Says zero-carbon, proceeds to show single-family detached homes in a suburban setting, mostly accessible by car only.
P.S. The concrete foundations look far from zero-carbon.
P.S. The concrete foundations look far from zero-carbon.
The main strike against suburban lifestyles today is that they’re energy intensive and thus carbon-heavy. There is nothing wrong with a energy intensive suburban life if that energy is carbon neutral.
(And yes, as other posters point out, there are some additional environmental externalities associated with suburban versus urban lifestyles. It’s not clear to me how severe these externalities are, and thus whether they are worth the tradeoff of increased quality of life for the many people who love living in the suburbs. As an extreme example, living a pre-industrial lifestyle would be much more environmentally friendly, but it isn’t remotely worth the quality of life tradeoff.)
Also note that, due to much heavier weight of electric cars, asphalt concrete surfaces will be damaged a lot faster. The relationship between vehicle weight and its damage to the road surface is exponential, not linear.
Sure, convenient for individuals but absolutely not sustainable for society, nor the planet. Even with electric cars and green energy.
The insane cost of cars: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ztHZj6QNlkM
The hard truth is that if we don't want to abandon our comfortable modern lifestyles, 80-90% of us will have to live in dense cities and use mass transportation 95% of the time.
It's impossible to service low density housing efficiently.
People also don't have to live in what we think of as cities at all. Rural living is fine if people live closer together in those areas. Such that they live in walkable towns that don't require driving and can be easily connected to other towns and cities via a bus or train. Europe is much better at this but you see vestiges in New England. It's just nobody should really be living beyond walking or biking distance of core services (transport, shopping, etc). The benefit for those who love nature is more untampered natural beauty in the surrounding areas. If anyone has ever been to a place like Banff it's lovely when fine right.
We don't even need more than that on average, we don't need Hong Kongs everywhere. "Brownstones" will do :-)
A home with space and a nice sized yard and an automobile to travel around in is great. It's nice to have a local train too to get into the adjacent metropolis, etc.
For short stuff, bakfiets. For the second part, sure, why not? Get a baby buggy for multiple kids.
Walking is also good for you.
Also, is all of this happening as a single parent? How many single parents with 3 kids are even out there? 0.00001% of the population?
All these problems are solvable. With probably less than half the money spent on car infrastructure and 5% the pollution.
Why does it matter how many parents? One could be away or working and the other has to go 5 miles to Costco or whatever. Your little bike things don’t work. Also there are lots of single parents with 3+ kids.
I don’t want your terrible solution or way of life. I like having a large home with a large lawn and a large SUV to drive my family where we want when we want. I take trains and walk too and use strollers of course. But that’s like 20% of the time. Your comment reads like a person who doesn’t have kids.
I have three kids. The eldest is 15. I’ve never owned a car. I probably never will.
Just look at NYC to find the typical pattern: Young person lives with multiple people in an area like the Lower East Side or Williamsburg (yay social life!), then begins to settle down in a place like Park Slope (just married!) and has a kid (dedicated to urban living) and then another kid comes along and/or the reality of urban living (the schools are awful, it's cramped and expensive, the city offers you nearly nothing since you don't go out like you used to) and the brownstone is sold for a tidy profit and they're off to the NYC suburbs to get more space and a better quality of life to raise a family in. The city is a short commute away still.
The Strong Towns ideology is attractive (especially for northern US cities), but I think if self driving cars come into existence, the ideas might not get very far in most places. Self driving cars are going to encourage sprawl like no other force ever has. I know I'd move further out if I had a self-driving car.