> When your kid spikes a fever at 1am and you have no car and you need to go buy some children’s ibuprofen, what are you going to do?
I could hit 3 bodegas from my front steps with a rock. I don't need to start a truck to get Ibuprofen.
I could hit 3 bodegas from my front steps with a rock. I don't need to start a truck to get Ibuprofen.
If you build a suburb so that you need a car, then, sure, I guess you'll need a car. But that's not because any of those activities require a car. It's just that your town was built to require it!
If we put a dome over your town and sucked out all the oxygen, then you'd also need spacesuit to perform all those tasks, too. But it wouldn't be because any of those tasks require a space suit. You'd need the space suit because we sucked out all the oxygen.
I didn't build a suburb - it was already here, just like you didn't build the city you live in. I drove to the suburb to begin with of my own free will because I didn't like living in a city (having already done so, Buffalo & Boston.) I'd already made the choice to live a lifestyle that is automobile-inclusive ;)
You don't get to judge or decide for me what is right for me and vice-versa. We all have a choices to make and do the best we can with what we have.
It's interesting that for all the intelligent people on HN, there's a lack of empathy and understanding that everyone has their own perception of reality. What's 'right' and 'real' in your mind may 1) not actually be reality 2) be neither 'right' nor 'wrong', but just a personal preference/opinion. I got a taste of this myself when I stumbled upon this book (and it's second part) https://www.amazon.com/DAY-Through-German-Eyes-Hidden-ebook/... (D-Day through German Eyes.) It's been eye-opening for me because I'd always assumed the Germans troops were evil men who were all bent on conquering Europe.
Also, exclusionary zoning played an enormous role in deciding what those places looked like and they did it in large part to control who got to live there.
Finally, your lifestyle choices have externalities, from the immediately obvious 30k deaths a year, to more dangerous streets for people who choose not to drive, to environmental damage, to cities clogged with the cars of suburban commuters twice a day.
http://science.time.com/2012/09/18/urban-planet-how-growing-...
https://www.prb.org/urbanizationanenvironmentalforcetobereck...
"It’s true that as people in developing nations move from the countryside to the city, the shift may reduce the pressure on land, which could in turn be good for the environment. This is especially so in desperately poor countries like Madagascar, where residents in the countryside slash and burn forests each growing season to clear space for farming. But the real difference is that in developing nations, the move from rural areas to cities often leads to an accompanying increase in income — and that increase in income leads to an increase in the consumption of food and energy, which in turns produces an uptick in carbon emissions."
In other words, wealthier people living in urban areas -- in both city cores and in the suburbs -- are worse for the environment than rural poor folks, and as developing nations urbanize, we can expect to see an increase in these impacts.
People on HN needs to get over themselves. Smart yes, able to see other's perspectives...hardly.
Without being forced to build in this financially insolvent manner, [1] no community would choose to isolate people from each other in the way that we do now in the United States.
Our neighboring country, Mexico, (among many others) shows that a costly design is not required for urban and suburban environments to work for humans.
The impending arrival self-driving car gives hope that the gigantic proportion of land devoted to car storage can be radically reduced, giving space for more buildings and habitable spaces between the buildings we have already constructed. This is a good sign for the future but we sure took an expensive, circuitous route to get there, all the while losing local power over our communities to industrial interests.
[1] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/4/19/the-sprawl-con...
That's such a nonsensical argument. Suburbs weren't designed for elephants, they were created for humans, just like cities. You want to alleviate the dependence on cars in cities, make public transportation as convenient and flexible as having a car. Oh wait, you can't. People have cars because they do provide a perceived benefit, otherwise people would choose the alternative in droves.
Maybe you all should create a pedestrian-only city and live happily ever after.
There is no choice but to build cities in this car-dependent way. Cities are forced to do so by our legal system that has been influenced by the automobile manufacturers and other industries.
Instead of me digging up some citations, just go watch Roger Rabbit. This has been the story for many years.