Hacker News Reader

Comment by unionemployee | Hacker News Reader

The scariest thing about Texas growth to me is the insane sprawl that seems to go unchecked in the state. Massive roads lined with gas stations, chain restaurants and big box stores, surrounded by cheaply built homes with four cars in the driveway/garage, just everywhere. It makes me want to leave the country.

View on HN

That sounds amazing, I might want to move.

Why does it bother you how other people want to live? Not everyone wants to live in an Arcology. If you want to, then go for it but let other people live as they want.

Objectively speaking, sprawl is about as inefficient as urban design gets.

It makes it nearly impossible to have walkable area around which smaller and more organic experiences can develop. It also makes o very hard to develop any kind of community.

Then there are the economic implications sprawl. It makes the city instantly dependant on cars and roads for everything. Things such as school transportation, policing and emergency response also become more expensive, as fewer people inhabit the region per mile.

It is like buying a pickup truck for everyday commutes. Sure, you can do it if you like it. But objectively speaking it is rather inefficient.

Are you in Europe or something? Just about every city in the United States is surrounded by single family homes and freeways with the same chain stores repeated every few miles. It's really hard to not find what you're looking for.

It isn’t. Your footprint becomes much smaller once you get out of your car. There are walkable/bikable areas all over the place that are livable, but they may not stand out if one isn’t looking for them.

Maintaining the roads and infrastructure associated with sprawl places a huge financial burden on cities that often can’t be supported by local taxes alone, not to mention the cost to individuals. Look at how much American consumer debt is tied up in cars. Definitely unMAGA. It also wastes a huge amount of land and isolates people as they move from work to home to their various other destinations, always sequestered away from others. Nothing is human sized, it’s car sized. People are welcome to live how they want, but they should also have to shoulder the cost of the negative externalities associated with their lifestyle. Of course, NIMBYism also often prevents denser development. It’s a vicious cycle. Here’s a screenshot from a video I took in Queens the other day - https://imgur.com/a/iShA4yV. No bike lane on this street, surrounded by pedestrians and in a walkable community (Kew Garden), yet, even in dense NYC, we’re prioritizing making enough room for this giant truck over humans. All these hardworking tax payers in Kew (who don’t drive) supporting the storage of this private property over the improvemt of their community. It seems quite backward to me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com