Hacker News Reader

Comment by Finnucane | Hacker News Reader

Not living in the suburbs improves mental health.

Not if you are living in a noisy and polluted location, which is the case for most people without a car, clichees aside.

Or just filled with so-called "night life" that so many people think they would participate more in if they lived closer.

The novelty wears off after a few years and with kids it becomes more of an annoyance than anything else.

This is horrible too, and I agree :)

I am a massive hermit. I still benefit from living right in our city, because now instead of getting in my car to go get takeout, I walk from my apartment to the restaurant to get takeout. This is regular exercise I never had before.

Sure, I'm not out clubbing every night, but I am still better off in a walkable environment than I was before.

The cars are what make it noisy and polluted of course.

The places with low rates of car ownership in the US are cities like D.C., NYC, SF, Boston, and Chicago. These aren't heavily polluted places, NYC in fact has great air quality most of the time due to prevailing winds. The ten worst cities for Air pollution have 0 overlap with the bottom 10 cities in car ownership.

Averaging air pollution (noise pollution is just as bad, btw) over a huge metropolitan area is not a meaningful metric though, I think.

You aren't going to see meaningfully different air pollution levels in micro areas most of the time unless there's something like a highway or large source of smoke. If you look at AQI measurements around NYC they're all within about 10 points, excluding 1 sensor that's right by a huge bus depot, and it's 20 points higher than the minimum, but maybe 10-15 above the average.

Also, noise pollution DEFINITELY isn't just as bad as air pollution. No doubt it CAN cause stress and CAN disrupt sleep, but air pollution is clearly a far bigger problem in general.

My favorite places in the world are small walkable towns in nature. Sprawling car-centric suburbia has more asphalt than trees. It sucks.

Even as a nature lover, I’d rather live in Manhattan NYC than car-centric suburbia like Central Los Angeles is.

Can you back that up with any study at all? Or are we counting smug anecdotes as facts these days?

Citation?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com