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Comment by drewcoo | Hacker News Reader

As often is the case, cars are the elephant in the room. In the alley? We have rebuilt our urban spaces for cars instead of people. Now we wonder at what we've lost but have trouble connecting it to the automobile because t's ubiquitous and most of us can't imagine it otherwise.

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Yup. It's the main reason many European cities and Manhattan feel so engaging and alive in comparison to other US cities (just using my experiences).

In walking cities you interact with the city itself -- you can stop and look at things closely, walk into a small store you've never noticed before, run into a friend and chat, or pause and just people watch.

In car cities everything's far off and viewed through glass, your only interaction being which direction you point your car and how fast it moves. And becoming distracted by something interesting causes expensive and dangerous accidents. Plus, driving is inherently frustrating and exhausting, in my experience, especially when compared to walking which is at least a nice bit of exercise. You just want to be where you're going and WHY IS THERE ALL OF THIS TRAFFIC?

The crazy thing is a minor change could make many suburbs much more walkable: put the stores on the street and parking in the back. Not sure why they started doing the reverse. I've lived in a lot of California suburbs that are still within walking distance to shops (~1 mile), but the experience is so bad because of the way they've arranged parking.

I don't understand why in many suburban areas there will be sidewalk for miles, and then it will just cut off for maybe a mile or so, just to have the sidewalk pick back up again on that same road

Typically the road w/o sidewalks was put in earlier, when sidewalks weren't required.

Or there is a change of jurisdiction, and one didn't require sidewalks and one did, often city vs. unincorporated county land.

In suburbs, the sidewalk is supposed to be installed by the contractor who is doing the building. Some of them "forget" and the inspector doesn't notice/care.

Because laws requiring sidewalks went into effect after some land was developed, and the city would have to pay for the land owner to put a sidewalk in.

Unfortunately many shopping centers that build out to the sidewalk will display a blank wall with ventilators and so forth facing the sidewalk, and the real entrances are in the interior, facing the parking.

In one way this makes sense since almost all customers arrive by car but it certainly makes the street visually unappealing.

EDIT: I wrote "arrive by foot", obviously it is arrive by car in suburban locations.

This also means that if you arrive on foot you have to walk around to some back alley or something in order to access the building, which defeats the whole purpose of fronting the shop directly on the sidewalk. Or they'll drop or raise the sidewalk in relation to the walk-up entrance and put a railing up making it impossible to access any shops from the sidewalk. As much as developers think they're favoring sidewalks they're really just paying lip service to the idea.

Many centers have no entrances on the street. All of them face inwards to the parking area.

Lip service - just fooling the planning departments which sometimes seem to fall for the dumbest ideas.

Bait parking is the sad reason. People are more likely to park and go into the store if they can see from the road that there are available parking spaces.

Maybe they need automatically-updated signs in the front that announce the number of parking spaces available in the back.

What I noticed when I lived in Manhattan is that I CONSTANTLY ran into people I knew, everywhere. Despite living in San Francisco much longer, and the city being much smaller, I ran into acquaintances far less often.

Manhattan? Manhattan seems like a grid made for cars. Not place full of "nooks an crannies". I'm not saying it's not nice but it doesn't seem to fit the article at all. Most European cities are a wonderful mess of winding roads. Manhattan is mostly a grid. They don't seem comparible.

Manhattan's grid was laid out in 1811, a hundred years before the automobile.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commissioners%27_Plan_of_1811

Lower Manhattan has plenty of nooks and crannies. My father had a secret street that he would park on when he needed to visit Battery Park City. It was a little-known street maybe one or two blocks long that was perfectly legal to park on but that hardly anyone knew about because it didn't go anywhere. I went with him a few times, and we were the only car to park there.

Plenty of nooks and crannies can be found, even in grids. There are always irregularities and sacred cows to be worked around.

Also, Chicago has a lot of nice nooks and crannies. Including an ordinance that requires that a cattle path be maintained through some of its downtown skyscrapers, and an old barn at the end of an alley.

https://www.chicagoarchitecture.org/2009/04/08/the-loops-mos...

It isn't about whether the roads are in a grid or full of nooks and crannies per se, but that the city itself wasn't planned around the existence of the automobile, either deliberately or because the automobile didn't exist yet.

A good example of this is parking minimums, which make Manhattan-style density literally impossible in places like the SFBay.

The big thing about Manhattan isn’t that its built in a grid, but that the shopping/offices/living are all mixed together. People are coming and going all day long. A lot of suburbs are like deserts.

Still, the ratio of people to cars is striking when visiting from more suburban areas. Many places seem like a sea of cars and pedestrians are very out of place.

Lower Manhattan is older and European in style. It’s only a grid above Houston (pronounced ‘How-ston’, not ‘Hew-ston’ like the city in Texas.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commissioners%27_Plan_of_1811

Yeah Robert Moses had a big influence, but there are still some areas that are more like what the article describes. They just tend to be little pockets off the beaten path that you almost have to stumble into.

Downtown, like below 14th st, feels a lot more like that, and even more the further south (i.e. older) you go. Midtown and uptown not so much.

The premise of the movie Crash (Academy Award winner) is that these glass and steel objects insulate the various cultures and races from each other... until they crash into each other.

And people actually live in the cities.

Also safety, or the pretence of safety. Who's going to be the architect signing off on an obscure narrow alleyway with poor visibility and hidden recesses in a major metro area today?

We're obviously living in some of the safest times there's ever been, but that probably plays on some minds (alongside the "it's more efficient to build straight lines" part).

In very expensive real estate markets high-end shops and chain stores will tend to dominate the store fronts on the streets. One way to create a sustainable space for small shops--flower shop, toy store, sandwich shop, etc--is to provide small, out-of-way commercial spaces such as along alleyways. Their size and location make them permanently unattractive to big stores, so you create a relatively safe inventory for mom & pop business ventures. The bonus is that now these spaces have a constant presence of people.

This is how Ginza in Tokyo is laid out, and it was wonderful to be able to just walk around and shop without listening to traffic noise all day.

Another thing that often plays into this is access for firefighting apparatus. A lot of modern streets in North America are designed to be wide enough that two fire trucks can pass each other. But North American fire trucks are huge (often around 8 feet/2.5 meters) and a 5+ meter road isn't really human-scaled.

Part of this might be necessitated by the fact that we build most structures out of flammable materials, but with better fire-control technology (sprinklers) that could be mitigated.

It's amazing how often alleys/laneways are some of the most treasured parts of a North American city.

I agree entirely. People are also somewhat blinded to it as well. They will complain about how trams slow down car traffic, while they are waiting on foot at a busy intersection that breaks up a shopping precinct. Completely ignoring the enormous impact that cars are having on their current space.

My city has caught on, and there are a bunch of car free streets and alleys being made in the CBD. They have boutiques and restaurants with outdoor seating, and it changes the dynamic of the area entirely. People are relaxed, not rushing, chatting with eachother without yelling . You get a lot more friendly encounters with strangers. It feels like you've reached some kind of special community area, just for you and the others there.

This is why it seems surprising to see an article like this in The American Conservative. I'd think those folks don't wan to give up their cars for anything.

> The American Conservative

Oh the irony.

Before there were cars there were horses. Some places are dense and cramp, the countryside is spread out. Talk of car cities or waling cities is mere confabulation. Some prefer dense cities, some the sprawling countryside of farms and having the nearest store an hour away. Why can’t people be free to live in less crowded, less crime ridden, less dirty and noisy locations if they prefer that?

> Why can’t people be free to live in less crowded, less crime ridden, less dirty and noisy locations if they prefer that?

Who says they can't? The question being asked was "why are there no nooks and crannies". Those by definition only appear in dense places. You can't have a nook in a large empty field.

> Before there were cars there were horses

There was never a time where the average city dweller had a horse, let alone two or three. In 1915, there were est. 20M horses in the US, for ~100M people. There are way more motor vehicles per person nowadays.

Because sprawl has enormous externalities that the proponents thereof refuse to pay for, and likely couldn’t actually afford without massive subsidies. I know lots of people have a homestead fetish (which I don’t deign to understand), but it’s not sustainable.

I keep seeing the word "homestead" lately. Is that a thing now?

It generally refers to the practice of living on enough land to support yourself, producing your own food, heating fuel, etc. Depending on how many people are involved you might be able to do this on 5 acres with a good water source, though of course that depends quite a bit on whether you want to eat meat, have cold winters, have bad soil, etc.

It's been popular with plenty of folks for some time, like libertarians, fundamentalist Christians, environmentalists, etc. - I notice it's becoming more common among people concerned about climate breakdown, who are probably concerned that the support structures which make cities possible will fail.

Calling it unsustainable probably refers to half-assed homesteading, where you basically do some gardening on a big patch of land but still drive everywhere and use lots of energy. Homesteading (grow your own food, coppice trees for heating fuel, solar panels for electricity, ride a mountain bike to get around, etc) can have a very low carbon footprint.

I think usually the unsustainability argument is about scaling it to the population of the world. Our modern and in many ways awful systems of mass food, energy, and water production are just vastly more efficient per capita of resource requirements than individuals could ever hope to be "living off the land". Even if their footprint's a bit lower, it's only a solution for the relatively-elite of the planet, and they're actually being more wasteful than others of net resources in some senses.

Just doing the quick ugly napkin math for rough validation, Wikipedia says the world has roughly 14,000,000 km² of "arable land". If you convert that to acres and divide by the current global population, that's a little under half an acre per human. If the average family grouping were of size 4, that's only 2 acres of supposedly-arable land somewhere in the world per family. That's skipping over a whole lot of details and side-points, but still, it doesn't seem like this is a sustainable path for the whole planet to go down.

They can - but they shouldn't expect it to remain cheap forever to commute by car into the city they don't like.

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