Greener cities: A necessity or a luxury?
nature.com
nature.com
Of course there are other ways of making space not all of which are totally voluntary to current residents/owners of property. Cities (including NYC) used to be much more cavalier with remaking areas in this manner.
If you manage to make people travel around faster, you increase the housing supply by a much higher amount than you can by converting local land into housing.
So, everybody would be better by increasing the reach and area for train tracks, even if you convert a reasonable amount of nearby area into parks, if also, while you are at it, you provide some way for local transit to integrate with the long-distance one.
The dichotomy on the article is just plainly wrong. Transportation enables you to improve on both, and without transportation you will have neither.
Better commuter rail/light rail is desirable. On the other hand, a commute is still a commute. I'm actually quite convenient to a commuter rail station that ties into the city's subway quite well. But I pretty much hate commuting into the city on the few days I have to do it because it still takes a big chunk out of my day.
If the speed isn't actually fast, then transportation needs to be improved.
Express train line, which means fewer stops or no stops at all between destination.
There's probably various inefficiencies such as infrequent service and slowdown of the train due to track issue.
For me, it's the issue of the train not being local to where I live, and infrequency of service, which means I could be waiting up to 20 minutes for the train to arrive in some cases. Stops are not as unbearable for me which felt like a minute or shorter for each stop.
The station is fairly convenient to me to go in for morning rush hour. It's unusable for an evening event. The train is basically empty if I even take it at the tail-end of rush hour. And trains are understandably infrequenty scheduled outside of rush.
I'd have trouble justifying subsidizing every off-hour rider with a $100 bill given there are trains; it just will probably take you 2 or 3x the time relative to driving if you want to head home after a play or a dinner.
The GP isn't replying to people interested in making his particular commute better.
When I did commute semi-regularly there were regulars going into the city though I only did so a couple days a week; wouldn't have been sustainable.
The greater metro area around where I live has far more jobs in many areas than the city itself does. I'm not sure there were any sizable tech-industry companies in the city proper for a long time although there are more now.
I was mostly responding to a comment way upthread somewhere that, even with a fairly good public transit system, going into a city can take a fair bit of time if you have to use multiple modes of transportation. So the answers are pretty suck it up, move closer, or don't go into the city much.
Well, yeah? Those answers are your alternatives if you choose to live far from the city, and I would think they should be obvious. You can't change the laws of physics. Or economics: I mean, you could build a bullet train between your rural town and whatever exact destination in the city you want, but obviously that's economically infeasible.
You see those gigantic parking lots and 4 way stroads? Many of the parking lots are empty for much of the day, and stroads are dangerous and inefficient.
For that matter, freeways and interstate highways are valuable resources we could repurpose for train tracks.
We have grossly inefficient transportation corridor that could easily be made more efficient.
Now, there will still be need to demolish homes and businesses for public benefit, but reducing traffic and making good use of land more efficiently means less homes will needed to be demolished.
To some degree, building more train tracks and allowing dense housing relieves pressure on the remaining areas.
The real problem is that to be healthy, the housing market in New York needs a lot more capacity in recognizance of this fact. There is no such thing as full zoning capacity in the same way that zero unemployment is not realistic or good.
Hong Kong really does explore the limits of unlimited growth upward.
I have seen pictures of those high rise apartment buildings. What's clear to me is that they're frequently skinny and tall. The tallness of these structures can be misleading, because we're not accounting for total volume of a building.
You can have a lot of density with relatively low height and greater area of space occupied. These may be green spaces or parks. Filling in those area with more building volume doesn't mean green spaces are impossible, but it would be an engineering challenge to put green spaces on the roof.
If you wish to see truly insane population density. You should see images of Kowloon walled city and compare that to Hong Kong. They're not really comparable. Kowloon Walled City is only 10 to 14 of stories high. There are certainly buildings higher than that in Hong Kong.
In any case, housing cost is determined by demand and supply. If there's sufficient supply of housing, the price would go down. If there's insufficient housing, the cost would rise. It doesn't matter if your city is hyperdense or not.
Kowloon walled city was torn down in the early 90s for good reasons.
The fact is, the world we live in isn't constructed in 3D, but rather 2.5D.
In any case, this is not an engineering problem, but a sociopolitical one.
> In any case, this is not an engineering problem, but a sociopolitical one.
It turns out they not only have to fund the construction of these buildings, but also sell them when they are completed.
1. https://www.thinkchina.sg/whats-stopping-hong-kong-fixing-it...
Perhaps. But if jobs are not a reason to live in a city, I expect that will change the housing equation for many people and they'll just move somewhere that isn't as crowded.
Which is probably even a good result overall. Lower housing prices for people who want to live in a city for other reasons--albeit perhaps with reductions in services and other favored urban features overall.
I think you're generally OK if most of your activities work via transit and Uber. As you suggest, as well, kids and pets probably make things more difficult.
I do own a car but that is only ever used for traveling to another State or to get into more remote parts of the mountains. For anything else, using a car would be inconvenient.
The biggest factor contributing to this hostility seems to be personal motorized vehicles. Reducing the number of motorized vehicles (and the space dedicated to them) whenever possible should have a much better impact than introducing greenery.
Put another way, I think people live better in a city made of concrete with few cars than in a green city with lots of cars.
I hear downtown Vancouver is also this way. Montreal's urban core and Quebec city also fit this bill.
I do admit everywhere else in Canada is terrible for being people friendly. Not sure about other places
Definitely not. The former is easily an oppressive 1984-esque metropolis while the latter easily feels nice.
Another key parameter is density. Low density with plenty of greenery and people will feel and be happy even if they may need a car.
Making space for more green is good for us precisely because it makes cities less hostile perhaps in a more roundabout way.
It's so fun going door to door and being like, "would you like to accept our lord and savior the silver maple into your yard?" We recruited an ecologist recently so we're expanding into native gardens and grasses.
Like getting married, doing the deed, having kids etc.
We keep coming up with “solutions” that solve or partially solve one part of the equation. In the article it mentions in order to prevent another incident of Hurricane Sandy, the city decided to build a massive flood mitigation project.
But has anybody stopped to think that maybe our best protections against nature is nature itself? Trees are a good start and definitely help brighten up a concrete jungle, absorb and store CO2. But this is only one aspect.
For decades, cities around the country have been destroying natural ecosystems in favor of single family developments (ie, suburbs) and highways. These concrete structures and monoculture ecosystems that replaced once diverse green spaces are terrible at absorbing and mitigating the effects of nature.
Man made drains get clogged or overwhelmed. Mitigation techniques fail quickly over time if one or more designs were built poorly. The build up of water slowly erodes the soil beneath the concrete and thus leads to formation of sinkholes. I think it’s expected that man made infrastructure will only last 25-30 years before needing a full replacement.
On the other hand, those once diverse ecosystems were great/amazing at absorbing the effects of Mother Nature. Trees, woodlands great and thrive here without any intervention from human beings. They also used to support living organisms — insects such as bees, and animals.
Some intervention needed in case of fire prevention (ie, “controlled burns”). But it’s otherwise self sustaining.
I think federal protection is needed on all green spaces. Not just national parks. Freeze and stop future development of the suburbs. Divest from car centric transportation and infrastructure (highways, roads, parking lots, parking garages, street parking). Destruction of highways.
Return the land to the people to build places where we can live, play, eat, and work. Scale up. Do not scale horizontally. End implied and direct subsidies given to SFH developments. End all subsidies on O&G (a multi trillion dollar industry by the way). Regulate O&G and use fines to pay for a greener future.
This needs to be tackled at all fronts.
> "A human breathes about 9.5 tonnes of air in a year, but oxygen only makes up about 23 per cent of that air, by mass, and we only extract a little over a third of the oxygen from each breath. That works out to a total of about 740kg of oxygen per year. Which is, very roughly, seven or eight trees’ worth."
You might think the problem would be minimal due to atmospheric circulation, but like with smog accumulation, some weather patterns can lead to problems:
"(2021) Declining Oxygen Level as an Emerging Concern to Global Cities"
Most likely plants can be more a efficient way. Probably everything fast growing is more oxygen converting, and co2 storing
They dress up the carbon causing steel beams and concrete with trees but don't forget the tree roots also destroy infrastructure, and at the end of the day it's (toxic) lipstick on a pig, and the continuous maintenance of the lipstick until the pig dies. Cities and human habitats are either being reclaimed by nature or fighting it. Until that fundamentally changes green cities are as realistic as carbon negative oil.
Until the extreme inequality at the core of capitalist society is addressed in a meaningful way (so never really), any so called "Green cities" will just be gated enclaves of the wealthy, and the poor will be forced to live surrounded by the pollution the rich are ultimately responsible for, yet are able to afford to isolate themselves from.