rtlfe

> Do people think they’re entitled to private apartments in the most expensive cities in the world?

If the cities weren't designed to inflate home values to enrich people who got in early, then yeah pretty much everybody could afford an apartment.

The size of the country is irrelevant. The vast majority of personal car trips are within a metropolitan area.

Alternately: there's a high cost to not creating a dedicated bus lane paid by everybody who rides the bus or chooses not to ride the bus because it's too slow.

> Why couldn't you just build transit that's above or below the existing space for cars instead?

It's basically free to paint a lane red and declare that it's only for buses. Tunnels can cost billions per mile.

Sounds like there's no other choice in Kyiv. In any US city there are hundreds of buildings with parking that people could choose to live in if that's what they want.

> Anecdotally certain areas in London shops with parking near or in front of the premises seem to survive better than shops that have no parking at all.

Presumably those are areas that don't have the bikes and buses the article talks about. You obviously can't make driving impossible without providing any alternatives.

A developer would only build a parking-free building if there are people in the area who want to live without cars. Otherwise it would be a financial disaster for them.

1km is a good distance for walking, but you can expand it quite a bit if you have good bike infrastructure and transit. You can bike 5km in 20 minutes at a pretty leisurely pace, which I would gladly do for a good restaurant or specialty store.

> permissive zoning allowing commerce near to housing

Generally people who want to reduce car dependence are advocating for this zoning alongside their advocacy for transit and bike lanes.

This data is old, but shows that despite similar numbers of vehicles people in other countries drive many fewer miles. https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar4.htm

> Where do your groceries come from and how should these people taking care of ensuring you get to eat get around?

What are you trying to say? You obviously don't need freeways and 6 lane roads running through city centers to deliver supplies to stores and restaurants.

This has been shown in studies over and over, but seemingly most businesses thinks their situation is somehow special and actively lobby against their best interest. Even 5th Ave in Manhattan, one of the busiest pedestrian areas in the US has had street improvements indefinitely delayed because businesses are fighting to defend the vehicle lanes.

https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2022/04/08/city-dot-still-mum-on...

> your situation is by far not the norm

Yes I acknowledged this in my previous comment. But it could be normal for every city with some pretty simple changes that no mayor is willing to make.

> Maybe

Good luck explaining that nuance to everybody in the neighborhood who thinks their home value is the most important thing.

> rising prices hurt the homeowner because it means taxes go up.

That depends. Idk how other places do it, but where I live there's a fixed amount of total tax for the year and it's distributed to each home based on its value. So if all the homes in the city go up equally you're paying the same tax every year, but if your neighborhood goes up faster than others, then you're paying more.

> Many people will have legitimate preferences that differ from yours

If your preference means that teachers can't afford homes within city limits, emissions won't improve, infrastructure can't be sustained [1], cars are the only viable transportation, etc, etc, then your opinion should really be discarded by decision makers.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-10-04/how-subur...

Sure, you're making a reasonable choice given the current reality. But it doesn't have to be that way. When I say driving should be difficult, I don't mean just make the roads worse without any other changes. I mean improve active transportation, transit, and housing density/affordability. In the short term, each improvement here will cause some pain in making driving slightly harder, but after sufficient time the other options will be good enough that nobody will miss driving.

> Crappy for cars means crappy for buses which are public transit.

Not if you give sufficient priority to buses.

Cleveland has an excellent center-running BRT line: https://nacto.org/case-study/euclid-avenue-brt-cleveland-oh/

And NYC is starting to implement busways: https://www1.nyc.gov/html/brt/html/routes/14th-street.shtml

> I would rather have 6x more houses that people can AFFORD to live than

Not to mention the huge positive impacts this would have on walkability, transit, climate change, etc.

> Ask yourself if you would like to spend 45 minutes aboard the bus system as opposed to 15 min. in a car

Ask yourself how the options would be different if cities weren't so focused on cars.

Edit: To be less vague - my choices to get to work are 20 minutes on bike basically for free, 25 minutes via metro for ~$100 a month, or 40 minutes by car for about $500 a month in tolls and parking plus thousands a year for the car itself and maintenance. There's no reason this can't be the norm in the US aside from local politicians deciding they don't want it.

> Are you perhaps being a tad hyperbolic?

Not even a little bit. Go read about exclusionary zoning in general or see your sibling comment's link for some reading on Vancouver specifically.

> Is it fair to say that the suburb layout is generally considered ideal to live in?

Is it considered ideal? Maybe. Is it actually ideal? No.

Aside from the huge negative impacts on pricing and equality that we've already discussed there's the environmental impact, isolation, car dependence, etc, etc.

> I would argue that most people would move to a suburb rather than a dense city all other things equal.

This is unfortunately true for Americans and I'd guess Canadians as well. I think this is due to some combination of:

- The absurd "American dream" vision that's been pushed by car manufacturers and other companies for many decades.

- Most American cities aren't actually very good, so most Americans have never experienced the alternative.

- Fox News and other conservative media pushing the narrative that cities are infested with criminals, terrorists, etc.

> Maybe sprinkle in some high-density apartments around to supplement the single-family housing?

Great. This is what would happen if there wasn't zoning.

Idk if you think that statement somehow refutes my point, but it certainly doesn't.

> Changing zoning is pretty short sited if you have the goal of having an area that people love to love in.

This implies that the current zoning was implemented for good reason. That's basically never the case. Most existing zoning was done either to increase property values or to keep out people that the elites don't want to be around.

> but it also takes longer to drive anywhere.

Great. Driving should not be convenient in cities.

> zoning is just one tool among many

Not really. If you don't build more homes, you have to limit how many people can live there. The latter is currently accomplished by money, but could be shifted to lotteries and waitlists if there was strict rent control or all housing was public. Both of those are significantly worse than just building more.

The "local street bikeways" tend to actually be pretty good though. There are plenty of traffic diverters and other calming elements, unlike most North American cities that just paint sharrows and pray for the best.

> If it turns out you have built lots and lots of the highest-density housing and there's nothing affordable in sight even after that, then guess what - you're basically in Manhattan.

Your point is good, but it turns out that a lot of really expensive parts of Manhattan aren't anywhere near as dense as they should be, such as:

https://www.google.com/maps/@40.744212,-74.0017042,3a,90y,34...

It's the same thing. Private car ownership requires suburbs and suburbs require car ownership. In properly dense city areas (not single family zones that technically are within the limits of a city) car ownership is impractical and there's very little of it.

> These small areas of hyper-convenience don’t exist without cars.

That's completely backward. Here are two different takes on how cities subsidize suburbs and rural areas.

https://www.brookings.edu/research/why-rural-america-needs-c...

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI

> Looking at the causes of death in the developed world, I think food (fast, restaurant, processed and junk food + sugary drinks) kills way more people than cars, even when accounting for pollution, brake dust, etc.

A big difference is that I can chose to eat healthy food as an individual, but it's basically impossible to escape the negative impact of cars without a major shift in how government allocates space and money.

> wanting to go somewhere that’s 5 miles away is normal for any place in the world

In pretty much any pre-car city you can get everything you need on a daily basis within a 10 minute walk from home, and if your job is farther you can ride a train.

Edit - For people familiar with the NYC region, here's a 5 miles radius from midtown. https://imgur.com/a/cfIqOvo This is an enormous area, and my rough guess is that 4 million people live in that circle.