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Comment by jcranmer | Hacker News Reader

> That isn't apartment building density, but that's about as dense as single family homes can get.

You can get a little bit denser by going full street grid--Chicago's single family home districts look to mostly be rocking ~6-9k people/km².

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I might be the only one but I strongly prefer grid-layout cities to these winding suburb road layouts anyhow. When your city is a grid you can make street names mean something and a person can navigate from place to place easily and have an intuitive idea of how far away something is, both without a cellphone.

you’re definitely not the only one. grids make much more sense. and not only for ease of navigation.

I think you are the only one.

I grew up in Chicago on a perfect grid. Now I live on a street that I picked precisely because you only drive down it if you live there. I don't like the sound of cars driving past. That's a personal preference that seems pretty generalized, even among people without kids.

And on a street like that, you don't need speed bumps, because people aren't speeding down the street.

He's definitely not the only person who prefers cities to suburbs. What?

Now, I think almost everyone would prefer if their one street were not integrated into the grid. That would be the ideal. You live in a grid, but with none of the downsides. But failing that, many people opt to live in denser areas rather than the burbs, even if the cost is that folks sometimes drive down their street who are going someplace else..

But that’s the thing. The street’s utility is exclusively to the houses that are on it. Those houses are very unlikely to be paying enough property tax to cover its existence. This luxury of yours is paid for by other people’s productive activity in the future. Great deal for you! But we the (net) taxpayers ought to think about how many more of these sweetheart deals we offer to cul de sac homeowners in the future, before we bankrupt ourselves.

I’m not a libertarian, I think it’s fine for government to tap rich people to provide nice things for everyone, but this particular nice thing (way more roadway than you pay for) has a pretty bad cost:benefit, and its beneficiaries are not exactly the neediest or most deserving of aid.

or if not 'tap the rich', better structure the payouts so there isn't such an imbalance. wage stagnation is a BIG problem.

I find it hard to believe that building a road is so expensive. Some random website I found claims the cost of a two-lane undivided road costs $3 million per mile in an urban setting. Looking at the satellite imagery of Mississauga linked elsewhere, the frontage of each house is around 50 ft. So there are about 211 houses per mile. That comes out to $14,000 per house to build the road. The approximate lifespan of an asphalt road is 18 years, leading to a per year cost of ~800 dollars. Of course, this doesn't include maintenance of the road (fixing pot holes, plowing, etc.), but $800 per year seems like a pretty manageable sum of money.

In Galesburg (the town in the article), it wasn’t a manageable amount. That town has extremely low property values compared to any towns I’m familiar with, though. The author’s single-family home is worth about $60k. The median home in Mississauga is $900k (CAD), so I assume they can afford to maintain their roads.

We’re talking about pretty different things, though. Suburbs of ultra high-cost-of-living cities have their taxes buoyed up their proximity to the big economic engines, while small towns like Galesburg have to figure out how to be self-sufficient without that constant influx of wealth.

But would more density really solve the problem? An inability to produce $800 per household will make anything hard.

The property tax bill in TFA is $1700, but roads are only one of the things property taxes buy.

I was thinking this as well. I wonder how much this is just a consequence of per capita city productivity being so many times greater than small towns.

More density means more people per road and less road in general. Done right, and households are not the only entities paying into the coffers

The median home price in Galesburg is $90k.

Makes sense for a declining city in far-out rural Illinois.

It’s an interesting question to me what these towns will do going forward. If participation in the global economy is required to maintain a first-world standard of living, what will these towns produce that the rest of the world wants?

Some will farm or extract natural resources, but these operations require fewer people than they used to, so fewer towns. Some will be holiday destinations for city-dwellers. But we will probably sustain far fewer of these towns than we have historically.

What do towns full of software developers produce? There are developers that like living out in the country.

> What do towns full of software developers produce?

Software? Sure there are software developers living out in small towns, but obviously not many in this town.

I think having some residential that's offset is fine, the problem is that almost inevitably these places are designed to be impermeable to walk/bike traffic as well, and with the long distances required to go anywhere, you do have to drive everywhere.

A positive counter-example would be Houten. Winding street layout that's not good for through traffic, but very nice for walking and especially biking: https://www.google.com/maps/@52.033207,5.1474598,3a,75y,4.09...

A big problem is this sort of design makes it hard to walk between places. All travel involves going to the main road, going some distance down that and then following a new branch. Queue route map that requires 10 minute drive to get to the "next block".

Not too bad in you car but it means that you can't walk or bike anywhere unless they have put in paths between blocks. Means that if a 15-year-old kids wants an ice-cream their parent has to drive them to the corner store.

You can have both, if you have a grid of main through-roads for transporting people around and then inside each "square" of the grid you have a continued fractal of sub-grids which aren't for through-traffic (slower speed limits, narrower streets, traffic calming measures, difference in material to make clear the difference from through-roads and local streets etc.). People traveling past won't use the inner streets because they aren't efficient for that, but people living in the neighbourhood will use the inner streets.

In Berkeley, CA they purposefully break up the grid for cars. So a street will be passable to pedestrians and bikes but blocked by bollards for cars. This gives the cul-de-sac effect without causing terrible walkability. Of course, traditional winding suburbs can accomplish something similar by adding pedestrian walkways through cul-de-sacs.

There's a good video explaining how urban and suburban residents alike want less traffic in their neighborhoods: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqQw05Mr63E

Are American cardboard walls and windows actually that bad that you can hear cars through them?

Cars? Probably not. Loud trucks/motorcycles? Absolutely.

As someone who lives in a recently built American house in a dense urban area: yes, definitely. It’s quiet enough that I can tune them out, mostly.

Most of Chicago has adapted against that problem: streets are now artificially cul-de-sac'd to cap them near arteries, so neighborhoods have explicitly designed traffic flows. It works reasonably well (I'm in Oak Park, not Chicago, but same deal). Obviously, you'd get less traffic in Glenview or whatever.

> I grew up in Chicago on a perfect grid. Now I live on a street that I picked precisely because you only drive down it if you live there. I don't like the sound of cars driving past. That's a personal preference that seems pretty generalized, even among people without kids.

Well, you could still get this, more or less, with a grid, like Barcelona's superblocks.

Yeah - Phoenix has a basically 1 mile grid, with lil side streets in-between the major intersections.

I hate it, because if you miss a turn, you basically have to go another full mile to hit another 'cross street'.

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