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Comment by amanaplanacanal | Hacker News Reader

It’s mostly because of zoning. If you separate retail from offices from housing, you force people to have cars to get around. Which then requires large parking lots and wide roads to deal with all the cars, in a big feedback loop. Those who can’t drive (about a third of the population are too young, too old, or disabled) are just forced to make do. Not to mention how difficult it is for the poor. Owning a car is really expensive for those living on very little money.

I feel like fixing zoning would at least make possible fixing the rest.

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You're not gonna get rid of the need to commute. Once people start forming families, "live next to work" is likely to be very unrealistic for one of the people involved, assuming they both work. One person gets a new job across town and the other doesn't? Setting aside whether or not most people would want to move anytime that happened, there's no longer a single answer. Start throwing kids in the mix and it gets even trickier. Gotta balance the schools in there, and the effect that moving would have on them, etc.

Reduce the need for shopping and entertainment commuting and build more transit so that more routs have practical non-car options and you reduce the need for traffic and parking, but that's realistically an incredibly expensive proposition for many cities. You need a really really really built out transit network to enable something close to point to point commuting in under an hour across a large city. (And traffic and parking becoming crippling things for a city are issues small cities often mostly duck by their nature of being small...)

It's a sort of "we all need to commit to changing our environment systematically for decades" problem.

> “Reduce the need for shopping and entertainment commuting and build more transit so that more routs have practical non-car options and you reduce the need for traffic and parking, but that's realistically an incredibly expensive proposition for many cities.”

These American cities are like the 600-lbs person who contemplates a lifestyle change but laments that it would be incredibly expensive to eat vegetables instead of fast food. “I need so many calories at my weight, it’s just a fact, they’re not cheaply available from that fresh stuff.”

> incredibly expensive proposition for many cities

I lived in Italy for a number of years. It is a poorer country than the United States in a lot of ways, and yet they manage this quite well.

It still comes back to zoning and parking: by allowing denser development, you can plan transit routes that serve a lot more people, some of whom don't even own an automobile.

The largest cities in Italy are quite a bit smaller than the largest cities in the US, so it's a very different situation.

Rome's metro area is about 4.3 million people. San Antonio's is about 2.6 million. San Antonio also has far more relaxed car-based commutes than the Bay Area or LA as a result.

If you dropped Rome's three subway lines in San Antonio you wouldn't get rid of that many car trips, especially since the city being smaller and less dense than the really big cities in the US makes the car trips that much easier in the first place.

Rome is notable for having kind of not great subway infrastructure for a major European city because, among other problems, they tend to encounter a lot of archeological stuff whenever they dig there.

And I'm not even talking about major cities. Where I lived in Padova, it has approximately 200K people in the same area that about 100K people occupy here in Bend, Oregon. Padova has way better transit than Bend does even if Bend is much more well to do in many ways.

Is Bend gripped by housing issues and traffic as much as the Bay Area or NYC or wherever?

The folks I know in smaller US towns simply don't have the same concerns about parking spaces as those in high-demand, high-population, central large cities. And comparing those cities to typically-small-to-medium-size Italian cities doesn't result in very actionable practical plans.

Bend has very serious housing woes. The housing crisis, at this point, has spread out from the epicenter type places like the Bay Area.

One of my best friends here got priced out and now drives in 40 minutes from a nearby town. That's bad for 1) him and his family 2) the environment 3) traffic.

If you ask people on Nextdoor, they'll probably tell you there's also a traffic crisis, but it's not true.

I live in Tokyo: there's over 40 million people in the greater metro area. It's the largest metro area in the world. There's hundreds of train/subway stations and most of the population gets around by public transit, along with cycling and walking.

Population size isn't the problem, the problem is the way American cities were built. If you want public transit to work, you have to make cars extremely inconvenient, which means little or no parking (and the parking that exists is very expensive), high density, and zoning that allows all this.

Is San Antonio really a city? That just sounds like an endless suburb to me

Allowing infill development of existing parking lots to create mixed use neighborhoods is in reality very cheap for cities to do. All it costs is rezoning: if they then increase taxes on the now very-desirable-to-build land, it’ll be a huge net win, with cheaper utilities and transport infra to maintain relative to the tax base. Sewers cost roughly the same per mile regardless of if you’re serving 1,000 or 10,000 people.

This becomes really obvious when you look at where cities like Kansas City receive the most taxes vs where they spend the most: suburbs cost Kansas City huge amounts of money that the inner walkable city neighborhoods subsidize, despite the per-capita tax returns being lower in the more dense neighborhoods.

>> infill development of existing parking lots to create mixed use neighborhoods is in reality very cheap for cities to do

No. That is a radical change in needs and services. Cars don't need sewage treatment and fresh water delivery. Parking lots don't need school systems and health care. Just saying that a parking lot can be converted to houses ignores the radically different local and external needs of human residents as opposed to parked cars. It is akin to those who say that office buildings should "just be converted to apartments" with zero insight re the difficulties of doing so in practice.

Compared to the same amount of services further spread out, infill is far cheaper, and tends to generate a lot more tax revenue compared to the infrastructure needs. Here's a sort of simplified, but real-world example that uses snow clearing:

https://bendyimby.com/2021/03/24/snow-and-financial-producti...

Something like sewers are more complicated, but the basic equation is that you're adding things in an area that's already served by infrastructure and often pretty good infrastructure at that, rather than adding in kilometers of brand new infrastructure for relatively low-revenue uses.

>> adding things in an area that's already served by infrastructure

Unlike in video games, "adding" load to infrastructure can cost more than running new lines. Everything from pipes to power lines have finite capacities. If a city sewer system is at capacity, as many are, dropping some more people into the middle (replacing a parking lot with houses) will require possibly ripping up the old sewer/water/power lines to expand them. And expanding their up/downstream connections. That can impact far far more than the local connection, often costing much more than green-field development. Imaging how much cost to open up and expand a sewer under any Manhattan street. Compare that to digging a trench through a green field out on the outskirts of town.

Everything from pipes to power lines also have a finite lifespan, and many cities are succumbing to crumbling infrastructure as the low density suburban tax base isn't covering their costs, and is unsustainable in the long term.

Yes it costs a lot in absolute terms to rip up and expand a sewer lines in Manhattan, but that doesn't mean it costs more per person being served by that infrastructure.

Snow removal is cheap. The expensive things like schools, criminal justice, and health care are all more expensive per person in denser cities.

They're more expensive per person in cities with a higher cost of living, which often correlates with density. But zoning restrictions increase the cost of living by contributing to housing scarcity.

Density isn't the cause of high cost, it's the response to it. It's the market increasing supply in the presence of high demand. When prices are high you want more of it, not less.

> You're not gonna get rid of the need to commute.

Higher density enables mass transit.

Moreover, work from home is a thing now. One person lives near their job, the other works from home, no commute.

> build more transit

This is putting the cart before the horse. The suburbs aren't dense enough to justify a transit route and if you install one there it will just go unused.

First you have to rezone all the low density areas to allow higher density. Then you look where people are starting to build once they're allowed to and install transit routes to the places that now justify them.

> Moreover, work from home is a thing now. One person lives near their job, the other works from home, no commute.

This works great as long as neither has to ever change jobs to either a different location or one with a different WFH policy.

In fact, I have increasingly seen the pattern of adults who work from home but have a commute to drive their children in the morning / afternoon. That's 2-ways both times, for the record. It's often multi-destination.

I know multiple people who bought houses 45 minutes from work that made way, way more money than needed for those houses.

They WANTED to be in the middle of nowhere. They could have had a house 11 minutes away with good schools and access to nature, but they choose 45 to be isolated. They live in their cars.

That's what congestion charges at city limits are for.

I wish I was further out of the city.

I think if actual self-driving cars arrive, they will fuel sprawl like nothing else before. I wouldn't mind a long commute if I could sleep or work or chill out as my car drove me to work.

I think this is actually a perfectly legitimate point of view if people are paying for the externalities: 1) CO2 emissions 2) paying more for road usage.

Everyone has different preferences and we should be free to fulfill them.

You're describing a train

A door-to-door train would be pretty cool, especially when my door is on a 10 acre lot 35 minutes outside of the city and I get a private cabin on the train that I can sleep in.

A self driving version of this could help you reach the train station/tram stop: https://www.karsan.com/tr/e-jest-genel-bakis

Why pay to have a house then though. Just have a self-driving RV and live wherever you want. You can live in the office parking lot during the week, and in the park the rest of the time.

Because I do want a home base. I want a large workshop for woodworking, painting, and maybe ceramics. I want a place to have musical instruments. I want a great home theater, gym, sauna, and an amazing kitchen. I want space to work on my motorcycle.

Land is important. I want a big garden and lots of space between me and my neighbors. I want quiet nights and a dark sky.

I could never afford this near a city, but once you drive thirty to sixty minutes, there are a lot of options.

I want a lot of things too but unfortunately I have a limited amount of money. I'd like all those things, but I'd rather have money so I can live off the interest and not have to work, so I have the time and energy to do any of those things.

To each their own.

In other countries you can commute easily without a car by using transit and rail.

I hope/believe that we are near a tipping point. There is a very large and very substantial neighborhood premium based on what's around it, but the zoning is the same everywhere so the competition was legally restricted to greenways, sidewalks, parks, and HOA facilities. Even in the suburban US, it is a VERY desirable feature to be within walking distance of a park where young children can play. This has created a strange effect, where people (let's be honest, affluent people) accumulate a collection of aspirational wheeled items - strollers, bikes, weird electric skateboard-like things, and other wheeled things for the kids. These are coupled local government parks and spaces where people can ride a bike JUST FOR FUN. I mean it very seriously that greenways outright avoid any turns that might be useful for economic life. Riding bikes on the roads is mostly for the true anti-car zealots.

I've been ready to buy a house for few years, but I've realized I'm no longer happy with the whole package. I want to realistically be able to walk or bike to get a dinner, coffee, or groceries. Yet, city centers (in the south for sure) tend to offer the most dangerous roads for doing this, and unhealthy environment, and poor social atmosphere.

I'm sensing that there are more people on the sidelines (who have remove jobs, after all) who are ready to buy into better neighborhoods. These people may not be willing to give up their cars, but there is negotiating space, and it is relevant that these are people who have economic clout to force the issue.

Riding bikes on the road, even in the US, is mostly for the poorest workers. It is most visibly for the committed exercise or competitive cyclists, and it is vanishingly infrequently but looms large in the public imagination for the "true anti-car zealots".

https://www.vox.com/2014/7/9/5883823/its-not-just-hipsters-o...

I think the lifestyle you desire can be had somewhat near downtown areas of large cities in the South. However, areas tend to quickly flip-flop between gentrified and not. Things within walking distance may be slightly limited.

Worse, this is really just for the 20-30s crowd or childless crowd. As soon as you have kid(s), you’ll probably find this unsuitable (school quality/location, 3 floor townhouse design, etc). If you went to college and grad school and then moved out there, you might only have 5 years of this…

For the better schools in a more solidly middle class area, one easily ends up in a suburb. And if one desires a house less than 20yrs old, one learns about unknown communities formerly believed to be in remote reaches beyond the boundaries of known civilization… (I jest but they are way out from the city center!)

And remote jobs aren’t a panacea. If one has kids in school, they can’t just uproot their family and move to a rural mountain town across the country on a whim.

I’ve also always been vexed that I can’t live near where I work. Aside from years of long commutes, the distance caused me to largely miss out on after-hours social events. Almost felt like a foreigner next to the people who lived closer.

Don't forget the socialization of costs that comes in the forms of cities crippling their traffic flow for the sake of dedicating half their road surface to people parking on it instead of driving on it. I love cars but a street covered in unmoving automobiles is an intensely perverse sight.

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