As someone who lives in an area with plenty of high-density residential buildings, I can attest that this is a perfect recipe for creating congested cities with such intense light and noise pollution.
For example, two regional lines (RER B and D) need to share a tunnel in the middle of the city. They've been investigating digging another one for a long time, but, AFAIK. they haven't found an economical way of doing so. The solution is to try to move people to other lines, but those are already very crowded and I'm not aware of any project to build a new line inside of the city limits.
- The Pakistani restaurant below our apartment would regularly host receptions/weddings until 2-3am. The sendoff typically involved groups of 20-30 people banging large drums loudly and singing as the happy couple walked out and were driven away.
- We had a neighborhood drunk who frequently (multiple times a week) would wander down the street singing Flamenco-style ballads about his unfortunate love life. My assumption was that the ex he was singing to lived on the street? Anyway, he had quite a voice and was great at projecting.
- The building behind us was shorter than ours and our rear balcony faced their rooftop. In the summer one of the apartments there would semi-regularly hold parties until 1am.
Cars were an occasional issue too, but people were a much bigger problem in that particular neighborhood. That said, I've also lived in dense neighborhoods with none of those problems, so maybe better norms/regulations are the answer... but existing noise ordinances in the US are rarely enforced.
Beyond the noise issues though I did enjoy the convenience/amenities that a dense neighborhood provides!
There's less car traffic too but that was such a background noise that I hardly noticed it. Though truthfully the first week or so at the new place I was conscious of it's absence.
Also... I live in a low-density urban neighborhood currently and it's the loudest place I've ever lived. Mostly it's road noise, but also one of my neighbors parties 12+ hours every weekend playing music very loudly. Some people are just loud, but cars make everybody loud.
Cars with fart pipes installed are the same kind of violation. Modern cars with functioning mufflers or electric powertrains... aren't actually that loud.
Until their tires hit asphalt. Cars have to go very slowly for the engine to be louder than the tires, and that noise is a function of weight, and electric cars are heavier than equivalent ICE cars.
"Electric cars are heavier" is some silly nonsense where people went looking for something to complain about. You can make an electric car as light as you want, with the trade off that it implies making the battery smaller and reducing range. But the Model 3 has a ~300 mile range and weighs the same as the average car.
What? Like wind hitting the extremely aerodynamic surface of the car designed specifically not to catch the wind? I have never heard or read this in my life - it is widely known that tires-on-pavement is the biggest contributor of car noise. That roar you hear standing a quarter mile from a busy highway is not wind, it's the tires.
> "Electric cars are heavier" is some silly nonsense where people went looking for something to complain about. You can make an electric car as light as you want, with the trade off that it implies making the battery smaller and reducing range.
Again, this contradicts everything I've read and/or is just willfully ignorant. You can't make EVs superlight by stripping down the body, for example. The battery is the heavy part and while they may get more mass-efficient over time EVs are now and for the foreseeable future strictly heavier than same-size ICE cars.
EVs aren't the savior of the environment, public transit is. EVs are better than ICE cars in most ways, but for noise all cars are a problem and EVs are worse.
Like the sound of a hundred cubic feet of metal displacing the air at 40 MPH and leaving vacuum in its wake, yeah. That they're designed to be aerodynamic is the reason they're not that loud.
> That roar you hear standing a quarter mile from a busy highway is not wind, it's the tires.
Now you're talking about highways. People don't typically drive at highway speeds on city streets.
> Again, this contradicts everything I've read and/or is just willfully ignorant.
People have agendas. They need some reason for electric cars to be bad.
The Model 3 weighs around 4000 pounds, as do the Ford Taurus, Chevy Camaro and BMW 3 series, all vehicles of approximately the same size.
Some cars are lighter than this. Some are heavier. In general the existing production electric cars tend to be on the heavier side because premium car buyers prefer longer range to less weight, and that's the trade off. But there is nothing inherently requiring that, and in fact electric cars with smaller/lighter batteries would be cheaper, so that's likely to be what happens as more affordable electric cars become available.
> You can't make EVs superlight by stripping down the body, for example.
If you have an electric car with a 1500 pound battery and a 300 mile range, there is a fairly obvious way to make one that has a 100 mile range and weighs 1000 pounds less, and it doesn't require changing the size of the cabin. You might even get more than 100 miles of range by doing this, because now the car weighs 1000 pounds less and requires less energy to accelerate.
> EVs aren't the savior of the environment, public transit is.
Public transit is inapplicable to any place without enough density to support it. More than two thirds of Americans live in suburban or rural areas. We could build millions of new high density housing units and the majority would still live in suburban and rural areas -- and that's unlikely to change, because housing is scarce and only a fraction of those units would be converted specifically because of how many more units you can put on a lot for high density housing. If you build 20 units to a lot you could double the number of urban housing units while only reducing the number of suburban/rural units by 2.5%.
All of the people who live there will continue to need cars.
That was an illustrative example. Tires typically overtakes engine noise at about 25mph. That's city street speeds. (In most car-dependent cities 40-50 is also typical city street speed.) Again, this is why tires are the majority of car noise. When you hear a car pass by on a non-highway road, you're mostly hearing tires.
If wind is a serious factor either you need to publish your secret findings or link me to some research I'm not finding.
This is like saying "a person typically travels at 30MPH". It doesn't mean anything. An off-road truck with knobby tires is going to have more tire noise than a sedan with snow tires which will have more than the same sedan with low rolling resistance tires. An 80s muscle car will have more engine noise than a modern 4-cylinder sedan which will have more than an electric vehicle. A gasoline vehicle under acceleration (as in stop-and-go city traffic) will have much more engine noise at a given speed. Tire noise is affected by the roadway material in addition to the vehicle. Tire noise in a 4000 pound electric car might overtake "engine noise" at a lower speed than it does for a 4000 pound V8, but that's because it's quieter, not louder.
> When you hear a car pass by on a non-highway road, you're mostly hearing tires.
Then why does it make a "whoosh" sound?
> If wind is a serious factor either you need to publish your secret findings or link me to some research I'm not finding.
I suspect the problem here is that the studies are so old. Here's the relevant sentence from the Wikipedia article called Road Noise:
> Noise of rolling tires driving on pavement is found to be the biggest contributor of highway noise and increases with higher vehicle speeds.
For this sentence it has three citations. One discusses the effects of road material on tire noise and not tire noise relative to other noise, another lumps tire noise and aerodynamic noise into the same category. The third, which is presumably where it got the premise, is from 1973, when cars commonly used bias-ply tires, which are much louder.
But let's not lose track of the thread here. The premise is that electric cars would be louder. A Model 3 is ~4000 pounds, the same as a Ford Taurus, so that's not going to be louder. Some cars are lighter -- a Honda Accord is in the same class and is ~3200 pounds, only 80% as much. But then it has a gasoline engine, which is louder than an electric motor. Does the 20% weight difference cause more noise than the gasoline engine vs. the electric motor? Somebody would need a dB meter to even answer it, and that's rather the point. Either way the difference is going to be small and people are just looking for something to complain about.
No. It's very different. It's more like saying "a person is usually about 5'7"." It is obvious there are difference, but it's not something that varies minute by minute, and the range of differences is not stated. There's definitely not cars moving 40+ mph without making a lot of tire noise.
You're right those aren't good citations, I looked at it earlier myself and didn't like them, but I didn't go through the work of finding better ones. But seriously, can you find a single study saying wind is a dominant factor in road noise? Again, I've never heard anyone claim that.
> Then why does it make a "whoosh" sound?
Because, that's the sound it makes.
> But let's not lose track of the thread here.
This started because you claimed modern cars are not noisy except for those with modified exhaust pipes. I'm saying cars are fucking loud, all of them. Electric cars are also loud and do not solve for the problem of road noise at all. The fact that we're trying to figure out if wind or tires is the source of the noise that we both acknowledge is quite noticeable makes no difference except to support my actual point, that cars are loud.
Based on what? A car with low resistance tires on concrete isn't going to make a lot of tire noise even at fairly high speeds.
> But seriously, can you find a single study saying wind is a dominant factor in road noise?
The one lumping tire noise and aerodynamic noise together is obviously contemplating that aerodynamic noise is a thing.
> Because, that's the sound it makes.
Tires make a rumbly sound, when you can hear them, as for example with the types of tires that make more tire noise.
> The fact that we're trying to figure out if wind or tires is the source of the noise that we both acknowledge is quite noticeable makes no difference except to support my actual point, that cars are loud.
There is a difference between something not being absolutely perfectly silent and something emitting a loud noise. Road noise for most modern cars at city speeds isn't loud. Exhaust noise for cars with negligently or intentionally defective mufflers is loud.
If you can hear it and you're not next to the road, that's too loud. It's noise pollution. You can personally draw an arbitrary line anywhere you want to determine what counts as "loud", but the actual phenomenon is that cars make an amount of noise that is detrimental to our health, sanity, and wildlife.
Living in a 1900s building in Brooklyn is vastly different from living in a 2020 building in Manhattan.
I'm guessing mid-1900s to early 2000s buildings are the problematic ones.
Congestion doesn't just refer to car traffic
Edit: think about crowded grocery stores and restaurants. Think community spaces like parks and libraries being packed all the time. Think about never being able to stop and get a coffee without waiting in a long line. Congestion
there definitely were a lot more people in the streets, other cities feel deserted in comparison.
There are so many of them. Every block seemed to have grocers and a small park.
Where I am it’s a massive supermarket every 5km, not a small one every 200m. You can shop different when it’s less hassle to go.
They aren't, with dense housing there is so much room for parks that they are everywhere. I live in such a place, you go out and you mostly hear birds chirping, not people, it is a cheap suburb with high rise apartments next to public transit and everything you need in walkable distance including hospital and government services and hardware stores.
Dense housing means there is more room for everything else, not less, so everything is less crowded. Birds singing outside of my windows is the main noise pollution where I live.
The main aim of density is to turn cities of a million into cities of ten million, not to just stick with a million and have birds chirping in parks everywhere you go.
Density is the population of a metropolitan area divided by its total area. Not population divided by the footprint area of residential lots. Density advocacy is all about accommodating population influx; it is really burgeoning population advocacy.
I've never heard of a density advocacy group being opposed to population growth. Density advocacy is practically synonymous with at least acceptance (if not advocacy) of urban population growth. Population growth is in fact like a sacred cow. You must never blame any urban problems on population growth; the cause is always not enough vertical build.
Is there any example of a density anywhere going on record that the metropolis in this local neck of the woods should somehow say no to more people, rather than building more?
Have other metropolitan areas do the same so there is no net migration.
> Is there any example of a density anywhere going on record that the metropolis in this local neck of the woods should somehow say no to more people, rather than building more?
There is a difference between refusing new people and having population growth as a goal. People exist, they have to live somewhere, increasing density increases the housing stock and gives them somewhere to live.
If one city is hostile to giving them somewhere to live and another isn't, people might move from the hostile place to the amiable place. But the solution to this is obviously to make the other city less hostile, not to make sure that all cities are maximally hostile.
It also changes behaviour. People are under stress all the time. It's not a nice or natural way to live. But it is easier to govern people.
Moving to car less city is the goal, but, as others note, the infrastructure is not there. So you're just pushing cars out... with no real answers being provided.
How is that good government?
And the roads you call mismanagement are already there! Removing them, deteriorating their use is what's new...
You might be thinking of packed slums in a developing country.
> But it is easier to govern people.
Ah yes, like the French, a famously docile people who never, ever rise up against their government.
That depends on supply and demand, not simply demand. More people attract, open and staff more shops, etc. It's easier to find a restaurant in a major city than a quiet rural town.
Not that there's _no_ foot traffic congestion or lines, but it's the same thing that happens in a case where there's only one Starbucks in a sprawling suburb or business district at lunch time.
A high density area is likewise it's own complex economy and system that seeks balance, when there's too many people in one area, you just go somewhere else or enjoy or compete with it. That's partly why Tokyo is simultaneously the most populated city on earth and one of the most quiet, clean, and least congested places I've visited.
In my sparsely populated city that sprawls, it's extremely noisy, dusty, time consuming to get around, the infrastructure is failing, and I rarely bump into anyone I know, because people are only visible at the beginning and end of their journey. Meanwhile here in Vancouver I often run into people I know multiple times per day because we're in the same spaces, or I can go somewhere else and not see anyone just like any other place.
Sorry, no this is culture. The same virtues exist in Japanese suburbs, nothing to do with a city.
It seems to me that it's mainly cars and a scarcity of places to be that make cities horrible and congested. More pollution, more noise, less space.
Have you lived (rather than just visited; extremely tourist-oriented areas can be broken in the way you describe, because all of the tourists stay there) in a large dense city? I'm sure there are exceptions (chiefly places with broken zoning/planning) but _in general_, if there's enough traffic for the cafe that people have to wait in long lines, _someone will open a cafe_. To the point where "there are a silly number of cafes" is a complaint people sometimes make about such cities.
Same goes for the rest of it, of course, but "dense cities have insufficient cafe provision" is a particularly bizarre take.
In Dublin (not a massively dense city; it's about a quarter the density of Paris, or a little less than San Francisco), we had an almost complete collapse of construction following the financial crisis, only really resuming around 2014. One interesting consequence of this was _fake cafes_. When you build an apartment block, you probably want to do _something_ with the ground floor, and in urban apartment blocks it'll rarely be used for housing; instead it'll be used for retail units. So if you build the apartment block, and then the next day the construction industry collapses and there's an unfinished site next door for five years, what do you do with the retail units? You don't want them to look derelict, so you put in fake cafes! (Via images on the windows).
Growth has since resumed, the unfinished sites are gone, and the fake cafes have become manifest, adding to the bafflingly large number of cafes in the city.
If your reply is that the vehicles are not needed because everyone can just walk: it takes more energy and more carbon emissions to walk a mile than it takes to drive a vehicle a mile -- and that's before we get to transporting things other than people. (Growing food is very energy intensive; walking burns food.)
I've never heard that before, can you expand on that?
My thought process is that food also implies some level of driving (delivering pesticides/fertilizer, driving crops away), the fertilizers are fossil-fuel derived, and if you count the sun it takes to grow crops to eat (or worse, as feed for meat).
The whole chain is pretty inefficient, too. Crops are pretty good at converting sunlight to stored energy, but animals and us are bad at retrieving that stored energy. The losses compound if we're eating meat.
Walking isn't a particularly efficient method of movement either, to my understanding.
The energy gets a bit spurious though. One could argue that if we're going to count sunlight going into the crops, we should do the same for the sunlight that raised the dinos so they could become oil.
I also would wager that starts and stops would impact this heavily. The human weighs a lot less so they can accelerate/decelerate much cheaper. The car would have a better edge on a long, straight mile with no stops.
The easiest way to see that it is plausible is to note that only 400 years ago, something like 90% of all human labor went into growing food, which is the way agricultural societies had always been everywhere. The way society was able reduce that to the 5% or so it is today was to use fossil fuels. The first big reduction came with the mechanization of textile production, freeing the food-growers from the need to make their own yarn and weave it into fabric to make clothes with. The tractor was of course also responsible for a drastic reduction in human labor as input to food-growing. Also, the replacement of horses with trucks for transportation of food from the farm to the nearest rail head or port or river (and transportation of inputs like fertilizer to the farm) meant that the food-growers could concentrate on growing food for people now that horses were much less needed.
It's not just the extra calories needed to walk as opposed to rest or to watch television: it's the fact that a single person in a delivery truck can do the work of a dozen people who have to do the deliveries on foot, and keeping one person alive and productive costs only one twelfth as much as keeping a dozen alive and productive -- even if no one walks anywhere or does any exercise. Sometimes for example in order to remain alive and productive, one of the dozen will need to visit a doctor. The doctor requires food to stay alive and productive. Doctors don't live forever and so need to be replaced, and that is an expensive process in part because medical students need food and lots of other energy-requiring things to stay alive and able to learn (and to grow from babies to people mature enough to go to medical school).
My guess is that that analysis continues to hold even if the dozen delivery workers can take public transportation as well as walk although maybe we have to replace "dozen" with "six".
I'm not saying that restricting vehicles in Paris is a bad move: I'm just saying that the effects on, e.g., carbon emission is not obviously good and that the planners who chose (e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann%27s_renovation_of_Pa...) to devote a large fraction of the area of cities to make it easy for vehicle traffic to flow were not just stupid benighted fools or evil people bent on making life worse for everyone.
[1] Excluding Uber style car-based food delivery services.
Oh, no, it's the other way round, mostly. It's easier to deliver a quantity and variety of goods to a dense area than the sticks. Which is why "go shopping" is a suggestion for people going to NYC, not Tucson.
Do you have a source for this? Sounds questionable.
100 miles? That seems very likely. That happens far quicker for the energy leaking heat machine sitting in the seat.
So, while maybe the theme of the statement is correct?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport
A car flying down the freeway uses less emissions per mile, but if one is traveling 50 miles versus just walking to down the block the former is using a lot more emissions even if it is more efficient per mile.
https://afdc.energy.gov/conserve/public_transportation.html - a full car gets amazingly close to a average train (USA).
And this is seen in that trains are most common where they can be mostly full.
What's scary about that is how quickly busses just get outclassed - they have to be as big as their biggest loads, but they're usually empty.
You can use your eyes to instantly observe that car drivers are not reducing their caloric intake to compensate for the fact that they "save" that energy by not walking.
There are 340kcal in 100g of wholemeal wheat flour[2], so walking one mile takes around 21g of wheat
Wheat flour creates carbon emissions of 0.80 kg CO₂e/kg [3], so walking one mile creates carbon emissions of 170 g CO₂e
Driving a vehicle powered by gasoline produces tailpipe emissions of around 400g per mile [4]
[1] https://www.healthline.com/health/calories-burned-walking#Wa... [2] https://knowledge4policy.ec.europa.eu/health-promotion-knowl... [3] https://apps.carboncloud.com/climatehub/product-reports/id/9... [4] https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-t...
Here's what I found: the formula given in the article is "calories burned = BMR x METs/24 x hour"
But the METs for lying quietly is 1. The author certainly forgot to subtract 1 from METs in that equation, and could easily have also forgotten to do so when calculating the given numbers.
100g of beef gives you 217 kcal [1], so you need 33g of beef for your walk
Carbon cost for beef is 99.48 kg CO₂e/kg [2]
So walking one mile fueled by beef creates ~3.3kg of carbon emissions, over 8 times what would be emitted if you drove
[1] https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/foods/beef#nutrition [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1201677/greenhouse-gas-e...
[1] https://www.thebeefsite.com/news/33676/uk-beef-carbon-footpr...
The issue is that they have mainly increased the friction of using cars in the city (reducing lanes, restricting parking, converting avenues to one-way) all the while the public transit enhancements are running late, and whatever lines were already there saw a drop in service quality.
So increasing density would require a major improvement in public transit. Note, however, that the city of Paris proper already has one of the highest densities in the world.
They put in some heavy traffic restrictions in my local city of Oxford by closing off residential roads, forcing all traffic down "arterial" roads instead and putting parking restrictions all over the place. A year later, there are no fewer cars on the road or increased public transport usage; some local studies by the university confirmed that. People just spend more time stuck in traffic travelling longer distances.
It's like having a person with an injured leg and a missing one. Instead of giving the person a prosthesis to remove the load, they've just lopped the other off altogether, leaving them to crawl from place to place instead of hobble.
So it’s a moot point when only one decision pathway can actually be budged by more then a few inches.
A 15 minute walk is 2 minutes by car, five by bike.
Only when the distances are greater than short-walk distance. Cars take up (huge amounts of) space at their destination by parking. You can only push two destinations so close together before their parking lots merge.
For example, you might need to spend some time getting to/from the car or wending your way through a parking structure. You may need to drive a more circuitous route due to one-way streets—-and certainly can’t cut through a park or building. You don’t need fuel/charging or maintenance every trip but it amortizes out to a small delay. And there’s traffic!
Anecdotally, a 15 minute walk (~1 mile) is probably about the break-even point. My spouse and I both went that far yesterday, one in a car and one walking, and yet we both got home at almost exactly the same time.
Erm aren't you forgetting something?
London just quadrupled its bicycle network. That seems like a massive improvement to me. When I lived there, biking was...let's be kind and say "less than ideal". Last time I visited I was amazed by the improvement, with protected two-way bike lanes right on the Thames and much more.
https://momentummag.com/london-just-quadrupled-its-bicycle-n...
Poster was presenting cars and public transport as the only two options, and complaining that one has been made worse without improving the other.
That completely misses the fact that there is in fact a third option that has been greatly improved, even if poster doesn’t like it.
Hence “Aren’t you forgetting something” rather than “you’re wrong”
If you increase density, you should be avoiding the need to improve public transit, as more people will be closer to their destination than it's worth driving to.
For the same population increase, less density means people have to travel farther to get to their destination. More people travelling farther necessitates more public transit
Now suppose you compress this many people into an area of 25 square miles, where the roads are still half a mile apart. Now the distance along one of the edges is 5 miles and the same million people only have to travel 5 million miles. But now instead of having 400 miles of roads (10/0.5 * 10 on each axis), you have 100 miles of roads (5/0.5 * 5 * 2), so each road has twice as many cars, or each bus has to carry twice as many passengers or whatever.
This is why mass transit works in cities and not in the suburbs. In a city you have enough passengers to fill the bus or subway car, in the suburbs you don't. But if you increase the density without putting in any mass transit, you just get more traffic.
On the other hand, the people who say we can't increase density until we build mass transit are full of crap. You can add a bus route in a day, you just buy a bus and hire a driver. In urban areas subways are generally more efficient, and those take time to build, but you can run a bus until the subway is built. It's no excuse to hold up housing construction.
As traffic and travel times lessen, people do travel further and more, but only to a point.
If your mailbox is attached to your house, you can lean out your front door to get your mail. If your mailbox is at the end of your 20 foot driveway, you take a few steps to get your mail. If you live on a farm, and your mailbox is down a several hundred yard driveway, you might hop in your side-by-side UTV. If your mail goes to a Post Office Box in town, you might hop in your truck and pick it up while running errands.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
If things that had been a 10 minute drive become a 5 minute drive, now they're worth it when before they weren't. You go to the shop instead of waiting 2 days for Amazon. You go to the shop you like more instead of the one you like less even though the lesser one is closer, because now the difference isn't as big.
If you make the drive shorter but make parking harder,
and you make the walk/bike shorter but walking/biking pleasant,
people will take their cars less.
Hmm...aren't you forgetting something?
Last I checked, Paris had a veritable bicycling revolution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycling_in_Paris
Le Plan vélo de Paris (2015-2020) doubled bicycle lanes to 1000km and increased ridership (apparently already high?) by 50% or more.
The current plan is to add another 180km and make Paris 100% cyclable.
But what that doesn't mention: the bike sharing schemes are hit-and-miss. I usually commute each way a good hour before rush-hour traffic, so I have a good probability of finding a usable bike. But during rush hour? Fat chance.
Oh, you're going to point out that there's a scheme helping you purchase your own bike? Indeed. What are you going to do with it, though? At home, you may be able to find a spot to park in your flat (it's not my case). You wanna leave it outside? Sure, go ahead, if you don't care about finding it in one piece in the morning. Ditto for the other end of your commute.
There's also the fact that bike sharing schemes only work in Paris proper and adjacent towns. If you want to commute in from further away [0], you better be ready to ride in traffic and have your own bike, assuming you don't live that far. If you're lucky enough to live in one of the places served by the new metro, it's still not ready (but should be real soon now - fingers crossed).
So sure, having more dedicated bike lanes (and some of the new ones are actually physically separate from car lanes) is great. Although sometimes the layout is... puzzling? Bike lanes switching from the left to the right side of the roads, narrow two-way lanes (Bd Sébastopol), etc.
But I wouldn't exactly call it a "revolution" in practice. My commute goes from the east to the northwest of the city, around 7 km. Of these, only around 1 km is a bike lane separate from the traffic. And it's ridiculously narrow. Bonus points for it being painted with a slippery paint for some reason (look up Boulevard Magenta). The rest is half on bike lanes shared with a bus, the other half on regular roads with no bike lane at all.
---
[0] Don't forget that Paris proper is home to ~2M people, while the Paris Region has ~12M.
I've even read an article in Le Parisien (local-ish paper) about how some of those bike storage units were actually removed for some reason.
Edit: I'm actually saying this as someone who enjoys and actually does bike. When living in the city proper, I think there are very few routes for which the bike isn't the quickest method of transportation. For my commute, which is pretty much a best-case scenario (modern metro with few to no issues, goes in a fairly straight line, don't have to change lines, stations close to both home and the office) the bike is much faster: 20 instead of 30 minutes.
Wouldn't we all love to have such a big flat.
I was talking to a friend living in London, and it would indeed seem that flats tend to be bigger over there. We do have many 100+ m2 flats, don't get me wrong, it's just that most locals can't afford those and live in shoeboxes instead.
There's also the fact that the layout doesn't always lend itself to storing a bike, most flats being rather old. Even though I would technically have the surface area to store a bike, it'd have to be in an awkward place to avoid blocking the passages.
Some newer apartment buildings do have areas for storing bikes more or less securely. But I doubt that's the case for most people.
Instead, what I'm hopeful for, is that the local bike-sharing scheme will improve. And indeed, I've read a few weeks ago that they were rolling out some improved model, which they expect to be more robust.
Over a third of Dutch people cycle as their most frequent mode of transport. Over a quarter of all trips are on a bike. 49% of primary school students and 75% of secondary school students cycle to school.
Cycling has been a national priority for the Dutch, like the automobile has a been a priority for much of the rest of the developed world.
With e-bikes, fitness and terrain are less relevant than ever. Unsafe(car dominated) bike routes are the number one obstacle to increased cycling.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycling_in_the_Netherlands
A quick search reveals that the average winter temperature in the Netherlands is above freezing, while average summer temperatures hover around 20C. Sounds positively delightful for biking. That’s not the case for much of North America.
Where I come from, generally in the Great Lakes region, the average temperatures range from -1C to 30C during the year. Not great for year-round commuting by bike. Some people do it, sure, but it is truly a commitment.
They don't have 40°C in Summer like in Southern Europe, or -20°C like in the Alps.
Riding worked for a particular phase of my life, now it doesn't, since I have a kid to take care of and the bike theft problem has gotten out of control in my locale.
My main gripe is actually availability of bikes in the bike-sharing scheme, since I can't bring up my own in the office, and since I work in a shady area, there's no way I'd leave it outside for the day. I also like the flexibility of not having to use my bike both ways. Think catching a movie or whatever after work and possibly getting a drink with friends. Although this is related to not wanting to leave the bike unattended for any period of time.
But nowadays, with electric bikes, unless you live on top of Montmartre hill (and even then), I think it's no longer an issue. I have a colleague who takes her two children to school on bike before riding into the office (she works in a different office, where they have an interior yard with bike racks). Her bike's got electric assistance and she doesn't seem to arrive out of breath or anything. She also doesn't seem exceptionally sporty.
You don’t need to be fit, just not entirely out of shape — or ride an ebike. You can easily do chores, get groceries, etc. on a bike. I take my kid to school in a cargo bike regularly. It’s faster than driving (at rush hour at least) because there’s no stoplights on the bike path. And rain gear is a thing.
It’s not for everyone but haters always claim it’s for no one. No, it’s just not for you, stop being a hater.
Hence, mostly flat.
If you want to bike fast you can do it when not on the way to the office.
(I once biked in Dallas at 95F. There not getting sweaty might be a challenge...)
People also generally don't arrive sweaty when biking (at least not more than those taking public transportation in the summer).
To avoid being sweaty: go slower to not over-exert yourself, wear less clothing (you might be a bit cold when starting your commute, but that's not a big deal), and if it's still not enough (not fit enough, hills, etc...), an electric-assisted bike might be the solution.
Sirens, people yelling, loud music, construction, etc.
Sirens: valid. But those suckers are usually attached to vehicles
People yelling: not often in my experience. And the usual offender when someone is yelling, it's some doofus in a car yelling at some other doofus in a car.
Loud music: not often in my experience. And the usual offender when there is loud music, it's some doofus playing loud music in their car.
Construction: valid
But the single most frequent / annoying loud sound: car horns. Constantly.
Most of what I remember of European cities, too, when anywhere near the denser parts.
Part of "city noise" is dependent where you're living, and how new it is. Close, cramped, older building with people arguing above and below and beside you? Not fun. Newer building with excellent soundproofing? Nowhere near as bad.
But they're attached to emergency vehicles. The fire department is not going to wait for the bus when responding to a fire, so you can't actually get rid of this by installing mass transit, and then its prevalence is proportional to density.
> People yelling: not often in my experience. And the usual offender when someone is yelling, it's some doofus in a car yelling at some other doofus in a car.
> Loud music: not often in my experience. And the usual offender when there is loud music, it's some doofus playing loud music in their car.
If people are usually in cars then the people making noise will usually be in cars. But it's not as if they're going to stop having business disputes or lovers' quarrels or whatever it is this time just because they're on foot.
And whether loud music is a problem depends primarily on who your neighbors are. In a city you'll have a lot of them and you don't get to choose who they are.
> car horns
Ironically this doesn't happen in the suburbs because there are more roads and parking per car, and thereby fewer traffic disputes and no need to summon someone from a building immediately instead of parking and going inside. So you're now equally making the case for cities to have wider roads and more parking.
However, in Manhattan the city is still very loud with 0 cars. Meaning in the middle of the night in midtown, not a single car, the city itself hums with a constant noise that is not healthy.
Witnessed this during covid when I didn't see a car for hours on a typically busy midtown avenue, but the city is still very very loud compared to a suburban setting.
So, we get rid of all cars, then what? You still live in a noisy city. No thanks.
Credentials: 5 years in midtown, 15 years downtown Manhattan.
But I distinctly remember watching the odd car here and there and wondering where they were going.
And things were quieter! There was the background noise of machinery and buses and cars but it was a lot quieter than even holiday Sundays.
Credentials: 14 years in semi-rural Texas, 25 years in Manhattan
I agree the city was quieter during covid, and would be quieter without cars. It's ridiculous to debate otherwise.
But a major is vastly noisier without cars than any normal suburb with the rare car passing by a residential street.
NYC will always be loud, cars are not.
Sirens
Construction
Buses
Semintrucks / public machinery (trash, etc)
Subway
Belligerent people
Lunatics
Inconsiderate people on motorcycles
Cars
Buildings / HVAC
Cars are near the bottom of the list
More of this, it's fun - when you don't live there: trams running on insanely poorly designed, or maintained tracks, trams running on extremely squeally wheels (see design, maintenance), sirens (running on overtime and at full strength, see screaming people), preachers (see screaming people :-), protests (The birds aren't real!), drummers, motorcycles ("Harleys"), dirt bikes (kids). In San Francisco, cars are the well behaved and quiet group in there.
They also are restricting the use of cars in their city center, which will help force de-car'ing for casual use & make people take efficient less demanding forms of transit.
This should help keep congestion & din from being aggravating!
And yet you live there, which means, presumably, that it's your best option relative to the alternatives. People should be allowed to choose living arrangements that meet their most critical needs, even if they also find reasons to complain about aspects of those arrangements that are self-evidently less important to them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_popul...
The other is that while the buildings are certainly tall, China also does a lot of "tower-in-the-park" style development where the plazas and landscaping in between tall buildings decrease overall density.
This will spell economic worries someway down the road as maintenance upkeep costs start to kick in.
In the 50es through 70es, there was a strong need for extra housing which led to the projects outside Paris ("citées"), to many factories torn down to make space, but also to much higher residential buildings here and there. Still worked fine (well, not many of the citées worked fine).
And people really, but REALLY love being able to walk to their preferred local baker and pastry shop (out of a choice of several of course), and to the local grocery store. The density has to be high enough to support these.
Turns out, high density also allows a great subway system. Nobody complains that it exists.
Let people build 4 units where today it's zone for 1, and if you disagree, you're an out of touch racist/classist/luddite who is just not a visionary and can't embrace the future.
Surely nothing bad is going to happen when you take a subdivision with 30 homes and take just 10 of those and turn them into quadplexes.
30 homes might approximate something like 60 cars and 60 children.
Now instead of 30 homes, you have 20 + 10*4 = 60 homes.
You're now asking infrastructure that hasn't been touched since the 60s to accommodate nearly twice as many people. And I get that not every new unit will also have 2 children, but some will and it no doubt leads to a net increase.
Where as before the road leading out your development had to accommodate 50 cars in the morning commute, now it has to handle more than 100. And this is just a minor inconvenience.
The real issues arise when you've doubled the amount of school children, but the number of teachers hires or classrooms built hasn't increased, and let's not even talk about teacher salaries.
Then there are utilities and other public services (first responders, etc.)
This was just one small subdivision with 30 homes, now imagine this happening across multiple parts of town at once and you can see the problem.
All that is to say, I've never been against building more housing (omg build up! it's so easy!), what I'm against is building more housing without proportional investments everywhere else.
It's a hard problem to solve, I admit it, but that's my whole point. It's hard, you can't just build more housing and call it a day.
Why is this fearmongering? Because your figures are wildly, wildly out of touch with reality. If you legalize quadplexes by right, you're not going to magically see a doubling of housing, there just aren't that many people! That is completely made up bullshit. Fast growing place have growth rates in the low single digits, like 2%/a, not 50%. Growth projections for fast growing regions like the Toronto area have 50% growth projections on the scale of decades. But "If we legalize quadplexes, our 100 home with turn into 102 home next years and there'll be one extra car" just doesn't have the same zing and it's hard to keep the housing crisis going with realistic complaints.
I can just as easily accuse you of moral righteousness, it's not a cover for anything, it's what's happening and with neither you nor I citing sources, it's just your word against mine.
Even then, come up with whatever cutesy numbers you want regarding housing, there are concrete numbers to point to for the side effects. Depressed teacher salaries is a well known issue. Overcrowding in schools is a real issue. Congestion and lack of public transportation is a real issue.
You can argue causality all you want, but if you leave out suddenly overpopulating areas as part of your equation, it's already flawed.
Lastly, you didn't read what I said.
I said it's fine to build more housing provides it comes with equal investments in infrastructure. You conveniently glossed over this fact because your solution of building taller still doesn't address it. So no, build taller isn't the only solution.
Again, reread what I said. I'm not against building more housing. Do you understand that? Again, I am not against building more housing.
All for building out public transportation, all for doing that is required to build more housing.
So either you take a slow and moderate approach to building more housing, which is fine, and will allow other infrastructure more time to catch up, or you make these investments up front with your larger scale development, as long as it's addressed it's all I'm saying.
Not sure what you're so up in arms about.
Going from single family homes to quadplexes does not solve the problem, build taller!
> Now instead of 30 homes, you have 20 + 10*4 = 60 homes.
Not building the houses doesn't make the people go away. What ends up happening is they have to commute in from somewhere else, and
> the road leading out your development had to accommodate 50 cars in the morning commute, now it has to handle more than 100
happens in a different road.
(sure, in the long run people learn not to have children in the West because living space is scarce, and your "doubled the amount of school children" problem goes away)
and most of those downtown high rises in most cities are office buildings. New York is really the exception.
Very large like Columbus Ohio?
https://borror.com/high-rise-apartments-columbus-ohio/
Waterkloof, Maine https://www.booking.com/hotel/za/menlyn-maine-high-rise-1-be...
Pikeville, Ky http://hapky.org/myers-towers.html
However, if we are counting 3 or so story apartments then there are definitely high-rises all over the place like you say.
I'm not sure how you mean that. Obviously you know that many people love cities with lots of tall buildings, NYC being the obvious US example. Clearly you don't like them, but are you saying the busy-ness is inherently bad? If you don't like it, can you leave? Usually, that's an expensive place to live.
Source: Manhattan, NYC
Most new developments are in dead areas because nobody wants to spend time surrounded by ugly, bland and functional architecture.
The metro line was completed, inaugurated, but never opened to the public, and eventually mothballed. For quite a while, it was rumored that they operated trains once a month to keep the system working and maintained, not sure up until when.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWxESIzJhCU [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGIz_zwoALU [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMHW9cEAO78
Its entirely possible to build a new city from the ground up. And starting with a clean slate allows planners to design with the next 10,20,30,50 years of growth in mind. It's very difficult to scale a city effectively without a long-term city plan.
I agree that is a net boon to society. I think the cross drift of ideas is a net positive, the human interaction can create more opportunities for those that have less, I don't think it reduces inequality meaningfully and I'm not suggesting that was a goal only that my prior statements might lead one to believe it does, but I've seen far more segregated cities be without many services during an infrastructure failure, because the people doing those services didn't live there.
There's a big difference between building a tall building with a large uniform floorplate that takes up much of a block and a tall building that is thin, only taking up a tiny slice of a block, and thus allowing sunlight to pass through.
For this reason gloomy Vancouver for a long time mandated point towers, for the purpose of maximizing light.
Paris' status quo of uniform 6 story streetwalls could arguably let in less light than a mixed amount of much taller thinner towers on 3 story podiums.
Here is a low rise area, H represent housing units, _ is the ground
H_H_H_H_H_H
H H H
H___H___H__
Paris is already among the densest places on earth.
The problem comes from the excessive centralization of practically everything France has, in Paris, leading to an overpopulation of the entire Ile de France region, which drive prices in Paris itself to the roof.
So rich people need poor/middle-class people to keep cities alive?
Maybe they should start charging for that ...
Let's call it "taxes".
So since rich people need baristas to serve them Starbucks, tax them to enable the barista to live near where she works.
It should work.
That's a good characterization of what's happening. But is subsidizing people to be service workers for wealthy Parisians a good public policy and good use of public funds?
Wait, that's actually what we have now.
Given that each of us is allotted exactly 8,760 hours in a year: Is it good public policy to force non-wealthy people to spend so many more of those hours in commuting than those who can afford to live closer to their jobs?
I live in a small, separately-incorporated city, a few minutes from downtown Houston, that has become increasingly wealthy. For several decades, the affordable bungalows built in the years following 1930s have been torn down and replaced by big houses. (Yes, my wife and I did that to build our house, more than 35 years ago.) Nowadays, though, many really big single-family homes are being put up on what used to be two-, three-, and four single-house lots. I get disgruntled every time we walk by one of those giant houses, because every one of them is, in effect, forcing two or more less-wealthy families to live further away — they're hoarding the space.
(My own thought is that for big, space-hoarding houses like that, property taxes should be progressive, so that such a house might be taxed at 2X, 3X, 4X, 10X the per-foot rate of houses on smaller lots.)
Wouldn't it be better to direct public policy and funding to helping create jobs elsewhere and leave the wealthy urban people make their own coffee?
That’s certainly worth exploring too. But there’s a reason I no longer mow my own lawn nor do my own auto maintenance: I flatter myself that I’m now more productive for the larger community when I do work that uses the skills I’ve spent years developing.
The cost of the necessary subsidy is calibrated to fall on grubby new-money high earners, so it is effectively free for the long-established propertied class who don't need much taxable income & locked in their property taxes long ago.
Liberalizing the market doesn't always work, even in the most dense economic liberal cities, the best environment for sustainable affordable housing is depopulation or some sort of recession or economic stagnation.
Note, by the way, that this inflicts real psychological damage, and perhaps we could also make the case that this should be financially compensated.
It's much easier to make sure middle and upper middle class people interact with the poor and such, but once you're rich enough to hire an assistant, you're rich enough to avoid most anything you don't want to deal with.
Is that a bad thing?