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Comment by CalRobert | Hacker News Reader

"everything is just closer together over here."

It's not "just" close together like it happened. The US has made it illegal to build human-scale dense neighbourhoods for 50% years.

Parking minimums, density restrictions, street width minimums, LOS (level of service) planning, etc. all combined to make the US an unwalkable, uncyclable, unenjoyable place to be a human. As a reward the US gets about 35,000 people a year killed by drivers, and many many more indirectly through lung disease, cancer, obesity, etc. as well as parents terrified to let their kids ride a bike.

Lots of free parking though.

This is a fantastic series illustrating the effect of urban design policy in the US

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lvUByM-fZk&t=346s

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>It's not "just" close together like it happened

Development gets done in whatever way makes best use of the available resources at the time. The overwhelming majority of the cities and towns in Europe were built out before transportation over land was slow and expensive so you had dense town centers surrounded by farmland and dense cities surrounded by even more farmland so to avoid spending precious resources on transportation. The practical limits on transportation constrained development.

By comparison huge portions of the US were built out after the advent the automobile (often tearing down and building over places that were previously more densely developed) and being geographically large there was always more land to build into so you got sprawling development because overcoming distance was fast and cheap.

The way we have more or less not built any infrastructure since the 20th century despite increasing population (and increasing clustering of the population in urban areas) is starting to catch up and incentive density but it will take time and policy sticks/carrots if you want it to happen faster than it organically would.

So yes, Europe to a large extent did win the lottery in that regard though they didn't know it at the time.

> Development gets done in whatever way makes best use of the available resources at the time.

Can you explain what you mean? I’m having trouble squaring that with my model of developers, which is that they try to make money, not make efficient use of resources.

Are you talking about Europe specifically? I live in America.

Efficient use of resources is one of the main ways to make money!

On a micro-scale, yes, but if there's an incentive to externalise costs that that's what'll happen, even that course of action in aggregate reduces everyone's profits. Tragedy of the commons.

True, but we have a lot of experience with designing legal frameworks and property rights that align individual and aggregate incentives.

It's not all historical accident. The US also bought into a vision of an auto-centric future that featured multi-lane highways right through downtown neighborhoods. This vision was pushed by specific people, notably Robert Moses[1], who advocated strongly for highway systems over public transport, and who succeeded in having a number of dense urban neighborhoods demolished to make way for highways.

There was also the General Motors street car conspiracy[2], which saw car companies buy up privatized public transit only to run it into the ground.

The fight against this future being imposed is also fascinating reading, particularly the work of Jane Jacobs[3]. She correctly saw past the hyperbole to the unfortunate consequences, fought against the vision but lost.

The reason not much infrastructure is being built these days is simply that cities are running out of money and credit. Every road built comes with a price tag for building it, and an ongoing price tag for maintaining it. The building price was so often done on credit (bonds), but the maintenance price is usually not considered. Given that roads bring in basically zero income for a city, every road built comes with an obligation for the city but no way to pay for it. In the past credit was issued on the assumption that future growth would somehow provide some payback, but after 50 years cities have hit the growth limits and still not seen any payback. Strong Towns[4] is an excellent book on the subject.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moses [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp... [3] https://shelterforce.org/2016/05/10/jane-jacobs-defender-of-... [4] https://www.strongtowns.org/book

Jane Jacobs is an interesting case in that many of today's urbanists read in her what they want to read.

She was indeed against highways going through the middle of cities and in favor of walkability and mixed use.

At the same time, she also opposed rationalist urban planning like Le Corbusier's clusters of towering skyscrapers. She would likely not have favored the mass building of vertical housing that many of the same people who oppose cars want in order to reduce housing prices.

Le Corbusier's clusters of towering skyscrapers aren't really a good solutuion either. They were implemented in Glasgow with disastrous results[1].

My (limited) opinion, is that auto-centric opponents want dense, walkable, cyclable cities. That doesn't imply towering skyscrapers, six stories of apartments with mixed retail, office, and light industry are sufficient. That should provide enough density to make public transit a viable option, if road space is reclaimed from cars.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/oct/16/urban-living-...

One of the challenges is that you have an existing city that isn't that. The towering skyscrapers at least are something you can implement in a relatively limited area a la classic urban renewal. (Which mostly doesn't work well.)

(But you'll find no shortage of people arguing for basically bulldozing the Mission and building a bunch of high-rises.)

The other has to be more organic but takes a lot of time and tends to generate a lot of resistance if 2-story zoning is turned into 6-story zoning.

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