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Comment by ngngngng | Hacker News Reader

This is my first introduction to The War on Cars, but I am such a big fan of this anti car movement. Strong towns was my introduction to the movement but my views were solidified through several city planning youtube channels (city beautiful, not just bikes). Before buying into this and related movements I relocated to a rural town where the vast majority of our taxes go to roads. Plowing, maintaining, building, it's all roads around here. Most of our town is convinced that our taxes are so high because of inept government or corruption but when you look at the city budget it's painfully clear that roads are just really expensive when everyone lives on 2 acres, every road is wide enough for 2 heavy duty dually trucks towing boats and potholes are unacceptable. Not to mention that when roads are high quality and wide, people drive fast. The odds of my kids getting smashed by a speeding truck are way higher than I'd like them to be.

We've got to stop with the whole "everyone gets a quarter acre and a truck" mentality. I live out in the middle of nowhere and everyday construction begins on a new home, filling in every gap of what used to be farmland. All of us are 15 minutes away from the nearest anything. To be fair though, I'm sure they're all moving out here for the same reasons I did. Housing near work or transit is so scarce and expensive that it just doesn't make any sense. We're spending the same as we would in the city center on a house, but we're getting a mansion out in the country instead of a shack in the city.

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Aren’t you doing exactly what everyone else wants to do? Mansion in the Sticks for me, but City Shacks for thee?

Everyone is making these same decisions up and down the society economic status lines and across the US.

One thing major cities could do to stave off cheap, cookie cutter expansionism is to buy up large swaths of land for city or state parks, and also cultivate those parks for high quality outdoor recreation. Such a policy would increase land price pressure (what local developer can outbid the government at scale??), particularly focusing on interstate corridors, which were built for… interstate commerce… but gets used for 40 acres and a mule commutes. The city comes away with a large land investment that it can prune as needed, or keep as a preserve as desired and directed by the govt/people.

Ok, so where does an already struggling community come up with $100mm to buy 200,000 acres of land surrounding the community? Land Conservancies are tax shelters where basically rich people or businesses commit their real estate assets to the government, or invest money in the conservancy to go buy up land. The land is conserved according to the conservancy’s covenant. Hold your nose, but its the fastest way to raise $100mm to tighten up development patterns.

Check out Wolf River Conservancy for a fledgling example.

https://wolfriver.org/land-trust

> One thing major cities could do to stave off cheap, cookie cutter expansionism is to buy up large swaths of land for city or state parks, and also cultivate those parks for high quality outdoor recreation. Such a policy would increase land price pressure

I think you underestimate the scale of what you're proposing. You mention 200,000 acres. To buy up enough land to curb suburban development, you'd be looking at buying all the land in at least a 15 mile radius, probably much more (people "happily" commute 15+ miles into every major city), so well north of 700,000 acres. Your 100MM suggestion seems laughable, at $500/acre. Maybe you can get land for that price in the middle of nowhere, but certainly not on livable land within 15 miles of a major city. A quick search indicates farmland costs north of $3000/acre across the US.

Maintaining the land would now be a major expense on the city. It would be a political nightmare (yeah, we could fund basic infrastructure, or we could bankrupt ourselves trying to buy every livable plot within an hour's driving distance). And of course then there's the problem that people would be unwilling to sell and eminent domain attempts would likely fail in court.

> 40 acres and a mule commutes

I have no idea what you mean by this but I would suggest you not. 40 acres and a mule has a very specific context and it's not suburban spawl.

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

> Your 100MM suggestion seems laughable, at $500/acre.

Shhhhh.... We're fudging numbers to raise capital to monopolize land around an urban center. You just don't get it.

Just my opinion, but I really hate any message created from the template "Shhhh... I'm making a snarky remark against the guy you replied, not contributing to the discussion constructively."

Do better next time.

This is a remarkably uncharitable description of a fairly mundane land-use policy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_belt

> Maybe you can get land for that price in the middle of nowhere, but certainly not on livable land within 15 miles of a major city

That land gets its value from the city. One can imagine border taxes (tolls, employment taxes, et cetera) funding those land purchases.

Initially it will be slow. But as the city buys and razes the writing will be on the wall. If that starts pushing down prices, a prisoner's dilemma will emerge whereby neighbors compete and further drive down prices. In the end there will be holdouts. But they'll be sustaining the infrastructure that supports them, a prospect that only makes sense for the rich and eccentric.

This would only work, however, if cities dramatically ease their effective ban on new development. Though that would largely obviate the need for a green ring in the first place.

> That land gets its value from the city.

Land in the middle of bumblefuck costs more than $500/acre. But this doesn't matter anyway because that high value for land around cities exists presently. An acre of developable land 5 miles outside of Seattle proper is probably worth at least half a million dollars even if there's no infrastructure running there.

> One can imagine border taxes (tolls, employment taxes, et cetera) funding those land purchases.

One can imagine many things that are unrealistic. Cities cannot tax people outside their incorporated territory so this idea that they'll just tax people to death for living outside the city is unrealistic. They could certainly add tolls, but not at the volume that would be needed for this. And if they tried, the state legislature would doubtless swoop in and make it illegal. e.g., In Washington, road tolls can only be applied to road improvements (indeed only to improvements to the road being tolled). Any city that goes overboard trying to tax outsiders aggressively will just get shut down by the state.

> But as the city buys and razes the writing will be on the wall. If that starts pushing down prices...

This is pretty ridiculous. If the city starts reducing supply, costs will go up, not down.

The purchasing scale needed to achieve this is insane. This would absolutely require many billions to achieve. Even if a city could manage to get their citizens to agree, and the state to allow it, and structure the burden so it falls on outsiders, it would still take decades to fund and execute, and in that time land value would go up due to the squeeze, making this more and more difficult for the city.

> Though that would largely obviate the need for a green ring in the first place.

This I agree on. City density won't be improved by preventing suburbs but by allowing more density.

My reference on the 40 Acres comment is clearly off base and not what I intended, thanks for correcting. I thought it was primarily an American Dream relating to Manifest Destiny, but per the wiki it was a lie presented to African Americans after the American Civil War.

I am, however, aware of the scale of what I am proposing. A lot of the land to be controlled ends up being junk land, be it hazardous flood plain or otherwise challenging to develop, but it creates large buffer zones that constrains private development effort. Farmland is relatively expensive land because it has economic output. But that fine, call it $3000/acre. Dont buy high value farmland. Do buy un-farmable floodplain or wetlands. A lot of the land gets donated or conveyed via easement. Bigger cities will have bigger budgets to work with. You dont have to buy all the land, just strategic lands that apply pressure and create value in other forms, namely that a state park is available for all to use, a ranch is available for none.

It is not laughable, it is currently being done in many cities. Probably not viable in major cities, if your frame of mind is NYC or SFO, this process will not make as much sense because its too late.

> My reference..

No worries. I assumed you must have meant something like that.

> I am, however, aware of the scale of what I am proposing…

For smaller cities I could see how this might work if it’s done before they really develop. I was thinking in terms of existing large cities, where it seems intractable in part due to the existing sprawl. I can’t imagine how this would play out in Seattle (where I live) because the sprawl is already well outside the control of the city. Even if Seattle wanted to do this, all of the land is under the control of the surrounding towns (Bellevue, Kirkland, Shoreline, etc.) at this point.

> My reference on the 40 Acres comment is clearly off base and not what I intended, thanks for correcting. I thought it was primarily an American Dream relating to Manifest Destiny, but per the wiki it was a lie presented to African Americans after the American Civil War.

I had this exact same misconception as well until a few weeks ago. I wonder how common it is! And where it comes from. Also worth noting that UT-Austin has a "40 acres scholarship" as their ultimate tier of endowment, which is a reference to UT-Austin originally receiving 40 acres on which to found their University (from the government as a land grant).

What major cities should do is legalize housing construction in them, and the US would urbanize very quickly, with enormous benefits for the entire country, including much less sprawl construction pressure.

Instead you seem to propose that cities try to expand their no construction zone to rural areas.

> Aren’t you doing exactly what everyone else wants to do? Mansion in the Sticks for me, but City Shacks for thee?

I'm hoping to be one of these people one day, but I'm also hoping to be taxed appropriately for it. Make people who cost society so much pay taxes to cover their costs.

And until then, stop taxing my condo in the city as if I'm the same as the 4 bedroom house on a 1/4 acre lot down the street.

> And until then, stop taxing my condo in the city as if I'm the same as the 4 bedroom house on a 1/4 acre lot down the street.

Taxes are based on ability to pay rather than actual cost to the city (land value is just a proxy for ability to pay). Otherwise poor people literally could not live in the city.

I'm not saying it's a bad idea to impose higher taxes on residences that have outsized infrastructure costs. But I'm not sure I see it as likely. (Or necessary, given that a city willing to do this could just as easily change zoning and suddenly there would be lots of pressure for those single family homes to turn into condos.)

I can't imagine poor people affording what would presumably be higher taxes in sprawling suburbs (though perhaps the issue is that there are suburbs in the middle of your city?).

Of course, taxing people based off their cost while also forbidding densification would just be a sick joke.

surburbs are low tax because they are built using bad debt for future generations to bankrupt on.

One is taxed too low, but it's not the condo.

Ottawa Canada did exactly this, creating a green belt in 1956. It appears to still be there. I wonder if anyone has done a benefits analysis?

Green belts are common in the UK too, they're very popular with the people who live in them and unpopular with people who don't on the whole!

Boulder, CO did this: https://aboutboulder.com/blog/why-does-boulder-have-a-greenb... There's a fund to buy up farms and ranches around the city when they come up for sale, and develop them as open-space for hiking or wildlife preservation.

Which, when coupled with building height and density limits means Boulder has housing prices like those of a city 10x its size. I live in a subdivision in a small town just on the other side of that greenbelt. Since the bus service is terrible, when I was commuting into the city it took an extra 5-10 minutes of driving through that open space to get to my office.

So while I personally love having the open space, its not a panacea that solves all the problems.

what do you think "40 acres and a mule" means? It's not about commuting.

Oh yeah, I guess I didn't feel the need to spell it out in my original post but I'm trying to move. The problem is all my family is in the states, so my options are limited and expensive. I don't think we have a truly walkable city besides New York, and I love New York but that's as far away from my western and Hawaiian family members I can get while staying in the US.

I mean.

I find your points interesting and I don't like ad hominem... but you start with "I relocated into rural town". It's hard to follow the rest.

It may be a pain point for me; my in-laws are constantly complaining about how "These used to be fields around here, now it's all houses". THEY (my in-laws) all live in houses. How are these other houses different than your house? Whenever I ask that question, I get blank stares, as if I'm failing to understand their obvious point and complaint, which I guess I am. It's kind of like being stuck in traffic and non-sarcastically, angrily wondering "Where are all these people going to on a Saturday Morning (or whatever)??!?" -- umm, probably similar reasons and places that we are :-)

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As a more meaningful discussion though, it's interesting that I see modern living ideas go in both directions:

- We should all live in high density, efficient, foot-friendly urban areas

- We should all create our own farms and lead self-sustaining off-grid lives

The sweet spot is in the middle. Small/medium sized towns and cities 50,000 people or less probably. Walkable and bike-able, train services, and then the surrounding area contains small farms and other recreation areas (parks, hiking trails, etc.) and all of this is accessible by car, bus, or bike.

Basically European towns and small cities.

Higher density is fine but high density like Hong Kong or Mumbai is an anti-pattern just as suburbs are.

Hmm, I don't think that's the middle though:

Proponents of self-sustainment as the way forward advocate off-grid lifestyle that provides energy and large amount of food/materials internally / within family or homestead. A house and a plot of land, and some fruit/veggies/animals, with solar or geothermal, etc.

In my mind then, a 5,000 people town is as much on the other side of the spectrum from that, as a 5,000,000 people town.

In fact, in North America, small and medium towns in my experience (Minnesota, Manitoba, Ontario) are quaint and lovely, but worst possible compromise - no self-sustaining benefits of independent homestead, but with limited to no public transit, no high density dwelling, spread out infrastructure. You cannot live without a car in a small north american town - modern or old. They are beautiful lovely historic worst parts of sub-urban without the urban/core.

[edit/disclosure: In fact, I live in one now (moved there for love:) and it is fascinating how much we get none of the benefits of either farm or downtown living. City Council repeatedly rejects calls for public transit, on probably awful unspoken grounds of not wanting "undesirable elements". We do have a cute main street and the 5% of population who lives on or around it can probably walk there. Literally the rest of 95% of population MUST own several cars to live. I'm always amused when healthy 25 year old SF-downtown dwellers promote bikes as solution to everything - that's just not going to be relevant to the aging population of Canadian or USA snowbelt sub-urbia:]

> Proponents of self-sustainment as the way forward advocate off-grid lifestyle that provides energy and large amount of food/materials internally / within family or homestead. A house and a plot of land, and some fruit/veggies/animals, with solar or geothermal, etc.

Yes but this isn't possible with current population levels so it's a non-started from a practical standpoint. It also has downsides as you can't build things like hospitals or universities, particle colliders, or hardware/electronics to do self-sustainment. All and I mean all who advocate for this specific way of life only do so and are able to do so because it's subsidized by technological innovation throughout the rest of the world. To be clear I support people doing this. I think it’s really cool and good for society, but it’s important to be aware of how you’re actually able to do it.

> In my mind then, a 5,000 people town is as much on the other side of the spectrum from that, as a 5,000,000 people town.

I think this would be a great opportunity to recalibrate, because those are not even remotely the same thing in any way, shape, or form. Even ancient peoples who were undoubtedly more self-sustaining than anyone who exists today had settlements larger than 5,000 people.

> In fact, in North America, small and medium towns in my experience (Minnesota, Manitoba, Ontario) are quaint and lovely, but worst possible compromise - no self-sustaining benefits of independent homestead, but with limited to no public transit, no high density dwelling, spread out infrastructure. You cannot live without a car in a small north american town - modern or old. They are beautiful lovely historic worst parts of sub-urban without the urban/core.

I agree that this is the experience but you need to look to Europe for better examples. I'm also advocating for things like train service, majority of your experience being walking or biking (i.e. a 15-minute town), and very reduced car ownership. Having a car isn't that bad, it's having 2 or 4 cars and using them for everything under the sun. Europeans have cars, and they also have infrastructure, and farms, and self-sustaining areas. It's a great blueprint to improve upon. I'm not advocating for what is, but what could be.

I agree with this though I'd set the bar higher. I think it's a very personal choice.

I wouldn't want to live in Hong Kong or a similar skyscraper supertall metropolis.

And single family homes everywhere with massive lawns are also broken because they make everything too car-ry.

But somewhere like London (less dense) or Paris (more dense) has a good balance somewhere. Like, here (London) we have streets and streets of "single family homes", but they're about 100sqm, they're terraced and thin. Walking by one takes like, two seconds or something.

On my street alone there are probably 200 of these things, and you can multiply that street by another hundred, and all of those are within easy walking distance of a high street and tube station. Those numbers are probably a bit off but you get the idea.

The thing is that people who get super into, well, anything, can't seem to resist going for one or the other extreme, and they seem to want to quantify everything, so it ends up being logically the case that like:

Beep boop

boop beep.

But that's playing The Sims, not like, living in a world with real humans with wants and desires. Some people want to live in Manhattan and others want to live on 50 acres in Arkansas and that's fine.

I agree with your sentiment, certainly. My main point of contention would be that the government in the US (and the Anglosphere in general) is very much ok with supporting and subsidizing suburbia. This comes in the form of zoning, federal funding for highways (where the bulk of the cost is in maintenance which will be causing local governments to go bankrupt in the future), government subsidies of oil, support for the auto industry, subsidizing environmental costs (i.e. you don't bear the cost for the destruction of the environment) you name it. There's no sidewalk lobby. Ya know?

Have you been to Hong Kong? (Not trying to be snarky) It's a got a great transportation system, very walkable, and you're never more than 30 minutes (by public transport) from over 100 miles of lush mountain hiking through the interior or the seashore. The density means that it is profitable to have stores like bakeries that are cheap enough that you walk by and think, I'd love a danta for US$1, while in the US you might make a special trip and get one for $4 + tax but it's not going to be an impulse buy. It even has something like four major universities. It's a travesty that China flagrantly broke their treaty, Hong Kong is what I think of when I think of an amazing city.

I have not and just used it as an example since it was one of the first places I thought of when I mentioned density (along with Mumbai). But I have been to Seoul and lived in South Korea for a year. I had Hong Kong on my list of places to go see... too bad what happened.

I absolutely agree with you that Hong Kong from an infrastructure perspective has a lot going for it, but I think that skyscrapers are an anti-pattern. You can't repair them yourself, they require specialized knowledge to create and support, extremely dense environments are breeding grounds for contagious disease (this is a general statement), and from a natural standpoint they're quite sterile (the parks, while great, are illusions of nature - a toy or a simulation). I think we'll also find that skyscrapers cause anxiety and depression here in the near future as/if research is conducted. You also require massive infrastructure for cities, again more specialization. They're very much reliant on cheap fossil fuels to create and support, even if they're per-capita lower on emissions. If we run out of oil and I live in a 30,000 person city in Europe, life goes on. I still walk like I was before and farmers still bring their goods to the local market. If we run out of oil and I live in Hong Kong the entire thing crumbles to bits.

You're describing a pleasant low population density situation which is a nice romantic fantasy a lot of people long for. I don't blame people for wanting that, but you must realize that it is the exact mentality that leads to suburban sprawl.

I think on aggregate, that is more expensive (financially and environmentally) than high density cities. Take all the infrastructure which needs to be built out for these small cities (roads, electric grid etc) which serve a very small number of people and now imagine if everyone lived like that and multiply that cost with building out this infrastructure for a many many small cities. Building 30 small idyllic villages instead of one hong Kong would end up having a larger environmental impact.

You’re thinking of something I’m not describing “idyllic villages”. Instead I’m describing modern towns and cities that exist all over the world and in Europe in particular where they were built before cars existed. They have low emissions, everyone walks or rides a bike, and they have regular train service.

> Building 30 small idyllic villages instead of one hong Kong would end up having a larger environmental impact.

Depends. If they’re American-style sure. If they are (again these are your words idyllic villages) then I don’t see much impact. You just walk around the small village. Maybe a farmer comes buy and sells apples or whatever. These scale and the evidence is in the city, where you can see companies will create multiple instances of their stores because there’s an upper limit on the number of people served. Also for a right sized city 50,000+ you don’t need massive infrastructure investments which require massive specialization, massive costs, and so forth. They only exist because there are too many people.

Also for items like roads those are fine. You can walk or ride your bike in them. Maybe they’re even multi-purpose. Most wouldn’t be driving cars on them for any reason though which is a big inefficiency.

>Basically European towns and small cities

coming from exactly one such European town (or more accurately the rural area around it) this is a 20th century bucolic fantasy.

Well-paying jobs are increasingly non-existent as brick&mortar is being killed by tech, education opportunities are limited, as is cultural life increasingly as the economy goes down the drain. More and more people commute 2+ hours to get to the better universities or better paying work. Doctors are hard to get a hold off, and so forth. Internet access as well as infrastructure in general is in mediocre shape because costs are high for small, spread out towns. The demographic shift as young people leave makes it even worse, elderly isolation is awful.

The first time I actually moved to a big city (abroad to Tokyo of all places) it took me a week to understand that the small town is pretty much over and also ridiculously romanticized.

Funny enough all of those things wind up being true in large metropolis areas as well but then also with its own basket of downsides.

Instead of commuting two hours to get to better paying work, you end up commuting two hours to afford the house you want. Doctors you can't get ahold of because their office is too busy to see you, wait 7 months, etc. Universities are impossible to get into because there are too many applicants, or the cost is too high. You can work or be educated over the Internet. Instead of having no culture in the city, you can develop or embrace your local traditions or cultural aspects. If there are none, then you can be the first one to start (building cultures is hard work, like maintaining government).

You can have a bucolic fantasy just as you can have an urban dream. Both can be ridiculously romanticized.

I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all solution really, I mean I for one would be a miserable alcoholic within a month if I was forced to live in an urban or even suburban environment. I also work with people who are the complete opposite and can't stand being outside cities for long at all.

In rural areas, cars make sense, because public transport is (usually) abysmal: bad connections, not often, don't go on saturdays/sundays, lots of walking, have to take various different connections, or have to phone them up to come (great way to get rid of customers even when they state they need it every workday). A bike is useful, but has its limits. Yes, you can clothe yourself, but doing groceries or going out and about with the family to a remote location (say 50+ km away) is a no-go.

In a city, bikes are useful because everything is compact and therefore relatively easy to reach. If more people go by bike, the traffic must adapt to bicycle popularity (as happened in Berlin, as is default in The Netherlands). Public transport is also good because its popular and various options for various ranges (tram, metro, train, ferry, etc). If both of these are good, the need for cars is less there, and public parking spaces are usually sparse in big cities, therefore expensive (also the required security costs money).

One thing car/bike have which public transport don't is that you are in a relatively private space instead of sharing the commons. In COVID-19 pandemic that's a plus, if you like being social to strangers (I don't, I'm a private person, but I don't condone such behaviour).

It doesn't have to be completely anti or completely pro car. Just like with FOSS and veganism and what not, there are shades of gray, people.

>> In rural areas, cars make sense, because public transport is (usually) abysmal.

Where in rural America is public transportation not abysmal? I don’t believe there is anywhere in rural America where a personal vehicle can be completely replaced by public transportation.

you have to put the disclaimer "usually" because people will downvote you for being "too certain". There is also the haters who are like "I know a friend who lives in a rural town that has great public transport so you are wrong on everything!"

If you’re anti-car you also need to be pro-city-shack for yourself.

I’m 40 and have lived in the US my entire life. I grew up in a very rural area, went to college in a small town, and now live in a tiny urban apartment. I have been anti-car my whole life and have never learned to drive.

Makes me laugh to see anyone in the suburbs say, “Boy I wish I didn’t have to drive everywhere.” You don’t have to drive everywhere! I’m living proof of that. You just have to make different choices and prioritize not-driving over having a McMansion. Yes, it’s inconvenient at times but that’s the trade off.

The gulf between what people say they value and what their actions say they value is monumental.

> If you’re anti-car you also need to be pro-city-shack for yourself.

Not necessarily. If you don't want your nice rural area to be turned into McMansions centrally located on a Wal-Mart, it's important to support stronger cities and towns. I don't think any farmers want to deal with $500,000 4000+ sq. ft. single family homes constantly trying to shut them down because the farm they moved next to smells and sounds like a farm.

> If you’re anti-car you also need to be pro-city-shack for yourself.

Many people would like to live in a city but can't afford it because even a multi-bedroom "shack" is incredibly expensive. You're basically suggesting that those folks need to suffer in order to validate their (totally legitimate) desire for better transit and more affordable housing?

The comparison is to a "rural half-acre". If you can afford a half-acre of land in a rural area but not a "shack" in the city, that implies a lot more about the continued under-valuation of "rural" land than costs of urban living. (Which the Georgists were arguing about more than a century ago.)

Why do you say rural land is under valued? What is society missing that should be included in the price?

Land is a very finite resource on this planet.

The easiest "carbon capture" (though it is slow) is and has always been: Trees. We need more forests than ever and we keep bulldozing them instead.

Rural development is often at the expense of trees and forests for at best mostly unvariegated farm land and at worst useless (but "pretty") green yards.

(Here again the externalities of the greenhouse gases aren't felt by corporations building the houses nor the average home owner. We'd never pass Carbon Taxes in the first place, but especially no one wants to talk about Property Tax Carbon Taxes on their homes. But we need to reforest a lot of land to better deal with climate change and that's not going to happen with just market forces at work. Trees, deer, and birds don't have the money to buy land/houses.)

Well said.

It seems to me those who came first, benefited the most. At the cost of everyone who follows. (if you think longer term). Eg; open land, develop it, live a grand life from the large profits. Subsequent years will have the property market determine the financial benefits from those who come and go. But then eventually, the natural loss starts to become a problem. And then everyone suffers. Everyone who is still around. This is just another kind of debt, just like "kicking the can down the road" wrt finance/national debt/money printing is.

Not only can those much further into the future not "benefit" (financially) from the ability to "cheaply" obtain undeveloped land, but they also sit with the problems due to the natural resources having been depleted (development of land does not only negatively affect tree...)

The whole concept of land ownership as it is, imho , is a problem.

Yes, that’s exactly what I’m suggesting.

If people aren’t willing to suffer today, then everyone is going to suffer immensely from climate change over the coming generations.

The fact that everybody wants change but nobody is willing to change shows me that climate change is an absolute lost cause.

That's a totally false choice. No one has to suffer for more (and more affordable) housing and more (and more convenient) mass transit - except perhaps the "winners" of the current system. It's also quite an entitled position you're espousing: just because you have the economic wherewithal to live in cities and forgo driving, doesn't mean that many people (and their families) who work in those same cities do.

Yes, I am quite privileged. Anybody who’s privileged (most people reading HN fit into this category) and isn’t thinking about the sacrifices they can make today for the good of the future needs to take a good hard look in the mirror.

But like I said, humanity is fucked. The next 200-250 years are going to be unimaginably awful for the descendants of people alive today who can’t imagine their lives being unimaginably awful.

Drive if you want. Live in a big house. Do whatever. It clearly doesn’t matter at this point.

It's also a spectrum. My wife and I have a nice house in an old suburb.

I bike to work, and I walk to one of our three grocery stores and to my nearby coffee shop. My kids can walk to all three schools.

It's not feasible for us to have _no_ car, but I get behind the wheel _maybe_ once a week.

You can say "we should adopt lifestyles that use cars _less_" without saying "we should adopt lifestyles that don't use cars".

Precisely. I used to live in NYC, and didn't have a car there because it was expensive, inconvenient, and generally not worth the effort.

Moved cities, and now I try to walk/bike everywhere locally, only using the car on weekends when I want to go 50+ miles from home. There's issues sometimes (my city's bike and pedestrian infrastructure is... not ideal), but I do prefer this situation to feeling completely trapped in NYC.

Curious if you have any recommendations for "old suburbs" like where you live -- that's precisely the kind of environment my partner and I are looking for. I know there are some in the suburbs of Boston, but it's really tricky to try to find those places because in my experience walkability scores don't really mean anything.

I live in NYC, but grew up in one of those old towns north of Boston (Salem). Generally these sorts of old towns were originally built with a very walkable downtown area and over the years may have added areas that were more typical of the post-WWII suburbanization. A town like Salem has also gentrified quite a bit from when I was a kid in the 80s and 90s, so it's probably completely possible to live in the downtown center and really not need a car at all. If you live in the newer, more suburban parts then your reliance on a car will increase.

Personally I prefer large, dense cities with lots of public transit and the access to international culture you get from being in a place like NYC, but a place like downtown Salem is probably really nice to live in if you're happy being in a small community.

Either way, the fully car based living most of the country relies on has always seemed ridiculous to me (I've never had a license or a car).

Thanks for the tip, Salem is actually on my list of places to check out. Much appreciated.

Agreed that fully car based living is ridiculous -- it's so sad to visit family and realize that I literally cannot go anywhere unless I hop in a car. I run for exercise pretty frequently, and find it a fun way to check out neighborhoods, and it is absolutely pathetic that most of my family members suggest driving someplace to run because their neighborhoods have no sidewalks, 60mph speed limits, and not even a shoulder to run on.

Traffic, price, and crime issues in big cities have largely turned me off from them since Covid started -- I just don't see the price:performance ratio there. But I also don't really take advantage of cultural things like museums and music venues very much, and I grew up in a rural community so cities have always felt a bit uncomfortable for me. So don't take that as an outright hatred of cities... I just feel they aren't for me. Hoping to find that "walkable/bikeable large town/small city" middle ground soon.

My partner and I were in a similar situation several years ago. Escaped from NYC and moved to the greater Boston area. We initially looked at places like Arlington, Waltham, Lexington, Watertown, Newton, and Somerville.

I agree that walk scores can be misleading, especially in this area. There are places that are listed as "walkable" because they have a lot of strip malls bunched together even though there are no actual sidewalks. On the flip side, we ended up moving to a small town with an abysmal walk score but good sidewalks, trails, and bike paths and a small but hardy contingent of neighbors who walk or bike to our local school and grocery store all year round.

I ended up just walking or biking around prospective neighborhoods during weekdays to get a sense of how many people actually get around in the neighborhood. I also ended up chatting with a couple of coordinators from the MA Safe Routes to Schools program to get a sense of which schools had the most kids walking to school. While they didn't have the numbers I was looking for they were friendly and helpful and I got a better sense of the different priorities in different towns.

Thar only worka because almost every one else is either driving to the store and school or living in an apartment. It's a simple matter of geometry.

> You can say "we should adopt lifestyles that use cars _less_" without saying "we should adopt lifestyles that don't use cars".

Essentially nobody is willing to do either of these things so it doesn’t much matter which I say.

> I’m 40 and have lived in the US my entire life. I grew up in a very rural area, went to college in a small town, and now live in a tiny urban apartment

My situation is the same as you except where you veer off the deep end and "I have been anti-car my whole life". I did learn to drive, not sure if I can still do it, but I never liked driving. however, I am not 'anti car'. some people enjoy different things or have different things going on in their life, stop this anti-hate bs.

> I however, I am not 'anti car'.

I suspect it is worth differentiating between `anti car` == `I don't want to need a car in my life` and `anti car` == `nobody should have cars`. I see both usages pretty commonly.

There is a more subtle boundary around opinion about how much city infrastructure should be manipulated to facilitate cars (or not), but this is difficult policy stuff.

I think the message of channels like “not just bikes” is that even if 2 acres and a truck for everybody was economical, its actually not desirable long term. Its just _so nice_ to live in a place with no traffic jams and your kids (and you too) are not just casualties waiting to happen.

The reason for shotgun houses in New Orleans is that the French property tax was created in the age of reason: The primary cost of the property to the govt was linear road length (later sewer, water, electrical, gas, postal, etc.) so that's how they were taxed (yes, there are other reasons for the architecture, but taxes drives a lot)

Some study that came out a few years ago showed that cities lose money on the richer properties but recoup it in the denser, poorer areas. Not very reasonable.

Taxing on street frontage occupied goes back quite a long time in France, I believe.

>the vast majority of our taxes go to roads.

I guarantee you this is not true. At least it's not true if you look at the totality of property taxes. If your city spends all of its money on roads it's because it's left things like police, fire, schools, and so on to county level government.

Yeah it's really hard to take you seriously when you criticize people for doing exactly what you did. Just because you did it earlier doesnt mean you are morally superior in any way.

Once I lived in the city,

it was too big and noisy

So I moved to the country,

to stop and smell the rosies

All my city friends joined me,

and put up nice new housies

Now it's too big and noisy,

think I'll move to the country

https://www.google.com/search?q=fred+small+too+many+people+l...

I didn't mean to come across like that. I was intending to criticize the system that put us all in this position where this was the obvious choice. Strong towns focuses heavily on the cost aspect of rural and suburban building with all the amenities of a city. I would prefer if we all had the option to move out to the boonies without it being the obvious choice because A) we stop running these towns as ponzi schemes, subsidizing current COL on supposed future growth and B) we built ample high density housing in city centers and near transit hubs so that housing in convenient areas wasn't a Veblen good.

So you get the 2 acre plot 15 minutes from town, but no one else should?

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