Americans, can we stop this failed experiment and let’s (re)build our cities with public transportation and alternative forms of transportation (ie, biking, walking, micro-mobility). Return the spaces occupied by parking lots, parking garages and use that space to house people. End these implied subsidies on “car housing”.
Death to the suburban experiment.
I feel like every post that shits on the suburbs should include how many kids do you have, for transparency. No family or kids, of course the city is better for you.
The only other option is some kind of technological silver bullet for carbon capture that manages to arrive in time.
Personally I'm fairly pessimistic about this problem. I don't see a political path to widespread mass transit in the US, and I don't know how you remove the incentive that developing economies have to pollute. It feels like a prisoners' dilemma.
Science evolves as does technology, and inevitably both factors will change over the coming decades. To base your life around the worst case predictions of models (where the disaster moment keeps pushing back as time progresses) is not logical.
And then specifically. I work from home as does my wife. Most of my driving (in a hybrid btw) is 2 miles to drop our kid at school or go to the grocery store. Really hard to connect this lifestyle to dooming the plannet honestly.
Operating on the basis of the most extremist "worst case" scenarios that are very unlikely (like your "peak oil" example) probably doesn't make too much sense, but it's probably not a bad thing to be rather pessimistic about these sort of things when making policy.
We can take no thought for the morrow and trust that future technology will sort it all out. Maybe it will, but what if it doesn't? There are no guarantees and hard constraints on our physical universe and planet. It certainly wouldn't be the first time in history human-made ecological changes caused large problems.
Or we can be more pessimistic today. Maybe it will later turn out that won't have been necessary, but it still would have been the smart thing to do as a matter of risk management, since we couldn't have known in the past how things would work out in the future.
As with all things, you can of course exaggerate, but it's a mistake to throw our the baby with the bathwater because some extremist said something extreme.
If you wanted to be extreme in CO2 reduction, I guess your best bet is to kill every living human and animal on the planet (to be clear, not advocating this!) Clearly that's "too high" a price to pay.
On the other hand, you can be very practical and look for CO2 reduction in ways that don't harm people's current lives. Increasing vehicle mileage is an example of this - mileage has doubled and emissions per vehicles halved since 1975.[1] In fact, I suspect this is going to get even better very quickly. My Highlander Hybrid, which is a large vehicle, gets roughly 50% more MPG than in this chart.
So we can say we're already doing a lot (and that's just one thing.) The idea that somehow the line between acceptable and unacceptable just happens to be right between suburban and city living feels a little too convenient for me.
[1] https://www.epa.gov/automotive-trends/highlights-automotive-...
A fantastic point!
Unfortuneately undercut by absolute truth (rather than per vehicle comparisons) that
* the number of vehicles (both in the US and globally) has substantially increased in number since the 1970s,
* many of the older vehicles with the poor performance are still active on roads somewhere,
* the nature of vehicle use in western countries has changed - while the efficiences for both cars and SUVs may have improved, the proprtion of SUV usage (with lesser efficiencies) has significantly increased.
I wouldn't advocate killing all humans and animals, but there's much to be said for halving the number of high consumption humans ...
I'm comfortable getting by for months on end sans most things - global field geophysics was an extended jolly.
That kind of progress has questionable impact on net emissions. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
1) There are trillions of dollars in petroleum reserves in the ground. This is money in the pockets of people, e.g. Putin. They aren't going to let go of that easily.
2) China and India have no realistic pathway to zero carbon and will buy the oil that isn't bought by the G7 sustainable nations. Most of the world's population will follow them.
The only valid response is mitigation. Amsterdam is below sea level. It is far easier to detect and solve real problems than try to predict massive problems in the distant future.
In a bike-friendly country, you'd do that by bike, not by car.
Of course, if your whole world is built around owning and using a car, then doing this by bike becomes dangerous and doing this by car becomes less insane. Then you find our you're dedicating a very large portion of the ground to those machines you use twice a day for 10 minutes - making them unfit for other purposes the remaining 23 hours and 40 minutes.
I really like driving - but I really like the outside to be fit for other things than driving as well. American suburbia falls way too far short of that.
But yeah, would I try this in downtown LA? No, never. (Although you could argue that LA is weird because it's neighborhoods are like suburbs. Would I try this in k-town? No. You need a car, for everything.) Of course I have to admit that there is some circularity with the LA situation - no-one wants to live in the city center, so only the destitute live there, which makes it less desirable. In many places in the world, this situation doesn't apply. Would I try it in Manhattan? Maybe.
Stories like yours are great but unsaid are things like: do your kids have a back yard to play in? How fresh is the air? Do they get to watch dad take care of a house and yard so they learn skills like that? Are they dodging shit on the street as they walk to school ( always was the case in NYC but extra bad now). Are their neighbors families with minimum two kids, or are they a much less family friendly demographic? Etc.
I used to not think about these things until I experienced the better version of these things in the burbs. The self-selection of neighbors who made the move to a family friendly location alone is a game changer
Maybe I’m missing something but that was never my understanding for the need for EVs to replace ICE, a need based in lowering reliance on fossil fuel and decreasing air pollution.
These are still required, whatever urban policy we end up with.
I see the urgent need for improved public transports to be paramount in these goals too, so both EV to replace the billions of ICE cars and better urban transportation alternatives are needed.
Whereas it can also be seen as kicking the can down the road.
In the kind of cold weather that cuts EV range, per the OP? I've been there, and thanks but no thanks -- I'm too old for that shit. I'll stick to my car even if its range is reduced.
> Return the spaces occupied by parking lots, parking garages and use that space to house people.
This I heartily agree with, but it can be compatible with cars if we can get self-driving finally sorted out. Just have your car drop you off, then go out of the city to wait for you (and perhaps charge itself at the same time).
> Death to the suburban experiment.
Suburbs have different problems than cities do, but I'm not convinced they're particularly worse or more plentiful, and there are certainly other (dare I say better?) ways to solve them than abolishing suburbs outright.
Between buildings, build an elevated walkway above the roads. With ventilation these walkways could cover a large part if not all of the area above roads. Promote social spaces, commerce areas, and open areas between buildings without sacrificing cars. Just build above them.
This is just an idea to reclaim walking space in our cities without making the enormous leap to banning cars/roads in cities, which we’ll still need to cart the enormous amount of products and raw materials a city needs.
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2015/03/05/sprawl-costs-the-publ...
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/2/5/suburban-infras...
Re: costs to cities, mostly focused on the extensive roadworks to serve solo car commuters - those are expensive and converted a lot of neighborhoods into something which consumes but does not generate tax income, and things like parking don’t generate much income, and all of that comes at a hefty cost to health & quality of life.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason...
As for this:
> I don't see how suburbs are incompatible with GP's proposal
Look at the last line of that post:
> Death to the suburban experiment.
> Land doesn't have any rights, so suburbs can't infringe upon them.
Slaves didn't have rights back then either, as I understand it. Can't infringe upon those!
More seriously, I haven't done the math myself but given concepts like "earth day" it doesn't seem like we're doing too well in providing for everyone, and that's with a large majority of people not living in the usa suburb style. It only seems fair if everyone (eight billion people) were given the opportunity to achieve an equal standard of living if they are willing to work for it; the kind of thing one would ideally codify in a binding human rights statement (e.g., ECHR). Under the ideal of giving everyone equal opportunities, freely taking however much land you fancy would almost certainly infringe on others' basic rights.
But anyway that's just about land use. I don't know that the amount of land taken is the restrictive factor here, it's probably more about how you get to and from your daily needs (transportation and heating being big factors in personal energy use). The fundamental limitation usually boils down to energy in the end (could live in the Sahara if you build a lot of AC and desalination and pipes to get it there -- spaceship earth style). Currently, we don't have a lot of energy available in a way that maximizes total happiness, considering global warming. We might have to take it easy with personal consumption rates until we do have the energy.
I'm traveling in Taiwan right now and it's just night and day. Outside of NY and small areas of Boston/Chicago/Phili/SF proper it's just a disaster in the US.
Fix the crime, and the pollution, and the noise.
Give people a way to live without constantly hearing their neighbors through the walls. Give people transit options where they don't need to fear for their physical safety. Give people a place to raise children without worrying about them picking up used needles on the street.
Give people space to be something other than interchangeable sardines in boxes in high-rise apartment buildings -- what about people who want to do woodworking, or welding, or work on cars, or hunt?
City live is only one of the valid lifestyles available to humans, and arguably it is the most unnatural, the most harmful, and the least tolerable. Change that before you call for the death of the lifestyles that other people enjoy. Otherwise, don't be surprised if "death to cities" is the response you get.
It's been pretty successful for a "failed experiment".