The American suburbs are a giant Ponzi scheme
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It is only the last two generations that we have scaled places to the automobile.
City, suburb, whatever the residential setting, this is the true enemy of creating a network of livable communities. Any jogger, cyclist or volksmarcher can tell you that a continuous green ribbon connecting communities enhances the quality of life many times over. It's a crime that road/highway development rarely takes this into consideration, especially when some of the nicest trails I ride go alongside or beneath some of the busiest roads in my metropolitan area. A well-planned paved trail can can offer a cycling commute comparable to that of an automobile (sometimes even shorter), only far more pleasant and healthier. Unfortunately, sharing the road with cars in any metropolitan or suburban area is a life-threatening experience.
The solution is to pack people more densely in mixed-use communities. Ideally most people would have their necessities within walking distance (grocery store, drug store, restaurants, movie theatre, bank, etc.) and public transportation to everything else, including work. Both of these goals can only be implemented affordably if population densities are high.
I offer as counterpoint Santa Cruz, CA, where I grew up. It's hard to imagine a more bike friendly city: there are bike lanes on nearly every road, there are special bike trails along many busy routes, and there are bike racks everywhere. And a lot more people bike than in other places I've lived.
But it's still a tiny minority, and the vast, vast majority of people drive everywhere because the city is too small and spread out to have decent public transportation.
Also note, I'm not only talking about commuting to work or shopping. I live in an area where every single structured activity my children are involved in (school, sports, entertainment, etc.) requires them to be chauffeured. That's one more car on the road that could have been avoided with better residential planning, urban or suburban.
The parent is right - studies have shown that if you improve bicycling infrastructure, you increase the number of bicycle commuters. However, you are also correct... even in the American city with the most bicycle commuters (Minneapolis) the total percentage of commuters using bicycles is less than 3%. Unfortunately, the density of American cities does not lend itself to bike commuting. Even though it's not even ranked in the "best places to bike" articles, I thought Manhattan was the easiest place in the USA to get around on a bike.
Agreed with your agreement with comments above. We live in (the suburbs of) Minneapolis, and we bike-commute. Most of the time I actually walk to shopping or to the nearest branch of the county library system, but I bike to do various errands. My wife is a regular bike commuter, who has put on 2,000 miles of bike commuting in all seasons since a year ago. But this area is terribly spread out, and for purposes such as bringing children to soccer games we have to drive. (Yeah, I know, driving to go get exercise sounds more than a little odd, but that is why it is called "travel" soccer. Just getting to different "home" fields for practices in different age groups in the sprawling territory of our local soccer club involves a lot of driving, even though our U14 player does his utmost to bike himself to practices and some home games.) Quite apart from the weather here, it's hard to imagine the percentage of bike commuters in greater Minneapolis going much over 5 percent, simply because of how sprawling the metropolitan area is.
For a description of bicycling culture in Minnesota in January (winter), see
http://www.bicycling.com/news/featured-stories/1-bike-city-m...
I never, ever cycle in the UK.
Reason ? In Finland towns have cycle paths everywhere. It's safe. People take their little kids cycling. Lots of people cycle.
In the UK it's appallingly bad in comparison. Some places may have a few cycle lanes here and there for appearance's sake but in the main it's nothing. When you go cycling in the UK you're taking your life in your hands. You're a completely unprotected second-class citizen. A guy I knew died that way, hit and run by a taxi. I certainly wouldn't allow my kids to cycle here.
However, things are getting better - Edinburgh has a pretty decent cycle path network (mostly on old railway lines, so they sometimes appear to be ridiculously over-engineered - with huge bridges and tunnels). We had a family cycle on Sunday morning where we cycled for about 3 hours with perhaps 15 minutes of that being on roads.
I wouldn't let kids cycle on roads by themselves though - something I did as a child from an early age without thinking about the dangers (I did grow up in a small village in the north of Scotland!).
There's more to it than recreational cycle paths though.
In order to change people's lifestyle - i.e. to be a practical alternative to the car in cities - the paths have to go somewhere useful. In other words, you need cycle paths connecting offices, schools and shops. Even in Edinburgh I see that as a long way off - and the city council seem fit to sink money instead into the neverending tram fiasco.
<sigh>
It was reasonable for Le Corbusier to claim so in 1920. To believe it in 2011, one has to ignore the result of a century of doing it: the suburbs.
While it's a heavily used system, outside of the center ring it's mostly for fitness and leisurely bike rides more than anything else. No amount of niceness makes up for the fact that those suburbs are 30 minutes away by car. Most people just don't have two hours to dedicate to their commute.
The fundamental problem isn't that biking isn't pleasant enough, it's that in a far flung suburb and exurb it's just not a practical choice.
Amsterdam is arguably the most bicycle-friendly city in the world. It has more bikes in it than people. The city is completely flat and designed for biking. Virtually everyone rides bikes. Bike lanes and bike racks are everywhere.
Bicycling around Amsterdam is one of the most pleasant activities I've ever engaged in. However, I wouldn't say that it makes for a nicer community on its own.
People are no more apt to socialize or feel part of the community if they're riding past each other on bikes at 10 mph than they are if they drive past each other at 60 mph or walk past each other at 3 mph. Though I suppose it is more likely that they'll stop and chat if they're walking or biking than if they're driving.
Downtowns, by their nature, are the very epitome of mixed use. They are almost always populated (to some extent), sport shops and restaurants, as well as providing employment. It doesn't get more "mixed use" than that.
Public transit systems are at their most efficient in these environments. In my experience the cities that offer the best mixed use neighborhoods have the best transit systems, if for no other reason than high density, mixed use areas provide the highest economic impetus for transit in the first place.
My point isn't that cities or suburbs are better, just that there's a place for both. Having lived in both and now getting to enjoy the best of both has allowed me a life I couldn't possibly have if I was stuck in one or the other. Scaling for automobiles works out really well for people who enjoy automobiles and the communities they create, which are not only livable, but enjoyable, for the people who want that kind of life.
Example:
In Atlanta (my home town) there are about half a million people living in the city. Though there are poor areas, the economy as a whole is much bigger than that, but the infrastructure isn't - even if you removed the cars. Here's where it gets tricky. Add in the population of the surrounding suburbs and the number jumps from half a million of over 6 million. If all of us lived in the city, not only would it be even more overcrowded, but it would collapse. If we somehow managed to make it work, it would cease to be small connected communities and become one giant urban sprawl. Look at NYC or LA for example. Riding a bike from one end to the other doesn't work so well.
At the same time, if you removed the city from the suburbs they would go broke. Suburbs without cities are just small towns, which don't usually have bustling economies and are often poor (relative to a city).
Suburbs are the natural growth/overflow of cities. When a city gets too big to sustain itself it either spreads the population out with suburbs or becomes an overpopulated, overcrowded urban area that's big enough to need to drive everywhere anyway (or take a cab). All those people have to go somewhere.
If my cost of living went up 10x, I couldn't afford to live this way. If it happened to everyone in the suburbs here and we all had to live in the city, the city would fall apart.
Instead of the historically traditional city with surrounding small towns, we connected the towns to each other and to the city with cars. It's one big culture, and one big economy.
What I think will be the most interesting, long term, is what will happen when the need to commute starts to drop. Remote working already has a lot of growing traction in the tech industry, but I can see it spreading to lots of other industries as well. Most jobs that aren't transportation or retail can be done, at least most of the time, from a home office. A 20% increase in remote working would have a huge impact on how everything fits together.
I don't think that conclusion is true. First of all there doesn't have to be a reason to drive to the other side of the city, if urban planning was done properly and everything you need for your daily life is within walking distance. Secondly, high population density makes public transport highly efficient, so instead of taking a taxi, you can take a train or a bus.
Also, there are plenty of reasons to travel around town that don't involve what you need in your daily life. What about when your friends want to meet at a bar on the other side of town? If that's 5 blocks, no big deal. If that's 15 miles it becomes a problem.
High population density doesn't make public transportation efficient, good planning does. If the public transportation system is designed for a city of 2 million, and the city grows to 7 million, the public transportation system won't be effifcient, or pleasant to use, at all. The unpleasantness and eneffieciency is one of the reasons so many people have cars to begin with. Private transportation takes you where you want to go, when you want to go there, in an environment of your choosing. As is mentioned in other comments here, walking when the weather is bad (cold north, too humid south) is very unpleasant no matter what.
Sure, but the alternatives can be more unpleasant still. Last winter I had a walking commute of 12 minutes in Toronto. You'd have a difficult time finding someone who found a 45-60 minute drive through congested and frankly miserable GTA winter roads less unpleasant.
Not at all! If everyone in metro Atlanta moved into the city proper, the population density would still be less than that of Paris, France.
Paris Population: 2.2 million, Paris Land Area: 40 sq mi, Paris Density: 55,000 per sq mi,
Atlanta Metro Population: 6 million [wikipedia says 5.3 mil], Atlanta City Land Area: 130 sq mi, Hypothetical Density: 43,000 per sq mi, (Actual Density: 720 per sq mi)
Atlanta is completely unequiped to handle that population (infrastructure-wise). It's not even clear that building out that infrastructure at that density would be wise. It's costly to build infrastructure for a city as dense as NYC. The cost of the subway system dwarfs the cost of running water and sewage piping to suburb. It makes economic sense in NYC, because space is at a huge premium. That doesn't necessarily make sense for Atlanta, a city with no natural boundaries and surrounded by cheap land.
I would presume we'd see much cheaper home prices. But I doubt the real estate industry will allow this to occur.
Living anywhere leads to costs for other people, but it's significantly higher in the suburbs. It'd be nice if governments would make people pay each other for those costs. Instead, they usually subsidize suburban living via roads, universal service fees, expenditures to ensure cheap fuel, etc.
http://www.newwest.net/index.php/city/article/farming_park_a...
Maybe we can start with this and move from there.
I'm not saying it's the case. But maybe, could it be the other way around? What if these were in fact just another externality of suburban life?
US policy with regard to the sale of oil is mostly on the prevention side. (eg. Iran, Libya, Iraq). At $100 bbl there is no shortage of oil outside the middle east. Did you happen to notice that once the US got involved in Libya the price of oil went up? See also wars in Iraq / Afganistan, now lets say you owned an oil field in Saudi Arabia, if it costs $2 bbl to extract and $1 to the Saudi's in royalties would you prefer to sell your oil at $30 bbl or $100 bbl?
The idea that the US has the military industrial complex to provide cheap oil to the suburbs is a fantasy dreamed up by environmentalists designed to appeal to urban pseudo-intellectuals (who are their primary base of support after the coal industry stopped funding them after they took care of the nuclear industry in the 70s). As a side benefit it makes suburban people think their gov't gives a shit about them. If you're a republican it's a win-win situation. This is like thinking that the protestant reformation was allowed to happen because the King of Prussia? was a liberty lover and not because it massively undermined the power of the catholic church.
Dick Cheney was not thinking about how to provide cheap oil to the suburbs, he was thinking how to make the energy industry rich. Starting wars on top of oil fields does not make oil cheap, it makes it expensive. If environmentalists think it makes it cheaper then all the better.
The US has a friendly neighbor to the north which has more oil than Saudi Arabia (especially at $100 bbl prices)
Even if what you were saying was true (it may be, I personally doubt it) all increased oil prices would do is fuel the conversion to coal powered cars (via the electric grid). Don't fight the future embrace it.
Regarding suburban sprawl in flood plains well, if your stupid enough to buy a house there you pretty much got what's coming to you. Why do we need central banking to rebuild suburbs in flood plains? It sounded like a bad idea in the first place, lets not do it again.
If the revenue generated from building in a flood plain is sufficient to recover the costs it should be easy to secure loans from the private sector. How about we just let the Mississippi take its natural course now that the area it flows through is filled with silt and will continually cause flooding because of this.
Subway and mass transit systems cost billions of dollars to build and maintain. Power, water and sewer infrastructure; policing and fire protection; subsidized insurance and natural disaster response; parking, health and sanitation -- These and others are the massive costs of high density urban living. This is a scalability issue. And my understanding is that it's difficult and expensive to build these things to scale to urban densities.
I think you're being myopic about the costs of cul de sacs and interstate congestion.
Beside, you've already got your answer. Read the last sentence: This is a scalability issue. And my understanding is that it's difficult and expensive to build these things to scale to urban densities.
Density is the issue.
I'd submit that the experience with broadband/cell phone costs+coverage in the US vs. other countries shows that it's cheaper to provide services if population density is higher.
Now, you may end up having no higher a ratio of towers to subscribers than in the suburbs. But what you do have, is a lot higher costs to rent an easement for the tower. Renting antenna space from a building is a lot more expensive than an easement in some back yard.
Edit: I know that won't work for everyone, but that's why we have choices.
(And I live in Europe. It's that bad here too. Really.)
Living in Sao Paulo --a place with much much much denser population than L.A. where I live now, I could walk everywhere (only had a weekend car) and my apartment was huge compared to the places I can afford here.
So, it's not the need to pack people. It's just not planned at all
All these different destinations have been spread-out, miles apart, often because of zoning requirements. This has been going on for so long that people have forgotten that in the past, many families didn't even have cars and all these destinations were within WALKING DISTANCE (or a street-car trip away). And yet, people had lives that were just as fulfilling, perhaps more so than they are today.
As the "New Urbanist" movement has been painstakingly re-discovering, communities do need to have "a center" to them. In America, these were called "main street" in Europe it is "the square". Whatever it is called, the idea is to have worthwhile destinations that are short distances away from where many people actually live. This creates environments that people care about and grow to love and that serve their needs much better than forgettable box stores surrounded by oceans of asphalt parking lots,
http://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_subu...
But more important right now: we can't just undo this. Metropolitan areas have become much larger than they were before, and you can't squeeze all that development into old boundaries or even old forms. There can't be one center to a metropolitan area.
And even the idea of local centers supposes that there are no useful decisions to make, that all providers of a service are equivalent except for their location. There will be a Catholic church in your neighborhood, but will there be a Baha'i temple? Can you get your kid to the daycare you want, then get yourself to the job you want, and get home, and have your partner do much the same, all within your local center or the limited mass transit connections you might find between centers? Is the entire concept of Costco wrong? Because there can't be Costco without decentralized multi-use transportation methods.
There's lots of smaller (single-center) towns with a nice downtown, and a crappy strip area elsewhere. In those towns everyone shops in the crappy strip, because they want a nice big grocery store with good prices, and you just don't get that with a local/small grocery store. And businesses that provide real value want to build new buildings, and it's damn hard to build the right building in built-up cores. Maybe resolvable, but it's hard, and regressing to older forms won't do it.
added on edit:
There's lots of smaller (single-center) towns with a nice downtown, and a crappy strip area elsewhere. In those towns everyone shops in the crappy strip, because they want a nice big grocery store with good prices, and you just don't get that with a local/small grocery store. And businesses that provide real value want to build new buildings, and it's damn hard to build the right building in built-up cores. Maybe resolvable, but it's hard, and regressing to older forms won't do it.
That's right, but not for the reason you state. They shop at the strip-mall because it's probably closer and more convenient to them. That's the issue. A focused, mixed use center is the ideal but it requires neighborhoods to be integrated into it. The problem with modern American planning has been a desire to strictly separate (usually by massive boulevards) uses from each other. Work pods, retail pods, and living pods are all kept strictly apart. That's when the strip mall becomes more convenient. It's easy to park and quick to get to.
However, when you look at cities that do this right (Portland is my go-to example always) then it's a very different picture. They are pushing the concept of "20 minute neighborhoods" with the idea that all of the citizens within Portland will have essential living resource (Grocery Stores and the like) within a 20 minute walk of their house. They are building sidewalks and working to re-engineer neighborhoods to nicely integrate these areas into the actual fabric of the neighborhood.
It's a bold plan, but it reflects what has been very successful in that city. There are neighborhoods in Portland where everyone DOES shop in the city center. Between effective transit and smart planning the relatively small city of Portland has built something really cool. They HAVE grocery stores (large format and with those reasonable prices you mention) within easy walking distance of many peoples homes. Those stores are heavily used.
I think the issue with urbanism is simply that most people don't have the option. It's something we've had to rediscover and recent trends have certainly shown a movement back towards stronger mixed-use neighborhoods in the last decade.
Ah yes, Portland, where diversity is the guy with a tan.
Oregon exports folks who tell us how wonderful things can be, but Portland is significantly less dense than other US urban regions.
> I think the issue with urbanism is simply that most people don't have the option.
Of course they do - they can move to urban areas. Heck - they can even build new ones. There are plenty of places in the US where you can build whatever housing/work fantasy you'd like. If you're correct, folks will pay to live&work there. If you're not ....
E.g.: "They shop at the strip-mall because it's probably closer and more convenient to them. That's the issue."
There's more than one way to interpret that. An alternate interpretation that I will offer: the strip grocery store is cheaper and bureaucratically much easier to build (the nature of green field development), and the logistics of using that store are easier (just more space), so that big-box suburban-style stores have driven other kinds of stores out of business, and suppressed the building of new stores. Maybe that's because of subsidies and whatnot, though even if so it's not clear that removal of those subsidies would reverse the trend.
Now I'm not just trying to be cynical and pro-suburb. I don't choose to live in suburbs, and yet we still do a lot of our shopping there, and I believe our and many other people's decisions are based on rational reasons. Reasons based in the-way-things-are, not the-way-things-could-be, but still rational. I lived in Chicago for a long time too, and there the suburbs were simply too far away. And a lot of things are a complete pain in the ass to do in that environment. Walking 20 minutes with your groceries in a handcart is not awesome, and most people aren't going to be very excited about that option. Not because they are unable to see the benefit, but because it's tiring and cold to walk 20 minutes with groceries, you can't get a full load, if you have a child everything is twice as hard, and if you have a baby then it's just plain shitty.
I think if density and urban environments are going to take back growth from the suburbs, we need new forms to support that. The corner store won't do it. The city big box store is just aping the suburbs. But we need something new.
One option frankly is many fewer stores. Amazon works great in the city. This is contrary to what many Livable Cities proponents want (local business), but personally I don't care about commerce. Commerce is a pathetic excuse for public life, and if it is automated away then so be it. I guess it's the same desire: if the old way of public life doesn't seem good enough, instead of regressing let's consider new forms.
Americans live in sprawl because they like it. It's simpler in many ways, cheaper (often due to hidden subsidies, but cheaper nonetheless), and broadly more attractive than life in the urban core is.
And this isn't a trait unique to Americans. I work, as do many here I suspect, with a very international group of people. When european and east asians arrive in the US and look for housing, where do they live? Yup, in the sprawl.
Basically, if you want to win this argument (and really, I'm on your side) you have to get off the high horse. You can't just rely on people finally "getting it" and moving back into the city.
By Americans SF is probably considered a car-free, and public transportation friendly city, but as an European I am shocked to see that almost every street more resembles a free-way than a living-space, and not just in SOMA. China-town so far is the only bit that reminds me of an European city in terms of it's street-life.
And I went looking for apartments/rooms to the north of Market street today, and was shocked to see that what could have been an exciting urban neighbourhood (and the only one built to human dimensions, within walking distance from the financial district), is a shady place, the Tenderloin.
It seems a critical mass issue as well, to some extent. In Europe the exciting young people live in the center, in human-sized communities, while in the US even for Europeans that want to be in the city, the city is made unattractive by crime, drugs, and trash in the street.
I guess I will be settling for something a bit further out, the Haight neighbourhood, or something north of Chinatown (people there don't seem to put their rentals/rooms on Craigslist), and a daily commute on the bus. Still pretty central probably on US-terms, but almost a flight to the suburbs in European terms...
(am still looking, if anyone has anything, mail at wybowiersma dot net)
Core ideas: - More room for green, less room for driving, still some parking-space (it is the fast driving, not the sitting cars that kill city life) - Very slow driving (15 miles an hour max) within residential blocks (a single narrow lane + speed-bumps and obstacles/hedges can enforce this) - No cars at all in certain streets, playgrounds instead, keeps young families in the city - Finally, build more densely, so shops / public transportation becomes economically viable. How hard can this be? (/me wonders what stops architects from simply copying historic styles and neighbourhood-layouts)
People definitely live in smaller spaces in the Netherlands (and Europe in general), but the quality and amenities of the public spaces is so outstanding, that it more than makes up for lack of square footage in one's house.
Houston is a good example of where it's not simply people choosing to live in suburbs, rather the city itself is one giant sprawling mess. Until the last decade, Houston had a law requiring all single-family homes to use at least 5,000 square feet of land. Laws require roads to be extremely wide, and laws require buildings to have parking[1]. This makes it really hard to have pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods.
Also, while it's an old article (1996) and becoming slightly outdated, "Home From Nowhere" is a classic essay on the subject[2].
[1] http://www.planetizen.com/node/109
[2] http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/96sep/kunstler/k...
It's a policy problem, not an education problem.
Currently I live in the suburbs of St Louis and I cannot conceive of a better arrangement - I have a large yard in which I can grill, socialize in and enjoy - all the conveniences of modern living (big box retailers, etc) and on weekends or whenever I need a dose of culture I can drive into the city (or take the metro) to take in the theater, a concert or show, the casinos, nightlife, festivals... whatever.
Believe it or not - I don't want to walk to the grocery store and frankly wouldn't - no matter how close it was because I buy multiple weeks worth of stuff at a time and don't want to deal with carrying 25 grocery bags around. I would rather deal with the minor inconveniences that come with owning and using a car than deal with the hassle of not having one.
Adding that label to everything you think is bad cheapens both the meaning and the point you're trying to get across.
But I hate suburbs, personally, so my opinion might be biased.
edit: a few more thoughts.
I live in a fairly 'typical' US smaller town (not a small town). Here, new houses are jammed on their 1/2 acre with a minimal back yard, row after row after row of them. They are made poorly and there are no trees lining the streets. Streets curve round and round, making it difficult to travel from place to place. New apartment buildings follow a similar fashion, but are very small: suitable for student roommates in size, not suitable for more than two-three single people living together (or a married couple).
Contrast this with the older downtown, where houses are somewhat original, trees are planted (leading to shady sidewalks), and the streets are straight, leading to easy travel.
I was thinking about this on a recent trip to Seattle's downtown. There, not only are there trees and original buildings, but the businesses as housing are intermingled, plus they go up, allowing a much greater compaction of space. I would believe there is quite a nice economy of infrastructure scale going on there. Further, it is not like you have to travel between Zones to go shopping or go out to eat: you wander on down half a block, and you're there. Both my town's downtown and downtown Seattle present a much nicer experience than the row housing suburban monotony.
When I first moved to the Seattle area, I lived in Microsoft corporate housing in Redmond, a smaller suburb about 12 miles east of Seattle. The area felt depressing, isolated and uninhabited most weekends.
Of course, if you tell most Seattle-ites that you walked from, say, Queen Anne to Paseo in Fremont, you'll get weird looks.
Surprisingly, another friend of mine who moved to Los Angeles for grad school a year now lives in a neighborhood of LA that she compares quite favorably to the Hill in terms of walkability. That, I would've never expected to hear.
Interestingly, when I go south to visit relatives in Tacoma or Olympia I feel a little like I'm going back in time about a decade, or visiting some underdeveloped country (bad food, bad transportation, almost no entertainment other than TV, malls, movie theaters and TV, etc.). They don't understand how I can live in a tiny studio with my gf and I can't understand how they don't go insane living like they're in something that feels only slightly more real than an episode of invader zim.
I'm not sure if this perception of the world is to my credit or not.
I'd be curious to hear your further thoughts regarding that.
As aaronbrethorst pointed out, Capitol Hill is closer to what you're talking about.
[1] Much of Seattle has some style of beggar, but the downtown ones are the worst. There's a bit of a crackhead-hippie continuum, and the downtown beggars definitely fall more on the crackhead side.
Queen Anne, Fremont, Capitol Hill, and Ballard are much closer to the new urbanist ideal than anything else available in the area.
Cities are great, but suburbs have their place (in large part because of a) building codes that prevent tall buildings and b) how schools are funded), which the author gets to some extent. If you're interested in the issue, try Edward Glaeser's book The Triumph of the City: http://www.amazon.com/Triumph-City-Greatest-Invention-Health... .
Biking on busy 35mph four lane streets where bored suburbanites go 50mph with no median is a prescription for death by invisibility. I had to double my short-lived bike commute to take advantage of back roads (which was even scarier because bored high schoolers barreling down the hill don't expect you).
Taking the bus to a destination (if it is even possible) can be a maddening version of real-life Candy Land in which you loop around and around and double-back and eventually reach point B.
Cul-de-sacs and the Fleur-de-lis style layout of suburban enclaves make public transportation a virtual no-go as the shortest-path distance from point A to point B is impossible as it would require jumping fences or at the least, going through people's sacrosant backyards.
Bottom line, in the suburbs you need a car to live - to go grocery shopping, to go to Applebee's to meet your friends and carry that annoying table buzzer around like an embarassing vibrator while you wait for your table, to go to the Multiplex, to go park in the deadly silent except for lawn mowers parking lot of your rental apartment megaplex, and (most importantly) to go to the closest major city to escape the burbs for real nightlife.
But, witness the explosion in mega corporate office parks, and realize that the growth was because not everyone wants to live in a city - especially once you have kids. Companies built office parks because that is where their employees wanted to live. Or was it a chicken-before-the-egg issue?
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I don't have a good aerial photo of roads arranged in this manner, but basically the idea is that you have a connector road with clumps of dead-end roads off either side. I'm assuming they come in sets of 3 per side, where one road goes straight and the other two curve away, like the "petals" in the fleur de lis.
Now, there are water mains breaking all the time, gas lines that are leaking, the roads that are down to the brick under layer that they were built on, many, many abandoned buildings that are a concentrator of crime and cost. For example, a former clothing factory on E 55th caught fire this past week. It's been abandoned since 1992, so the city hasn't gotten any tax from it since then. Crime is really bad, especially on the east side.
People in the suburbs resent giving the city any money, because everyone in the city to them is stupid and lazy, and their taxes are really high already. And now the people are starting to move even farther out to Medina, Geauga and Lorain counties, and complain the taxes are even higher. It's ridiculous. Unfortunately, I really don't see this changing anytime soon, due to the way schools are funded though local property taxes.
Wouldn't Detroit be better? Detroit has already collapsed, and is well into a long contractionary period. Local government (sans Kwame) have basically said "well we gotta get used to a smaller tax base and scale back".
Oh, and i absolutely agree on Ohio's school system being totally batshit (Michigan's too). The fact that state funding for the Ohio public schools was declared unconstitutional by the state supreme court, and then the state government just simply did nothing is a fucking outrage. To this day, nothing has been done to fix the fundamental injustices of Ohio's schools (rich suburbs can afford rich public schools, and poor towns get nothing. Not even intact school buildings).
And too be fair, Cleveland is collapsing almost as fast as Detroit, save for Downtown, Tremont, and the Gordon Sq. area.
Edit: And possibly UC, but that's still debatable. It's certainly not falling as fast as the surrounding neighborhoods, that's for sure. But there are also 5+ police departments patrolling to try and keep the riff raff out.
It looks like suburbs are doing just fine and only inner city collapses.
I always wondered why would people want to work in downtown.
Some people also work from home.
Aren't benefits of "food trucks" unavailable in suburbs?
But it is true that the suburbs are unsustainable, barring the invention of Mr. Fusion or similar. When cheap oil is gone, the suburbs are gone.
Oh there are replacements, but none of the replacements can deliver at scale at a cost cheap enough to keep the suburbs going. The suburbs don't just require oil... they require very very cheap oil. Otherwise they are simply not economical.
Electric cars are feasible, but they're going to need a lot of extra grid capacity. Keep in mind that after oil peaks gas and coal will peak too, and keeping the grid up and growing capacity in the post-fossil-fuel age is going to be a major undertaking requiring the full development of pretty much every post-fossil-fuel energy source: gen-IV nuclear, wind, solar, etc.
All that adds up to cost... which brings us back around to the original point: it's not going to be cheap. Thus, the suburbs won't be economical. It will be cheaper to just abandon the suburbs and save the energy than to support them.
The suburbs will be the slums of the future. You can already see this happening.
Nuclear should be pretty cheap once we are forced to stop building reactors as unique works of art, and stop powering them with one-time-use fuel elements.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0446320/
And in free as in beer, glorious 240p:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3uvzcY2Xug
It's entertaining and, IMO, well worth watching even if you disagree with some of the people they interview or prefer your documentaries balanced and dispassionate. You're sure to come away from the movie feeling you know more about the history of the relationship between the automobile and the suburbs.
I dislike the suburbs as much as the next wannabe new urbanist type, but a) given development patterns of the last 70 years, it's hard to see anything happening to suburbs save on the same timescale and b) hybrid and/or electric cars will replace gas-powered ones if the price of oil rises high enough. Sure, the (current) higher stick price of hybrid / electric cars means that cities will become more attractive at the margin, but given how easy the substitutes are, I think electric cars (and the infrastructure necessary to run them) are now advanced enough to ensure that oil prices alone won't damn suburbs.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3uvzcY2Xug&t=16m15s
And later on they discuss hybrids and electric cars specifically. But to be clear, I don't recommend the movie because it's right, but because it asks interesting questions and leads you to think about interesting possibilities.
We use a lot of energy. If we're going to replace the energy from fossil fuels with energy from electricity, we are going to need a lot more capacity than we have today. And as you can see from recent news, doubling or trebling our capacity is no small feat.
While the talk was more about large building projects, in the second half he does talk about how Copenhagen has transformed itself into a more bike and people friendly environment. More specifically he details how people's behaviour has changed in response to the different environmen, where walking and riding has been made more accessible and safer (for instance bike lanes on the inside of parked cars, so the cars protect the bike lane from the street), more people end up walking and riding.
Now suburbia has pretty much been designed for cars rather than people, and as such it is no real wonder that you have to drive everywhere rather than cycling or walking.
It should be possible to change this suburbia to something less car friendly, perhaps in cities like Detroit and others, which are in the process of removing suburbs entirely (or so I have read), so that people's behaviour changes. However I don't see this happening easily in the USA. People will relinquish their suburbs, cars, SUV's only when pried from their cold dead hands.
Not that he wasn't a terrible person. But he wrote the rules that allowed a lot of this kind of development to happen.
If there's something to change with regard to the suburbs is that we should distribute the costs of living in a suburbs vs cities fairly. That is suburbanites should be paying much larger portion of the costs of public infrastructure and roads that stretch dozens of miles out to the countryside and are of no use except for suburbanites themselves.
However, there's a much more serious problem related to the effects of suburbia.
The fundamentals of current city planning and urban design, largely borrowed from the Garden City utopia, for the suburbia are so detached from the reality of urban development in cities that the greatest danger is in blindly applying these incompatible principles to the urban environment and, in effect of doing so, crippling the real fundamentals that actually govern a vibrant city life. We are killing the whatever health our cities might still possess by making them more fit for automobiles, segregating different uses into different zones, and doing huge disruptive redevelopment projects that wipe out and reset to zero big parts of city neighbourhoods.
The result from this is be the devastation of cities by applying governance and design principles incompatible with city development--which has already been going on for decades--which effectively leaves people only the suburbia.
Such a monotonous development is bad for the survival in general as is anything that lacks diversity. Think of Windows viruses versus virii for other platforms. Such a big disruption that could wipe out suburbia for anybody but the richest of the people is the rising of the price of oil. The oil price has already reached levels where daily automobile commuting from the farthest backwaters of suburbia becomes an actual economic obstacle. If, or when, suburbia fails, I'd like that we would still have cities where to retreat.
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To get you started, Geoffrey West, one of those physicists at the Santa Fe Institute who stick their noses into everything but physics, does a schtick introducing the idea of power-law scaling in urban agglomerations that you can find in various versions on YouTube [1].
An easy-reading overview of the same idea is Luis Bettencourt's paper with West, recently published in Nature, which points out that "doubling the population of any city requires only about an 85% increase in infrastructure, whether that be total road surface, length of electrical cables, water pipes or number of petrol stations. This systematic 15% savings happens because, in general, creating and operating the same infrastructure at higher densities is more efficient, more economically viable, and often leads to higher-quality services and solutions that are impossible in smaller places." The already classic reference is their 2007 paper in PNAS [3].
But the power-law approach ignores the true city-suburb distinction by focusing solely on size. (Suburbs are not small cities.) Edward Glaeser, a top urban economist, and Matthew Kahn recently did a panel study of geographic greenhouse gas emissions that includes a direct comparison of cities to their suburbs [4]. They found that suburban household emissions are higher than those of city households, usually substantially, in 48 of the 50 largest American metros. (See Table 5 for the money-stats.) The methodology reveals a wide urban-suburban disparity in energy-efficiency that I imagine is mirrored in the efficiency of use of many other resources.
(Next up, someone needs to integrate these approaches by comparing urban and suburban power-law residuals [5].)
None of this bears directly on the author's point in the linked article, but it does suggests that suburban development is a poor investment if an urban option exists.
1. A recent (and short) version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4m-jM_Z9LtA
2. http://www.cabdyn.ox.ac.uk/complexity_PDFs/Publications%2020... [PDF]
3. http://www.pnas.org/content/104/17/7301.full.pdf+html [embedded PDF]
4. http://www.hks.harvard.edu/var/ezp_site/storage/fckeditor/fi... [PDF]
5. The residual approach is presented in another recent paper by Bettencourt, West, and crew: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...
While I do pay more for rent, I do have a more enjoyable day. No commute. Walking distance everywhere of importance. Cool back-drop.
So, the ultimate question then, given what we have, how do we scale this up?
You need a certain amount of density. But the overriding purpose of the density is to be able to cram more stuff-you-want-to-do near your house.
Also, keep in mind that the "stuff" in stuff-you-want-to-do can be replaced with "people".
"Bicycle Rush Hour Utrecht (Netherlands) III" -> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-AbPav5E5M
Now try that in wide swaths of San Francisco: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=22nd+st+and+rhode+island+&...
When nobody can afford to commute from their homes to their work, and there is no alternative, Roger Rabbit will seem bitterly unfunny.
To make a claim like this you need some hard numbers, in my opinion.
The article states that that average includes the unemployed or part-time workers. In fact, same article mentions a 7.5 hour average when only working days are counted.
"Employed persons worked an average of 7.5 hours on the days they worked. More hours were worked, on average, on weekdays than on weekend days--7.9 hours compared with 5.5 hours."
This about matches what you would expect for full-time employees. I'm not sure how this can be construed as laziness. In fact, there are several studies that show the exact opposite: Americans working more hours than most other first-world countries. I do not have links handy, but I believe one was posted on HN a few months ago.