see in US cities like Los Angeles or San
| Diego.
| bonestamp2 wrote:
| Tokyo is amazing in many ways, but especially infrastructure.
| I was embarrassed when I went there for I felt like the
| countries I grew up in were lazy by comparison. The most
| popular type of vehicle on the road there (in my observation)
| was a concrete truck.
|
| The subway system is unbelievable. They don't try to build
| huge line extensions every few years or decades the way we
| do, they are constantly expanding and improving it all the
| time. It's absolutely amazing what they have built there, and
| at the same time remained incredibly polite and gracious.
| timerol wrote:
| Ahmedabad, India appears to have about 6M people and 1 highway
| interchange. The interchange isn't even a full cloverleaf, but
| instead only allows 4 of the standard 8 cloverleaf options. In
| 2012 it was listed as India's best city to live in.
| anticensor wrote:
| Do you mean this interchange:
| https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=16/22.9676/72.6599
| rsynnott wrote:
| > Where are the examples of major metropolitan areas without
| big freeway intersections?
|
| Many European cities keep them largely outside (in a ring).
| LatteLazy wrote:
| Siena pop 30k
|
| Huston pop 2.3mil
| adolph wrote:
| This is the intersection of East Freeway and East Loop. It
| occupies about 1.58 km^2. It is an older interchange reflective
| of relatively modest traffic volume that set a wide space to
| ensure room for future growth (which didn't happen on the eastern
| side of the city). Many newer interchanges operate at higher
| volume and density.
|
| https://www.google.com/maps/@29.7748476,-95.2664193,17.32z
| redm wrote:
| As someone who lives in Houston, the simple reason there is
| sprawl is because its flat and land is cheap. This makes it easy
| to live on large lots or on small average. It's also hot, so
| people spend more time indoors and drive everywhere.
| crispyporkbites wrote:
| Italy is pretty hot too
| ska wrote:
| Don't forget lack of zoning and state commitment to building
| highway/freeway infrastructure.
|
| It's partially a collective action problem. Since everyone has
| pretty much committed to doing nearly everything via car the
| marginal cost at either the individual or system level of
| adding one more car (side) trip is very low.
| wmeredith wrote:
| I'm glad someone said this. The size of the interchange vs a
| small town in Italy is an odd comparison. Land and gas are
| cheap in one place and they're not in another. That's basically
| the end of the story.
| conductr wrote:
| I'd say more to do with technology available at onset of
| growth. Modern versus ancient in terms of cities. I found the
| marketing brochure in my mid-century house in Dallas, they
| really thought that the Jetsons was going to happen. Same
| house was built north of downtown Dallas from some horse
| farms and pitched country life with modern conveniences. The
| exurbs that reach damn near Oklahoma now are still pitching
| the same thing while my house is very much considered in the
| city.
| syoc wrote:
| The source. Plenty of other pictures and examples.
|
| https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
| hadrien01 wrote:
| Images and content about the interchange and the city center on
| pages 14 and 15
| alpineidyll3 wrote:
| These highways suck to drive on and have as much delay as
| Illinois highways half the surface area. Its one of my least
| favorite parts about tx.
|
| The reason is largely that they just scaled up traffic patterns
| which are fine for 2 lanes to 6-7 lanes. It's absurd. The local
| legend in Austin is that the highway designer later committed
| suicide. I bike to work.
| davegauer wrote:
| I heard the same suicide tale about The Stack when I lived in
| Phoenix. I wonder if this is a common urban legend?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stack
| Nitrolo wrote:
| I'm almost certain it is. There's a housing project in Rome
| that has the same tale, apparently the architect killed
| himself after seeing it completed.
|
| https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corviale
| ryanmarsh wrote:
| Surely the traffic can't be worse than the humidity.
|
| Kind sir I call your attention to the condensation on the
| outside of your car windows.
| Udik wrote:
| The comparison is entirely pointless. There are interchanges in
| Italy that are of comparable size; just outside my home town,
| there are medium-sized factory buildings that are larger than its
| entire historical center, complete with its 13th century frescoed
| palaces. The area of the Sistine Chapel - 560 m^2- is easily
| dwarfed by that of most small supermarkets.
|
| The fact is that- unless scarce- space is valued- no, wait, it's
| _defined_ - by what it contains and by your relation to it, not
| by its size. When traveling on a motorway you cross multiple
| times per second the entire length of your living room, a space
| where a centimetre-sized stain can give you nightmares. This
| beauty in the Netherlands ( https://www.spoorpro.nl/wp-
| content/uploads/2019/01/maasvlakt... ) is more or less the size
| of Manhattan. The Mona Lisa painting is smaller than the patch in
| your backyard where you keep your garbage cans. And so?
| adrianmonk wrote:
| One factor that hasn't been mentioned here is climate.
|
| Siena seems to have a very mild climate. Its average high
| temperature[1] in August is 28.3degC (82.9degF).
|
| Compare that to Houston's monthly high for August, which is
| 35degC (95degF). Houston is also very humid[3].
|
| Most people don't want to take a 10-minute walk when it's 95degF
| and humid. You arrive at your destination panting and very
| sweaty. It's more comfortable to take a 10-minute drive in an air
| conditioned car. To some people, it's preferable even if the
| drive takes 30 minutes due to traffic.
|
| ---
|
| [1] https://en.climate-data.org/europe/italy/tuscany/siena-1089/
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_Houston
|
| [3] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/america-most-humid-
| cities-090...
| gpderetta wrote:
| I don't think temperature has anything yo do with it. There are
| still plenty of cities in southern Italy were temperature goes
| above 40deg in the summer and still do not sprawl.
| Flobin wrote:
| You say that as if there are no dense cities in places that
| have a similar climate as Houston. What about Taipei, for
| instance?
|
| Houston has a July average high temperature of 34,7 degrees C
| with an average relative humidity of 74,4. The same data for
| Taipei is 34,3 degrees C with a humidity of 73.
|
| Yet Houston has a population density of 1398,76/km2 whereas
| Taipei 9700/km2, almost 7 times as high.
|
| Data from Wikipedia.
|
| Actually, perhaps this map says it best:
| https://www.dropbox.com/s/tkoekp0or12ppjc/Screenshot%202020-...
|
| (If anything, building densely can create a lot of shade, which
| can be quite beneficial.)
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