Hacker News Reader

Comment by umvi | Hacker News Reader

I've lived in highly walkable, pro-transit areas. It does have benefits, don't get me wrong. The flip side of the coin is that those areas usually have high population density. That comes with a lot of its own cons - noise pollution, air pollution, annoying neighbors you can hear and smell through your walls, etc. To avoid these cons, a lot of Americans want their own house on their own property and doing that means moving to a lower population density area which means less walkability, less transit, more cars.

View on HN

Noise and air pollution are in part caused by cars. Meanwhile in the suburb, you have lawn mowers and leaf blowers, which I absolutely hate with a passion.

I don't know about annoying neighbors and smells. That seems to be a design and engineering issue.

> I don't know about annoying neighbors and smells.

If you live in a lower income area, get used to your condo/townhouse occasionally smelling like marijuana and/or tobacco whenever the neighbors decide to hotbox. Also get used to arguments and loud music late at night on weekends.

> That seems to be a design and engineering issue.

I'm sure you could build hermetically and acoustically sealed condos that keep out all unwanted noises and smells, but those sound like "rich people" condos that are not very economical.

Sounds like issues that an HOA (if you're into that) or the police/311 ought to address in a city. I assume that's why these services exist -- to resolve conflicts between people who live in dense environments where there is no option but to resolve the conflict.

If those issues go unresolved, that's a dereliction of city government and apartment administration duty.

If I have a kid who is learning music, your plan screws over any opportunity they have to practice at home. I've lived in newly built apartments and even those are not sound proof.

Not to mention public transit is dirty and unsafe in any major city in the US because there is way too much tolerance for disorderly and disruptive people.

Sounds like Minimum Code (building) isn't good enough.

The cost of decent insulation is a low percentage of overall cost. Also don't know if low income family can afford a nice/safe house in suburb, multiple cars etc.

> Noise and air pollution are in part caused by cars

Having lived in a Berlin Altbau flat, in a dense central neighbourhood, I can say that's not the biggest problem. At least not when at home.

Crappy neighbours are. For both noise and smells.

Techno blasting behind the wall. Arguing families and shrieking children, through the wide open windows. Passionate cigarette and weed smokers (plenty of them in Berlin). Smoke from cooking wafting through the Hof.

This is even a bigger problem if you are unlucky to have to live in a commie block (pretty much anywhere in Central Europe). Even more neighbours, even denser.

Air pollution: Caused by what? Probably cars.

Noise pollution: Caused by what? Probably cars. (Sure, some sirens here and there, but rural and suburban living doesn't make you immune to the sounds of train crossings, highways, jake brakes, motorcycles, etc).

Annoying neighbors, smell/hearing through walls:

1. Easily mitigated through smart building design and practices, enforced by building code.

2. You can have completely detached single family homes and still build walkable transit-oriented suburbs just by sticking to some simple development practices:

- Banning subdevelopments that disconnect form the city street grid, requiring residential neighborhoods to fit into a holistic city plan rather than farm parcels being sold where the city greenlights residential development projects without an ounce of thought to how it integrates with the town/city.

- Prohibiting neighborhood designs that increase walking distance, like winding roads and cul-de-sacs.

- Building traffic-separated, safe, pleasant cycling and walking infrastructure that offer a workable alternative to driving

- Building roads with traffic calming measures in mind. For example, unnecessarily wide suburban neighborhood streets encourage speeding.

- Properly funding transit service and removing social stigma against transit usage ("I won't take the bus that's for poor people" - we literally need government ad campaigns to help change minds on the issue just like those used to promote seatbelts.

- Prohibiting parking lots against streets, like in big box store developments. Parking should be required to exist in the back of the lot wherever possible.

- Removing mandatory parking minimums. Believe it or not, real estate developers don't naturally want to build parking lots that can't make a return on investment. They're often required to by the city to make them in order to...you guessed it...help ease traffic!

- Prohibiting excessive dead space/green space/setbacks in developments.

Overall, I don't agree that there are downsides to walkable areas that have to exist.

I've seen that stores against the road thing in a Food Truck cooking competition TV show. Did a good job of tricking some contestants for a bit until they realized the scale of the area was still large parking lot sized and the street was just the no consumer doors (or very infrequently used 'side' doors) face of strip malls with parking lots.

Density can't be faked by flipping the lot into the middle of the block. It can be made real at a city level by design and engineered accommodation interfaces. Public owned mega parking venues at the edges that interface between the city core and external regions. A utility layer and isolated areas for vehicles to deliver or traverse the city.

Well, I'm not saying "go ahead and build parking the exact same size as a Walmart parking lot right behind everything and all our problems are solved."

And I'm advocating for a holistic solution here: doing things like restricting the location/size of parking in addition to other measures. They all work together. Nobody's going to walk/cycle if all the pieces aren't in place.

Remember this also: You don't have to eliminate cars to reduce trips and lessen dependency. The choice on whether to use a vehicle can be left up to the individual, but if there is no realistic choice then the end result will be that the spaces we see in our lives will be maximized for vehicular use rather than a more balanced paradigm.

Great example is this business park in the Netherlands, where it's really obviously built quite well for cars with ample parking, it's nowhere near the city center, but it doesn't exclude people from getting there other ways. So, there's still a lot of space used for car-based infrastructure, but it's not anywhere near 100% car usage like you'd see in an American suburban business park: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDXB0CY2tSQ

Let's say that Walmart builds 500 parking spaces when there is no realistic hope of walking, but what if there was a frequent bus line stopping right in front of it, housing in close proximity, and separated bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure that felt safe and inviting. Would they build those same 500 parking spaces on their own free will (with more of them sitting empty) or would they build fewer parking spaces for a lower overall cost? Essentially, we should be prodding the "free market" to get closer to our desired outcomes rather than giving them only one choice.

If you have a situation where people driving to the grocery store use a car 100% of the time (for all the heavy bags), but maybe they only use the car 25% of the time to get coffee or get to the park to take a walk, that's still a win over using the car for 100% of activities.

Noise pollution: Caused by what? Probably cars . . . rural and suburban living doesn't make you immune to the sound of . . .

Noise pollution in the city is just a fact of the population density. Speaking from experience, if you've lived there for some time your hearing won't even be sensitive enough to truly appreciate the difference in a rural area.

It's just never going to be <35db in the city like it is in the rural community that I live in where I get to wake up to bird song. It took me 3 weeks when I moved back from living in the bay area to "hear" how quite it was, years of living in the city had desensitized my hearing. Sure, cars and especially fast moving cars contribute to the din of the city, but considering how loud it was even when the streets were empty in the middle of the night, I think that HVAC, elevators, and subways along with people being people create plenty of noise.

In the rural area I live in I can hear a car coming down the road from over a mile away at night, even with terrain in the way, and because of the low density most of the time throughout the night there are no cars. There is just no way you are going to be able to attain that level of quite with urban population densities - the 24/7 public transit would be louder.

Most of the noise in cities does come from cars. You're right that cities will never be <35 dBA, but most rural areas are not usually that quiet either. For example, even slight wind will cause ambient noise in wilderness to 40-60 dBA. Cities without cars can easily average <55 dBA. See this video [1] or this research [2] for sources.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTV-wwszGw8 [2] https://www.easa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/dfu/Backgroun...

Rural areas are obviously overall quieter, but that's not very relevant because we can't have 100% of the human population living in rural areas. That's impossible.

My overall point is that cities/suburbs that have fewer cars have less noise, and that reduction of the usage of individual vehicles is a major contributor to city noise. Just compare decibel levels standing in a residential block of the Upper East Side or inside Central Park versus the exit of the Lincoln Tunnel.

The loudest noise ain't coming from the HVAC and elevators, nor the underground subway.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com