Why cul-de-sacs are bad for your health
slate.com
slate.com
The answer to why Atlantans drive so much is not that they are lazy, but that they have somewhere else to be. You can lament that walking is good exercise, or you can appreciate the ability to raise a family in a house with a backyard while having a reasonable commute to a Fortune 500 company's world headquarters, a startup community, or a global research university.
Walking everywhere is nice as long as you know exactly where you want to live, you don't care about space, and can afford high rent.
This makes it possible to actually connect useful mass transit to the suburb, which as the article explained, people will use if it's there.
This makes it possible to actually connect useful mass transit to the suburb, which as the article explained, people will use if it's there.
The article says that people in midtown take MARTA to the grocery store... I can confidently tell you that this is incorrect at best. People in midtown drive their car to Whole Foods on the way back from their 15 minute reverse commute to work in another part of town. They will later walk to a local restaurant, bar, the park, or a local grocery or retail store, but it is rare that they will use MARTA except to get to the airport.
The correlation seems credible, but not the causitive. That is, you probably could build developments where cul-de-sacs are common for streets and where mixed use properties are connected by walking paths.
The most likely people to use Marta for groceries are the poor (and assumably carless) particularly from the South of the city (West End). And, I feel like my Publix is the only one located on the line.
I'd add that I ride Marta to get to Lenox, Buckhead, and Braves/Falcons games most often. Friends that live near stations and ride Marta also ride to GT.
This happens is areas of low housing density (single-family homes in Jefferson Park) and high density (high-rises in Lincoln Park.)
That's just blocks away from this:
https://maps.google.com/maps?q=Andersonville,+Chicago,+IL&hl...
The point is these shots are not atypical, it's like this throughout Chicago. Even the "not so good areas" have the same fundamental layout.
If you can live and work entirely in the city limits, public transit might work.
I'd say your experience is primarily with the suburbs, not the city.
In other words, demand for walkable housing / mixed-use development is high. Supply is low. And we should build more.
The article absolutely hits the nail on the head with the point about parking lots. When my wife and I go to Philadelphia, we'll walk several miles from the federal plaza to U Penn campus, window shopping, having lunch, etc. When we go to the mall in Newark, DE, we'll drive from the Costco to the Panera because we literally can't figure out how to cross the road on foot.
The cities built in the 1960's need to be razed and redeveloped with Westchester, NY as a model. There's nothing wrong with having suburbs where you can have a back yard, etc, but structure those suburbs like small towns with retail of their own and rail service into the core city. Actually let people live right next to the rail and retail, instead of surrounding it all with enormous, pedestrian unfriendly parking lots.
In my view it's more complicated than that.
Actually let people live right next to the rail and retail, instead of surrounding it all with enormous, pedestrian unfriendly parking lots.
Yup, that's what people are trying to do[1]. It's unpopular with commercial developers, so local government has to convince them to accept higher costs without causing a lawsuit or driving them away entirely[2].
[1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlanta_Beltline]
[2 http://atlanta.curbed.com/archives/2013/09/04/at-glenwood-sc...]
I like Atlanta. I lived there for 7-8 years.
People in Atlanta drive because the urban planning is a disaster.
Biking would be faster than cars which get stuck in sever traffic and that buses which don't run very often.
https://www.google.com/maps?saddr=Quintas+de+Country+Club,+C...
It is not possible to commute by bicycle since it is illegal to bike along the expressway - the only way to get between Carolina (where I live) and Isla Verde (the next town over).
It has its origins in the 1950's when the expressway was brand new and led to job creation. Nobody dreamed bicycles could be taken seriously as a means to get to work.
I once biked it... about 10 miles in about a 1 hour.
https://www.google.com/maps?saddr=Quintas+de+Country+Club,+C...
This article highlights the parts of the city which are 100% dedicated to parking: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6883589
tl;dr: Cars take up too much space, inflating a city artificially.
Yes, there are a lot of parking lots in Atlanta. As I commented on the original submission, they aren't there because of the market for parking, but because it's an easy use for commercially zoned land while you wait for someone to build a highrise on it. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3514352)
Taking this piece by piece:
> can afford high rent
From the article: "The average working adult in Atlanta’s suburbs now drives 44 miles a day."
The IRS estimates that the average automobile cost about 55 cents per mile. At Atlantian levels of driving, that's almost $700 a month. That's a huge amount of rent money--but I think driving expenses are spread out, less visible, and less predictable, which leads people to underestimate them.
> you don't care about space
Yeah, this is a tougher one, although you can get a surprising amount of space in walkable and transit-able areas--for example, neighborhoods in Portland manage to combine great walkability with quite a bit of space and single-family homes. (It's worth mentioning that these residential streets are laid out in a grid pattern without many cul de sacs.) But yeah, commuting does allow us to live where land is cheap, so if you really need a lot of private space, you might need to live further out.
> you know exactly where you want to live
Well, it depends, doesn't it--the denser your area, the more options you'll have within walking distance. I very much doubt that I have more options within a 15-minute drive of my Orange County apartment than I would within a 15-minute drive in a typical urban center. On the other hand, without a car, my options in Orange County are extremely limited. A city like Boston, where other modes of transport preceded and then occasionally took precedence over the car, has great amenities (including Fortune 500 companies, startup communities, and global research universities). You just don't need to drive to them.
Lastly, the article isn't about "walking everywhere." It's about being able to walk to a grocery store safely and conveniently. It's perfectly possible to walk to the corner store every few days, but hop in the car when you need to travel longer distances.
That doesn't really reflect my experience unless we're talking about really inefficient vehicles. I drive 45 miles a day. It costs me about $140 a month in gas.
I figure gas is ~1/3 or less of my overall costs (and I've had good luck with maintenance on an older car that I don't carry collision insurance on)
You do if you want to pay your rent with them, which is what we're talking about here.
Your oil needs to be changed more frequently.
Wear-and-tear on your car is almost certainly correlated with miles driven, meaning maintenance, repairs, and replacement occur more frequently.
Cars ownership is about more than just the cost of fuel (which is cheap in the U.S. compared to the rest of the world). Sure, maybe the IRS rate is a bit high, but it seems the intention is to compensate for the average cost of ownership per mile, not the marginal cost to drive a mile. Don't trivialize it by pretending to be ignorant.
That said, I tend to live pretty centrally located mainly to make my commute easier, if I could also have nearby (within a 5-7 minute walking distance) shopping etc, I'd really like it. The Phoenix area added light rail (my apartment is actually really close to a stop), but only a limited number of places I need to go are along a nearby route.
Of course, I am pretty lazy... I've been parking farther away on purpose to get more walking in when I go places, including work.
There is nothing magical about big, vertical cities that demands they be horribly expensive. They're expensive because they're rare. They're rare because of city planners who don't push back on developers that want to build sprawl.
Going into a mall hardly qualifies as "being part of a community".
I can understand the allure of cul-de-sacs but perhaps a regular "street grid" system with "pipe sprouts" would be better for everyone. Overall, our American lifestyle is the culprit here. Just compare any small American town with a small Italian town: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fedesk8/7880293850/ and you'll notice what the cause of bad public transit and over-use of cars is. We seem to have a passion for living far apart and having our space.
Most suburbs are just bad design through and through. They're not really optimal at achieving their goals, and they have countless terrible side effects.
The world outside presumably filled with undesirables.
The lack of connectivity discourages through traffic (i.e., undesirables), and meandering streets that run every which way helps artificially draw out the walking distance between any two points, further hobbling any desire or ability for people who walk/take transit to visit (i.e., undesirables).
Suburbs weren't always like this, we had walkable suburbs a long time ago, and in some places we have them again. But the most typical archetype of a suburban neighborhood is an exercise in extremely class-conscious design.
Despite the revitalization of urban cores across the US, the mentality that drove the construction of these suburbs still remains. The thing that jumps into my mind is the furor over Seattle's extension of light rail into Bellevue - a high-income suburb. All of the opposition boiled down to "but the undesirables!".
Until we shake the whole "urban = poor" thing, we'll continue to architect our suburbs in this way.
The trick with mass transit - particularly permanent infrastructure like rail transit, is that you're not really building it for right now, you're building it to shape the future.
My go-to example for this is Toronto, Canada. They built the subway in the 50s and put stations in extremely low-density neighborhoods. Nonsensical at the time naturally, but if you take a gander on Google Maps today, nearly all of these subway stations have evolved mini-cities around themselves, and the surrounding suburbs have realigned to maximize accessibility to the subway station.
Rail transit is always betting on the future rather than today. The question is if Bellevue is willing to redevelop around the infrastructure - or if the disproportionate power held by Kemper Freeman et al will put a stop to it. The natural evolution of neighborhoods around transit infrastructure is not subject to the curation of taste and wealth than has been emblematic of the development of Bellevue until now.
Agree! But it's too late for Bellevue. Its low-end houses are already $500K. It'll take $billions (including plenty for lawsuits) and decades to get stations within walking distance of most people. Better to install next year a more flexible "subway" consisting of buses (Rapid Ride as it should've been).
The plan is for Bel-Red Road to become an artsy light-rail corridor, with densely packed restaurants and condos. When that becomes reality my kids will have mostly only 2 choices: a tiny condo for $500K in today's dollars, or a junky 1950s house for $1 million+. And the city will be a lot more crowded than it is today. I don't think Bellevue will be livable at that point. That's not all the city planners' fault of course.
My go-to example is Montreal's Metro system. I like how they use long buses so there's no loud squealing of metal wheels on rails.
When I was a kid, living in the same city, I could afford the time to burn to spend 2 hours taking the bus to a friends house and 2 hours back (this is in a roughly 4 sq mile city). When its 8 degrees and snowing, or 105 and sunny outside this is not all that bad of an idea... when its 70 degrees you take a bike or walk.
Also make sure NOT to coordinate your local city bus service with neighboring cities. You can transfer between systems, if you're willing to stand in the rain for up to 45 minutes at times and pay two fares of course.
This is how you have a 100K person small city, major suburb of a 4M big city, and yet from my car when I look into passing bus I never see more than one or two teens, maybe an old person, that's about it. Out of 100K potential passengers.
I could take mass transit to work. I charted it out once at about 2 hours each way. Of course I can drive door to door in a bit less than 30 mins... I would save about $2 a day and that works out to about $1.33/hr which is a microscopic fraction of my current pay rate and tolerance for labor to save money. So I drive.
So that's the "correct" way to implement bus service keep everyone on both sides happy.
They also ensure that there are two cars in every garage, guarantee a lifetime of high oil and gas consumption and are situated around big-box stores and malls. It's a very efficient, gilded jail.
Unfortunately dense urban development in my neck of the woods is essentially a forest of towers designed to be dorm-rooms for affluent twenty-somethings. Anything more than 2-bedrooms is absurdly expensive and rare. And the towers are rapidly turning into empty shells. I had to leave the city (and fortunately found a suitable, pleasant alternative) shortly after my wife and I had our first kid. I was terrified that we'd be forced out and into one of these communities.
[1] http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2013/0911/Face-of-US-po...
- Block some of the noise from nearby major streets
- Obscure the view of traffic
- Give the neighborhood a less "uniform" feel (think of how you feel in a neighborhood with 20 identical houses in a row. Arrow-straight roads contribute to that feeling)
- Reduce through-traffic- not because "outsiders are undesirable" but because through-traffic is noisy
- Reduce speeds of through-traffic. Neighborhoods near thoroughfares often wind up battling with cars whizzing through at 45mph; gently tangled roads combats that.
You are right that it can make the neighborhoods a little less walkable (although reduced traffic can make them safer to walk). A nice solution I've seen is shared open spaces in the neighborhood; pedestrians and cyclists can then navigate freely, cutting through blocks as they like.
Wow, talk about putting words in his mouth. He's referring to the status quo for American suburbs where those meandering side streets don't connect the arterials except at just a few choke points and there is no walking connectivity either. Fix those things does not imply "perfect grid".
You're right, he should have said "racism" and tackled potatolicious's bullshit head on and not been so polite.
"A little less walkable" is untrue. Meandering suburban layouts are dramatically less walkable - we're not talking about even the same order of magnitude.
Here's a commonly cited diagram of the difference in walkability between a grid layout and a sprawl-suburb. Both of these are real places, not hypothetical illustrations:
http://hbr.org/hb/article_assets/hbr/1005/F1005B_A_lg.gif
"A little less" is an understatement bordering on the edge of untruth. There used to be a better high-res version of this map that I can't find anymore - the right side is Ballard, Seattle, I've forgotten where the left side is (IIRC Dallas). The blue is the area reachable by walk from the central starting point in a given time (IIRC 10 minutes at average pace).
Note that Ballard is far from a "perfect grid" layout - there is still ample delineation between arterials and side streets. The grid is also lightly broken up every few blocks to prevent people from speeding right on through, while not making pedestrians go out of the way in the wrong direction.
The notion that sprawl-type neighborhoods are somehow safer for pedestrians (and conversely, grid-style layouts are more dangerous) also doesn't bear out in reality. Dallas, TX (a particularly famously suburban city) has a pedestrian fatality rate of 1.7 per 100K pop. NYC, the mother of all grid layouts (a perfect grid, even), clocks in at 1.8 per 100K. There's nothing to suggest grid layouts (perfect or otherwise) are intrinsically more dangerous to pedestrians.
The whole traffic business also doesn't jive:
> "Reduce through-traffic- not because "outsiders are undesirable" but because through-traffic is noisy"
Except non-sprawl suburbs with grid layouts have been restricting through-traffic for decades. Throw down a few of these: http://www.nowtopians.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/mosaic-...
They're wonderful and keep side streets from becoming arterial relief valves, while allowing you all the walkability and accessibility of grid-based layouts. No chokepoints, no gates, no driver blasting his way through trying to find a shortcut to work. They also do a great job of curbing drunk drivers, who are more likely to get beached up on one of these than in the side of a house.
They look pretty good too: http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8002/7132823357_600fba9ee3_z.j...
Some people even make them into little parklets, though I'm not sure if I'd want to hang out there: http://www.vancourier.com/polopoly_fs/1.577052.1376349174!/f...
People who live in these neighborhoods aren't idiots. This isn't a win-lose scenario - this isn't pedestrians vs. safety vs. noise. We can have our cake and eat it too, in fact many neighborhoods around the country do. Besides the "uniformity" thing, there's really nothing that the sprawl-type suburb solves that hasn't already been solved in non-sprawl suburban developments. You can live in a house with a yard with a BBQ with a deck with a garage. You can have space for all your stuff. You can still walk to the grocery store. You can still save money and take the bus to work without it being a giant pain in the ass. You can still have nice parks nearby and your kids won't go to school in a skyscraper.
The opposite of the sprawling suburb isn't towers full of people stacked on top of one another, it's another type of suburb altogether.
As for "a little less walkable", that was me hedging my speech because I don't know exactly how walkable the worst offenders are, and I consider "how much less walkable" to be tangential to the point I was trying to make anyway. I was not trying to argue that "the tradeoffs are balanced" or anything like that.
It's true that many suburbs, especially the early ones, were explicitly racist (i.e., bylaw-segregated communities), that's not what's under contention. The question is if the physical design of suburbia is influenced by the desire to keep undesirables out, above and beyond any sort of legislative or extralegal measures already being undertaken at the time.
There aren't any easy answers here. I think it's quite self-evident, but obviously there is room for disagreement. One of the defining feature of modern suburbs is the "gate" - the limitation of access points to nearby arterial streets. It's fairly obvious (and even a perk for buyers) that this effectively separates the road network within from the outside and discourages through-traffic. The main claimed benefit here is safety - but from what?
One oft-claimed safety improvement is traffic. This isn't really true as pedestrian fatalities are still comparable to urban areas. But I am willing to accept that people believe they are getting improved traffic safety in these places.
The other oft-claimed safety improvement is crime. The idea is that if you make through-traffic a giant pain in the ass, then anyone who is there who doesn't live there is likely up to no good, and it makes troublemakers and potential criminals easier to spot. This is not illogical - and it agrees with Oscar Newman's Defensible Space theory.
The question is to what extent that is classist. This is where things get murky. We know a few things from the early days of suburbia:
- Cities were experiencing high crime and violence, and suffering from a particularly compressed housing market due to the sudden return of millions of servicemen. This is the primary force that purged people out of urban centers and into newly developed suburbs.
- Only the middle and upper-middle classes could afford cars. Suburbia (in that format) was fundamentally incompatible with public transit. Occasionally this was an enforced incompatibility - see: Robert Moses and the low overpasses on Long Island.
- Suburban developments were explicitly advertised as an escape from the gritty, dangerous cities of yore. Many were explicitly segregationist. I don't think it's at all a stretch to say that separation from the poor (and black, if you want to go there) was a substantial motivator for early suburbs. Like today, personal safety is one of the main selling points of suburbs, the contention is to what extent that was code for "because no poor people here".
- The design of suburban street layouts to minimize usefulness as through-roads is deliberate and an oft-touted selling point. The contention is to what extent this was an aesthetic preference vs. an exclusionary tactic. This is a hard one, since even during those times people were less-than-explicit about motivations against the poor.
The use of street design as a class/crime barrier has been very transparent and blatant in the past - even the recent past. For example: http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1996-05-03/news/1996124052_...
Most other cases are not quite as blatant and clearcut. There is grayness between simply wanting safe neighborhoods and wanting all poor people out.
I wonder to what extent pedestrian fatalities are comparable because kids play in the street? i.e., it is safer but children engage in riskier behavior and it reaches an equilibrium?
If you're driving in New York City, there are constantly people trying to jump in front of you. Out in the burbs you'll hardly ever see someone walking, so if someone walks in front of you, you may have zoned out and failed to detect it in time.
I've talked to many coworkers over the years who live in newer subdivisions without sidewalks. When mcmansions are so close together that you can stretch arms and touch two house at once, and no one has a backyard bigger than my garage, not having people walk in front of your house is seen as a privacy thing. Like, if you grew up in a "normal" house and then got stuck in a mcmansion subdivision and now your lawn is only roughly the size and dimensions of a driveway, you get kind of sensitive about what little you have. They see it as uncomfortable or creepy that I have sidewalks and are even more weirded out about the fact I actually use the sidewalks for after dinner walks like many of my neighbors, so I'm creepy for walking past houses and waving "hi" and stuff. Its kind of like non-nudists don't much understand nudists and vice versa. Which is getting a bit off topic but being a privacy and personal space type of thing is sorta on topic anyway. I think they're also weirded out by the bowl of spaghetti road designs, such that people seem to appear out of thin air 20 feet away and then disappear, unlike a more civilized street grid like where I live (about 60 years old, the house, not me (yet)) So hopefully that data provides some insight.
(edited to add it might be a territorial thing, like a dog. People raised to think 30 feet from their house is "theirs" are going to have weird attitudes about personal space when placed in a house with a front yard thats less than 5 feet deep, compared to a dude who lives on a one acre plot of land)
Why do they have to? I don't see why you couldn't build a more natural walking path away from the street traffic that would be less objectionable to homeowners since there wouldn't be the automotive noise and danger to children.
1. There are far, far more differences between Midtown and Mabelton than urban planning (Midtown is a young, liberal, much higher than average percentage of gay residents, close proximity to Georgia Tech) and Mabelton is pretty much in the opposite direction in every way possible. It is an apples to oranges comparison.
2. A huge advantage of cul-de sacs is that people don't speed down them like they do on residential connective streets, which is a huge plus when you have children of a certain age.
So, you can get the desired effect of the cul-de-sac without the cul-de-sac.
You wouldn't imagine that such a finely delineated categorical segmentation would occur, but it's very visible. Take, for instance, the fighting between Fulton County and the metro/MSA: last year's SPLOST vote [1], the Braves Stadium move [2], etc. all serve to exemplify how polar these two populations are.
Those in the city want regional tax money to improve transportation in and around the city, those outside the city want to be left alone (yet still be able to commute to the city); Atlantans bemoan urban sprawl, suburbanites loathe city spending. It's interesting to watch nothing get done.
[1] http://southernspaces.org/sites/southernspaces.org/files/ima...
[2] http://www.ajc.com/news/sports/baseball/braves-plan-to-build...
Wow, first I'd heard of it. I mean Turner Field is all of 16 years old; probably time for a new one. At least that should alleviate the summer downtown congestion, though I don't believe 285/75 really needs it. There's a section there that I thought I counted 9 lanes. Using City-of-Atlanta logic, I guess it's time for a 10th one, eh?
More on topic, will Cobb now allow MARTA to extend up there now that a stadium is coming?
(from article) > Reed concluded his statement by saying he is “excited” about potential future uses of “the land that is now Turner Field.”
Really. Can't wait to see what he's planning, b/c damned if I'd ever call that section of town exciting.
They are going to tear down Turner Field and do a large infill development project. Turner Field sits on one of the larger contiguous single-owner plots in the city.
There aren't a lot of young white men living in Mableton. It's mostly younger black and hispanic people, and older white people.
My parents are from Mableton,and I live about 10 minutes away.
Cost of "home" in Midtown, $500k: http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/847-Myrtle-St-NE-Atlanta-G...
Cost of "home" in Mableton, $200k: http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/4582-Somerset-Rd-SW-Smyrna...
Midtown, local elementary school is a 2/10 on GreatSchools. Mableton, 7/10. If you want to live anywhere near midtown and have a decent public school, tack on another $150k and you lose most of the touted walkability.
It's strange to build Mableton up as the straw man for Atlanta suburbs since it's only 10 miles from midtown and a ~25 minute commute to several of Atlanta's job centers, and is probably more diverse both racially and economically than midtown. A place like Kennesaw, 20 miles out, 45+ minute commute, and less diverse would be a smarter target.
So much of these discussions seem to be single people arguing against places they've never lived, trying to convince people whose lifestyles they don't understand.
If you took my grandfather's fully rural town in the middle of Nebraska, there isn't much in the way of cul-de-sacs but people still drive everywhere because of - what seems to me - the more dominant issue of population density.
was it really "designed"? To me one of the issues with modern development is that it is explicitly "designed/planned" and thus diversity and vibrancy is naturally limited by the views/imagination of the designers/developers and politicians. (an illustration from another area - it is like "planned" economy vs. naturally evolving/developing capitalist economy)
You're right about low density being the more serious issue. That and zoning forbidding mixed-use and mandating parking minimums.
Where does that figure come from? A lazy guestimate of 1m/stride puts that at 10km/day. That's 2 hours of walking a day. Who the hell spends 2 hours a day walking?
Or maybe run for 45 minutes, or walk to work, or go swimming or do a ton of other physical activities I am not going to bother listing.
Personally I ride mountain bikes in every way possible, and time permitting also as often as possible.
http://walking.about.com/od/measure/f/10000steps.htm
FWIW I live in central DC and walk for about 90% of my total trips (although I have a sedentary job and a short commute), and the moves app says I go roughly 3mi/day, which squares with my intuition looking at a map.
I did find two studies related to amount of walking to show health benefits:
http://link.springer.com/article/10.2165/00007256-199723050-...
http://wlv.openrepository.com/wlv/handle/2436/11110
No mention of number of steps. I think people add it for a way to equate a certain amount of time walking.
I try to bike to work every day and/or walk about 5km in addition to anything else I do (work, lifting weights, etc).
I don't measure (anymore). I just try to move my body as much as I can when I can.
Having several family members with fit bits, I can tell you it's definitely do-able. It adds up more quickly than you think!
1) Its downright difficult to get thru even the laziest day without 4000 or so steps
2) 10K means you "exercised" perhaps an hour. I'm not talking about sprint training but went out for a walk, hiking, etc. Half hour at lunchtime won't quite do it (maybe if you speedwalk?)
3) Its really easy to leave the GD thing in your pocket and wash it. Although running thru a dryer cycle immediately will fix it.
4) low power BT is kind of like NFC. There's apple products, and a couple android devices claim to half A support it but in reality it doesn't work. So in real world practice its apple or nothing for NFC and low power BT aka BT 4.0. And its been that way for some years.
Not to mention the trips to the washroom/photocopier/kitchen/whatever. It's not hard to do, especially if you avoid driving when you can. There are lots of people who spend 2 hours a day driving, yet oddly that doesn't seem as crazy to you?
Healthy people.
My Fitbit defaults to wanting to see 10k steps a day, and 5 miles a day, which is more than 10k steps for my stride. My daily average steps is a bit over 8400 (including jogging for a bit less than 5k twice a week or so), and my average mileage is 3.8. I typically take one walk a day during work, for maybe 1000 steps.
I keep forgetting I've put it to charge and never put it on.
The closest shopping center is more than half a mile away and the one I go to most, and where I go to check my company's mail, is 2.5 miles away. The distances themselves are not so bad, but the main road is a 4 lane highway with a posted speed limit of 55 - but people drive faster. Frankly, the thought of walking or biking along that road is scary from a safety point of view, so yes, in general I drive everywhere. Ironically, if I want to go run laps at the closest city park, I have to drive to that too.
The area that the author is describing is 25 miles away and takes at least 45 minutes to an hour each way by car, so I go there as infrequently as possible.
Frankly the situation is not too bad, because telecommuting is the best work situation ever. The internet beats commuting - be it by bus, train, or automobile - any day!
I don't think aesthetics is really the main point. Older cities like New York and London aren't designed for cars. High rise buildings don't have parking for every home / desk so it isn't an option to have that many cars in the city.
Cul-de-sacs on the other hand are the signature of urban sprawl. If you live in a cul-de-sac, odds that walking to shopping isn't very convenient. You also probably have a car, so why bother?
When I was working there, in a building with ~2000 desks, the underground car park had a spacious 80 spaces. I lived a bit further out, so I actually had a driveway, but if you live in the centre you are lucky to even get on-street parking.
Still, as you say, it makes no sense to have a car due to the easy availability of public transport. It's a catch 22 really :)
Things may be relatively higher in Midwtown than places much further away, but none of it will be "expensive" for folks reading this.
In the US we have high density housing (condo skyscrapers) and low density housing (suburbs) but not much in-between that's nice.
Today these are close-in neighborhoods full of generally smaller homes with yards. They tend to have small yards, as they are generally built pretty close together.
I live in Denver which has an enormous number of those homes ringing Downtown. New Orleans has the garden district and surround. San Francisco fits that bill with the huge number of row-homes in the city(although the costs are nuts). Portland most certainly has a lot of that stock. Capitol Hill all the way to the Queen Anne in Seattle fits that bill. Dallas has the park cities. New York City has queens. Little Rock even has an excellent selection of inner-city bungalows (the neighborhoods are in poor repair, but they exist).
The issue we have in the U.S. is cultural. I think it's a widespread mental disease. We're willing to drive enormous distances, spending huge chunks of our lives in cars, so that we can own giant houses full of rooms we don't even use. It's nuts.
http://www.fs.fed.us/wildflowers/news/images/amelmstreet.jpg
Todays municipalities are shunning urban forestry for miserly xeroscape landscaping. "Native landscaping" is often anything but, and has turned entire neighborhoods and towns into gravel strewn deserts. Obsession over costs has reduced much of America into a series of soulless strip malls and gated communities. Historic districts are today largely devoted to tourists while the rest of America lives in chicken wire and stucco tract homes made by economic refugees rather than craftsman. America is ugly because its people will not pay for beauty.
Regarding smaller yards, a return to < 1000 sq. ft. Sears-Catalog style architecture may be a more aesthetic alternative than heaping up duplexes or townhouses, or heaven forbid, closely packed trailer parks. Also, building codes should be loosened. Nothing kills the spirit of a neighborhood like "military review" uniformity in home construction.
I lived in West Midtown for five years post-college. It's the epitome of hip re-urbanization and all that comes with it. I walked from my house to a local restaurant or shop exactly 0 times during those five years.
I moved to a cul-de-sac in a northern suburb six months ago. I'm 1 mile from 270,000 ft^2 of retail shopping and 1 mile from a walkable downtown with tons of shops and restaurants.
Do I drive 60 miles to and from work every day? Yes. I've also walked to restaurants and shops on numerous occasions. And as pointed out by rkischuk, I live in a house I couldn't begin to afford in West Midtown and we live in good school districts.
If you want to live in a small apartment in a high density area away from cul-de-sacs, good for you. Let me make my decisions based off what I've optimized my life for without demonizing me because we place different levels of importance on different items in life. I am happy spending $33/day to commute in exchange for a walkable area, larger house, better schools and more family-friendly environment.
>> happy spending $33/day to commute
Just curious, how do you factor in an hour+ of commuting per day? For me, that seems like it would far outweigh the costs of moving further away from the office. Time away from kids, time not working/sleeping, etc. Money can be earned or received in investments, but Founder time is a finite resource at the business. Obviously if you're married with kids there are a lot of factors that determine living situation, but in isolation it seems like a false economy.
It seems like just multiplying by your effective comp rate would make this commute far more expensive than living closer. For instance, if you bill at $100/hr, you've just told me your commute costs a minimum of $133/day (~$2,660/mo) [at $150/hr, that's $3,660/mo, etc.]. This should easily cover the price delta between e.g. midtown and 30 miles out. And that's before factoring in the other benefits that come along with not spending that much time on the road every day.
I can't make the math work, I'm wondering how others justify it.
There are many ways to turn this into productive time. Think. Listen to audiobooks/podcasts. Run through a few key work phone calls. Catch up with friends.
I really enjoy my commute.
I'll also point out that while that's theoretically $3660/mo if you aren't productive throughout any of the drive, that's not actually something many people can convert into cash. Many people spend time during the day with various items to unwind or provide a mental break from work. Working more is not always a goal. I don't want all my time to be spent working or sleeping.
You also have to account for where you spend your down time. I chose to live near friends and family in a place I can raise my kids. If I didn't live where I do, I'd be driving out here on the weekend and maybe once a week.
In addition, if you're living in town with kids and you want a quality education, you might be able to bill more $ a month (presuming you're building a business where you're selling your time, which I'm not and I don't want to do), but you're going to spend more money on a quality education or a house.
Everyone has different circumstances. My math works out for me. It might not for you.
It's not optimal, because commercial and residential area are zoned apart, so things aren't as close as they could be, but at least the routes between then are efficient.
I'm a 15 minute's walk from a grocery store, a mall, the elementary, middle and high schools that my house is districted to.
Connectivity counts: More intersections mean more walking, and more disconnected cul-de-sacs mean more driving. People who live in neighborhoods with latticeworklike streets actually drive 26 percent fewer miles than people in the cul-de-sac forest.
I imagine the stats are because folks like to walk a circuit, not walk out-and-back on the same route, because its boring.