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Comment by wizofaus | Hacker News Reader

> "Some may even choose to move farther away"

I've been pretty sure for a long time that this is one of the most overlooked results of building/widening freeways/highways - a large number of us make decisions on where to live based on travel times of relatively newly-built or improved roads (not to mention cheap fuel etc.). That then effectively locks us in to a car-dependent city layout whereby too many of us live too far from the places we need to visit regularly (incl. where our family/friends live) for anything other than car-based travel to be convenient. Obviously there are huge benefits in making it easy for people to travel significant distances quickly and cheaply, but at some point the costs start to outweigh those, and it's not clear we have any sort of process in place for assessing when we've reached that point.

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I think we can safely say that the suburban experiment (and the car-dependent experiment) have failed completely.

I was recently in Taipei. I stayed in New Taipei City, which is not the center of town. And yet, within a 10 minute walk there was (1) a very large, beautiful park (2) all the shops, food, barbers, medical clinics, etc you could ever need (3) a metro station.

From that station I could get to most anywhere in Taipei & New Taipei, a metro area of 7 million, in under an hour. I could ride it 3 stops and board a high speed train 200 miles away, fully the other end of the country, in less than 90 minutes. In the month I was there, we probably rode transit 150 times, and only one train was ever late. By 4 minutes.

What we've done in America is a complete disaster. Instead of being able to simply walk out your front door and get groceries, walk your kid to school, walk to the doctor, walk to the restaurant, we have to get in a car and drive FOR LONGER than the walk!

Having basic services within a 10-15 minute walk is one thing (and in general shouldn't be hard to achieve with sensible zoning etc.) but it's the trips many of us regularly to get to work, to visit friends/family or access larger shopping centres etc. where there's little choice but to drive that concern me. That people will put up with being stuck in barely-moving peak hour traffic often for hours each day to make such trips really speaks to the poor quality of the alternative options, but seems to me an inevitable consequence of our collective decisions about where to live or work that are based on unrealistic assumptions about the practicalities of always being able to get where you need by car, and that governments will continue to massively prioritise infrastructure projects to support it.

I mean, the NY transit system will take you pretty much anywhere in an area with a population of 8M. For scale, note that New York State alone is about 4x larger than Taiwan. I agree that having walkable cities is a good thing but it's not like all of the US is one giant suburb, and it's not like the US has anywhere near the density that would be required to justify "high speed rail across the whole country, just an hour away"

The US is plenty dense for hsr. The population is highly concentrated on a few regions. For example, a single trunk line from Vancouver/Seattle/Portland/SF/LA/SD would cover, what, 40 million people?

A similar trunk from Boston through to Florida would cover another 100 million.

These are absolute no-brainers. Obviously people going from Boston to Miami may still choose to fly, but all the destinations point to point between will be much faster by rail.

The best time to start doing this was 50 years ago, but now is also a good time.

The reason the suburban experience is still happening is because the urban government are failed/failing. Inability to manage homeless, drugs, gangs and education force families out of cities and into terrible commutes

Seems the causation is reversed.

Take Section 9 housing. Originally, it was setup for everyone to live in, with the idea that tenants would have the skill to maintain their housing,and local governments would provide funding.

However, what happened is that suburbs got built and setup rules so only whites could get loans & move there. The feds dramatically subsidized building these suburbs (billions in roads, sewage, etc), so the buying cost for houses in suburbia was massively low relative to true cost. So the whites moved to the suburbs on the basis of good personal economics (via gov subsidy and cheap credit) and good marketing (suburb developers sold the dream).

The suburbs thus became politically powerful (white & somewhat wealthy now, bc of subsidized housing). Suburbs didn't want (and still don't) want to pay for city expenses, but since suburbs are generally part of the same municipality, they could use their political power to cripple inner city services. Which they did.

Then the urbanites (mostly not white, bc suburbs where racially zoned) gradually became destitute as businesses couldn't survive without adequate services. And with destitution we see the rise of homelessness, drugs, etc that you rightfully point out.

Seems like it's high time to recognize the calamitous mistake and fix it

How do you fix it without harming yourself. It’s a prisoners dilemma every person is optimizing for themselves and the individual maximum is burbs. Collective maximum is urban but I see no way to get there in a democratic society.

Right now the burbs are able to zone out or otherwise not have to deal with homeless, poverty, subsidized households, and lock in local tax revenue to high earners. As such burbs are the only good individual choice

Yeah it's tricky politically, because suburban life would be dramatically more expensive without the massive subsidies.

However, I do think there is a growing body of urbanites who are pushing for change. California recently passed SB9, hopefully the first of many densification bills.

Perhaps if a leader-state like California gets far enough down the road for the economic benefits to start accelerating, greed will work in the urbanists' favor

That there's been massive failures in government policy over the decades isn't really debatable, but I doubt the impact of homelessness and crime is that big a factor on prompting families to move to suburbs in most cities (well, at least, in Australia. I'm basing that on the fact that many suburbs with higher homelessness and crime rates are still desirable places to live here, generally with property prices to match - primarily because they're located closer to the city centre with a wide range of transport options to access to various services, unlike outer suburbs that make at best a token effort to support any form of transport other than private automobiles).

Sounds a bit semi-urban to me if there's good transit connections.

But yeah to your point I don't think homeless prompted people to leave urban areas, people leaving urban areas caused homelessness. The causality is reversed, is my point.

The reason people left, as alluded to above, was largely government subsidy + good marketing/lobbying by suburb developers, auto companies, and road builders.

You may like this article [1] from the Financial Times about how the urban sprawl of cities in the UK makes them unproductive.

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/a45e028d-4b81-4bef-9546-970838ab9...

Would be interesting to see that extended to cities in the US and Australia which are generally surely far worse as far as sprawl and car dependence goes.

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