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Comment by alistairSH | Hacker News Reader

Do they like them because of inherent qualities of US-style suburbs, or do they like them because that's all they know?

Also, suburbs are only affordable because we continue to defer infrastructure maintenance. At some point, we will have to pay to maintain all the bridges, roads, etc.

I'm not anti-suburb necessarily. But, I do loathe the car-based culture we've created. And the rage that any mention of alternative transport seems to elicit among many suburb dwellers (who also love to bitch about traffic problems, but only want more tarmac as a solution).

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I think a lot of the rage against alternative transit is the apparent bias among many such proponents to "First, we make car travel much, much less appealing; only after that's accomplished, then we'll hope to make alternative modes competitive with the nerfed version of private automobiles."

The more competent proponents of alternative transport start by making the alternative transport better than cars.

San Francisco is almost a credible example. Pre-Covid, it was quite common to want to go from point A near Market Street to point B, 1-2 miles away, also near Market street. This could easily take 45 minutes by car or 5-10 min by bike. If the BART or Muni went to the right place, you had a Clipper card so you didn’t need to navigate the atrocious payment system, and you didn’t need to use the elevator, it was reasonably fast. If the Market street improvements had gone quickly to every-five-minute bus service with a dedicated lane, the bus would have been a huge win over car/rideshare.

A lot of transit planners seem to fail to understand that good transit will be widely used even by affluent people as long as they trust that the transit is frequent (or runs on a real schedule and the schedule is accessible), has appropriate hours, and is clean and safe. Instead there are pilot programs with 1/4 the service, and they fail to attract 1/4 of the riders, because 1/4 of the service is simply not a good alternative to a car.

It’s like the Caltrain wondering why the tech employee ridership isn’t great when the express service stops before all the programmers go to work. Or Sonic.net deciding to put fiber in the neighborhoods that already have a lot of customers of their DSL service.

That hasn't been my experience at all (living in the DC suburbs).

Local example: I live in Reston VA. We've slowly been adding bike lanes to existing roads as other improvements are made. In some cases, this required cutting from 2 lanes to 1 lane. However, in all cases, traffic timings and accident analysis was undertaken and in all cases that I've seen, traffic flow either improved or if there was a decrease, it was on the order of 1-2 seconds per mile traveled. Additionally, in most cases, traffic accidents of all kinds were reduced.

But, you wouldn't know it from listening to the anti-bike crowd. They see the reduction in lane count and immediately jump to "nobody rides bikes!", "run them over" or worse. Seriously, it's that bad.

I'll also add that in some places, the bike lanes are rarely used, but that's as as direct result of poor designs created to silence the noisy motorists. Another local example - the main thoroughfare along my neighborhood has bike lanes. However, the lanes stop just prior to the two places you would want to ride your bike - the high school and the shopping center. So, of course fewer people use the lanes - they don't actually GO anywhere! It's infuriating.

Edit - the sidewalks along this same thoroughfare also start/stop or switch sides. This makes it less tenable to walk to the school or shopping (the road is about 2 miles end-to-end; shopping center at one end, high school near mid-point). Lots of people are within 1 mile of either destination, but running back and forth across a 45mph busy road is simply unsafe. A pedestrian was killed a year ago running from the sidewalk on one side to his home on the other. How the heck is this even to code? Argh.

Humans are emotional more than rational. Positive numbers won't outweigh the anecdote of being stuck in a traffic jam while the bike lanes sit there, effectively empty.

City planners and bicycle activists need to work with human nature, not against it.

The only traffic jam on the road outside my house is caused by the hundreds of high school kids driving themselves to school instead of riding a bike (which they can't do, because the bike lane doesn't go that far, because their parents demanded the road be left untouched to make room for more cars).

If over half of the high schoolers driving by your place would really chose to ride a bike instead of driving... Well, the high schoolers you know appear to be quite different than the high schoolers I know.

Even myself - I couldn't wait to be able to drive to high school, nevermind the bus, my bicycle, carpooling with neighbors, etc.

Getting a car at 16 is only a thing because it means freedom from having mom/dad drive you everywhere. If alternate transit existed, this would resolve itself.

> That hasn't been my experience at all (living in the DC suburbs).

In my experience what "first we make car transport less and less appealing" translates to is "we should allocate some of this land dedicated to free parking for other uses."

Unfortunately you just can't have a walkable urban neighborhood and also a glut of free parking. But suburbanites insist that city-dwellers should shoulder the opportunity cost of making their wasteful transportation choices more convenient for them.

Often it’s the businesses nearby that want that parking to remain. If you don’t give people a convenient means to come from where they live to where your business is, you can’t get their shopping dollar. I don’t care if it’s hard to get there; I’ll just shop someplace else that is convenient.

I live on the edge of a city. Most of my shopping is out in the suburbs as they crush the city core on convenience of time and transport (and often on price due to overhead).

> Unfortunately you just can't have a walkable urban neighborhood and also a glut of free parking

With proper ventilation, subterranean roads and parking areas could enable this where geology is favorable, but it wouldn't be cheap.

This could maybe be viable for malls, stadiums, or huge residential buildings. But I don't see it working for rowhome/townhome heavy areas. Just not enough scale to be worth it.

Would be nice if Tyson's was bikeable and 7 as well. Lots of improvements are being made to the W&OD trail which is nice as well.

Oh man, don't get me started on Tyson's Corner.

The urban planner who decided to drop a major employment center inside the triangle made by 3 massive highways (with little/no housing, no transit access, and ridiculous street layout) needs a kick in the crotch.

I agree, I completely rely on transit and don’t own a car, but it’s clear a lot of activists want to penalize owning a car. Transit can out compete car ownership on its own merits (see NYC, DC & Boston) but it requires significant investment which most are unwilling to accept. Imo the fundamental problem is that most activists are fundamentally fairly left leaning and public/private partnerships would be the best way to build out subway/light rail systems in up and coming cities. Due to ideological commitments they’re unwilling to consider this option.

in LA, almost every train stop has nothing over it, like no retail, no commercial, and no residential at all. it's such an easy win to have a commercial developer build a 6-story mixed use complex right on top of the station. but no, we need to make sure everyone has to walk at least 1/3 of a mile to their final destination.

That's one place northern VA is doing ok, finally. With the Metro extension to Dulles Airport (and beyond), they did revise the zoning and development plans in the blocks surrounding the stations. Millions of sqft of mixed-use developments are going in where previously it was low-rise office and massive spans of asphalt parking.

Part of it is economics - proximity to the metro made the land more valuable. But part was the county BOD and planning commissions putting their foot down and making changes to zoning (changes to min parking requirements, changes to housing density, etc).

As somebody who lives across the street from the edge of one of these zones, it's a mixed bag. I get to walk to work. Next year, there will be a new grocer on my way. Pretty good. The downside is more traffic, especially on bridges across the airport access road (we really need 4-5 instead of the 3 that exist today). And, as land values have gone up, developers are trying their hardest to buy up parkland and convert it to condos/offices.

I had encountered unexpected hostility against cyclist on the road. No making car travel unappealing was involved, just someone existed on bike and someone else somehow took it as provocation.

>Do they like them because of inherent qualities of US-style suburbs, or do they like them because that's all they know?

Many Americans do have real-life experience of living in dense cities but still prefer suburbs because of their stage in life. A copy & paste of another comment outlining common multi-decade life timeline:

- early 20s (single no kids) : going to college in a city or working at a downtown firm so they enjoy the dense city living like Manhattan, Chicago, etc... walking to restaurants and bars, museums, cultural things

- mid-life with kids: they enjoyed cities in their younger years but they want to raise a family so they move out to the suburbs. They want the better schools, yard, garage to putz around in etc. Yes this means the proverbial "soccer mom" with a SUV to drive the kids to sports practice, ballet lessons, etc

- retired and kids are grown and gone leaving an "empty nest": some senior citizens might sell the suburb house and move back to a city condo and enjoy walking to museums again

So the suburbs are attracting the knowledgeable former city dwellers. Yes, lower land cost (and hence cheaper sq ft) is definitely part of it but not the only advantage. Some do like the quieter streets, a garage to pursue hobbies, a yard for barbeques, less crime, etc.

Here are some reasons...

1. You have a yard for you and your kids to play in. I know a number of people who love this. You can send the kids out to the yard without having to be there with them. When the weather is nice you can do this most days. And, the kids can have a blast doing it.

2. You can grow a garden. Flower garden or vegetable garden... I know a number of people who do this. This brings them pleasure in multiple forms.

3. It's a place that's yours rather than someone else's. When you rent there is someone else that owns it and you live there. Some people like to own and have more control over their space. It's about agency.

All three of those can be true in a city.

Like I said, I'm not anti-suburb. I am anti-car-dependent development planning.

Technically true; we own* such a place in Cambridge, MA. It's not something that's affordable for the median household income though. Structurally, I suspect it could never be, because the inherent low density required for that means that places nearest the city with that density will be bid up beyond what the median household can afford.

Which in turn means someone of median (or even 75th percentile) income who wants to buy a house with a yard big enough for kids to meaningfully play in isn't going to do so in Cambridge, but can readily do it in a number of suburbs within an hour's commuting distance of Cambridge/Boston.

* - or rather the bank owns more of it than we do and we’re slowly buying it from them...

> It's not something that's affordable for the median household income though.

Unless you have building codes that encourages the same type of domiciles as 'the city'. The Roncesvalles neighbourhood of Toronto used to be a suburb of "the city", but now it is in the city, and the houses have big lots, lanes/garages, and plenty of square footage:

* https://www.google.com/maps/place/200+Geoffrey+St,+Toronto,+...

They're expensive now because urban living is cool again, but up until the late-1990s/early-2000s, land was not that expensive "in the city": urban living was generally considered only for immigrants, and the WASPs lived out in the 'burbs.

For some stuff that's a little less palatial, just go up the street for some good examples:

* https://www.google.com/maps/place/50+Geoffrey+St,+Toronto,+O...

There's no technical reason why areas/neighbourhoods couldn't be built like that again.

> I suspect it could never be, because the inherent low density required for that means that places nearest the city with that density will be bid up beyond what the median household can afford.

I see no reason why. Cambridge was, once upon a time, a streetcar suburb of Boston. There's no reason you can't just build more dense suburbs and outlying cities. You just don't need them to be car-dependent. There are tons of suburbs outside of major European cities that are just less dense and more family oriented while still being well served by transit and being walkable for all peoples' daily needs.

Having a private yard for your kids and their friends to play in (as listed #1 upthread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26556317) is the thing that necessarily constrains maximum density. We have about 1/4 acre in the city. That’s somewhat more than the minimum, but you’ll be hard pressed to get 10 units per acre and have everyone have a meaningful yard.

Why does everyone need a meaningful yard? The point of mixed use development is that you mix housing aimed at people at various phases of their lives. There's no reason why everything has to be one or another. You can have a 10 unit multi-family building amidst a block of rowhomes.

There's also no reason all the land has to be personal and private. Condo buildings can have yards and gardens. Kids also do fine playing in public parks, rec centers, and playgrounds. There's a variety of built environments that serve families' needs that we simply do not build because of zoning restrictions. Singapore manages to build extremely densely, keep housing costs accessible to median income families, and still have their kids grow up happy and well adjusted. It's a policy choice America makes to be this wasteful and it's mostly done by making it illegal to build any other way.

Not everyone needs it, obviously. Many people want it, also fairly obviously. This subthread is discussing the preferences of families who do and those units will, by geometric necessity, have a lower maximum density.

Some of the benefits: During COVID, we put up a trampoline for the kids to play on and get some exercise. Private yard meant we didn’t have to ask or fight anyone about it and there’s no additional COVID risk because everyone already lives together.

We put up a vegetable garden as well; no one is bothered by it.

Plenty of people want to (or are okay with) live in high-density housing in an urban environment. Not everyone does; as you say, there’s no reason everything has to be one or the other.

> All three of those can be true in a city.

At what multiple of price?

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