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Comment by DannyBee | Hacker News Reader

"You should try living in a cabin in the woods."

This isn't even close to a reasonable retort.

It is if you have a preference for urban environments and your choice is between SF/NYC/London/etc and Salt Lake City, where it feels like every other street is as wide as the average block in another city.

To each their own of course.

Well, in SLC you are about an hour drive away from arguably the best skiing on the planet.

To each their own of course.:-)

To be fair, SF is far closer to and more practical for good skiing than London or NYC.

And yes, living in the Bay Area, I miss (from Switzerland) skiing being an hour's drive away. It's all relative...

> SF/NYC/London/etc and Salt Lake City, where it feels like every other street is as wide as the average block in another city.

Funny you mention that because I make the same comparison with London vis-a-vis SF.

Outside SF proper, the SV urban design is as bad as in Utah.

Appropriate username :)

I spent most of my time in Eden and Ogden so I don't know anything about SLC's urban design beyond my impression of the sprawl from brief visits. Personally, I think terrible urban design is the norm in the US (in no small part to suburban sprawl) and SF/Bay Area are easily some of the worst offenders in my limited experience. I can't really think of any well designed cities in California because the vast majority are parts of huge metropolitan areas where everything is so spread out that you end up driving through five or more different towns each with their own geographies and philosophies on urban design just on your daily commute.

I think I'm heavily biased though, because most of the old cities in Europe seem to me to be far better despite their chaotic growth over many centuries.

Yes, terrible urban design and bad infrastructure and bad policy is pervasive in the USA.

You can just look at neighboring Mexico with 1/6th the per capita income and correspondingly lower public budgets where transportation, urban maintenance, and quality of city life are routinely better. And not just relatively better: Mexican cities (outside the shady border region) are nicer than American cities to live in. If you could put a typical neighborhood from Puebla or Guadalajara or León or Mexico City into Dallas or Los Angeles or San Jose or Atlanta, it would be the best, nicest neighborhood in the city.

And that's not even bringing up the great cities of Europe at all. Because that would be completely unfair.

It's like the health care system: Even a great country does some things horribly wrong and suffers for it.

I went to Mexico city with my family about 10 years ago and it didn't seem as you describe. I remember looking out our car window and seeing huge expanses of what seemed like shacks. Many of the road were wide with seemingly no lane markings, and people making their own lanes. We were at one such intersection, and got pulled over by a corrupt cop who was on foot. Supposedly we came too close to one the of people who constantly surround our car whever we stop, trying to sell us stuff. The cop took my dad's driver's license and demanded 1000 pesos to give it back. My dad negotiated it down to 200 pesos. We went to a hotel specifically chosen because it looked modern and had wifi. The pool was normal sized, but only had 1 foot of water, and it was green.

What were you doing in a car in Mexico City? First time I drove there, it had me shell shocked for months.

Next time, get out on foot and see the city. You can't see anything from a car. [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6r83MF9BRZA&feature=youtu.be

Although, interestingly, the SLC design predates cars: http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/plat-of-zion/

If Brigham Young could foresee how cars would abuse the design, he would have laid out Salt Lake City like Paris or maybe like Kyoto.

Alas, President Young had long since exhausted his outrageously lavish budget of divine providence just getting to Utah.

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