I don't believe it is very easy to drive in Siena, Italy. I also don't believe it is very easy to live under a highway interchange. To each space its own.
Imagine judging Siena based on the ease of driving. That would be equally as arbitrary as judging Houston by its space allocation to roadway interchanges.
Hendrix pulled this eye-opening comparison from a report compiled by the U.K.’s Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission, which sternly suggests that housing 30,000 Italians is less wasteful and more sustainable than using the same amount of acreage to simply move cars around. There’s truth to that, of course [...]
There's no truth to that, of course. Houston is a gigantic port city and population center, in a region of the USA where automobiles are almost essential to life because everything is spread out and public transportation is sparse. Even if you only focus on designing for people, there are people commuting in those automobiles and their quality of life goes up when their daily commute doesn't include a series of congested off-ramps and on-ramps in bumper-to-bumper traffic.
In Houston, the user drives. Just because Tuscany is nice doesn't mean there is any reason why space in places where the use case is different should be judged with Tuscany in mind as an ideal.
To take it to the extreme, this article is akin to a comparison between the ISS and a soccer field. The author decided that the soccer field is a better use of space because it accommodates multiple times as many participants as the ISS.
There is no reason to judge space in one place by the use patterns of a totally different place.
Your immediate best interest might be bad for the community.
> I prefer to have a car.
> I like being able to use a telescope and not hear cars.
So I am not sure s/he cares much about the commons. :D
I'm honestly confused, how are these things not possible in the city? My earbuds worked perfectly fine on the bus and train pre-covid, and my apartment has its own thermostat (and indeed its own HVAC system)
FWIW though, listening on headphones works perfectly well while walking or on mass transit. Scheduling isn't too big of a deal when the bus or train or whatever runs every 5 minutes or so.
I think the real reason though is more that I just really like standing and walking, and dislike sitting still for long periods. I also kind of dislike the stress and responsibility of having a car.