Hacker News Reader

Comment by viro | Hacker News Reader

Then why was there a mass exodus during the height of WFH? Data seems to show that people pay that premium to reduce commute time. Let's not forget full remote was a lot harder to get before covid.

View on HN

That's because the HN urbanist crowd is a very small and vocal minority. The vast majority of people WANT to live in suburban or rural areas. Only 19% of Americans want to live in a dense urban environment. [1]

[1] https://pewresearch.org/social-trends/2021/12/16/americans-a...

People have no idea what they really want. They however know how they live now, so when asked they will say they don't want to change.

Where someone lives is a compromise. Everyone wants the best of ALL words: the dense urban area with a subway entrance on the same street, plenty of shopping and other entertainment. They also want a ski lift up a mountain, finish your day ski day in your own backyard, and a tropical beach in the front yard, among the other benefits of rural living. That is physically impossible no matter how much money you have, so you make the best of what you can get even though it cannot be perfect.

With the current situation of the US subrubs are the best compromise, but as things change different compromises become better. Right now dense areas are a lot more expensive for a lot less space, and often that space comes with the problems of living in a very old building.

Note that change will not happen overnight. Even if 30000 square foot apartments (intentionally be absurdly large to make the point) in neighborhoods with good schools was free it would take a lot of time for people to move even though the rent savings would allow for more than enough other lifestyle changes as to make it a better compromise for most people.

> Where someone lives is a compromise.

Yup, it's generally just a balancing of priorities and trade offs. For me, having to drive everywhere I need to go would make me really sad, so I chose an urban environment, in a neighborhood where there's a good mix of residential and commercial, that is decently well-connected to public transit. But that means I have to deal with more noise, crime, and homelessness, and don't get to have a yard, despite higher living costs.

But that's my trade off, and others don't prioritize the same things I do.

Yep, and the costs is good summary of where the compromises balance out on average. Since urban areas cost more, it's fair to say people prefer urban areas more.

Supply and demand come into play too. It only takes a slight imbalance to drive costs up. That is if there are 1000 units in an area and 1001 families (counting roommates and single people living alone as families) want a unit then the price will go up until someone is no longer willing/able to pay it.

The numbers in the survey are linked are where people want to live, not where people currently live. More urban residents want to move to the suburbs/rural areas than vice-versa.

60% of Americans prefer living a a community with larger houses and having to drive miles to get to school, stores, and restaurants versus having smaller houses and businesses within walking distance. Urban residents are divided almost evenly and 49% of them would prefer to drive miles to get to businesses if it meant that they could live in a large house. [1] I suspect the discrepancy with the previous survey is because both scenarios had the participants living in houses and if they were asked to pick a walkable apartment community or the car-dependent house community the number of people who would pick the denser community would be lower. The data is clear, more people prefer the suburban and rural car dependent lifestyles than the walkable urban lifestyle. Making arguments that people just don't know what they want is incredibly condescending and controlling.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/08/26/more-americ...

No one is arguing against suburbs. We are arguing that car infrastructure (roads 100% devoted to car traffic, free curbside parking and parking lots everywhere) should not be subsidized. You want to use a car? Pay for it. Otherwise free car infrastructure destroys the vitality and livability of wherever it spreads.

Suburbs existed before the car. See "Streetcar suburbs" on youtube.

The point is that it isn't a bad thing if a local government listens to their constituents and builds what they want instead of building what a online vocal minority of people who don't live in their area want. Your argument about subsidies is only logical if you also advocate for no non-use-based taxes and the privatization of all services like healthcare, schools, and transit, since if one shouldn't have to pay for some things they don't use or want to use, then they shouldn't have to pay for anything they don't want to. Transit is also far more subsidized on a per user level than roads are, and I would be perfectly willing to pay the unsubsidized cost of car infrastructure (and so would most drivers), but I suspect that you wouldn't like having to pay the unsubsidized cost of transit. Car infrastructure also doesn't destroy the livability of an area, as shown by the survey results above; no one wants to live in an unlivable area by definition and most people want to live in areas you would deem "unlivable".

Im not so confident that car drivers are not sensitive to cost changes. Eg. The gillet jaune protests in France over gas price changes

You missed the point of the comment. The relative price increase for car drivers to pay for 100% of their infrastructure cost is far lower than for transit riders. In my area, which is one of the most pro-density and transit-oriented cities in America, it would take a small increase in gas tax, and we've already had a large gas price increase from the market, so returning to normal prices with a small tax increase wouldn't hurt too much. Meanwhile, a bus ride costs the taxpayer ~$7 and the rider pays ~$3. That number does not include the cost of the roads the buses drive on, as government owned vehicles are exempt from gas tax and the transit system does not contribute anything towards road maintenance. A train ticket costs ~$3 but costs the taxpayer ~$30, not including capital costs. Most of the fare revenue also comes from unlimited use passes that all businesses are forced to buy for their employees if they are over a certain size, even if the employees never use them. Meanwhile, drivers in my state pay a ~-70 cents per mile subsidy (that's a negative in front) for the highways. Local roads are more complex, as nearly every arterial has a bus or bike lane these days and every building needs a road to run up to for a variety of reasons. These numbers are taken directly from my state government and my local transit agency's reports, not from some YouTube editorial or blog post. I find those personalities just speculate on what the "true" cost of infrastructure is instead of actually looking it up.

Going from $3 train tickets to over $30 tickets hurts a lot more than going from a 50 cents a gallon gas tax to a 60 cent one. In my particular case, moving to a user-pays system would mean that I would save $500 a year in car registration taxes that are used exclusively to fund the transit system, which would more than cover a fair increase in the gas tax.

Most of transit costs are fixed, so more users lower per cost. Both roads and transit have these factors

Those numbers are just the operating costs, which scale much more closely with the number of riders, the cost of the building the infrastructure itself isn't included. Including the capital costs would make transit look even worse.

That is false, Transit costs go down per rider as things go up. The cost to operate a bus is just over $100/hr in the US (average), including capital costs. It doesn't matter if only the driver is on the bus or it is packed full. It doesn't mater if everyone is riding for an entire hour or they only ride for 5 minutes.

The cost operating costs for a train can be much less (a train can be fully automated which really brings costs down), or much more (if you run drivers and conductors). However as until the train is full requiring that you buy more the costs do not change at all.

Roads have similar concerns - the cost to build and maintain a road is mostly fixed, but it scales to much slower. A full bus every 5 minutes has far more people than the same road with the maximum number of moving cars, so you need to build more roads faster, thus the capital costs of roads is much higher.

If you have more people who want to ride a bus than the bus can carry, then you need another bus and driver. That is a step function that scales with the number of riders. What you said is only true until the bus reaches capacity, but if people actually use the transit (which is not the case in most of the US, but is the case in the area my numbers are from), then the cost is directly related to the number of riders.

Also, most buses don't have 5 minute headways, so if you're going to assume that you may as well assume that every car contains 4 people. Additionally, a 100 person articulated bus coming every 5 minutes is equivalent to 20 single occupancy cars per minute (or 1 car every 3 seconds), which is typical for a busy street. You need really short headways to match a car lane, shorter headways to beat it, and even shorter headways to justify making the lane exclusive to buses.

But where people want to live is influenced by what they know. So they want the suburbs to get out of bad schools, not thinking they can reform their schools. They want suburbs for a nice house without asking why their neighborhood can't be made great.

What if they think that every family having a nice house makes their neighborhood great? Why is being able to walk to a dozen restaurants the only thing that makes a neighborhood good? Is it possible that people do in fact know what they want, and you are being condescending by assuming that they are too stupid to not know their own wants and desires? Stop with the conspiracy theory that people disagree with you because they are brainwashed or uncultured.

Every family having a nice house is one of the things that make a neighborhood great. Walking to a dozen restaurants is another such thing. We can continue making this list until it has several thousand items (maybe even millions?). In the end you cannot have everything on the list, so you compromise.

I did not say people are stupid. More like people are creatures of habit and often fail to realize how a change they could make would cascade into making things better. That is they are more likely to be pessimistic and see the downsides.

People know what they want when given the existing choices. Frankly the existing choices for dense city living suck for most people (bad schools and they can't afford as much space are big ones), so it is no surprise that people choose suburbs: it is the best choice. The real question is can we reform the dense urban areas so that people will decide they want it over suburbs?

You are still assuming that people who want to live in suburbs are heathens who just need to be shown the light. You aren't even considering that they just don't like density.

I'm saying people are more complex than that. Thet don't hate density, given their options density isn't the best life for them. I'm further saying that dense areas have made themselves unappealing and given some changes many suburban people would prefer density.

There are advantages to density, and advantages to rural living, but yiur cannot have both at the same time.

That survey didn't ask respondents to ignore price, so it's not simply revealing what they want. Urban areas cost more and this was presumably considered in these responses.

Even if the responses were the same ignoring prices, I would probably put more weight on the market prices (i.e what people actually do and the resources they devote to it). Why do urban areas cost more and have a lot of people if people don't actually want it?

The price per square foot may be higher in the city, but people often spend more in total on housing in the suburbs. For example, someone who moves from a small urban apartment to a large house in a nearby suburb is likely spending more, and they do it because they prefer living in the house over having more money in their bank account.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com