Do We Look Fat in These Suburbs? (2014) | Hacker News Reader

Do We Look Fat in These Suburbs? (2014)

theatlantic.com

9 pointspavelrub11 comments

My wife and I have lived in the mountains in a small town (Sedona Arizona) for about 16 years. Things are too spread out to walk to stores but we have the exercise advantage of nearby hiking trails (my favorite being 80 meters from our house).

We have a perfect lifestyle but we are now talking about living for a while in a city where parks, restaurants, stores, librairies, movies, etc., are all within an easy walk.

I think that the one world government forces will continue pushing people to live packed into urban areas for both resource efficiency and tighter control of citizens. Not a good thing in general, but after a long time of living in an out of the way place, a few years of urban lifestyle sounds good.

More people per square foot makes the real estate more valuable. It also seems to appeal to "efficiency" but outside of people commuting a long time by private car, I'd be hard pressed to buy into that.

At its core, the idea is that human muscle power is somehow more efficient than machines, something I'm pretty categorically set against. :)

Transporting 200 lb of human is more efficient than transporting 200 lb of human plus 2000 lb of vehicle.

Transporting something a short distance is more efficient than transporting something a long distance.

Both of these factors work in favor of densely packed cities being more efficient.

Only if you wave hands at all the costs.

So basically, people are less healthy in suburbs (well, perhaps American ones, because they're larger in size and spread further away from city centres) than in towns because they have to drive everywhere in the former? It makes sense, but...

Wouldn't it mean it'd be even healthier to live in the middle of nowhere (read, as rural of a place as possible) and then simply not drive or take the bus? It wouldn't be time efficient, but hey, if you want to be really healthy, what's a 20 mile hike to the shops and back, uphill both ways?

Yep, you'd be even healthier! :)

But you wouldn't get to reap all those sweet sweet housing, infrastructure, and gas subsidies of living in the burbs.

The principal thing people get in the 'burbs is cheaper real estate. I agree completely that the subsidies should go, but if you look even at the tax end of it, it's a loser unless you will stay long enough to fully pay the thing off.

It's a matter of convenience.

A quick search tells me that normal human walking speed is around 5 km/h. Asking Google to convert the distance, 20 miles is around 32 km. That means it would take over 6 hours in your example to walk to the shops; almost everyone would prefer to take the car or a bus instead of wasting 6 hours in each direction.

Now suppose the person lives in a walkable, mixed-use neighborhood. Suppose also the shop she wants to walk to is 1 km from her house. The time used would be a bit more than 10 minutes, short enough that there's no real need to get a car or public transport.

There's also the matter of public transport itself. There isn't a bus stop in front of each building. Depending on where you live, you might walk 5-10 minutes to take the bus, then walk 5-10 minutes from the bus to your destination. That's also short enough to be tolerable, so you get people who don't even have a car, or who have a car but use it mostly for longer trips (or for when it's raining, which explains why the transit gets so bad even with a few drops of rain).

Quick tip - to convert roughly from miles to km, pretend the miles is BCD, and convert to decimal. So 20 miles = 0x20 km = 32 km.

You can also use the Fibonacci sequence: km/miles = phi (within 0.5%), and the limiting ratio of sequential terms of the Fibonacci sequence is phi.

1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34

    3 miles = 4.828 km
    5 miles = 8.047 km
    21 miles = 33.796 km

This is hardly new in many regards. The excellent books "Suburban Nation", and "Bowling Alone", both written in late 90's do a great job connecting urban design patterns to life individual and community outcomes.

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