Comment by LucasBrandt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by LucasBrandt | Hacker News Reader

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I don't want to discount that you're largely content with the the suburbs as they're built today - that's fine and there's nothing wrong with enjoying it. I do want to point out that from my point of view living in a really dense area, some of the reasoning is contradictory.

> I walk for exercise in my neighborhood

> Public transit will never work for me ... I hate wasting my time traveling and cars are the only things fast enough to make going anywhere vaguely tolerable

The suburban model doesn't allow people to live close to any of the places they go. I too dislike wasting my time traveling, but I don't have to: I can walk five or ten minutes to the grocery store, dentist, park, restaurants, etc. I end up walking a lot over the course of a week, and personally I also bike to further destinations (a lot more people would here too if there were protected bike lanes like you mentioned you want). My travel time _is_ my exercise time - no need to spend time on extra walks to accomplish that, and there's interesting things around me when I go from place to place. The subway or commuter rail can take me further away faster than a car when I need to go somewhere distant.

But I'm lucky I can afford to live in a part of Chicago that hasn't been totally disinvested in over the last half century, like a lot of the city has. The state didn't pave a highway through the middle of it like they did to other - mostly black and brown - parts of the city to convenience suburban drivers.

The suburban model that works just fine for you comes at a cost to society. We need to reckon with that and build more places where people aren't forced to drive for their day-to-day necessities and desires.

You assume that the places I go are close to where I could live. Work from home so no travel there, supermarket is a mile away but I can't bike there because the roads are shit and the only time I go is usually after hours before the store closes and biking the dark is even more dangerous. Everything else I go to in my life is not very often and at least a 20 minute drive away.

My walking is to get me away from urban noise and people. My recreation takes me to places like get away from urban noise and people.

I find your travel time report interesting. I believe it that for where you go, it works. But I did a test with places I would go to in the Chicago area and none of them accessible by public transit and are typically an hour to an hour and 1/2 drive away (state parks). I test travel time by Google maps and driving is almost always significantly faster.

Yes I am glad that parts of Chicago were spared the insanity of interstate highways into urban spaces. It makes no sense doing that. Interstates should bypass urban centers. Although we should probably look at history as to what might happen. I suggest looking at what happened to urban centers that lost the competition for rail lines back in the late 1800s.

Another interesting experiment would be to map out the impact of replacing highways with train lines and full switching yards etc. that carry the same load of passengers and freight in the same timeframe.

I agree with you that we do need to work out a way to minimize costs of human existence both suburban and urban. We also need to fully account for all the externalities for both living spaces. We also need to reckon with there are country mice and city mice. We have very different values and very different physical tolerances in our living space.

We also need to look beyond the dichotomy of driving or walking but instead consider neighborhood delivery services for food and other ordered goods. see: https://www.businessinsider.com/lifvs-grocery-store-sweden-u.... I found this article interesting because I got a chance to see firsthand urban and rural Sweden and Finland this summer. Both places have food deserts of a sort. I don't fully grok it yet but it looks like people are comfortable with having only one or two vendors for a given item in a small store with a relatively small selection. There didn't seem to be the same "obsession" we have with getting a better price.

> ... Sweden and Finland ...

You're correct, people generally aren't too bothered if there are only a couple of choices, either of shops (e.g. two supermarkets) or products (two types of cereal bar).

I wouldn't in any way call it a food desert though. All the normal food for the region is available, the rest is just luxuries.

(And to the general point, people owning cars but mostly using them for recreation would still be a huge reduction in traffic, noise and pollution. That's not unusual for European city-dwellers, who often own one car and use it once or twice a week.)

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