Hacker News Reader

Comment by CalRobert | Hacker News Reader

If only we were hellbent on building communities where you don't need to get in a car every time you leave your house. California (outside of a few astronomically expensive city and town centers) is a hellscape of stroads and parking lots as far as the eye can see. There's a better way to design cities and towns.

Yes, we need electric cars, but we also need fewer cars, and every NIMBY fighting tooth and nail against allowing people to live close to jobs, amenities, public transport, and bike infra is responsible for accelerating our present crisis.

View on HN

Santa Cruz voted down turning the disused railroad branch line connecting Watsonville to the old cement factory in Davenport into a rail trail [0], by an enormous margin. If this trail were implemented, it would basically create a scenic, flat mixed-use trail going through all of the major areas for hardly any cost. It would've created an easy ride to actually get between places people want to go, both for work and tourist destinations.

It was shocking how short-sighted people were about this. So many pro-rail people showed up thinking "we'll turn this into a commuter or tourist thing", with so many people overlooking the fact that a huge amount of capex would have taken to make this safe for trains again (e.g. some of the more decrepit trestles and bridges need to be replaced, fine for bikes, irresponsibly risky for trains).

I love train commuting just as much as anyone, but this train simping was infuriating when we could've had a fantastic easy bike path, like the one that goes along Hwy 90 in Seattle towards the mountains.

It really seems like we deserve the stroady fate we're hurtling towards in California. NIMBYs and ridiculous zoning will rule the day, until everything is just broken :(

[0] https://ballotpedia.org/Santa_Cruz_County,_California,_Measu...

The saddest part of all this is the railfans and trail fans are fighting each other like rats for a few discarded scraps. That's ridiculous when so much space is allocated to cars.

> If only we were hellbent on building communities where you don't need to get in a car every time you leave your house.

Not everyone lives in dense cities, nor does everyone want to.

>There's a better way to design cities and towns.

What makes them better? I love Tokyo, for example, but would hate to live there - as it's too crowded for my sanity. But I'm not going to hate on others for wanting that. I'd rather the government focus on fostering choice and options, rather than picking what they deem is "best" for everyone.

>...every NIMBY fighting tooth and nail against allowing people to live close to jobs, amenities, public transport, and bike infra is responsible for accelerating our present crisis.

I think you're misreading the argument from many NIMBY's: they aren't fighting against those things, but rather fighting against growth in population _in general._ YIMBY's take population growth and density in an area as a given assumption, and then solve from there. NIMBY's on the other hand would argue that there's plenty of space to spread out elsewhere.

You can have suburbanism with walkable towns. This is how suburbs were built before 1945.

And those still exist! And any “small town” is walkable almost by definition-but people move away from them to the outskirts of the cities.

I don't think that's true. My grandparents live near a town of 4k people or so that's not walkable in the slightest, spread out over miles of highway with massive city-sized streets criscrossing everything. Most of the houses are 2+ miles away from the grocery store.

I'm sure they exist, but what is around the grocery store that there's no houses within 2 miles?

Often the "new developments" near these towns are out of town a bit, but even two miles isn't an insane walk.

I'll grant that many of them don't have much in the way of sidewalks, but you can often find them.

It has some unbuildable hills on one side, the county hospital on another, and then parking lots plus a giant highway interchange filling out the rest of the space.

Go visit Chadron, Nebraska sometime. On foot. You'll see the error in your generalization.

Arial reconnaissance seems to show it similar to the town I'm in; it could use a bit more sidewalks but the old downtown is certainly walkable and even Walmart shows obvious paths where people are walking across the grass/ground.

>> If only we were hellbent on building communities where you don't need to get in a car every time you leave your house.

> Not everyone lives in dense cities, nor does everyone want to.

I may have missed the part there were the original post said otherwise.

We could check the history books on this, but I'm pretty sure before cars everyone did not live in "dense cities". ;-)

One thing I noticed looking for a house is front side lot lines got a lot longer between 1900 and 1950. 1900 front lot lines are around 25 feet. 1950 you see 50-75 foot lot lines. Streets got wider too and setbacks were added. 1900 street is 35 feet no setbacks. 1950 with setback it's 100 feet.

Ignoring density that means people would have to walk 2-3 times farther to get to businesses. Except car centric zoning increased the distance between houses and businesses 3-10 times farther.

Very true.

(Though innovations like bicycles mean you can still get to places pretty fast.)

But per the OP's comment, if you're not in a densely populated city, your distances to other businesses and people is not primarily driven by how long it takes you to get to the end of your lot or how wide the streets are.

Most people can't even live in a walkable city if they wanted to. We haven't built enough capacity. The Bay Area basically stopped building housing after the 70s and is about a half million units short overall IIRC.

Tokyo density isn't necessary. I now live in a East Coast city that's denser than San Francisco and has very very few buildings over 4 stories -- there's a sort of low-scale density that pervades the city's entire surface area, as opposed to the California model, which is SFHs with big yards and massive setbacks over 90% of the urban landscape, 10% massive high-rises.

The government is massively subsidizing private car ownership with zoning, minimum parking requirements etc.

It should be a personal choice, but until someone using a road needs to pay a toll that's high enough to outbid other uses of that land it's not, it's central planning.

>> If only we were hellbent on building communities where you don't need to get in a car every time you leave your house.

> Not everyone lives in dense cities, nor does everyone want to.

Fortunately, you don't need to in order to not be car-bound. I live in a small college town (10k people), and ride a bike for almost all trips April-November. It's easy, because there's no suburban mess of six+-lane roads or 40+mph traffic to cross. We went to a party at a friend's house on Sunday on the other side of town; my five-year-old daughter road her bike, and I carried our two-year-old on mine. We are hours away from the closest "dense city", and biking is easy and safe.

My parents live in another ~10k person New England town. My 82-year-old mom drives her car once a week to get groceries, and walks for the rest of her trips. This myth that you can only be car-free (or mostly car-free) in big cities has got to die.

The stats are telling though, you put your family at 250% risk of death by choosing the bike over the car. That is a major problem that needs to be addressed with infrastructure.

Unless your city has separated bike lanes, it's hard to say that this is a safe choice compared to a car.

In the UK the stats are even worse, with something like 16x risk of death and 78x risk of injury. https://kennettpeterson.com/2016/08/26/riding-your-bike-is-7...

I feel pretty comfortable that riding a bike here is safer than driving a car in the suburbs. Drivers generally pay attention, and speeds are much lower. More infrastructure would make it better, but we have a real protected lane for the part of our commute that actually has significant traffic.

> Not everyone lives in dense cities, nor does everyone want to.

That's great for them, but let's price things realistically. As it stands right now, the exurbs are economic dead weight. Their infrastructure isn't supported by their tax base and it never will be.

I think we might find that people not wanting to live in dense cities might feel differently if they are actually required to pay for the infrastructure that the dense cities are currently purchasing for them.

>As it stands right now, the exurbs are economic dead weight

>I think we might find that people not wanting to live in dense cities might feel differently if they are actually required to pay for the infrastructure that the dense cities are currently purchasing for them.

You mean like some monstrosity of a 6-lane intersection that got spec'd out that way in order to quality for some state grant? Pretty much all local development is "how do we qualify for someone else's money" driven.

These municipalities could go it on their own. But if you turn off the money tap you also lose the ability to complain and threaten to take something from them if they don't do what you like and that is a compromise nobody seems willing to make.

> These municipalities could go it on their own. But if you turn off the money tap you also lose the ability to complain and threaten to take something from them if they don't do what you like and that is a compromise nobody seems willing to make.

Yes, these municipalities could pay drastically higher taxes to keep their infrastructure functioning without subsidies. That doesn't refute my point, which was that they might feel differently about the arrangement if those things were realistically priced in.

I hear this argument a lot, but it has never made a ton of sense to me: different area are specialized for different things, and they have a spillover effect of that specialization into neighboring areas.

Dense urban areas specialize in economic output: that economic output spills over into neighboring areas (urban areas produce more economic output than urban areas consume)

Suburban and exurban areas specialize in providing labor: that labor will spill over into neighboring areas (suburbs have more workers than people working in suburbs)

Rural areas specialize in production and extraction: those goods will spill over into neighboring areas (rural areas produce more raw materials than they consume.)

This means that suburbs will consume more than their "fair share" of economic output, just like urban areas will consume more than their "fair share" of labor and goods.

There is nothing inherent to the design of suburbs as they are that drives their efficiency at providing workers. It is fundamentally different from the economic efficiency of a centrally located factory or a very large rural farm.

The suburbs are the way they are (in part) because of the housing preferences of workers, which themselves are influenced by subsidies on sparse suburban living. A denser suburb could serve the exact same purpose in your model while supporting it's own upkeep.

Isn't this density argument true of pretty much anything, though? A really dense farm could serve the same purpose as a large rural farm while supporting its own upkeep better along multiple axes (e.g. water use, land-use, infrastructure requirements).

It seems like there are two arguments here: the first is that it's unfair (or maybe unreasonable?) that suburbs are subsidized by urban taxes. This is the point that I would argue makes no sense to me: lots of regions are supported by other regions in one domain or another.

There's another argument which is that denser land-use leads to more efficient land-use in almost every case. This argument makes sense to me, though I'd argue that efficiency isn't the be-all-end-all for why people choose to live where they do (e.g. lots of people even in this thread have expressed that they chose to live in a less dense area because it better suits their desired lifestyle).

My argument is this:

denser land-use leads to more efficient land-use in almost every case, but efficiency isn't the be-all-end-all for why people choose to live where they do. People who choose to live less efficiently should bear the burden of that inefficiency, with some exceptions such as mail delivery, education, etc. where equal access is a cultural value we want to uphold.

I guess the fundamental argument is that absent other factors, there is no societal economic benefit to a person living in a single family home on a half acre compared to a townhome so there isn't a reason to subsidize the upkeep of things related to their choice of living situation. Their share of road, water/sewer, electrical maintenance, infrastructure projects that support their commute, etc.

I probably should have noted earlier that I don't have a fundamental issue with taxes being a net negative from the city and a net positive to the suburbs. If that's what it takes to support social services, education, public parks, etc. then that's fine.

> What makes them better? I love Tokyo, for example, but would hate to live there - as it's too crowded for my sanity. But I'm not going to hate on others for wanting that. I'd rather the government focus on fostering choice and options, rather than picking what they deem is "best" for everyone.

I don't mean to single you out, but I find comments like this really perplexing. Do you really believe the GP meant "everyone should live somewhere like Tokyo"?

Most urbanists in the US are talking about fostering choice and options. Right now in the US you have effectively two options - rural or suburban car-centric living where owning a car is the only efficient option - or living in extremely dense environments that still cater to cars but its at least possible to live without one.

You can look at a number of different countries in Europe to see how even small towns can still be built with a natural density curve to allow choice rather than the car-centric sprawl that we have here.

> You can look at a number of different countries in Europe to see how even small towns can still be built with a natural density curve to allow choice rather than the car-centric sprawl that we have here.

I think this is the model American urbanists need to take. Move to small towns where they can have more influence, and they don't have to try to force their preferences on existing large communities.

Get involved with development of a small town, guide it into these mixed use styles and attract like minded people. It would be significantly less of an uphill battle, and wouldn't anger all of the people who like the ways things already are in their large cities.

> and they don't have to try to force their preferences on existing large communities.

Or they can advocate for their ideology until existing large communities share their preferences.

I didn't really talk about climate above but that is a huge influence as well. I think advocates feel that time pressure and don't see any other option but to push for sweeping changes quickly and at a large scale.

> Not everyone lives in dense cities, nor does everyone want to.

More people would like to live in dense cities, that what there currently are apartments available in dense cities. We need to build more dense, to answer to the demand with supply.

Of course not everyone likes dense, walkable areas. But dense areas, by definition, don't need much land area. So the rest of the land area remains available for sparse communities. Everyone should be happy, then.

Your "choice and options" opinion is a vapid opinion that's somehow weaseled its way into most degenerate right-wing/internet libertarian talking points, and "don't hate" is just wokeness adapted for the same purpose.

Free market capitalism does not have to apply to every single policy discussion. If you feel like you're being hated on, that's the price of having an opinion, in this case a bad one that leads to worse infrastructure and more pollution for nearly everyone else.

Coming from Europe, I was very surprised in Vegas when I needed to spend 10min crossing a road with a taxi, because it was hell to do those few hundred metres by foot.

I think that there is a lot of work that can be done for public transportation (and pedestrians) in the US. At least in dense cities.

> I'd rather the government focus on fostering choice and options, rather than picking what they deem is "best" for everyone.

This is not a reasonable interpretation of reality.

One, the government effectively limits choice today via single family zoning and car centric city planning. Claiming NIMBYS are for more choice is disingenuous.

Two, there are some valid definitions of better, if not best. Dense, walkable, bike friendly, public transit oriented city planning leads to more active lifestyles, fewer transit deaths, less air pollution, lower carbon footprints, and better city financials.

Spreading out as worse isn't an assumption. It is a multi faceted and we'll documented reality.

"Not everyone lives in dense cities, nor does everyone want to."

I very specifically mentioned towns as well. Somewhere like San Luis Obispo comes to mind. It's about having places where you can walk, bike, or take transit for most of your daily needs. It doesn't need to be a city.

You should look into what the California legislature is doing to tackle the housing crisis because it's actually a lot, probably more than any other state by a mile.

All California municipalities have to have what is called a Housing Element, which is a plan with the state for how they're going to build more housing. Many (rich) towns have fought this on the grounds of it "ruining the character" (which is just NIMBY code for being exclusionary).

But not having one has real consequences as Santa Monica recently found out [1] where ~4,000 new units (20% affordable) got court approval and the city can't say no.

Likewise there are other laws that are abolishing mandatory parking minimums, which goes to your point of California being a car-dependent hellhole (which it is, much like most of the US).

Another example: bypass zoning and planning for building residential property above commercial property if the road it is attached to is a sufficient width. This will allow the building of mixed commercial and residential (which most cities forbid) without lengthy and expensive planning.

But there are a whole host of other bills that have been passed to make building cheaper and easier. Hopefully this will culminate in the Holy Grail of zoning in most municipalities making anything about building anything other than single-family homes illegal (which it is in most of the US).

[1]: https://smdp.com/2022/10/12/new-15-story-project-automatical...

I have! I think it's an amazing development. Letting locals vote to block construction nearby was a huge mistake. Santa Monica getting their comeuppance was shared at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33186186 but it didn't catch on.

I agree with you, and it’s frustrating seeing people in the replies who don’t seem to understand what good urban design can provide.

I want good urban design, but I realize that converting our existing construction is tremendously expensive and fraught with project risk. Our car-centric cities and suburbs cannot easily be undone. While it would be nice to have additional mass transit lines and increased density, all of these things are decades away at best.

Edit: Therefore I am not against improving things for cars in the meantime. I don't think this is a zero-sum game.

It took decades to demolish vast swaths of US urban centers and replace them with surface parking, highways and sprawl. 1930s Dallas could be mistaken for 1930s downtown San Francisco. It will take decades more to undo this damage.

I've been watching NotJustBikes[1] on Youtube recently and he really drives the point home of how screwed up infrastructure is in the US and Canada. The problem for us seems to be cultural, we consider public transit to be a form a welfare rather than actual public infrastructure. We consider taking the train of the bus a thing you do if you're to poor to own a car and anytime expansion of a subway system is considered, there's always the kneejerk reaction of "you will bring crime to the suburbs".

And anytime we do build a mixed use development, we make sure that it's marked as "trendy" and "hip", as to not give the impression that this should be a normal mode of development. Anytime a development like this goes up, property prices around the development are out of reach to working class families and that even further drives the point home that this is not a normal mode of development, rather a playground for the wealthy (and you're going to need a car to get there if you don't live in the million dollar townhomes around the corner).

When these mixed use developments do go up, American's are amazed by the walkability and livability. News outlets do puff pieces on these new developments and everyone is happy about it, then when it's time to do more development around the city we go back to the old ways of segregating everything to the nth degree.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0intLFzLaudFG-xAvUEO-A

>The problem for us seems to be cultural, we consider public transit to be a form a welfare rather than actual public infrastructure.

This is true practically everywhere bar a few select cities and megapolises. Doubly so if you have to get on at a stop which is dirty, dark and crowded. General exceptions include lack of parking and knowing you'll drink at the venue.

The Dutch ain't doing it because Utrecht Central looks swell with all the cigarette butts everywhere.

In what sense? Utrecht Centraal was splendid last time I was there, and Utrecht in general was fantastic.

Look at the ground near the bus stations next time. I can't make it any more obvious than that.

Are you aware of any resources that talk about what the design of a "cleanroom" city might look like? I always think of a high rise surrounded by parks with a subterranean train connecting it to the rest of the surrounding society.

I like the idea of being able to be alone in nature easily but still living with modern conveniences. American cities (at least LA, SF, and Seattle) all require a car.

The worst depression of my life was living in San Francisco and never being able to be alone in nature. (I was very broke and didn't have a car.)

http://www.newurbanism.org/pedestrian.html

https://www.archdaily.com/954928/creating-a-pedestrian-frien...

https://naturalwalkingcities.com/

That's your opinion. Plenty of people have the means to move elsewhere so they can not own a car, but they don't because they don't like your vision of transportation. My own opinion is as valid as yours, which is that public transport usually sucks ass.

> California [...] is a hellscape of stroads and parking lots as far as the eye can see.

Many people don't see it that way. Millions upon millions, actually.

The fact that California needs to tax the rich to make electric cars work is a sign that said technology is not economical. Doesn't even matter why. I'd own an electric car if I could, but every time I've considered it I've realized that it doesn't make financial sense. One might think that now would be the best time to buy an electric car, but good luck with that when wages are stagnant, YoY inflation is ~8%, and the price of goods is up. I can simply drive less or take my motorcycle. As long as California is totally cool with its gross wealth stratification, people are going to realize that they can live in an affordable area, drive to and from work, enjoy the privacy of their own vehicle, and still come out ahead from where they would be if they lived close to work. I'd be making far less money if I lived in any of the cities my workplaces have had their offices located.

> every NIMBY fighting tooth and nail against allowing people to live close to jobs

I've never heard of anyone not wanting that. There's NIMBY attitude that might get in the way of people living close to their jobs, but your characterization of "every NIMBY" comes off as reductionist and a gross exaggeration. Surely citizens would never vote against their own interests. No, no one ever does that. /s

I'll move back to a city as soon as you pass laws on fragrance, booming radios and dog barking. In all cases those are a huge hell-no for me.

It's a matter of preferences, I for one far prefer living as distant from people as possible, "stroads" as you call them are often the most convenient places to shop for anyone who doesn't wish to live in an urban center.

Great, but don't use laws to forbid people building what GP and I like.

Your heaven sounds like my hell :) I don't want to live in a super dense metropolis filled to the brim with high rises where I cannot barely see the sky, and people are jammed into streets like cattle and no one has yards. If you do there are a ton of cities in America that are not in California, see New York, Chicago etc. Its funny as everyone who complains about California's high housing costs say the answer is to turn the entire state into Manhattan.

I think a better approach here is to focus on the supply side of things which is completely driven by companies that want people in the office and the offices are in SF or Palo Alto/Mountain View etc. So the answer here is either allow remote work and encourage people to leave California, or break up the head offices and move them across the country into less expensive areas.

Before the tech boom houses would go for $500-600K in San Jose(I should know as I bought a place in 2013 for $550k) so this high housing crisis is totally artificial and recent. It also doesn't help that having a million+ engineers/tech employees making $200k+ a year all crammed into one geographical region which is constrained by water and mountains.

It doesn't have to be a metropolis, the US just needs to fix their damn zoning laws. It's crazy that in most American cities, you have to have a car to get anywhere. Zoning in most places make it impossible to do things like walk to the grocery store or let you kids walk to school.

The only time we think of walkability is in big cities but what if suburbs proposed this radical idea of building services that people use closer to where those people actually live. If your day to day is dropping your kids off at school, going to the grocery store and gym, and then work, why in the hell did we decide that your home, work, grocery store and gym should all be in segregated parts of town where the only way to get from one place to another is an expensive hunk of metal.

> why in the hell did we decide that your home, work, grocery store and gym should all be in segregated parts of town where the only way to get from one place to another is an expensive hunk of metal.

Because we decided to prioritize things like peace and quiet, distance from people and outdoor spaces for play, cooking and recreation above not leaving a tiny bubble for your whole life.

Living in tiny condos sucks and isn't for everyone, this is the tradeoff we've chosen.

That said, I'd much rather have my kids walk to school in a suburb than a dense urban area.

But that's the whole point: having suburbs be livable on their own, with schools, shops, doctor offices all in walking distance. I grew up in a small (2000 people) town in Central Europe, which had all that, plus some factories where majority of the population found employment, and it still felt like quiet, cozy place.

if you think compact walkable cities are hell wait until you see what happens as we continue with the status quo and our way of life is destroyed forever due to climate change.

I missed the part where they said they wanted to live in "a dense metropolis filled to the brim with high rises where I cannot barely see the sky, and people are jammed into streets like cattle and no one has yards". Did you respond to the wrong comment, or did you just invent a strawman to argue against?

Not strawman, but this guy just has Burgerbrain: the only choices he can conceive of are those in the US. Anyone who has been to any suburb in Europe or Japan knows that you can easily build housing that is well between "high rise hellscape" and the extremely large parcels in most US suburbs. It's mostly about allowing those options to be built, which most zoning currently precludes. Any non-SFH-only residential area is so expensive and rare in North America that only high-rises make sense to justify the land cost. Meanwhile, everyone in the burbs will fight tooth and nail against allowing multiplex construction because they think it will lower land value somehow (and is often code for "we don't want the poors moving in here").

Burgerbrain indeed. I wish I could take everyone here strawmanning my comment and thinking I want us all to live in Takyo for a trip to Houten, NL - a not very exciting suburb of Utrecht (though some there would take issue with calling it a suburb instead of a town in its own right!) where you can do everything by bike and public transit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com