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Comment by bedobi | Hacker News Reader

Having lived in Tokyo for years, the elephant in the room is "cars". The whole city is full of pleasant mixed use neighborhoods that are more or less car-free, and centered around public transport hubs that have everything you need around them. People, including unaccompanied children, can and do safely walk and ride bikes everywhere at all hours of the day, including when grocery shopping etc. The world can learn a lot from this.

Before anyone chimes in saying "nO tHeRe r cUrS iN tOkYo tOo" - of course there are! The point is the city isn't designed around cars. (and the parts that are are the least pleasant)

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I lived in Tokyo for almost five years, and owned a car while I was there ... I don't think this is a question of the city being "designed around cars".

There's a lot more "design for cars" in Tokyo than there is in, say, New York City - look at the Shuto expressway with its multiple rings of highways that run around the city and the radial routes that join them together; its elevated sections and tunnels through the most densely populated parts of the city...

There are also many areas in the urban core with multilane roads, but these always seem to be complemented with pedestrian over/under-passes.

Driving in Tokyo is very much more pleasant than driving in the NYC metro area. There is no street parking (by law), but there is often masses of underground parking to compensate: go to Akihabara, for example, and you'll find a five-story deep parking garage with >500 spaces under the Yodobashi Camera store.

One thing that Tokyo does have is a regulatory regime that means that cars are unavailable to the less well-off. That awesome Shuto expressway is a toll road. You have to provide documentation of owning a parking space in order to be able to register a vehicle. The biennial safety inspection (shaken) and taxes are very expensive by comparison with U.S. standards. Gas costs the best part of $6 per gallon.

>You have to provide documentation of owning a parking space in order to be able to register a vehicle.

This is amazing! Free parking is a scourge in urban areas

I can't agree, just because it works for tokyo and fits the culture doesn't mean it fits the culture everywhere.

Tree parking is an unneeded subsidy. The state/city should either sell or rent spots

Edit: lol Free* parking

I think it’s still related! Here’s a good video on the subject: https://youtu.be/d8RRE2rDw4k

Amsterdam is similarly regarded as excellent for biking and walking, but it’s also great for driving. This is hugely different from America, where basically every transit mode sucks (in dense areas) because dense areas are designed for cars at the local level. The solution that Amsterdam (and seemingly Tokyo) have used is to separate the two. You have roads which are excellent for high-speed cars, and local streets which are excellent for people to walk and bike. But you shouldn’t mix the two with local streets designed for high speed driving. (These are sometimes called “stroads”, and are one of the most common road designs used in North America for local access to shops.)

The reality is that if you follow the advice of walking/biking infrastructure advocates, you also get a city which is nicer and safer for driving, because cars are much more separated from the most dangerous and stressful elements of city driving!

This is honestly the thing that bothers me most about cities the US. Having grown up in Europe, I find many (I'm sure there are exceptions) US cities to be plain ugly and unlivable. The reason is obvious to me. It's that they are designed around cars. It makes such a huge difference.

I grew up in Stockholm and it too sadly is very, very car centric compared to Tokyo. Amsterdam, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Paris and others are much better... I wish all cities everywhere was more like them! (and Tokyo)

Note that Amsterdam made a conscious flip on this, as did other Dutch cities. Take your 4 lane street, turn one lane in a tram lane, one lane into grass + trees, reduce the width on the other two lanes and add a bike lane with a heightened divider. Bam you've got a street for a more livable city center.

It also took them the better part of several decades.

Most cities that have tried doing this globally have only done so very recently, and it shows, but that's okay, because it took time and patience to methodically go through more or less every Dutch road and change it.

The US can't even imagine the collective attention span required to achieve this.

You don't need outward collective action, really.

We remade our cities in favor of cars, mostly through applying changes to engineering standards. We could do it again, but the current engineering establishment doesn't want to change in many cases. (They had an easier time applying their standards, because by and large no codified standards existed before them.)

It just keeps getting better! The next step is to eliminate car thoroughfare entirely, e.g. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Hortusbrug/@52.3673495,4.9... which as of a few years ago only has tram, bicycle, and pedestrian access.

Lived in Paris for years but wanted to go to my native Normandy 90 minutes away by car often, with friends (so train is uneconomical, and whatever): I love car free cities just as much as I love cars, but I feel they always miss the massive parking space at the periphery. Those have to be free one day, and truly understood and desired, so we can sort of mix the intra city metro/bike, the intra regional car, and maybe the rest by train (but again, train multiply cost for a group when car divides it so hard to choose).

Now I live in Hong Kong, bought a 1998 Porsche 911 that guzzled gas and spat good smoke, that cost me so much in eco tax and gas tax (the same thing, really) for so little use I gave up and am car-free now :D

Cant wait for massive electric cars adoption where the discussion will move away from how we murder the world for fleeting amusement, and back to transport convenience and pleasure to drive. But Im sure we ll find problems with Lithium mining or whatever.

I think that there much better approaches to your problem than to just wack a great big car park on the outskirts.

For instance if you don’t have a car, the money save from not having a large piece of machinery sitting around most of the time would probably more than make up for a few train tickets. Another option is car share fleets which allow you to split costs and avoid a cost of owning a car.

Even with electric cars, cities should still be designed for people rather than cars. Electric cars are still a massive burden on the environment so we shouldn’t be aiming for most people to have their own.

>>>For instance if you don’t have a car, the money save from not having a large piece of machinery sitting around most of the time would probably more than make up for a few train tickets. Another option is car share fleets which allow you to split costs and avoid a cost of owning a car.

But cars are not only transportation. They are also secure, climate-controlled semi-private spaces. If I leave a nightclub with a woman at 1am, too far from my home to walk there, trains shut down for the night, no taxis available.....

Having extra pocket money to buy train tickets is useless in such scenarios. If I have my own privately-owned vehicle (POV), I can bang the woman in the back seat, in the club parking lot. And I sure as shit don't want to "car share" with anybody ELSE inclined to do so as well!

POV ownership is like having insurance: it's often underutilized but when you REALLY need it for those rare edge cases, it's worth its weight in gold.

Making cars electric doesn't solve any of the problems with cars though. Cars, no matter the technology, are the problem. I'd much rather get rid of more or less all cars, permanently, period.

Cars create opportunities for working class people that wouldn't exist otherwise. You're advocating for removing mid to long range personal transportation entirely? what's the basis for this? I'm all for city neighbourhoods being less car centric.

Sure, but they are still deadly. Self driving isn't ready yet despite the low bar of needing to be better than humans

Of course you can't stop at simply getting rid of cars and calling it a day, there's countless other things that would have to come with that. Obvious ones include improving public and active transport, but really, fundamental transformation of entire cities to be less like Houston and more like Tokyo and Amsterdam is what's needed.

People love to respond that that's too expensive or unworkable or unrealistic or whatever, ignoring that it's actually the status quo that is too expensive, unworkable and unrealisitc, and that there are now a bunch of previously car centric cities that have been deliberately and fundamentally changed very successfully.

But that's silly. Everyone agrees with you but what if you need to go to your grandparents in the country side village of 200 farmers ? You could build a once-a-day bus line or you could just let people take a non polluting car from a lot outside the city.

Cars are not the problem: it's their aggregation in dense city + their pollution. Remove the pollution, people stop dying, we can then discuss your dream of perfect public transport for optimization's sake.

>>>People love to respond that that's too expensive or unworkable or unrealistic or whatever, ignoring that it's actually the status quo that is too expensive, unworkable and unrealisitc

I'd want to see some numbers to support that. What does it cost to provide round-the-clock availability of secure, climate-controlled public transport to every possible location, urban or rural? Bullet trains on standby at 0100hrs to take 1 guy from Osaka to Kanagawa would cost a fortune. In comparison, while PARKING and roads definitely have costs associated with them, the hardware/infrastructure is largely concrete, and inexpensive to maintain when operating below capacity. So 1-2 people can hop in a car and take a road trip at a far lower net/civilization-wide resource expenditure.

Japan has great public transport. Japan also has great cars and a very healthy car community. What part of Japan's transportation approach classifies it as "unworkable and unrealistic" to such an extent that completely banning cars is the optimal solution?

I don't get that one. Cars are mostly fine if they don't pollute. They'd just be large bicycles. Why do you think the concept of automated personal transport is "the problem" ?

I think for instance we can't possibly build enough railway and bus network to serve every inch of the territory and it's simply to allow fast speed individual transport to distribute the load. It can be even automated with no pilot control, but it's impossible to schedule-base every location in a city without displacing people, rebuilding cities entirely around specific common transport etc. In Europe and Asia, where we build a lot of cities organically, it seems silly. In the US, where cars are even MORE prevalent to the point cities are built for them rather than humans, it will never disappear.

> I grew up in Stockholm and it too sadly is very, very car centric compared to Tokyo. Amsterdam, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Paris and others are much better...

I’m really glad to see this because I moved from central London to central Stockholm 20 years ago and no one believes me when I tell them I find this town more car-centric even than London.

Away from the tourist areas, everything in Stockholm is arranged around the free-flow of traffic - from the phase of traffic lights, the dimensions of the roads vs pavements, to the sheer design of the street layout.

Unfortunately the car-mania of the 1960s and 70s still survives here, which is dangerous for kids and enervating to live with, and such a contrast to other European towns.

Add it to the long list of popular misconceptions about Sweden in general, most of which are held by the Swedes themselves, lol.

It’s not all of Sweden though. I live in Malmo and I haven’t felt the need to drive at all.

There are people who drive of course by the bulk of the city feels like it’s for the pedestrians and cyclists, and driving through the city itself is simply awkward.

I moved here from London. If that helps lay context.

The city council in Stockholm in the 60s had a plan to empty what they saw was the slum-center of the town, the residents of which they felt were morally degenerate, and move them out to the suburbs.

The working classes would then commute into work on public transport, while ‘fine’ office workers would take their car. The cachet attached to traveling by car has never been lost, and any attempt to curtail car use is always met with enormous resistance ever since.

Looking at pictures of Stockholm in the 40s and 50s one can see the streets were full of cyclists.

Having 2-3 major automobile (cars, trucks, busses, etc) manufacturers in a country half (or less) the population of NYC probably explains why.

Overwhelmingly, it's the Social Democrat party, not evil capitalists or car manufacturers, who are responsible for aggressively promoting cars and car centric policy and infrastructure in Sweden. This fact will grind the gears of both Swedes and misinformed Americans alike, lol.

Interesting, what sort of aggressive promotion of cars have the SD party being doing?

Just to note. The abbreviation for the Social Democrats in Sweden is "S". The "SD" party is the Sweden Democrats, a socially conservative right wing nationalist party.

The history of "folkhemmet" is a topic about which entire books are written, but I'm not sure there are any that focus specifically on the car, I've appended some stuff from a quick google below.

As a result of this history, today, the social democrats (just like all other parties) pay lip service to environmentalism, curbing emissions, fighting climate change etc etc, but the truth is they rely heavily on the utterly car dependent rural, small town and suburban voters they themselves have created, and are thus constrained in how much they can really push policies that meaningfully reduce car dependency.

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https://mhrf.se/broschyr/hjulspar

När väl vågorna efter andra världs- kriget började lägga sig blev vår in- ställning till bilen och bilismen oåterhållsamt positiv och Sverige blev det land i Europa som hade det snabbast växande antalet bilar per in- vånare. Det blev snarare det övriga samhället som fick anpassa sig efter bilen än tvärtom. Dessa hjulspår kan vi idag se lite varstans, inte minst i våra städer och tätorter som så småningom fick genomgå genomgripande förändrin- gar och i många fall till stora delar byggas om för att biltrafiken skulle fungera rationellt. I samband med det stora genom- brottet under 1950-talet förändrades synen på bilen. Man såg den inte längre som en lyxartikel, bilen kom till och med att bli en byggsten i folkhemsbygget. I skriften ”Har vi råd med bilen?” slog socialdemokraterna inför valet 1956 fast att bilen både var leksak och nyt- tosak och att den inte längre enbart var en angelägenhet för överklas- sen. Bilen kallades till och med för en demokratisk kraft...

...Man drömde om att komplettera folkhemsidyllen med en lagom stor bil – kanske en Volvo PV 444 eller en Saab 92.

---

https://www.tekniskamuseet.se/lar-dig-mer/100-innovationer/b...

Med det utbyggda vägnätet och det stadigt ökande antalet bilar började samhällsplanerarna övergå från att anpassa bilismen till det gamla samhället till att istället bygga ett bilsamhälle enligt förebilder från USA. Bilen ingick nu i ett gigantiskt tekniskt system där motorvägar och bilanpassade köpcentra med väldiga parkeringsplatser ingår. För att nå fram till bilsamhället började också Sveriges städer omvandlas — stadskvarter revs, vägar breddades, parkeringshus byggdes och städernas förorter utvidgades allt längre från stadskärnorna. Resultatet blev ett kulturellt och ekonomiskt bilberoende.

You have to remember that after the self-imposed devastation of WW2 all European countries wanted to catch up with the US. Fridges, televisions comfortable houses and yes cars- these things were available to every worker in America. Living standards equal to the US were finally reached in the 1970s.

I thought that the social democrats have been having close ties to the industry for a very long time? Maybe not capitalists in a strict sense, but industrialists? To me it seems like it's the social democrats, the industrialists and the unions who for long time worked quite a lot together and aligned?

New York City proper (five boroughs) has a population of 8.4 million. Sweden has a population of 10.35 million. But yes, I agree with your sentiment about having high density of manufacturing in a particular segment will probably skew your policies towards it. This might explain why Munich is so rich, but has such poor mass transit compared to Berlin.

What surprises me more is that big Japanese cities like Tokyo and Osaka chose to build enormous rail networks (above and below ground) instead of wide, fast boulevards and raised expressways.

Tokyo has an extensive network of raised expressways. They're just so extortionately priced (roughly $1/km) that nobody uses them unless they really have to, but since Tokyo is so crowded, they're jam-packed all the time anyway.

https://www.japanistry.com/shuto-expressway-explained/

I was thinking of NYC metropolitan area w/ 20 million in population :) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area

I lived in Stockholm for sometime before moving to London. There are a lot of parts in London where it's very easy to live without a car. I think the main reason is because it's essentially made of small towns that eventually all merged together. One is never too far from a fully functional high street and etc. Stockholm is built differently and having a car there makes life much easier even though the public transport is very good.

I have lived in london for the last 10 years (and counting). I don't own a car and I wouldn't want one to drive in London.

I live in zone 2 though. Probably things would be different if I lived further away.

we left London last year after spending there 10 or so years. We spent the last 5 in a leafy part of South London. Commuting to work( before covid) was pretty easy with trains but also time consuming. Arrival of our child did change things and not having a car was putting limits on certain things by quite a lot. If I'd turn the time back, I'd definitely buy a car.

I think Stockholm's greatest problem is the geography. Everything going north or south in the entire region has to pass through the same few islands in central Stockholm, all options are awful. Therefore we end up with the horrific traffic on for example Hornsgatan or Sveavägen used for essentially thoroughfare when they instead should be calmed nice livable streets.

The way to solve it is by finishing the bypass (Förbifart) Stockholm and an eastern ring connection and then start greatly limiting traffic going through the center.

Completely agree outside the inner city. You can feel that it was designed in the 60s and 70s and then never touched again.

There are many boroughs in London with a majority of households not owning a car - more than 60% in Islington, Hackey, Tower Hamlets, Camden, Westminster, City, with Haringey, Hammersmith/Fulham, Kensington/Chelsea, Newham, Southwark, Lambeth, Newham, being over 50% without a car.

Oddly the Isles of Scilly, which are tiny, and lack a proper vehicle ferry to the mainland, has about 50% of the population with a car or van. The furthest you could actually go would be able 2 miles.

These US vs EU cities discussions appear a lot on HN and when I see people lamenting that their European city is too car-centric I always wonder if they mean

a) their city is not the public transport utopia people want to believe it is

b) their city is completely unlivable without a car

Because this is quite important distinction - I suspect that many Europeans want to convey point a) but are potentially being understood as saying point b).

Depends which city but it’s A for decent sized cities in central/north/Western Europe (less so for eastern and Southern Europe although major cities there will also be like that).

Even midsized towns in Germany, Austria & Switzerland will be pretty doable without a car. In less affluent countries like Poland and Czechia (I have lots of friends in both and lots of relatives in the latter) outside the major cities people expect to drive (it might still be possible just less convenient than in the German speaking countries to rely on transit). I have Greek friends who say it’s similarly inconvenient in many parts of Greece.

But I suspect almost nowhere urban in Europe will be completely unlivable without a car.

Public transport is not utopia, yes you can go everywhere but you'll be squeezed in with 50 other people (or worse) in a can.

I regularly go "in a can" (tram) with more than 50 other people and it's really quite comfortable and pleasant.

In the case of Stockholm,

public transport is better than places like LA and Brisbane Australia (which isn't saying much), but hilariously bad compared to Tokyo and London. So it's somewhere in between.

livability without a car likewise is OK in inner city and immediate surroundings, but quickly gets a lot worse the further out you get. (unlike eg Tokyo, where even suburbs very far from the inner city are very convenient and liveable without a car)

Genuinely curious: what do you find "hilariously bad" about public transport in Stockholm? I've never lived there, but as a casual visitor the T-bana, trams, ferries etc seem to work just fine.

Often, trains and subways will straight up not run because "there were leaves or snow on the tracks" or whatever. Like, OK? No other city I've ever lived has had that problem, lol? (let alone that often! it happens all the time)

Punctuality is pretty bad, which wouldn't be a problem if frequency was good, but it's not, so...

It can be pretty unsafe and unpleasant.

Basically, it's "OK" in inner city and immediate surroundings, but quickly gets a lot worse the further out you get.

Dublin’s light and intercity rail is affected by leaves too. It’s a major problem for rail adhesion in autumn.

London's the same. Here is more info from Transport for London: https://madeby.tfl.gov.uk/2019/10/07/leaves-on-the-track/

Almost every big city has problems with trains running late or being cancelled, I think it's more common than you might think. I live in Stockholm and before the pandemic (when I commuted daily on the pendeltåg and before that, with the roslagsbana) I agree with you it could be pretty bad (there were several days where they simply closed off the trains and everyone had to squeeze into much smaller replacement buses, and a few times when even the replacement buses didn't run - you had to find a cab to get home... and good luck finding one.. but at least the government covered the fee if you could show there was no other alternative at the time) but having lived in a few other countries, I've seen all sorts of crap like that as well, and other things that nearly never happen in Stockholm are quite routine at other places, like stations and trains where passengers squeeze like sardines, buses so full some people go hanging outside the doors (the bus driver is supposed to close the door, ofc, but the situation is so precarious they try to let in as many as they can as they know how terrible it is to be just left behind because there's no space), robberies on night buses (which to my knowledge can happen in Stockholm but are extremely rare)...

There are almost certainly very few cities in the world (if any) where residents who need to use public transit day in and day out think it's a consistently great experience.

The leaves+water and pressure forms an extremely low friction surface that risks derailing the trains and happens all over the world.

Some trains have special brushes or water jets to clean the tracks

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2860418/End-...

Stockholm's inner city is about as walkable as any other European city I've visited, and much nicer as you're much less likely to get into dilapidated areas (there's almost no graffiti or dirt on the streets, unlike places like Milan, Lisbon or Bruxels) except for a couple of places where, unfortunately, the beggers from south-east Europe congregate, making the place look like a gipsy camp. But the suburbs outside the central area are much more like American or, more closely, Australian cities, with a huge sprawling area where having a car becomes more important the farther you go, but still with decent public transport at least for peak hours... that's just due to the low population density in those areas... Stockholm attracts a lot of young people and families because that's where the jobs are, mostly, so this situation seems unavoidable to me... Adelaide is in the top 3 livable cities, and the situation there is very similar (actually it has a much smaller central area and a perhaps even bigger and less dense suburban sprawling), the differences in ranking between them seems to me mostly artificial unless you're taking into consideration Adelaide's beautiful beaches and mostly great weather compared to most of Europe.

I think New York is fine.

New York is quite loud, which is not good for your hearing and causes a whole bunch of health problems. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/aug/31/new-yor...

I would also say that navigating the piles of garbage on the sidewalk is not fun, either.

This 100%, I measured the volume in my neighborhood in Central Tokyo 5 mins from the nearest station (it’s one of the more popular spots in the city) and it clocks in at 30dB or less. Compared to Manhattan where it’s deafeningly loud all the time.

Aside, NYC’s train system is, besides being filthy, unreliable, slow, poorly maintained, and a pain to switch between transit agencies, it’s also unfriendly to anyone who isn’t fully able bodied (the escalators and elevators are always broken and only present in a small fraction of stations), and neighborhoods are often designed in ways that lend places outside of the Manhattan core to be more dangerous and unpleasant than they have to be. Not to mention the usage of land in and around stations is very poorly used (the ~2 shops in Times Square station are a hilarious joke for what’s ostensibly the financial capital of the world), and any expansion of the system is prohibitively expensive for stupid political reasons.

But I suppose it’s still better than the transitless wasteland that is most of the USA.

>This 100%, I measured the volume in my neighborhood in Central Tokyo 5 mins from the nearest station (it’s one of the more popular spots in the city) and it clocks in at 30dB or less. Compared to Manhattan where it’s deafeningly loud all the time.

Shibuya?

Shibuya is somewhat exceptional in Tokyo whether or not it's unique.

In Manhattan it's more like the constant blaring of horns and near-constant sirens of various types.

No, but even there if you walked 5 mins from the station towards Ebisu (away from the arterial road), Shinsen, Yoyogi Uehara, or even towards Harajuku on Cat Street it would probably be similarly quiet.

You don't really have real cities in the US = there are a few exceptions but most of the time it's just a very tiny center and a lot of people living away from the center. That's not what a traditional city looks like.

Exactly. The US has very few cities proper, and a lot of huge suburbs that sometimes feature a city-like downtown (L.A., Houston), and sometimes don't (most of the Silicon Valley).

The real honest dense US cities, such as NYC, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and a few others, were built large and dense before the advent of the car, and had entrenched public transportation system before 1930s.

Those that were not as lucky got remade for cars in 1930-1960s, and cemented in that state by zoning regulations.

Europe obviously had a large number of dense cities since medieval times. Even small cities in Europe often ended up dense due to land limitations, and the generally relatively high population density. Cities in the US very rarely faced this limitation early enough, with a few natural exceptions like Manhattan or San Francisco.

I can't help but think that we're doing a repeat with building things around mobile phone use too

How do mobile phones affect city planning?

No need for door bells. No need for street signs. No need for taxi stops. No need for privately owned cars (rent via phone app or use Uber like service).

Those things affect urban planning a lot.

That's silly. Phones can get damaged or stolen, looking at a sign is much faster than looking at a phony and signs hardly take up any space.

Are you suggesting that cars can't get damaged or stolen? lol

Its still really convenient. It is really starting to pick up - I can use my phone to pay fares in a lot of metros now, have real time transit tracking, and use it for navigation even when walking.

Its definitely, imo, to the point where it is becoming a responsibility of societies to provide its citizens access to these technologies because of their utility. That means subsidized / free phones and service, imo. Everyone really should have a baseline of digital access as a fundamental right, hopefully this decade. The COVID relief free cell service in the US I think has been an eye opener for me.

I don't think we're ready for all those things to disappear. The only thing that really has gone since mobile phones are phone booths.

But the thing is Street signs and door bells don't take up any space. There's no real benefit in removing them anyway.

Private cars are a big issue but the problem is people commuting from outside the city and shared car schemes are too expensive for that.

Walking around Toronto, Canada, I've noticed that it's getting harder to find street signs. Their placement is for drivers in cars, not for people walking.

All those phones require towers and some 5g bands need way more to blanket whole areas.

Many European cities were also constrained by city walls. Land may have been available but it wasn't necessarily defensible.

Yup. Urban growth boundaries are very important, and aren’t new.

I’d always wondered what would happen if the US had a city with an UGB and very unrestrictive zoning.

You're talking about Portland, OR.

L.A consists of many fairly dense walkable neighborhoods. You can live in these neighborhoods without a car.

If you mean Los Angeles then I can't disagree more. Maybe Westwood, maybe downtown. But "consisting many of fairly dense walkable neighborhoods" is not a description I would ever have been expected to be applied to Los Angeles.

Venice, Santa Monica, West Hollywood, Silverlake ?

These are vanishingly small postage stamps compared the absolutely vast sprawl that is LA. I mean seriously. Get on the 10 and head east. Let me know when you get outside the sprawl. It'll be over an hour at highway speeds. It's that big. Just the city of LA itself is 503 square miles. Santa Monica is (nominally) 8 square miles--and most of that is not what you are referring to. 3rd street promenade, a few beachfront streets, a few blocks on Wilshire and Santa Monica blvd. I have a feeling you never really drove around LA and appreciated how absolutely massive it is.

And here's a nice infographic comparing the density of LA and New York, if you're interested in more than anecdotes:

https://www.its.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/05/...

TLDR; no, LA is not mostly dense, walkable areas. Very far from it.

I don’t live there, but I’ve driven around it. Just saying, it’s possible to get by without absolutely having to drive to get a cup of coffee or a bite to eat at least in some parts of LA. If that’s important to you, you can live in those parts. Most people actually don’t care about that at all. So, having to drive everywhere is not a problem for them.

Well, I lived in LA for 4 years and walkable is one of the least applicable adjectives I can think of. I enjoyed LA but chose to leave.

How many neighborhoods in LA have a walkability score high enough where most errands can be accomplished on foot ? Quite a few, right? This list has 10 and doesn’t even mention all of them https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.rent.com/blog/four-walkable...

This one is a better list https://www.walkscore.com/CA/Los_Angeles

Why does the US need to have traditional cities?

I grew up in a high density city overseas and I can see the appeal of both types of city. I personally prefer low density, car centric cities (obviously we need to finish solving the emissions problem from cars, but that's separate).

Except that’s not separate by the fact that there isn’t a solution and the planet is being destroyed as a result.

It means you are dependent on cars for one, which also means insurance companies, gas,car payment, etc... I am actively trying to ditch cars in a car city because of this. You wastr so much space for parking lots too. You interact with a lot less people because you are always at some destination with the journey barring you from interacting with the people of the city. Physical fitness and health is also affected.

It is ridiculous. In order to have food and shelter you need to be dependent on not just a landlord and grocery store but also insurance companies, car dealers, oil and gas companies, DMV/DPS,mechanics,etc... and infractions against driving law can leave you unable to work, get food, go to the doctor (outside of ER),etc... a traditional city does not require a regulated license for teansporation and you don't spend almost as much as rent on transportation. Especially for low-income people, liquidity is important, it is the reason behind why it is expensive to be poor. Think if all the tragic social cost that can be avoided if people can instead spend money on their other needs instead of cars.

I read somewhere how car makers bribed and played dirty to prevent things like rail cars from being adopted by cities. To me it relfects on how much corporate-run the city is.

From what I can tell, depending on the "car lord" is getting worse and worse too. There may have been an era when cars got more affordable due to greater reliability and longevity. I'm concerned that the car makers have figured out how to defeat that idea by charging fees to use the electronics in your car, and that servicing the batteries is going to be a rent-seeker's heaven.

This is why it's so important to own and maintain the good older vehicles. Resto-modding reliable chassis like 1990s Lexus LS should become more popular. Developments in rapid prototyping, additive manufacturing, etc... all make this easier. I'd love to see more open-sourcing of aftermarket parts as well.

But then again, I'm a weirdo who pulled out a car's entire wire harness to install a CAN-BUS system and solid-state power distribution modules....

We Americans are a nation of people who spend the vast majority of our waking hours inside. We go from building to building via car isolated from the world and each other. It’s an enormous waste of land and resources since every building has to have its own parking. Most parking lots at stores sit empty most of the time. It’s unhealthy that we walk so little. It’s unhealthy that we interact so little with those around us. It’s unhealthy that we spend so little time outside. We are a nation of zombies addicted to fast food, rage (caused by living virtually in information bubbles designed by Facebook and others), and a fear of interacting with each other.

Seems like most Americans like it this way. You say unhealthy but that is what the market overwhelmingly wants.

A market with federal intervention in the form of implicitly guaranteed 30 year mortgages and toll free highways.

And that government was created by the same people… your point is?

I understand your point that citizens in a democracy get the government they deserve. Choices are not made in a vacuum. Path dependence can lock us into local maxima. A series of rational reactions can sometimes lead to an irrational result. People complain about energy price volatility, traffic jams, and climate change but are unwilling to plan meaningful change. Short term concerns and lack of easy solutions tilt us into the same old ways of car dependency, restrictive zoning, tax funded and congested highways, parking minimums, and ever higher housing prices.

The market doesn't want this, it wants to make the most out of land near cities. It's the government (local) that bans density and mandates car-centric development.

The ability to walk in quiet, open spaces with low pollution is one of the top advantages of low density suburbia.

Low density suburbia can, and usually has, plenty of walking spaces with a ton of nature around. I lived in multiple suburban neighborhoods and I was always either within a short (and easy) drive to a park or had great walking areas in the neighborhood itself. Contrast with high density, where you have to deal with pollution, noise and potentially crime just to walk to a park (and in the park itself)

Regarding "fear or interacting", in my experience I have a lot of more interactions, of the cordial and polite kind, with the few neighbors I have in my low density area than I've ever had when I lived in a high density city where you can feel like an ant in a colony.

A lot of that pollution is due to cars.

I lived in a suburb with lots of walking paths and within walking distance of a grocery store. This is a rarity in the U.S. Even on nice days very few people out and about. It was rare for me to encounter more than one person on a hour long walk. While some suburbs have walking paths (and many do not) my experience is that few take advantage of it.

Cars are expensive and use an enormous amount of energy. You can buy dozens of e-bikes for the price of one EV, and charge dozens of e-bikes from one fully charged EV battery. EVs do not fix the emissions problem, as most emissions are from brake and tire residue.

>>> most emissions are from brake and tire residue.

That's not plausible... think about how much gas a car consumes per year, compared to the amount of mass of tires and brake pads consumed. Even minimizing my car use, I fill up the tank every few weeks. The wear from my tires is barely visible on a week-to-week basis. I don't think they're even within an order of magnitude.

GP likely meant "particulate emissions" though EVs also have greatly reduced brake dust emissions.

I'd sell my soul to basically never drive again. Once you find yourself In a situation that just works with out driving the concept just seems stupid. To be fair I do my fair share of ubering but at least Im reading or on my laptop while someone else deals with the incredible shittynsss of driving. For me there is no good trip where I have to drive

Forget about the emissions issue, I just hate driving and having to depend on its supporting infrastructure (repair shops, gas stations, insurance...) for my day-to-day needs. I live in a US suburb. Can't even get a sandwich or buy milk or see someone without strapping myself into my fucking car. This is no way to live.

If I could, I'd give up ever having to drive again in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, here we have few realistic options given where employers are located and how poor the transportation options that remain. It's a racket.

I feel just the opposite. I enjoy driving. It puts me in a thoughtful state and the feeling of being free to take whatever turn, shortcut, or scenic route I want at a whim is great. I don’t look forward to the day a human driving is a weekend, closed course activity for the privileged.

You cannot take a scenic route on a whim. You can only take a route that roads and infrastructure is built for and regularly maintained.

what is your point exactly? I can't literally choose to drive my car anywhere, as I am not the dictator of my local DOT. but there are many pleasant routes that do exist near me, and I can choose to take them any time.

But you can do all those things when walking or on a bicycle too. When I want to disconnect I just had to the natural park in the mountains beside the city I live in. It's huge and there's always new things to explore.

Moving to Thailand I haven't missed having a car. I bought a motorbike and that works really well without taking up as much space (though are louder than I like and there's no infrastructure for electric alternatives).

The part that rubs me is in both Thailand and Vietnam, despite Bangkok and Hanoi being dense with inexpensive and comprehensive public transportation, even the current youth generation still want cars. When I ask "why?", it's still about status and other reasons are secondary.

Yeah I noticed in Thailand there's many people living in corrugated iron sheds with a big brand new pickup parked beside it. They really have weird priorities :)

I agree, I moved to a city in Europe and not needing a car anymore feels really liberating. Not having to worry about costs, damage, fuel, maintenance, the stress of driving...

I hope I'll never have to own a car again.

> I live in a US suburb. Can't even get a sandwich or buy milk or see someone without strapping myself into my fucking car. This is no way to live.

Where I live has walkability by accident but the car infrastructure is so massive here, to support as many (probably more, TBH) employees who commute to our area for work as there are people who live here, that it destroys your ability to walk anywhere quickly. The street crossings turn a 10 minute walk, one way, into a half of an hour or longer.

I consider an area unwalkable once an intersection 5 or more lanes wide appears.

Downtown Copenhagen has many of those....

US lanes are probably much wider, plus driver etiquette is probably lacking in comparison to Copenhagen.

Yep, these are 5 lane crossings.

I moved to SF specifically to avoid having a car. Everything about owning a car pisses me off. Insurance and registration are a racket. Parking is either expensive or miserable. Traffic and seeing how other people behave makes me hate my fellow man. Every time I try to merge onto a crowded highway I realize I’m risking my life.

I’m angry that urban design for decades, almost a century, was planned around these machines. Obviously in rural areas they are incredibly freeing and useful. But having traveled the world I’ve come to realize and hate how peculiarly dependent we are on them in the US. We are heavy outliers among developed countries in how much we rely on cars and eschew public transit. They’re dangerous, expensive, and an annoying. In most cities in the developed world it’s normal to be able to get to a convenience store in a 5-10 minute walk.

I live in a Chicago suburb that has everything within walking distance and access to two train lines. I can easily do everything without a car.

> If I could, I'd give up ever having to drive again in a heartbeat.

Try it. I lived in Chicago years ago, where cars are expensive and inconvenient to own, at least by American standards. I would walk to the grocery store, which was about 4 blocks I guess, about a 10-15 minute walk. So your shop is limited to what you can carry back, so you have to shop every day or every other day, with the walk there, the shop, and the walk home taking the better part of an hour. Every other day or so. And on the way you are accosted by at least one street person asking for money, and with your hands full of grocery bags you feel a bit defenseless. And then there were the rainy days. And the cold days. Not fun walking 10-15 minutes at 6 degrees F with a 20mph wind in your face.

It had its charms, but overall it sucked. I prefer my rural house and easy weekly shop with a car now.

Why would someone want to try that?

In Copenhagen, I can walk to several grocery stores in 5 minutes.

Although since my 15 minute cycle to work takes me directly past seven (yes, seven) grocery stores, I usually stop at one of them on the way home from work. It is essentially like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYHTzqHIngk

Putting all preferences aside, American suburban living is fiscally unsustainable and supported by massive borrowing.

That’s one major reason American infrastructure is so bad. Towns have to balance their books, and that means they cannot afford to maintain their infrastructure until the federal government, which is not legally required to balance its books, borrows a ton of money to give away for basic infrastructure to be maintained.

> American suburban living is fiscally unsustainable and supported by massive borrowing.

These are city dweller opinions, and they're not going to change continued suburban and rural development.

Suburbanites shouldn't have to pay for city subway and potholes. Those are city problems.

Suburban and rural land is cheaper, the air is less polluted, and the low crime environments are ideal for raising families. If people want to live there, it's their prerogative.

You can buy a 2,000 square foot house for your family in the suburbs at a cost lower than a 700 sqft box in the city.

With remote work, it's not even clear that cities are an essential construct anymore.

Suburban land is cheaper to buy but far more expensive to service (water, electricity, roads, etc.) and maintain.

https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-02/inside-th...

Cities are subsidizing your excessive consumption and land use not the other way around.

> Cities are subsidizing your excessive consumption and land use not the other way around.

You're making value judgments about me, and they're not even factual. I happen to live in the city. I just see the value of suburbs and the incredible waste, inequality, and ineptitude of cities.

Servicing suburbs isn't expensive. With wind and solar, they'll grow even cheaper. Suburbs often have their own municipal water supplies paid for by their tax base. Roads aren't as expensive to build or maintain, and many people own trucks that can drive on dirt, gravel, and potholes.

Cities have pollution that contribute to cancer and pulmonary diseases. Noise that increases stress. Busy people that have less sense of community.

Name a city where an average American can even afford to buy a home.

With wind and solar, everything grows cheaper. Single family homes are irrefutably less efficient than denser multi-family homes.

https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2014-03/documents/lo...

I won’t disagree with your comments on noise and pollution, because those are real factors, but you are 100% moving goalposts now.

Single family sprawl is more cost efficient than dense development when you include regulatory compliance.

What regulatory compliance? Got any studies?

Just from a logical perspective, companies don't build skyscrapers/increase density in cities to lose money.

This is a reference to the NIMBY/YIMBY fight, where the YIMBY position is that most non-single-family-home developments, other than the super high end, have been effectively been made illegal through a combination of zoning laws, neighborhood review processes that add extraordinary costs, unreasonable requirements and delays, and other arbitrary veto points.

The best intro points to the argument are probably still https://www.amazon.com/Rent-Too-Damn-High-Matters-ebook/dp/B... or https://www.amazon.com/Golden-Gates-Fighting-Housing-America... although neither is free.

Where is pollution coming from? Cars generate lot of noise and pollution when they through city streets or on highways. Motorcycles can be especially loud if nobody bother to muffle them.

I didn't intend to, I meant cities are subsidizing suburbia.

You sure went off on a tangent and didn't address a single point, correctly - but mostly at all, I or the article made. Pipes are expensive, underground utilities are expensive, roads are expensive. All of those things scale much better within a city and its population & density. Servicing suburbs IS expensive compared to cities. Water is typically metered and paid for as a user rate not from the general tax fund.

Sense of community is on you, not where you live. Either you're not getting involved or people don't want to be around you.

You are talking right past me to be heard, with subjective facts, not to have a discussion.

Cities don't "have" pollution. The pollution is brought there by suburbanites driving their cars into the city, and by car-centric city design.

Um, there are other sources of pollution besides cars...

Cars are the main source of noise pollution and air pollution in cities, nothing else comes to mind. Factories and such were either moved to other continents, or zoning was updated to ban them in population centers. I guess fossil fuel combustion contributes as well, but that's on its way to becoming less of a problem.

Is this really true though? Every infrastructure project in cities seems to cost billions of dollars (Boston’s Green Line Extension, New York’s 2nd Avenue Subway). It would take quite a lot of suburban road, gas, electric etc infrastructure to add up to anything close to that.

They cost billion of dollars but they are also supporting places that also pays a lot more taxes.

With suburbia, you get low cost infrastructure, but also low tax revenue. You better hope that your tax revenue exceeds the costs of supporting suburbia.

The infrastructure costs in cities are more expensive but service many more people and economic activity, they are amortized much more efficiently than a suburban bridge to nowhere.

Is this true? As a case study, Boston’s population is about 700k, call it a million people living in a genuinely urban environment in greater Boston, of a metro area of 3 million. I think there’s more suburbanites than urbanites in most American metros.

Where do the suburbanites work? That tunnel, rail, or subway is allowing who to get into and out of the city easier?

> The Green Line Extension (GLX) project will extend the existing MBTA Green Line service north of Lechmere Station and into the communities of Somerville, Cambridge, and Medford.

GLX is primarily about serving the urban community better.

From wiki:

> The Green Line Extension (GLX) is a construction project to extend the light rail Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) Green Line northwest into Somerville and Medford, two inner suburbs of Boston, Massachusetts.

I’m not familiar with the Boston area, are Medford and Somerville mainly urban extensions of Boston?

Somerville is the main beneficiary of GLX and is basically part of the urban core of Boston, yes.

You’ve set up a bit of a straw man argument there. The person you’re replying to isn’t saying suburbanites should pay for city potholes, they’re saying suburbanites need to be able to pay for their own (suburban) potholes, and the ugly truth is that suburban infrastructure maintenance is economically unfeasible. Suburban development has only progressed as far as it has via ponzi-like borrowing schemes that are entirely dependent on new growth.

https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme

We need to place more emphasis on the efficiency of transportation and infrastructure in new developments, and density is a major factor there.

I don’t like StrongTowns personally, it just doesn’t grok with my experience that many suburbs are wonderful communities where neighbors know each other and kids play together and folks go watch high school football games. I’ve found that cities make you more anonymous. Living in a high rise in a city I knew just about zero of my neighbors, in my suburb I know all of my neighbors by name.

Yeah, I can definitely relate with you on that point.

I grew up in a mid-size suburban town where I knew many families in my neighborhood and generally felt a strong sense of community. I’ve lived in various cities over the years since, and I’ve never quite felt the same connection with my immediate neighbors. I still know and identify with many people in the area I live now, but they’re much more interspersed.

"Suburbanites shouldn't have to pay for city subway and potholes."

Then city residents shouldn't have to pay for the roads that make car-centric suburbs possible or the various subsidies given to rural residents. Honestly, one of the benefits of civilization is that we help each other out even when it does not immediately benefit us as individuals. Rural and suburban life would not be possible without cities, and cities would not be possible without rural and suburban residents.

Cities form naturally because of industrial operations that are more efficient when they are concentrated in a single place. Remote work changes nothing about it because there are still plenty of jobs that cannot be done remotely, including many of the jobs needed to support remote work (e.g. data centers, warehouses, intermodal terminals). Suburban life depends on industries that make no sense in suburbs or whose presence will ultimately transform suburbs into cities.

If suburbs were as superior as you suggest, cities would not be growing and real estate in cities would not be as valuable as it currently is. People are choosing to live, work, and raise families in cities more than they are choosing suburbs. Remote work has not changed anything and will never change anything. COVID-19 led only to a transient spike in demand for suburban homes that is already declining as people realize that the pandemic is already in its final stage.

Migration patterns overwhelmingly demonstrate that people are migrating from high density cities to low density, "hardcore suburban" cities. In the US, high density living is a boutique lifestyle choice that is constrained in the offer side (NIMBY), thus the prices. The fact that there are people willing to pay for this lifestyle doesn't mean that they are a majority, or even a significant percentage of the overall population.

Why should cities be expected subsidize rural and suburban living? Those higher infrastructure costs are rural and suburban problems, no need for states to transfer tax revenue simply because cities make more money for less infrastructure costs.

>Putting all preferences aside, American suburban living is fiscally unsustainable and supported by massive borrowing.

This is commonly stated but is not backed up by any real world evidence. Infrastructure costs are on the order of 10-15% of government cost. The cost of government is almost all in paying salaries (and pensions) to employees providing services. Governments that have gotten into fiscal trouble are there because of ballooning pension cost.

Paying workers for upkeep and construction of infrastructure is part of the cost of having said infrastructure.

I don’t think this makes much sense. It’s mostly big cities like Chicago or Boston (still dealing with Big Dig debt) with trouble financing themselves, suburbia seems to do very well financing itself with its property tax base.

This varies a lot across the country. Most of the local suburban streets are maintained through a combination of local city/county and gas taxes and don't come from the "city money" general tax pool. Not to mention that most states don't have a dense city to speak of, so they are in practice >95% low density.

The federal government maintains the highway infrastructure (and subsidizes other non-highway building) which does help enable suburban living in many places. I suppose that you aren't advocating to get rid of that because the immense usefulness of such system (travel, trucks, buses etc), though.

Eliminating the suburban lifestyle wouldn't have a massive impact on sustainability of the system because a lot of it isn't maintained by the federal government or simply needs to be maintained anyway. Reducing the number of cars that are on the road due to the suburban lifestyle will reduce the amount of money that comes from the federal government and shared money pools, but probably not too much in the grand scheme of things.

Thus, I think that saying that "suburban living is fiscally unsustainable" is an exaggeration and we should instead say "we need to better allocate the costs of suburban life to suburban taxpayers" (which wouldn't make such a huge difference anyway, especially if we also remove the city living subsidies that come from rich suburbs).

> Why does the US need to have traditional cities?

Where does my comment imply that the US needs anything?

It took me a while to realise what it was that bothered me, but yes there's a real lack of 'high street shopping' and markets type organisation from what I've seen in North America - instead drive to a big square ~car park~ 'lot' surrounded by 'big box stores'. Everything scaled up.

If you like it fine, can't really say either's objectively better, it's just really quite different and I suppose you likes what you grow up with or are used to.

A counter argument is that US has a very developed suburban living culture with families living in houses. And while obviously this is comfortable living, you then need a car to get to the city center.

Having said that, I agree that nothing beats the walkability of European cities, quality of living wise. US has a lot to learn from that.

I thought a lot of people also live in houses in and around Tokyo.

Japanese houses are quite different from US ones. My in-laws live in a house in suburban Chiba well outside Tokyo, but it has literally no garden space and the neighborhood is so densely packed a taxi can't even pull into the little laneway it's in. Within a 100 meter radius there's a grocery, a drugstore, several restaurants and more, and everybody gets around on foot, by bicycle or by bus.

tbh a yard seems less necessary when you can walk everywhere

And kids can actually walk places by themselves, have social lives and develop some independence instead of being stuck in the backyard.

I want this for my kids (stuck in US suburbia), but have instead opted for them to grow up close to their grandparents. I’m not always sure that I’m making the right trade off, and it annoys me that I even have to make such a choice.

Anyway, it’s been over 20 years since I visited Tokyo, and I’ve been to many major cities since. Tokyo remains my favorite.

If you haven't seen it already, the YouTube channel Not Just Bikes has a great video making the other decision (ie. moving to the Netherlands) with some compelling reasoning: https://youtu.be/ul_xzyCDT98

They do, Tokyo is full of detached homes, and the people living in them don't need a car. (some have cars, some don't, but a car is not needed, and even those who have one, chances are they can't use them for things like grocery shopping etc even if they wanted to)

This type of urban design is unsustainable. It is the reason why the US is number one at producing greenhouse gases.

The US is neither the largest producer of greenhouse gases nor the largest producer per capita.

My bad, number 2 largest producer of greenhouse gases per capita. Right behind Australia which basically has the same type of suburban city design centered around cars.

> It is the reason why the US is number one at producing greenhouse gases.

This is incorrect. China currently holds this spot. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_greenhous...

per capita is the more accurate measure. Yeah I note my mistake in another reply.

Even so, the US historically took the number one spot for both total greenhouse gases and greenhouse gases per capita. If you look at it from a perspective of a longer timespan, the US is basically number one.

It is only in recent times does the US now currently take the number two spots for both categories.

Indeed. Here is an animation of the cumulative emissions starting 1750:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jx85qK1ztAc

The US come in first, my home country Germany takes the fourth spot.

Yeah this is because the USA has offloaded making all its stuff to China. With this in mind the USA CO2 number is even worse than it first appears.

Are you saying that emissions shouldn't be attributed to the country they're generated in? If so, that's certainly an interesting perspective.

The attribution is much more grey with the advent of so much globalization. As humans we like to pin the blame on a singular entity but the real world is far more complicated.

Technically it shdnt. Just imagine you send your oil to another country to produce stuff for you, should the carbon emission for that be counted for country A or B? I think clearly country A. Now what if the oil doesn't come from country A but is bought from the money for the goods from country C. Well, technically you shdnt attribute it to country B. Either A or C.

You wouldn't need a car if there was good public transport :)

Good public transportation systems require a certain level of density to be practical, roughly on par with where European cities are at. This is why places like New York have fairly decent public transportation systems compared to the rest of the country.

You're not wrong, but your plan involves either uprooting people or sending out so many buses that it would create an ecological catastrophe far greater than we have now (assuming you want to cover all of the suburbs mentioned by the op).

After moving to Europe (and Eastern Europe), I can't really consider those places in the US "cities" and get an uneasy feeling that something is off when I'm back stateside.

Concur totally after living in Sevilla (Spain). US cities - with the exception of New York - are just cookie-cutter strip malls. There’s a fundamental lack of coherence that’s hard to explain.

It’s pretty easy to understand when you realize Americans don’t like eachother. If we liked living together we wouldn’t be so car centric, it’s not like the cars built the cities for us. And we keep getting worse. Small towns I drive through now are full of angry people who seem to want to be left alone. It’s incredibly sad.

We are a selfish and community-less people that enjoy the frontier and adventure more than quaint small towns where people have to get along.

There are advantages but in the long run I hate it. And yes I’ve lived everywhere in America. The few that like the more euro model have to pay a 10x premium to live in SF or NYC.

The north east (unsurprisingly) has many nice small towns, with moderately OK rail connections to big cities, and decent communities. Northern NJ (for example) is full of them. They’re obviously less common as you go west.

> It’s pretty easy to understand when you realize Americans don’t like eachother.

As a general rule, people don't like each other. In places where people live close to one another it's not because they like it but out of some kind of combination between inertia and necessity.

When I go to France or England or India (city centers and countryside) people may not Love each-other but they seem to generally be ok with being together and cooperating a bit more. In America it’s a whole new level. Except for a few idyllic small towns and suburbs that are actually economically and racially exclusionary that seem to have a faux-community.

I think the point is that for a series of reasons, during the 20th century the US built a lot of infrastructure that allows a lot (not all!) people to get further away from each other than is typical in Europe (probably elsewhere too, but I have no experience other than the US & Europe).

Neighbors on a street in London don't love but do tolerate each other, and deal with the implications of close proximity and shared responsibilites moderately well. In the US it's much easier to move somewhere and get a parcel of land that makes you feel like a sovereign property owner. Your neighbors are not as adjacent, and may even be ignorable.

Obviously this doesn't cover the millions of Americans who live in relatively dense (generally older) cities, but it does impact the millions who live in suburban, ex-urban and rural parts of the country.

I agree. If we liked each-other a bit more tho that force wouldn’t be there.

I’ll quote the American classic “elbow room” as soft proof. https://youtu.be/aHVx4nqgMPQ

Wow, I had never seen that before. What a bizarre video with a forced tie-in of the whole manifest destiny idea with lunar missions (1976).

It seems to completely ignore the reality of communities and society (and history, for that matter) for an unquestioning expansion of our domain, all wrapped up in this patronizing metaphor about needing "elbow room".

Yes. It is our narrative. This is one of the most honest videos I’ve ever found of our true views on life in America vs the ivory tower discussions that constantly blame GM and Robert Moses for destroying their “communities”

If that is "The American Narrative" how did Chicago or New York City ever happen? How is it that a majority of Americans live in metropolitan areas rather than further out where they can more "elbow room" ?

The European conquest of north America and subsequent repopulation with immigrants (alongside a vastly diminished indigenous population) created an ethos and an opportunity for people who wanted to live away from everybody else to do so ... by pretending that the continent had been empty, and because of the need for natural resources, this was relatively easy to do.

But alongside that process, Americans were building some of the largest cities in the world, developing and improving "urban technologies", and generally pushing the boundaries of what cities could be (a role now largely taken over by SE Asia).

Any explanation for the structure, placement, demographics and dynamics of American society that focuses on single reason for things (whether it is "elbow room", "Robert Moses" or "racism") is going to be wrong about most things.

So cars did this entirely on their own. Come on

You might not like cars but everyone else does. They like and want cities this way and in reality it’s people like us that are the outliers. We aren’t right. We are going against the tide.

We built cities around cars Because we like cars — because they put distance between us and our fellow American we don’t particularly like or want to tolerate.

I write:

> Any explanation for the structure, placement, demographics and dynamics of American society that focuses on single reason for things (whether it is "elbow room", "Robert Moses" or "racism") is going to be wrong about most things.

to which you respond:

> So cars did this entirely on their own. Come on

Is there something that unclear about what I wrote?

Because you comments are constantly just boiled down to “it’s too complicated to understand”.

Look people left cities in the 50s because they didn’t like other people in cities. It’s a well known and established fact. It’s called white flight. And it continues to this day.

Those quaint European neighborhoods, towns and villages are all also racially and culturally homogenous. And where that is changing, there is animosity and discord.

I can understand why you're being downvoted but I think you have a point. Someone who drinks beer and listens to country music is not going to be doing neighborhhod dinners with orthodox jews. We can claim to be all multicultural and all accepting but we always seek out like minded people. Culturally homogeneous communities let people put their guard down and give people common ground to connect on. You could argue that we want to create a new type of homogeneous culture--one where nobody eats pork, nobody wears MAGA hats, people keep their religious beliefs to themselves, etc. but that's still a homogeneous culture.

I agree even if people are downvoting you.

I don't think that is true. If you look at how larger residential areas looked in the States historically, you'll these placese were very livable, since there weee no cars. The main issue in the US is that at some point the jobs of city and regional planners were hijacked by car industry lobbyists. The current state of affairs is what followed.

Far before cars, people left those cities for more space and fewer neighbors. It’s the foundation of our narrative.

Are you sure this is what really happened? The US built cities like any other country on this planet, but the influx of immigrants and people's pursuit of wealth pushed them to settle new lands and establish new population centres.

What's more, until not so long ago, US cities looked differently. Then a lot of what was already built got destroyed to build motorways and huge parking lots. If you look at aerial photos of US cities from around '30s[0], you will see much denser, more walkable cities. Then take a look at what General Motors proposed with its Futurama at the World's Fair; it is the essence of what cities in the US are currently, albeit cranked up to 11.

Some of Europe's cities took the road that GM pushed, and one very prominent example has been Amsterdam[1], which is currently known as one of the least car-oriented cities in the world. The changes have been reverted in the EU, but not in the US, and that is the current state of affairs.

On the last note: US historically has been a place, when local communities had to be strong, strictly because of its roots in colonizing the continent. Without local communities that then shaped into larger organizations, the history would be very different, and States would be under Britain's rule for much longer, maybe even to this day.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/boston/comments/bkkfww/1930_aerial_... [1] https://inkspire.org/post/amsterdam-was-a-car-loving-city-in...

Am I sure that westward expansion in the 1800s really happened? A lot of people seems to quote a lot of stuff in HN while missing the pretty obvious big picture.

And you are making my point. If we wanted to shift back to carless society we could, others have.

We don’t. Because…

I'm not asking whether the expansion happened, but whether you think whether it happened because people in the US dislike each other, which is a completely different questions altogether

> If we liked living together we wouldn’t be so car centric

It's entirely the other way around, car centric planning results in less community. It's much easier to be angry at the other 2t metal boxes than at your fellow human being.

American cities used to be just like European cities: designed for walking, mixed use developments, small shops, public transportation everywhere. It's only after the delusion of the car being the future was popularized - in large part due to very successful advertising by the automotive industry - that policy was written to heavily subsidise car-centric development to the point of making everything else illegal. There's even real, convicted conspiracies of the automotive industry purposefully buying public transportation just to kill it.

You know I used to believe that for many years and I’ve come to the conclusion that this is just a “bike-city” circle jerk scapegoating Robert Moses in order to ignore our deeper problem: Americans don’t like each-other.

We would have built better cities if we wanted carless communities. But we didn’t and still don’t.

We want this. This is what we like. We are a sick people. And it isn’t Robert Moses and GMs fault, they are a product of us. We weren’t brainwashed we weren’t forced into this. There is no cabal that made it this way. We choose it. The sooner we accept that the sooner we can evaluate real options for change.

This just historically inaccurate.

Older US cities have many of the same characteristics as cities in other parts of the world. Those characteristics can vary, from small single-family homes tightly packed into a walkable neighborhood to large scale apartment dwelling with city squares and boulevards nearby.

Americans used to build cities this way. Whether it was Moses or the emergence of a general dislike of each other, or a multitude of other possible reasons, we generally no longer do.

Moreover, many of those older city neighborhoods are considered extremely desirable to live in, even today, so much so that they have become very exclusive areas available only to those with plenty of income or wealth. That doesn't imply that most Americans would necessarily make that choice even if they could, but the continued elevation of housing costs in the best of these "old world" neighborhoods suggests to me that your thesis is at best incomplete and at worst just incorrect.

I don’t understand what you are refuting.

But I live in Pacific Heights, one of the most desirable old world communities in America, and it’s mostly empty and full of ghost capital homes.

People like it for a while but they leave for the suburbs pretty fast and go looking for elbow room away from others. And it’s mostly because the energy under the surface of the beautiful homes is rude, selfish and inconsiderate. From the owners to the workers that come to service the homes. Regardless of class we are really angry people.

Pacific Heights is indeed one of the most desirable neighboors, and is very much non-surburban in its nature.

but ...

The current situation in uber-expensive real-estate markets when it comes to high-end housing should not be over-interpreted as having more to say about what most Americans want from the places where they live.

Pacific Heights current situation is also very similar to wealthy old neighborhoods in cities across Europe. London at the very least is full of such examples.

also ...

> I don’t understand what you are refuting.

>> We would have built better cities if we wanted carless communities. But we didn’t and still don’t.

^ this is very accurate.

There are multiple studies and historical accounts documenting exactly this TsunamiFury. Car lobbies are actually clearly tied to many city planning decisions, combined with white flight and corresponding government loans to create suburban communities that essentially cut others out.

Additionally interstate commerce in a comparatively intensely large land mass like the US did create a need for additional transportation, but the sprawl has indeed been very much tied to the factors PaulDavisThe1st and others have pointed out. Its not 'not liking' each other. Its money + racism + poor representation of the populous. Like a lot of things.

Sure. I’ve studied that for years and I’ve come to the conclusion that is not the root cause. At the end of the day it’s a boogie man people trot out to excuse the fact that they did that and continue to do it together. They let it happen because they wanted it.

Hm... fair enough. I have studied this for years and come to the opposite conclusion. Specifically in Geography and Urban and city planning courses.

What studies or books lead you to your conclusion?

That people ultimately do what they want. They aren’t brainwashed. Car companies or lobbies don’t build our cities. We build them they way we want them. If we wanted them some other way we would. And most people live in suburban sprawl where they distance themselves from their fellow American — who they don’t particularly like very much.

Womp.

Rather than they “used to build cities this way”, perhaps it just takes centuries for cities to evolve to a good form.

I wouldn't say it's an emergence of a general dislike of each other. It was desegregation; the dislike always existed, but before Brown vs Board of Ed and other decisions in the same cities different racial groups lived in different worlds.

Blockbusting was a real phenomenon in which real estate agents would move a black family into the neighborhood to get white families to fire sell their homes, and it worked because they could no longer legally isolate minorities from their children. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockbusting

We know that this happens today, even with minority groups that are affluent and do well in education metrics. https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/07/silicon-valley-whit... (And before anyone accuses me of "wokism", the original story was broken by the Wall Street Journal, which is decidedly not a "woke" publication.)

> Americans don’t like each-other.

Specifically white Americans want to avoid living with brown Americans. Once segregation was no longer law, it launched a wave of destruction for public infrastructure: pools, schools, transit, even things like sidewalks all became things to oppose if they had to be shared.

It's more than that. Jews, Asians (individually, Chinese, Koreans, Vietnamese, etc), Italians, Polish, Irish, Arabic ... all segregated into their own neighborhoods. The "melting pot" was never really real. We are a nation of immigrants that never really got along with one another except when common interests were threatened.

I don't know that it's uniquely American thing either, I think this happens anywhere that different cultures come together. Humans are deeply tribal.

> all segregated into their own neighborhoods.

Check out Shellings model of segregation [0]. Global seggregation doesn't necessarily mean that local decisions have strong preference for their race.

e.g. for two types it's enough to have preference "I want at least 33% of my neighbours to be same type as me" to reach segregated global result.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schelling%27s_model_of_segrega...

I think the intensity matters: my Irish ancestors weren’t considered white when they got here but there wasn’t a mass exodus from cities rather than sharing infrastructure, and they were allowed into whiteness over time (especially when large numbers of cops were needed to police black populations). The ones who served in the military weren’t restricted to certain units and duties, etc. When white people moved to the suburbs, the neighborhoods which were razed to make highways had a very uneven distribution.

That’s definitely not perfect (and it’s like, say, Chinatowns weren’t raided or sacked) but that option of coexistence wasn’t on offer in much of the country.

This is inaccurate.

The GM conspiracy bought streetcar companies to replace them with buses, not to eliminate public transportation.

The reality is that streetcar companies were already unprofitable, killed by infrastructure cars and poor urban planning. So it was already easy for GM to buy these companies.

> The reality is that streetcar companies were already unprofitable

What seems to me to be a good takedown of “public transit must be profitable or be dismantled”, or “the US post office must be profitable or be dismantled” is: How profitable is the US military?

Everybody has a budget. Going red is just very bad. Sustainability is the keyword here.

A streetcar enhance economic activity and transportation, especially when built with proper urban planning, and may even make a profit.

With the profit, the public transit agency can use the fund to improve infrastructure with hopefully less political influence in order to further it missions.

You could of course make a trade off and not mandate the agency to be profitable and subsidize it, but it's a political tradeoff.

Just because a business turns a loss doesn't mean it isn't sustainable.

Public transport is unprofitable pretty much everywhere, because the explicit transactions don't offset costs of operation. However, the cost of not operating public transit is that you end up with awful car centric cities, more respiratory disease from increased traffic, lost efficiency from congestion, higher real estate prices in walkable areas, etc.

Additionally, there's a ton of positive externalities that are not factored in when judging profitability. Effective public transport increases foot traffic, which increases economic activity.

Even if public transit was 100% free, it would still be worth running. The market is awful at evaluating long-term large scale effects, and just disregards them as "externalities". You can't blindly trust markets to build your cities.

An even better one that's directly relevant is: How profitable are roads? Public roads are exclusively unprofitable and yet they get fully subsidised.

I’m very unconvinced but this. New Yorkers famously all hate each other yet if you can afford to live in relatively central parts of New York, you don’t need a car. Though New York is still somewhat car-focused. Internationally, London has similar but a slightly milder case of car-dependent sprawl to New York (but people still famously don’t like each other). Swedes are also known for their desire for space and privacy yet they somehow manage to live in cities that don’t follow the North American model. And many Dutch cities used to be going in the direction of the American model (held back by the lower wealth after the war preventing mass car ownership) and only changed direction in the 70s after won’t-somebody-think-of-the-children political campaigning and some very slim majorities in votes on the topic. And the transition was a slow one too.

So this is not as black and white as it seems. There are three major pushes that end up pushing people out of the cities.

* the aforementioned highway boom, but this is not enough to actually kickstart the whole thing; most European nations also had a highway boom around this time with much less sprawl

* lending standards. Prior to the Great Depression, banks are wholly in control of mortgage lending. The collapse of the economy also collapses the banking system and the housing market; banks have to foreclose on properties that are no longer worth anything. As part of the bank stabilization efforts, the FHA creates national standards for loans that it will insure. These standards are restricted to single family homes, and to properties without commercial (small businesses have a really high rate of failure). This has the effect of encouraging banks and developers to stampede into single family suburban development; the cost of financing is a lot cheaper because of the Uncle Sam guarantee, and it's a lot more profitable as a result. No other type of property is given this kind of preferential treatment to this extent, and this still more or less persists today.

* desegregation. This is the big one; prior to the civil rights era, suburbs are expanding rapidly, but cities are still growing. The moment Brown vs Board of Ed passes in 1954 all hell breaks loose. The real estate practice of blockbusting gets into full gear, where real estate agents spook the white people out of a neighborhood by having one black family move in; they proceed to buy the houses on the cheap from white people fire selling as fast as possible, and then take advantage of black and minority sellers. Whites move into suburbs in droves, because it's "where the good schools are" without the minorities they used to be legally separated from. And this is a national phenomenon. Even today, we see whites flee school districts with increasing minority populations; they do so even in districts where the minority groups are affluent and educational metrics remain positive, like Cupertino, CA or Johns Creek, GA: https://psmag.com/news/ghosts-of-white-people-past-witnessin...

Exactly. I said “don’t like” to avoid making this explicitly about racism but it’s true. And those planners that made these cities people currently complain about had droves of people who “didn’t want to be near other Americans of another color or class” and loved car filled suburbs and strip mall towns.

Is there a shred of data to support Americans hate each other more than other countries? I will even take a buzzfeed poll slapped together in a minute.

Your handle.

Good try. I am not American. I am an Indian citizen who loves the opportunities available in the US than in India.

One of those opportunities was a good PhD education that taught me how to spot bullshit.

So to confirm what is happening here for a neutral observer, are just cooking up things when you say Americans hate each other more.

I would say Europeans hate each other more. They had two world wars centered around Europe in the last century and way too many real secession movements: Brexit, Catalonia etc.

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

>Small towns I drive through now are full of angry people who seem to want to be left alone. It’s incredibly sad.

I would love to know how you determined that.

I do a lot of road-trips through rural Oregon, California and sometimes Texas. I get middle fingers, angry truck drivers actively trying to run me off the road. Someone even hit me once, for no reason. I get threatened semi often in towns where I look like I don’t belong, but trust me they do it to each-other too.

Rural life has always been hard and rough but it’s sad. Their towns are dying and they look, act and feel miserable to each-other.

> It’s pretty easy to understand when you realize Americans don’t like eachother.

The way American communities were laid out by previous generations was not caused by the recent political strife.

I'd say it has much more to do with available modes of transit when the place was settled than it does any national characteristic of incivility.

It’s pretty easy to live in big cities in America ( Seattle, SF, Boston, Chicago, parts of LA ) without a car or without regularly using a car.

I only somewhat agree.

First of all, it depends if you have to commute to an office in some industrial park (even if it's only one or two days a week).

Then there's the question of where your friends live, whether you regularly do activities outside the city, etc. Zipcar and Uber definitely make it easier not to own a car. But my observation of people I know in SF who don't own a car is that they make ample use of both Uber and regular/short-term rentals. People can definitely get by but it's often by adjusting their lifestyles and activities in that you just don't do things that are hard to do.

If you live in Japan without a car you will probably end up taking a taxi from time to time. They are lined up outside the major train stations. Overall, relying on mass-transit probably is more pleasant there, and takes less lifestyle-modifications, but you still have less freedom than owning a car. And probably take longer to get around usually. Also in plenty of Japan, by the way, you definitely need a car to get by reasonably. It's not like countries in Europe where half the population lives in the capital city.

If your goal is to avoid any sort of exercise (and the "forced" exercise is one of the biggest reasons to go carless in my opinion) then yes large sections of US cities may seem inacccessible without a car. But if you like walking like I do (at least up to a half-mile or so) then you can live just fine in US cities without a car, in my experience. I've done it all over.

I live well outside Boston but have lived in Cambridge. I'd mostly be fine with walking and taking transit around the city itself--which I've done. And probably mostly wouldn't want to drive. But I'd regularly want to get out of the city for hiking and other activities and I wouldn't want to deal with rentals every time. (People I know who do live in the city and do similar activities generally own cars.)

Even given a decent commuter rail system it doesn't help for those sorts of activities.

So it's not really getting around the city but getting anywhere outside the city that isn't on convenient mass transit.

Public transit in Tokyo is faster than cars for the vast majority of trips. The only exception is if there's no lines connecting where you want to go, and you need to transfer a couple times. Nobody complains about "lack of freedom". When people want to go on trips, they rent a car, but even then, they usually take the train to their destination, and then rent a car there.

True, but the problem here in the US is that the places you can do this are so limited that the price to live that car free lifestyle is astronomical. You either pay 2,500+ a month in rent, have a house payment that is 5,000+ a month, or have to buy a car, move out to the country and shop at a dollar general.

Seattle isn't really that walkable in its current form lol. It only has a Walk Score of 74 and a Transit Score of 60.

I've been in Portland the past month and have managed pretty fine on the public transit here. Its also quite affordable.

They could do more for sure, but all the bridges and roads that are now public transit only are quite the breath of fresh air.

Portland like mentioned about European cities and towns is also incredibly homogenous culturally and racially by most American standards . Lived there for 6 years as a brown person and glad to have gotten out.

US "cities" are just not dense enough to be called cities.

This is not America's fault. They have a resource most of the world lacks: space. Too much space and you cannot make a real city.

There's no "cannot", it's a conscious choice - if you have more space than necessary that absolutely does not require that you expand to fill all of it. And in particular this has caused issues because American cities tend towards sprawl, filling up area with low-density housing that requires significantly more infrastructure per capita, and implementing zoning laws to prevent higher-density development even as the population grows, resulting in housing shortages.

Not Just Bikes has some excellent content about this, e.g.: https://youtu.be/XfQUOHlAocY

They sprawl because people want space. If you're from Paris or Tokyo or London you really just don't know what it's like to have a quiet, detached house with a nice garden, maybe a pool where your kids can play randomly without needing to plan a trip to the community center, space for a garden, knowing everyone within 200m of your house by name...

It's a completely different way of life that is not possible without lots of space. Some people want that and so they will pay to buy it. It's not like city planners are laughing in smoke-filled rooms like, "haha! this will be our most sprawling city yet!"

As some other commenters have noted, in cities like Amsterdam and Tokyo there are enough nice safe public spaces that even young children are free to play outside on their own and there's much less planning required to go places since you don't need a car.

That being said, I'm sure there are plenty of North Americans who love having a ton of space for gardening etc. But I would guess they're actually in the minority and that most people choose to live in sprawling suburban developments because they're the only affordable option to guarantee access to good schools and a safe neighborhood.

People see what people want to see. An average family with two toddlers using bicycles to get around in the dead of Chicago winter. Sure, sure.

I would wager that the vast majority of the folk here that are pushing this romanticized idea of car-free european city have actually grown up in upper middle class US suburbs and bulk of these attitudes are really just subconscious rejection of their parents' lifestyles.

Having grown up in one of those car-free european cities myself, I can vouch that the US set up is, on average, far more convenient, which is also why you see car/pool/detached house/garage ownership rates increase with income and GDP. People that have the means clearly choose to avoid communal setups.

Agreed. The closest you'll get to a walkable/non-car focused designed city in the US is NYC or Boston. MTA is accessible nearly anywhere in NYC (not without exceptions) and runs 24hrs

A big limiting factor with many cities though is if you need to commute to an office. In Boston, for example, many professional jobs will require commuting out to the suburbs. In tech specifically, there's more in the city than there used to be--there were basically no major employers in the immediate urban area any longer as of a couple decades ago. But the majority of engineering jobs broadly speaking require driving to a suburban office.

Americans like their own yards and giant houses and lots of storage.

Personally, I'm guilty of this (except the huge house part). I want 5 acres of land and don't want to see my neighbor.

> I want 5 acres of land and don't want to see my neighbor.

You're not making Greta angry enough, don't you want a personal Olympic-sized swimming pool as well??

I also live there and one interesting bit that, in retrospective is OBVIOUS, is that there are also no cars parked on the streets! Like, if you look at pictures or walk down the street it feels so pleasant for some reason but difficult to put your finger at it, until you realize there's no huge cars piling on the sides.

I prefer European Architecture for downtown buildings, but the no cars bit generally overpowers this preference in making Tokyo at a similar level of beauty for me, and the bits where there are particularly beautiful buildings in Tokyo or Japan well that's just perfect.

(also warning like parent, there is some street parking, but it's just minuscule)

Yeah, it really adds to the pleasantness of everything when everything is not covered in cars and infrastructure for cars. The whole notion of street parking is bizarre. No one would tolerate if you used public space in the middle of a busy city to store your stuff. But if it's a car, suddenly it's OK. Just what?

Bike parking is everywhere too. Trying to get bike parking in our city is like asking for the council for their first born. All of a sudden funding and public safety are all extremely dire concerns. Whipping a 4x4 through the CBD and plonking right in front of a business is fine though.

Interestingly, this also greatly improves visibility for all forms of road locomotion: walk, bike, (push/electric/motor) scooter, car, truck. That said, there is also something zen about urban drivers in Tokyo. They are unusually patient and careful. I have never seen anything like it in other countries.

I believe it’s because Tokyo does not have public parking space. Parking lots are private and when you buy a car you have to proof you have access to a parking lot. Makes sense if you think about it. Land in cities is valuable, and the cost parking should be priced in the cost of car ownership.

You really notice it too, walking around the city feels very quiet even though there are so many people and a decent amount of noise from businesses. When you make it to a busy road, there's a notable lack of businesses nearby and you really notice the noise difference. That said, car speeds in Japanese cities are slow, and cars are heavily regulated so they're just not as loud as other cities.

Cars add a sort of tense background track to life, perhaps because we perceive the danger subconsciously as a pedestrian. Sitting in my house in the burbs I can hear the highway out the window, in Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, there was a type of quiet I just wasn't expecting from a city.

I think the enabling features for this to occur are of course public transport and mixed use streets, mixed use sets the stage for a sensible compromise between cars and people. The majority of streets do actually allow cars, but you barely see any using them because they'd be incredibly slow, like walking speed. This means that if you decide to use one, you must really need it and so you can, but if not then you'll just use a road more suited to fast cars.

Replying to my own comment because I had a thought,

> Sitting in my house in the burbs I can hear the highway out the window, in Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, there was a type of quiet I just wasn't expecting from a city.

I'm also wondering if it's because of the density of buildings. In the burbs, I can hear a dog barking a block away, and the highway is pretty far from me but I still hear it. In Tokyo, it can almost feel like the city is muffled, and I wonder if that's because of the intense amount of concrete, medium height buildings and narrow, sometimes winding, crosshatching streets. In the immediate space you'd expect some reflection, but there's no way you'd hear something a block away.

I feel like this is a chicken and egg problem.

In many western cities - and I won't name names - the downtown area is not pleasant due to anti-social behaviour. So even when they do make it walkable, I don't want to walk there, I'd rather drive to a suburban mall and reduce my chances of an altercation.

Until that's fixed it's a non-starter.

Is this a problem that America has generally? I.e there are areas where most people are scared to walk through in every city?

I know many parts of the world have problems like this, but Europe doesn’t have many places like that.

I wouldn’t say danger and unpleasantness are the same thing here. Every decently sized city has higher and lower crime rate areas. Locals tend to be more sensitive to this than tourists and the higher crime areas often have their own charms, because the crime isn’t really visible. True unpleasantness is only found in a few notable cities, is very visible, and both locals and tourists avoid it or have developed a coping framework or take a mission-based approach to their encounters with it. But those unpleasant areas don’t necessarily come with a greater chance of mugging or stray bullet shooting or auto part theft.

Yes, it's a known problem. Lax law enforcement, most social services are also "downtown."

While the commenter said they wont name the cities, it can be Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, etc.

It makes it unpleasant, and if you do have to live in the middle of downtown or such, not only are you paying more - you have to for safety. Safety of a living place, safety of controlled entry, safety of a garage for your car, etc.

In General it's all depressing, you'd imagine downtown cores would be the "best" of a city, but in the USA they generally are not.

Now whether or not it's true insecurity, fear or such can be up to person/gender but criminal statistics do not lie. You can pull up a map and see where the majority of crime is reported of happening - and there you go.

Then you can look at the threshold and severity. But nowadays we live in an era of political correctness or wokeness, so saying or making direct observations of that data can become very faulty quickly, especially once you bring up age, gender and race of the perpetrators.

So eh.

> especially once you bring up age, gender and race of the perpetrators

Is there sufficient social support for the families of young black males? If not, it may make sense economically to provide it, if it would make American cities functional again.

You'll have to get past the entities that profit off whatever problem(s) you are proposing solutions for first.

“social support” is what caused the problem in the first place.

If I'm not mistaken they never received any kind of reparations, so they've been a permanent underclass since slavery.

He is referring to 20th century social services meant to fix slums, that wound up making marriage something that could get you kicked out of public housing and on-books work something that could get you kicked off financial support. This is often blamed for making everything worse and contributing to the social disaster zones that were the large public housing projects in northern cities.

Any links or references to share? Does this have a name?

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth is a pretty accessible introduction to one of the most notorious public housing disasters in the US. It was available on Netflix at some point.

The name for welfare discouraging marriage is "the marriage penalty", but it's a general policy thing that people still argue about, so I couldn't find anything good about the old AFDC marriage penalties on short notice. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/wedding-bell-blues-marria... does a quick outline in passing.

It's a big topic. Some entries here:

https://www.city-journal.org/html/black-family-40-years-lies...

Not one of the cities you mention is in the top 10 cities with the highest murders per capita.

https://www.roadsnacks.net/murder-capitals-of-america/

The same is probably true of other crime as well.

murder per capita is an important statistic for a city, but it can be misleading.

for one thing, it depends a lot on how city borders are drawn. for example, baltimore city usually shows up in top five lists for per capita murders, and indeed it is an unusually violent place. but unlike many (most?) american cities, baltimore county is completely separate from the enclosed city. if you calculated murders per capital for baltimore city and county as a single population, it would still be bad, but it wouldn't be in the national top five every year. a corollary to this is that murder rates can vary much more neighborhood-to-neighborhood within the same city than they do when comparing entire cities. most cities I've been to have at least one or two dangerous areas to be avoided if possible.

second point: even in "dangerous cities" upper-middle class professionals are unlikely to be victims of violent crime. they generally choose to live in safer enclaves of those cities. realistically, property crime is a greater concern for this demographic, which does not scale linearly with violent crime and is not restricted to the "bad neighborhoods" the same way. interestingly, "safe" cities like seattle and SF actually have higher rates of property crime than baltimore.

IIRC St. Louis has a similar arrangement with the surrounding county.

Addressing the context, though, Baltimore certainly belongs in any discussion of unpleasant downtowns. Altercations are a potential issue even driving (more so than walking actually). But there's also increasingly little to even walk to. The nightlife and culture all moved to the surrounding neighborhoods, now you just go downtown for the aquarium or the occasional bureaucratic necessity.

> Altercations are a potential issue even driving (more so than walking actually)

are you referring to the complimentary car wash at president and lombard? but yeah I agree, there's a lot that's wrong with baltimore's downtown.

if you assume that most people have to commute to work, it does make sense to have a downtown that's mostly office buildings and well-connected via public transit. so I kinda expect most downtowns to be kinda boring, not sure why you would expect them to be fun to walk around it. of course, nowhere in baltimore is particularly well-served by public transit, and the downtown is not merely boring; it's downright unpleasant and somewhat unsafe.

Yeah, that and the one on MLK (not really downtown, I know). Seems pretty common that women take the long way to avoid both.

I guess you could imagine restaurants switching from lunch to dinner service, but yeah the whole idea of downtown lends itself to emptiness I guess. Certainly not helped in Baltimore's case by how many of the offices are just empty.

> Is this a problem that America has generally? I.e there are areas where most people are scared to walk through in every city?

The problem is more that America has areas where most of the inhabitants are living in fear.

Cities with shittier weather, e.g. in the Northeast or upper Midwest, don’t seem to have this problem as much. Much less antisocial behavior than in California cities, which seem uniquely bad in this respect.

You would think so, but we still get plenty.

What used to be a nice, safe neighborhood near uptown no longer is. Leave your car doors unlocked if you park on the street overnight, or else you'll find the windows broken by morning by kids looking for stuff to steal (happened to a coworker, the one night her husband forgot to not lock the doors).

In the last two years, theft of catalytic converters from cars, as well as carjackings, have skyrocketed citywide. It has definitely changed the mood on the streets.

We also have homeless camps, which get cleared out when the annual deep freeze comes through (amazing that people try to sleep outside when the temp can drop to -40). Those same encampents leave used drug needles all over public parks adjacent to schools.

Granted, I'd have the problems we have over what CA cities have to deal with, but then again I also chose to bail entirely to live out in the countryside.

Do you live in the PNW? Because that sounds a lot like the PNW.

The northern east coast is what I believe the GP was referring to. We don't really have homeless people. I've honestly never seen a homeless person before, until I left. Neither has anyone tried to "get something" out of me, until I went down south or out west.

I think it's cultural. The people who had moved out West were those that weren't necessarily successful or prosperous in their homelands (e.g. Britain, Russia, or the original 13 colonies, comprising mostly of the propertied class). So what you get is a bunch of grifters, drifters, and people who didn't "fit."

And well, if that's what your communities are comprised of, I expect them to be antisocial.

The saddest thing is I have family there, who have children; and seeing those children slowly take on the typical West Coastian attitude (and believe that property, violent, and sexual crimes are simply the way the world is), has been heartbreaking. I'm sure they will perpetuate the cycle of shit, in their own unique way -- even if it is minor.

The north east coast has 4 states with some of the highest homelessness rates (New York, Vermont, Maine, and Massachusetts). https://www.statista.com/statistics/727847/homelessness-rate...

nope, upper midewest here. it's been nearly 200 years since the first major non-native settlements were founded here, primarily fur trading, logging and farming. Needless to say, culture has changed rather drastically since then. lots of northern european immigrants in the mix, plus more recently refugee communities from vietnam, somolia and central america.

"grifters, drifters and outcasts" really doesn't describe us at all.

I was wrong.

It seems like I still have many more places to visit.

There is far less, yes, but still enough to make walking around the city an unpleasant experience

Shoutout to Not Just Bikes for thoroughly and enjoyably diving into the problem with cars as primary transit: https://www.youtube.com/c/NotJustBikes

I live in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, and while it has many issues the general "not designed around cars" makes everything feel much more human scale which is something I miss when I visit the US.

Unfortunately, cars are a status symbol and becoming increasingly prevalent, which then puts pressure on government officials to design around them. It doesn't help that government officials all have cars and clearly see cars as superior and a sign of being a rich country.

It's not designed around cars, but it is designed around motorbikes! Worse in many ways, although perhaps not in terms of "scale".

It isn't designed around motorbikes either. They didn't really exist in numbers 30-40 years ago which is when much of the infrastructure was put in place. Go watch some videos of Saigon in the 1980s, it is mostly bicycles with a tiny smattering of motorcycles and cars.

Another Japanese city that would be quite livable without a car is Osaka. I myself have lived carless in Tokyo and Yokohama for nearly forty years without any problem. About ten years ago, I started going to Osaka several times a year and have found it similarly easy to get around on foot and public transportation. The center of Osaka is quite flat, and a lot of people there also use bicycles. If I weren't settled in Yokohama, I would be happy to live in Osaka.

What got you into Tokyo 40 years ago?

Basically mid-twenties wanderlust. I was planning to stay for maybe a year, supporting myself teaching English, before either going on to another country or returning to the U.S. But as soon as I got here I got a strong urge to learn the language, and I spent the next couple of years studying it intensively. I then starting doing freelance translation work and, over the next few years, gradually settled in both careerwise and in my personal life. It’s now my home, and I will stay here after I retire from my current university job next year at the age of sixty-five.

Did any of your translation work involve anime or video game?

How did you fare after the bubble economy burst in the 90s?

> Did any of your translation work involve anime or video game?

No. I translated a wide variety of texts for many different clients, but I was never asked to do any anime, manga, or video games. Not being into those things myself, I didn’t seek that kind of work, either.

I knew quite a few other professional Japanese-to-English translators in the 1990s, and only a couple were doing otaku stuff. I wrote a bit more about this at [1].

> How did you fare after the bubble economy burst in the 90s?

No effect. After the bubble burst, I realized that some of the work I had done in the late 1980s had indeed been “bubbly”—fluffy PR materials for purely domestic companies that had no need for PR in English but were spending their borrowed money on things they didn’t need. But when those jobs disappeared, other work arrived to fill their places. I had as much work as I could handle pretty much continuously until 2005, when I took an academic position.

I knew only one freelance translator who left the business because of the burst bubble. He had been working mainly for real estate developers, and real estate was the sector hardest hit by the downturn. Rather than trying to build up a new slate of clients in another field, he changed careers.

If you have any other questions, feel free to contact me privately. My profile page contains the URL of my website; see the About page.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29576575

I think Tokyo still has too many cars (and plenty of two or three lane roads) and Japan as a whole isn't really bicycle friendly. The city is very dense however and the cost of parking spaces makes cars only accessible to upper class families.

I actually agree with this. Tokyo isn't like Amsterdam, where there is an explicit goal to reduce reliance on cars. Instead, the relative lack of cars is kind of an accident resulting from other policies and ideas. I'll take it over explicit and deliberate car-centrism, but I do wish Japan was more like the Netherlands - that would be perfection.

Japan as a whole may not be bicycle friendly, but you can get across all the major cities on bike quite easily without interacting with high speed cars. There are either bike lanes on main roads or back streets with no traffic to circumvent interaction with cars.

Have done this in Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya and they have been fantastic cities to bike commute in.

There are definitely some areas were biking is amazing, such as Shimanami kaido, Biwa lake and Kasumigaura.

Cycling in Tokyo is a bit of a mixed bag in my experience, some streets have bike lanes, some have a bicycle strip on the main road (though this is often shared with temporarily parked cars), sometimes bicycles need to share space with pedestrians. Signage is often unclear.

I guess calling it bicycle unfriendly is a bit harsh, but at the same time it often feels that bicyclists rank third behind cars and pedestrians.

Biking in Tokyo is more casual and for short distance, people don't bike to work, they bike to the nearest train station or shopping street. It is very different attitude, there is no need for helmets, the speed is low and there are no dedicated lanes, most traffic is mixed with pedestrian traffic. I find it much nicer than the lycra culture of biking in countries like the US or Australia, but each biking culture makes sense when considering the different environments.

and the cars that are there are smaller, with special kei car classes being smaller still.

Meanwhile in NA the market has shifted to ever larger and larger pick up trucks, which are more and more dangerous for pedestrians.

You want to live in a city that pushes people into subway cars like cattle?

Communicable diseases?

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