It can certainly cause light issues, but I'm not sure why it would cause _congestion_?
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.
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.
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...