The Future Is Not Retro | Hacker News Reader

The Future Is Not Retro

pedestrianobservations.com

88 pointsluu109 comments

We recently moved to a large-ish (but not huge) city and since I would be working downtown we looked at becoming urbanites (easy commute, can get rid of one of our cars, proximity to restaurants, shopping, things to do, etc.).

Then we discovered that urban accommodations for a family of 5 do not exist at any price (and small 3bdr apartments can be had but are hard to find and extremely expensive). So, into the suburbs we went. The only people that seem to live in/around downtown here are either young singles (with good jobs, given the costs) or homeless.

Maybe when the kids move out and I'm close to retirement, but then I'd rather live in a shack on/near a beach somewhere, so nah...

I lived in the downtown of a major metro for close to two decades. Many of my neighbors vowed to raise urban street smart kids but when the children actually came plans changed. They'd quickly discover their current condo wasn't large enough, so they'd upgrade to something larger. Then transition to a townhouse and eventually a detached single family home, though often inside the city limits. Once they hit school age, things split between those who could afford private school and those who made convoluted excuses as to why the nearby inner city school wasn't appropriate for their child and then move somewhere else. Most often to the suburbs but sometimes to wealthier part of town. I moved away before any of the children became teenagers but it would be interesting to check in and see how things evolve once that happens.

In Chicago you don't need convoluted excuses to not send your kids to the inner city schools. They are often objectively terrible and violent places.

> a detached single family home, though often inside the city limits

Wow, to even have that as a viable upgrade path.

I don't even live on the coast and in my metro, with the local range for a middling middle-class income, having a detached house within the city limits is an absolute pipe dream.

It is weird how a house in Minneapolis has ended up costing more than a comparable house in the Jacksonville, despite the latter having twice the population, being in the tropics, and located on the coast.

Jacksonville is a weird case, because the city limits include a freakishly large area compared to almost every other large city in the US: Jacksonville's city limits span ~875 square miles, vs. ~58 square miles for Minneapolis (and another 56 square miles of St. Paul). Jacksonville essentially includes a huge chunk of its suburbs within the city limits. If you drew an 875 square mile region around the MSP area, you'd find houses that were comparable in cost to the ones you're referencing in Jacksonville.

This is absolutely the case in Metro Vancouver; finding a 3+ bedroom, 2+ bathroom condominium is an almost insurmountable challenge.

The issue, almost entirely, is decades of municipal councils who could not imagine families wanting to live in towers, and so zoning for and approving almost exclusively singles and partnered housing in condos.

Recently, some of the councils have seen the err of their ways and begun approving a small amount of family housing; but it's woefully inadequate.

The mayor of New West himself resorted to buying two adjacent suites and joining them when he couldn't find family housing!

I think your story needs to include the specific city to be judged. Also what do you mean by urbanites? In DC, you can buy a 3 bedroom rowhouse not near downtown but near a subway for ~750K ~ 1M, which is basically the limit of what a two lawyer family can afford. In Baltimore, depending on how big you want your house to be and where, you can spend between 250K and 750K. I'm not as familiar with other markets.

This comment reminded me of a thread I read on r/baltimore a few months back that compared 1M houses in Baltimore and DC, it was pretty striking: https://www.reddit.com/r/baltimore/comments/aw9476/what_a_mi...

It's a little distorted because even inside the city location changes house quality per dollar a lot. For example, I live next to a million dollar row house in Baltimore… But it's only $1m because it is split into 5 one level apartments, so you can easily rent it out and get your money back. If you were to join it into a house again, you'd lose money.

Then we discovered that urban accommodations for a family of 5 do not exist at any price

I grew up in a large city and had a ton of friends in families of 5+. Their houses still stand today. I live in the same city today and have neighbors with 3 kids. Maybe this is true of the unnamed city you're speaking of, but this is a bad generalization.

Most people given a choice want each kid to have their own bedroom. The kids CAN share, but it is a lot easier when each kid has their own space to escape to.

> Their houses still stand today

Was this some intensely sprawl-based city like Dallas? Because the only way this seems realistic to me is if by 'house' you mean actual single-family detached housing. And there aren't many highly populated cities that have a lot of that within their municipal borders.

I'm in Cambridge (Massachusetts) and my apartment is a 4-bedroom. Building used to be owner-occupied, now converted to two addresses with two apartments in each plus a shared basement with a single-room fifth apartment, price is astoundingly low for the area because the landlord is just the senior who grew up there, I think the other apartments are all 1-2 bedroom or studio. It might be a bit cramped, but you could rent the entire big apartment and fit four to six kids plus two parents.

Holy hell, how much are you paying for that? I just did a quick look through rental prices in Cambridge and I'm seeing 1000sqft one bedrooms going for $2000/mo and up.

So... okay. Maybe that number of rooms in such an area exists, but it's not exactly something the average working family can even think about affording

I am paying for one-quarter of the 4-bedroom apartment (that is, one bedroom plus shared spaces), which comes in at $950/mo. I am well aware that this is absurdly cheap for the area. Probably part of the discount is from the lack of insulation and also lack of a lease (month-to-month rent, no legally-enforced guarantee that rent won't go up or I won't be kicked out, though the landlord thus far seems like a decent sort and I'm not too worried). I don't know the rate on the other apartments.

There are many buildings of about that size in the neighborhood, though I don't know how they're divided internally, and it would of course be more expensive if you're renting a full house worth. I don't recall the square footage of the apartment.

No to both. I'm talking about row homes located ~3 mi. from City Hall in Philadelphia (which is the center of the city).

Seattle has tons.

That's probably a matter of lack of demand, though. In my Southern European city you can find everything from a tiny studio to a 3200sq ft apartment with 5+ bedrooms, right in the middle of the city. Of course, it'll cost you.

In the US it isn't lack of demand it is lack of supply. Yes it will cost, but most cities won't allow you to build such thing, so you can't get 5+ bedrooms at any price.

Eh, people who buy 5+ bedroom apartments in city centres, and the people who build them, are not exactly political outcasts. I'm pretty sure that if there were enough of them, they could nudge the city councils into changing those regulations.

The problem is it is a vicious circle there aren't very many, so nobody has a family in the area, thus the schools are the low income inter city schools that you wouldn't send your kid to, thus nobody with kids would move to such an apartment given a choice. You can hate the suburbs as much as you want, but the type of person who would want a 5 bedroom apartment as a first choice is going to move to the suburbs in the end because none of the benefits of the city are worth sending your kids to bad schools.

We do it but our kids share rooms. The girls are in one room and the boy in the other. They will complain when they’re older but that’s life. Most people aren’t willing to have 5 people in 1050 square feet.

Alon’s continued insistence on super spiky housing with a focus on towers remains something I can’t get behind.

The East Village is mostly 3-5 story mixed use apartment buildings. It has a population density of 82000 people per square mile.

If we could get Queens and Brooklyn up to that, we could literally double the population of the city.

We know what happens when NY gets big tower housing - it turns into the Upper West Side, Midtown West or FiDi all of which are miserable places to walk through.

It’s not just NY. I spent a few months living in São Paulo (Pinheiros and Jardin’s) which does exactly what Alon suggests - big towers near subway stations that are spaced far apart often with awkward tiny buildings next to them and fall off in density a kilometer or so away. Also miserable.

What the spiky housing near trains theory fails to address is that ultimately housing is for people to have lives. And there is a scale at which life is comfortable - it’s like the East Village, like Miraflores in Lima, like Ximending in Taipei.

If we reduce the problem to people per square meter and transit carrying capacity problem we can theoretically make space for people but I’m not so sure they’ll want to live in them.

It is really hard for me to believe that it would be better to push past the 5-7 story mark instead of just trying to spread the 5-7 story housing zoning wider.

If I haven’t convinced you yet, consider this - if you brought the greater NY area to the density of the East Village it could fit over 370 million people or roughly the entire population of the United States.

So yeah, no towers please.

Why can't we simply say, "what are the greatest places to live densely" and just copy-paste design elements?

The Netherlands is one of the most dense regions in the world. But it doesn't feel like it -- at all. It is human-scale.

We don't have to sacrifice our humanity or quality of life. There is plenty of room.

Are people in the Netherlands similar to people in the United States? In the US you will primarily get a neighbor that is watching football, shouting swear words and always accompanied with the smell of budweiser as you pass them in the halls. You will always know when they are home... And if you don't get that guy it will be the screaming couple.

I think the problem perhaps is that in house-owning countries, the apartments are usually cheaply built, or cheaply converted, so leak sound like sieves, because everybody who has any money wants to live in a suburb. In apartment-living countries, they put earth between the floors, and the walls are pretty heavy duty. So you don't really have that much noise pollution.

Dutch weed stinks more than American beer

From my own perspective, the Dutch are more similar to educated Americans than any other country in Europe, including UK. Kind of a midwest friendly vibe.

Queens and Brooklyn can't get up to that level of density unless we build more transit lines. This is very difficult to do in NYC. Without additional lines, the city's road infrastructure would not be able to handle the additional traffic.

I think the author's point is to build more density along existing lines. Many stops in Queens and Brooklyn already have 3-5 storey development around them. Thus, build higher in those areas.

I agree that 3-5 storey development is a nice density for living in (I choose to myself). But practically speaking, spreading that zone wider in NYC, without any sort of transit plan, is not possible.

You might not like walking through it, but I think Long Island City is a success story for this model. Thousands of workers, who otherwise would've been driving up rent in Manhattan, decide to live near the LIC transit hub in high rises, and I think the city as a whole is better off because of it.

Walking through LIC makes me deeply unhappy but I agree with you completely. In terms of its ability to deliver on raw numbers of housing increase it has been a total success and arguably helped keep rental pressure off my crappy Alphabet City apartment (and by extension the cheaper apartment I would have moved to and so on down the chain) by drawing away midtown finance types.

I do wonder which is harder: changing zoning laws in Gramercy and the West Village or fixing capacity problems on the F/G/NQR or LIRR

Replying to this after having a spent a few days in Tokyo, a city based on which Alon makes many of his arguments and I have to say it is also miserable. The experience of Tokyo neighborhoods is a relentless wall of gray, right until you take the train into an outlying neighborhood which is of course mostly three and four story mixed use apartment buildings and homes.

> We know what happens when NY gets big tower housing - it turns into the Upper West Side, Midtown West or FiDi all of which are miserable places to walk through.

I've never been to NY. What makes those parts miserable?

Rich people move in, place looses its vibrancy, everything starts to look the same, etc. Ofc, the miserable part is not true for the affluent who gentrify the place. New York is a dirty old place but sometimes something special happens naturally, when people from all over the world, from all cultures, blend in and create something, it’s very hard to describe if you don’t experience it in person. The problem is that New York’s specialness is slowly dying out

Wait, correct me if I misunderstood something - building high-rise apartment buildings makes living there more expensive? But how does that happen, since high rises provide greater supply of living space?

The only places people will build high rise apartments is where there’s a demand for it, near concentrations of jobs. Having more housing allows more people to live there which will lead to more people having jobs there. Imagine if you doubled the population of Manhattan. Finance in the US would become even more concentrated there and they’re well paid. By allowing agglomeration effects[1] to work more more housing could lead to higher housing prices. The solution to this is to build more housing. If you increase supply enough prices will fall.

[1] Tech and Silicon Valley, Fashion and New York, Oil and Texas, if you want to be in X industry you go to Y city. It’s easier to get a job, the jobs are better and better paid, there are more people doing the job.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_agglomeration

Supply vs Demand.

There is a lot of demand for high rises close to city center and not enough supply of those buildings for the entire population.

Similar to how all real estate works really. Pick any small town Kentucky and you'll find housing prices that are dirt cheap with huge lots. Why do you find those? Because very few people want to live in tiny towns in the middle of nowhere.

It is so strange. I'd love to read an economics paper on it. I think it has to do with the fact that building a lot of expensive (above market) housing stock in an area tends to increase surrounding housing prices. It makes sense, but somehow seems to violate supply vs demand.

Well, I would first like to read an economics paper that investigates whether the premise is true at all :)

In general, I'm pretty sympathetic to this point, but how many square feet per person does the East Village have compared to other metropolitan areas?

As it relates to the US, this post had interesting ideas regarding urban development, and no grasp at all of suburban development.

While urban lifestyles are becoming more fashionable in the US, growth is higher in the suburbs[1]. Whether this is because suburbs are the only option for people moving to new cities (as urban cores become "full"), or because Americans (including millennials) are much more comfortable with suburban lifestyles than they are given credit for is up for debate. But to speak as if a sharp turn towards public transit based cityscapes is America's fait accompli betrays a serious lack of understanding of the country and it's people as they currently are.

[1]https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2019/05/24/big-cit...

Indeed.

There is also this statement:

> It’s not even an imposition. It’s opportunity. People can live in high-quality housing with access to extensive social as well as job networks

Here's the author is saying that "high-quality" housing and social network is supposedly stronger in urban areas. With regards to housing quality, I think the urban/suburban quality is highly debatable. In terms of social network as well, I think this is probably most true in the context of "professional network". Many people move to more suburban or rural areas precisely because of feelings of alienation and lack of personal connection traditionally associated with large urban areas. This has been remarked on by social observers for well over a century.

The most ironic thing about this whole post though is that it gives no credence to how the "future" predicted by the '90s kind of won: The Internet has made many professional and communication opportunities available to people wherever they may live. While we might not live in that IBM commercial version of an anonymized future where "The Internet does not care if you are X", we do live in a world where the internet has disseminated many of the traditional benefits of cities (and "civilization") to wherever a person may live. Knowledge, education, communication, art, work: all of these are much easier to obtain outside of cities now, and that has massively factored into why our current "future" has allowed that demographic shift into the suburbs to continue.

>Knowledge, education, communication, art, work: all of these are much easier to obtain outside of cities now, and that has massively factored into why our current "future" has allowed that demographic shift into the suburbs to continue.

This is really underselling the simple fact that our federal dollars still heavily subsidize suburban development at the expense of urban amenities and development patterns. Most of the rapidly growing cities haven't actually built any expansions of transit capacity or coverage since they hit their growth spurts over the past few decades, and the housing supply hasn't kept up either. If it's functionally illegal to build urban capacity you're not going to get urban development. It's a much simpler story than grandiose tales about how the internet obviates the need for human interaction.

> This is really underselling the simple fact that our federal dollars still heavily subsidize suburban development at the expense of urban amenities and development patterns.

This is simply not true. Secondly, the restrictions around urban development are self-imposed at either the State or Local level. SF, NYC, Chicago, etc. have zoning and development restrictions that Houston, Atlanta, Austin do not.

Astute observers may determine for themselves why that is, but this is not a federal or subsidy issue. (Just how much has the CA never-to-be-completed train cost again?...)

> This is simply not true. Secondly, the restrictions around urban development are self-imposed at either the State or Local level.

Made possible by the unending spigot of funding for laying down asphalt. These decisions become less and less tenable when the underlying substructure goes away.

What’s more is that it’s not even accurate. There is no equivalent federal impetus behind building walkable neighborhoods and transit the way there is to subsidize the maintenance of road expansions and interchanges. 4 out of 5 federal transit dollars go to highways.

And it even goes into what we do through industrial policy. We didn’t bail out people who make trains or buses, we made the auto industry the national manufacturing priority. For God’s sake the government doesn’t even build railroads. They’re all private and leased.

> Just how much has the CA never-to-be-completed train cost again?

A fraction of DoT funding to serve way less dense population clusters. What’s more, transit projects get decided in ways that are lousy with veto points while highway funding just gets put through with little resistance.

Honest question: Have you lived in Austin?

Because there's no way it's going to survive the influx of people it's seeing, in part because it faces the exact same urban development crisis that other cities are facing and making the exact same mistakes. For every person that points to Houston or Austin as being exemplary examples, I wonder if they have actually tried living there. This is before we even start talking about the dire nature of trying to walk anywhere in these cities.

Honest answer:

I have lived in Austin for 10 years off-and-on (I had a startup where I had to drive 6 hours to a different State every 2 weeks for 3 years). I have lived there permanently for 7 years.

I have also lived in Houston, 2 other cities in Texas (including Midland), 6 other states in the U.S., and was not born or raised in the United States.

For the last 7 years, I have also worked for companies where the tech headquarters were either in NY or SF.

Where do you get the idea that Atlanta does not have zoning and development restrictions?

Agreed.

The idea that a social network is better or of a higher quality simply because there are more bodies around you is a false premise. This sweeps aside the idea that people may prefer a lower density social network where each party mutually seeks another out as opposed to forced through proximity.

People in dense cities don't have social networks based on proximity, where did you get that idea? On the contrary, the big city is where you can disappear, and live almost anonymously. The alienation comes exactly from that: the lack of forced interactions with the same people pushing you into forming social connections.

Certain groups/bubbles look at their friends who, like themselves, tend to be college-educated, relatively well paid, young, childless, etc. and conclude that everyone is (or at least wants to) move into urban cores. In fact, there is a general migration out of areas like the rust belt and many very rural towns to places where there are more jobs. But the migration into urban cores is mostly fairly specific demographic groups into a relatively small number of elite cities. Which is a notable change from the net outflow as recently as 20 years ago. But it's still a relatively modest shift in the scheme of things.

Mostly because we've made it such that they're the only people who can afford to move into city cores any more.

There are still a lot of people who could afford to live in an urban core but choose not to.

Wonder if Starlink and other LEO internet services will make rural living accessible to high salary remote workers. While the rural lifestyle isn't for everyone, it's the extreme that would also open the door to exurban and small town living. Add in online shopping and ever evolving streaming entertainment options, it wouldn't be surprising if many small towns and rural areas saw new migration into them.

There's rural and super rural. I live in the UK, 15km from the nearest big town, 90km from london, surrounded by fields and woods, but 2km from a rail station and with 300mbps fttp. I can work just as effectively as colleagues in London with folks in India, China and the USA... My point is that extreme changes to infrastructure aren't needed for cities to become much more distributed and for urban movement to become much reduced and changed in pattern.

I'm about the same distance from Boston in a fairly rural town in the middle of about 3 houses on 100 acres. And that's not especially unusual for this area. So I'm just a little over an hour from the city and am even near a commuter rail line.

I think a lot of people imagine larger cities and their immediate suburbs on one hand and rural Wyoming on the other. There are plenty of places--many with pretty affordable housing--that are comfortably within the radius of major cities (in terms of jobs, culture, amenities, etc.) but which are not urban living.

Yeah, as someone who grew up on 12 acres off a dirt road -- in the comparitively populated SE corner of Michigan and still within the suburban area of a small city as well -- I think a lot of the more Eurasian crowd have a hard time understanding the true scope of situations like North American rural communities.

Cable didn't even come up to our street, and this is ~4mi from the local town -- pretty far from 'super rural' in local terms.

My dad has a property in Maine, likewise just a few miles from the nearest small (~10,000 population) city. He's the last house on a dirt road that can still get ~1Mbit DSL and cell reception is really marginal too. And that's barely rural by Maine standards.

The economics of DSL are driven by the physics and physics is harsh. Basically the signal to noise for high frequencies drops through the floor after 2km and for low frequencies after 10km... with good copper and lots of clever DSP (that's long range adsl btw) The good news is that I think MIMO will make a lot of properties more economic to serve with radio in the next few years.

Not sure why this is being down voted. In all the discussions about cars and congestion I always think in the future so many more people will just work remotely. That seems like the best fix. I'd love to live rural and have access to high speed internet and consumer goods. Only issue I have with rural life is access to good schools and doctors for my kids.

>I always think in the future so many more people will just work remotely

People have been saying this for over a decade now (probably much longer, but that's when I started paying attention) and I've yet to see any evidence at all that it's true. As the owner of a rural house where my only internet option is satellite, I'd love for it to be true, but I still rent and apartment in the Bay Area where I live most of the time because that's where my employer wants me to be.

It varies a lot by company and other factors but both numbers I've seen and anecdotally the numbers are up in the software industry. More and more people I know who switch companies end up just remotely if they weren't already--including at companies that weren't historically remote-friendly.

Of course, lots of employers aren't really remote friendly and others are probably better described as being OK with some WFH but not as much 100% remote. (I'm pretty much all-remote at this point but I'm technically attached to an office even if I don't have a desk there any longer.)

Interesting. My last two jobs (including my current) working from home is very common. We have several 100% remotes and others work from home 2-3 days a week. My friend's company is nothing but remotes (no home office). People have been saying this for a decade but just recently the infrastructure is there. Today's it's so easy to jump on Skype or Google Chat and video conference with people. 10 years ago we weren't quit there.

I've known people who have remote worked in tech with just satellite. It's not ideal/cheap and there are definitely compromises especially as video becomes more and more part of everything. So it can be done today, albeit with compromises.

5G could potentially improve the situation as well.

A few years ago I saw a video on YouTube of a developer at Microsoft who lived in a yurt in rural Montana or Idaho. Seemed to work pretty well for him and his girlfriend. Though they never said it, I got the feeling that they did sometimes go into town for a bandwidth run now and then, probably for large uploads.

If I'm not mistaken 5G is line of sight. If so, might be more useful in flat areas than up in the mountains though repeaters could make that work.

Certainly none of today's alternatives to broadband are great. And I don't really know to what degree and under what circumstances 5G will help.

But, yeah, it can be done even in the context of a lot of tech jobs. It does require making compromises though. Probably little or no streaming video, for example.

I couldn't even imagine. My family upgraded from dialup to satellite around 2006 as a luxury, and the latency was basically unworkable for anything remotely realtime.

Even for a reasonably decent plan, the caps were also ridiculous as well. I could realistically watch maybe 45 minutes of YouTube per month.

I have a rural house with satellite internet. I work from there several weeks a year to stretch my time away from the hell that is the Bay Area. It works fine as long as all I need is access to the git server, despite the fact that I usually blow through the bandwidth soft cap within a few days at most. I usually take at least two trips into town (7 miles each way, pop. 700) to get cell service for conference calls over the course of a week.

>While urban lifestyles are becoming more fashionable in the US, growth is higher in the suburbs

You would really need to conduct surveys questioning where people want to live versus where they do live before it's possible to understand current state and likely future trends. I have a suspicion that most people would rather live in a different place, but have had to compromise because the place they have in mind doesn't exist. Not that it couldn't exist, just that today it doesn't because <circumstances>.

From just observing people's personal anecdotes about where they'd like to live, I've noticed a few common situations:

- Folks trying to find a way to host a growing family in a dense urban setting (examples in this thread). They often end up in suburbia, and endure soul-sucking commutes.

- Young single high-earning professionals that want to live in a remote/rural/setting. They often just stay in the city while pining for the fjords as a kind of long-term early retirement plan.

- Retirees that want to live in dense urban places with great public transport and medical facilities. They're simply priced out of this for the most part.

I don't feel this article has a very strong point or that it offers strong arguments towards why this non-retro future is unavoidable and / or better.

> "The status anxieties of Basil Fawlty types who either can’t or won’t adapt to a world that has little use for their prejudices are not a serious public concern."

This is exactly what Urban Planning is concerned with. If Urban Planning ignores a subset of people as they are not a serious public concern (hint: they are), is it really building a future for people? Or a future designed to optimize moving cargo (people?) around...

Furthermore, it seems like a "strawman" argument. Where exactly are people arguing that the future of urban settlement must be exactly the same as it was pre-auto?

"We're planning for a future for all the people who fit our plan" is not a recipe for a successful (or workable) plan.

I felt it was quite weak too.

The title of the article should be "I do not want the future to be retro" or, more honestly: "I do not want the future to be traditional."

Given the authors biography, frequent relocation amongst expensive, elite international cities, this is not surprising. The fact that the author ended up settling in Paris, however, is very funny.

Having lived and worked in several highrises, I'll say that density advocates (which includes me, mostly) almost always glaze over vertical commute time and annoyance. Elevators and steps are a huge pain in the ass any time you're carrying anything more than a messenger bag/handbag and a travel mug. And there always seem to be way more doorways involved, somehow, with doors that don't really want to be opened or stay open long enough to allow real-world transit.

Now try it with a stroller and multiple crying children.

Yes, I can only imagine!

> Already, people lead full lives in big global cities like New York and London without any of the trappings of what passed for normality in the middle of the 20th century, like a detached house with a yard and no racial minorities or working-class people within sight. The rest will adapt to this reality, just as early 20th century urbanites adapted to the reality of suburbanization a generation later.

What patronising guff. Some people love city living, a lot can't stand it. You may be happy to live without a back yard and without your own space, that doesn't mean that we all will, nor does it mean that many of those already in cities aren't already compromising.

Yes, let's build train networks. No, let's not pretend that means everyone will be happy to live in a box ten floors up, or that this is somehow inevitable.

Not really an accurate picture of the big global cities in the middle of the 20th Century, either. If anything, the working-class density has declined in core areas of New York and London, hasn't it?

Well, by and large, people in the US at least who could afford to were leaving city cores in the latter half of the 20th century. And, even before that, densities were down from their peaks as cities moved away from tenement housing etc.

Your life right now has unpriced externalities among them: deaths from vehicle miles driven, sedentary car bound lifestyles, parking lot deserts, reduced childhood autonomy, pollution, highway driving commute times, class segregation by neighborhood).

You are welcome of course to continue living that way, but I wish you luck affording it once society chooses to price those externalities in.

> our life right now has unpriced externalities among them: deaths from vehicle miles driven, sedentary car bound lifestyles, parking lot deserts, reduced childhood autonomy, pollution, highway driving commute times, class segregation by neighborhood).

I commute into a city by train a couple of times a week, working remotely otherwise, and don't drive all that much at other times, so your stereotypical assumptions here don't really count for much.

Solving population problems with density + transit isn't exactly non-retro. Building trains and subways has been a thing for longer than interstate highway connected suburbs.

It's historically rare for people to accept a reduction in convenience, or quality of life. Even then it's only a reduction as a trade off for other improvements.

If we are talking about future mass transit, I'd expect it to look more like a larger version of Uber pool. Where a destination is entered into a smartphone, and transit mode selection is handled in the background. Something along the lines of smart buses combined with micro mobility.

The future of transit appears to be headed towards the smartphones and e-bikes, not the train station.

That future cannot work. In dense areas there are too many people trying to get around and it leads to congestion just like individual cars do. Only mass transit can solve the problem. In less dense areas the wait for the car is too long as so you may as well have your own.

How are buses not mass transit?

They are, but for much lower passenger volumes than trains or subways.

A bus rapid-transit line with all the bells-and-whistles like grade-separation (don't share any roads with cars), elevated platforms at every station for faster boarding, etc. can't handle more than about 3k passengers per hour[1]. A standard bus-line without that extra infrastructure, much less.

A subway line can handle 30k passengers per hour. You could build ten times as many bus lines on parallel roads, but it's probably going to cost more than the subway line and you are going to run out of space when you consider locations that have a subway station every quarter to half mile. Fitting ten bus lines in that space would be one every 150 feet or so.

[1] https://www.liveabout.com/passenger-capacity-of-transit-2798...

The context here is app based transit. A fix route bus stuck in traffic can handle 30x as many passengers as the same bus running an app based route. Add in the other features you name and the bus can get 10x more than the bus in transit. Then you can go to a train (subway or elevated) and get another 10x over that!.

Conclusion: app based transit isn't useful if you need to move masses. (Apps can be useful if there are a few rare trips that the otherwise good local system cannot handle)

They can be, but they need not be. An empty bus, or nearly empty bus is not mass transit. Mass transit needs to run fixed routes, which is the opposite of what on-demand call apps give you. On demand buses have the annoying property of wasting your time by going to pick up someone else who isn't even on the way. Thus you won't ride one unless nobody else does (not mass transit) or you have no other choice (again not mass transit)

And even bus based mass transit hits carrying capacity limits.

Bogotá’s bus rapid transit system, which is among the best designed in the world (train-like boarding platforms, all door entry, express and local “tracks”) is nearly impossible to use in rush hour because too many people are trying to use at once.

At that point the only thing that works is a subway or elevated train line

True, but in context of the question this doesn't matter: app based transit scales WORSE than individuals owning a car. Apps as a supplement for people who mostly use real mass transit can be useful, but it alone is worse than everybody driving their own car.

For mass transit, a myriad of smartphones, e-bikes and smart buses seems like hell. Don't forget the "mass" part...

Can you elaborate? Why would that be hell?

It seems to me many (semi)individual vehicles are not a solution to mass transport, like trains are. Plus of course the traffic congestion potential of many vehicles.

The trouble with Alon is that he starts with the conviction that we should build more fancy trains, and then works backwards comes up with policy arguments so that makes sense.

Given the huge spike in interest in outdoor recreation [1,2] we've seen in the US, I have a hard time believing that the future of tourism is urban. Even as someone who thinks decarbonizing should focus more on public transit than electric cars, outdoor recreation is one area where I think electric cars make sense. I also think it's not a crazy idea to build public transit to popular outdoor areas. Ski areas in Colorado and popular national parks have huge high-season traffic jams that would be helped immensely by having public transit. Rail is nice if the traffic warrants it, but busses are great too.

[1]: https://www.nps.gov/aboutus/visitation-numbers.htm . [2]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/191240/participants-in-h...

Passenger rail is barely economical for routes that are used year-round. Like it barely works in the NY-DC corridor, and not at all for SF-LA. It seems unlikely that it'd make sense for something as seasonal as a ski area.

I think it just depends. A lot of ski areas are right along interstates, like I-90 in Washington, so if you were going to run a rail line along I-90 between Seattle and Yakima/Spokane, it might be economical to build a stop at Snoqualmie Pass. There are also often small towns and communities that might benefit from being connected to the bigger city by rail year round, like the Colorado mountain towns.

Do the interstates make a profit? Municipal roads in New York? The economic reason to improve transportation is that reduced travel time leads to greater communication and commerce which increases growth. This applies as well to subsidizing rail as to subsidizing automobile use and rail is vastly safer per passenger mile.

Neither interstates nor rail make profits. But they are funded for with some consideration of ROI. The government shouldn't (and mostly doesn't) build interstates that are used only a few weeks a year.

If the government has money to spend on rail, it should put it where it'll serve the most passenger-miles/year.

Does public transportation have to make a profit?

I hope the future is more distributed teams and therefore more remote jobs, so people can get good jobs wi5thout having to move to a big city or its suburbs.

I was following up until "They’d have uniform missing middle built form in most of the US and UK", at which point I threw an ERR_CANNOT_PARSE.

I believe it's

uniform(missing-middle(built form))

built form: function, shape and configuration of buildings as well as their relationship to streets and open spaces.

missing middle: built forms between high-rise buildings and single detached homes which promote walkable urban living and fit into the character of many residential neighbourhoods, which "have gone ‘missing’ from many of our cities in the last 60 to 70 years."

Is this group really any significant amount of people? In my experience most people realize that progress and change are inevitable, the question is only how.

"One faction of urbanists that I’ve sometimes found myself clashing with is people who assume that a greener, less auto-centric future will look something like the traditional small towns of the past."

Strong Towns has gained a decent following, and their core arguments[1] are pretty compelling, although their founder has the tendency to express half-baked theories about monetary policy that I think undermine his credibility somewhat.

[1] https://www.strongtowns.org/newcomers

What are the monetary theories?

National parks becoming less crowded seems especially unlikely. It's not that hard to rent a car. Hopefully electric cars will become more easily available?

How do we feel about places like brooklyn and queens -- which are essentially urban in nature, but technically auxillary/suburban cities?

>The theme of the future is that, just as the Industrial Revolution involved urbanization and rural depopulation, urban development patterns this century involve growth in the big metro areas and decline elsewhere and in traditional small towns. This is fine. The status anxieties of Basil Fawlty types who either can’t or won’t adapt to a world that has little use for their prejudices are not a serious public concern.

The world will go in a trajectory based on its current dynamics and the factors at play, not the author's ideologies. And it can develop new prejudices, compared to which Basil Fawlty types might seem inoccent and quaint if not preferable (much like the current era, with Trump et al, seems more frightening to the starry eyed days 90s).

In fact, if climate issues worsen, and the trade wars and splintering get worse, the future might do away with the whole "urbanization" concepts as peddled by the author.

So I wouldn't so so smug as to think some provincial echo-bubbly thinking is on right side of history...

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