I'm from Glasgow, Scotland myself and I've never been to US but I've done a fair amount of research. Our societies differ a lot if it goes to moving around. I can normally walk around the whole town(600k people). I take the public transportation when I'm lazy.
I am always amazed when I hear from my US friends "you have to have a car otherwise you can't get anywhere" or "there are no sidewalks". Wow. In Europe most of the cities are a lot more densely populated than in the US which cuts costs, but even though there is more people packed in the same space(lots of people live in flats), they don't mind bacause everything is close and they save their time. And green areas? Why have a back yard when you have a park 5 mins away.
It's interesting how the standards of living differ between us. It seems to me that a lot of people crave a suburbian house in the US. I'd love to live there for a while to get a feel of the society and why it thinks in this way.
There's a TED talk I stumbled upon some time ago - only 5mins but perfectly approaches part of the problem we are discussing here ;) "How to reinvent the apartment building" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-KnaYZJg48
If you want to compare to a similar city in the US look at Portland, Oregon. The city proper has 500k ~ 600k (~2.5m if you count the 'metro area' -- for comparison Toronto Canada has ~2.7m people in the city proper).
Berlin is a bit like a US city in term of sheer surface area. But the individual neighbourhoods are much more livable and self-contained and the S-Bahn (suburban trains) efficiently connect all the sprawl. The individual neighbourhoods also have fairly efficient grids compared to US suburbs and usually higher densities (taller buildings, more multiple-tenancies).
I've not been to Scotland specifically, but I've been to other parts of the U.K. and Ireland and most of Western Europe and I've observed this difference, in most of Europe, the cities tend to have an ancient core, often surrounded by a pre-car secondary core, surrounded by an post-car/post-war dreary apartment ring on the outskirts.
The two inner cores are pedestrian dreams, for obvious historic reasons, but automotive nightmares. The wealthier parts of town tend to be in these inner cores, and the low-end workers tend to live in the outskirts.
The outskirts areas of European cities are generally pretty abysmal by American standards. Unkempt, graffiti-filled, feel dangerous. This is where all the train yards are. They remind an American of what we call "inner-city" projects, only they surround their home city.
Because of the income levels that live there, and being tightly wrapped around the more prosperous inner cores, they are however, better informed by the pedestrian friendly natures of those inner cores. So they usually have great integrated bus service and passable mass-transit (if the city has it).
The reasons for this outer ring are numerous, but it's usually a mix of rapid construction after the war (people needed houses, FAST), mid-century social experiments (public housing projects), and the inertia created by those two things.
What's outside this ring? Generally farmland, dotted with small towns and villages. I've never seen density drop off in the states as quickly as I do in Europe. You're in a city and then you're immediately in the countryside -- there's very little transition. It's not true everywhere in Europe. But it's fairly consistent.
Cities in Europe are also pretty close, Glasgow to Edinburgh is ~1hr driving. Glasgow to Manchester is ~3.5hrs, to London in 6.5, and Paris in 11. If they weren't so close, inter-city transport would be unbearable. But because they're so close, national rail ends up working like commuter rail and you can hop a train from Glasgow to London in 4 hours.
Heck, Glasgow to Kiev is 31 hours, or about 4 days of driving.
Or here's a trip I did once in Ireland. Dublin to Belfast to Dublin to Galway. It crosses the entire country a couple time and the whole thing takes around 6 hours.
Virginia has 3 major urban areas, the North (near Washington D.C.), the Capital at Richmond, and the South Eastern Coast around Norfolk.
The North of Virginia is a bit like London, a continuous conglomeration of several adjacent areas and small towns and cities. It has about 3 million people in it, but it's worth looking at a piece at a time:
Arlington, VA has about the density of Glasgow, has several interesting neighborhoods, is highly walkable, has subway service, buses, is bikable.
A walk from Celtic Park to Ibrox Stadium in Glasgow will take you about 1.5hrs. While a similar length walk in Arlington from the Potomac Overlook Park to the National Cemetery takes you about 1.5 hrs. Here's what the core looks like from the air (the circles are areas around the subway stations) https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3d/Arlingto...
It only has about 1/3 of the population of Glasgow, but most purposes it's a fair approximation of a place like Glasgow in the U.S. If you figure in Neighboring Alexandria, VA (also part of the North), you get even closer to an American Glasgow. It's every bit as reasonable a place as most European cities.
But Arlington and Alexandria aren't particularly important areas in the U.S. They're just parts of the Washington D.C. metro area, which has around 6 million people, the 7th largest in the U.S.
Now drive 2 hours South to Richmond, which by American standards is old, founded in 1737 (before the U.S. existed!) And even though it's half the density of Arlington and Glasgow, is still highly walkable in most of the city. It doesn't have a subway, but it has extensive bus service, a major university, government buildings, etc. It feels like a small European city in those ways.
Go 2 hours East and you end up in Norfolk, which is basically a conglomeration of military bases and ship builders. With about as much thought put into city planning as that sounds. It's not very walkable, suffers from all of the criticisms ever levied against American cities, requires a car to get around etc.
Now what's in the rest of the state? Farmland, small towns, villages. But Virginia doesn't have to rely on Virginia for farming. There's a million square miles in the middle of the U.S. that do nothing but grow food, and most of that land sits unused, and unfarmed.
So most of Virginia's farmland is nonproductive. It sits there unused and non-productive. So what do you do with a bunch of cheap land that's only costing farmers money? You sell it, chop it up and offer houses to people who want to raise families outside of a city, but don't want to live in the isolation of the wilds. You create suburbs.
So 2 out of 3 ain't bad. I've just described 2 minor American urban areas that are as reasonable as most places in Europe. You can even take a train between them.
Suburbs are not a uniquely American thing. As European agricultural productivity and economic integration has increased, American style suburbs are also becoming popular in Europe.
I kinda have mixed feelings about it (and I plan to move out even further, since my job allows remoting.)
The thing is, money "lost" are spend on wages for people building roads, infrastructure, houses, etc. And this type of work more often done by local workforce, not some international company with bank accounts in caymans.
So... how exactly money are "lost"? Lost by whom exactly? People found jobs, which otherwise would not exists, and more infrastructure is built. Which in turn bring more people to live there, which in turn brings more local jobs (i.e. mom-n-pop AC/plumbing/electric company, Homedepot, etc)
And built roads are not quite wasteful too - as far as I know roads drive economy, not subdue it.
The other thing that this article ignores is that not everybody wants to live in an urban setting. Indeed, I suspect that to the people who live in the suburban sprawl, the money doesn't appear "lost" at all - in fact, they probably see it as money well spent for what they consider to be an improved standard of living. Personally, I live on 11 acres about 15 miles and a 17 minute drive from work. Although I could have a 5 minute, 3 mile drive if I felt like living in the 'burbs (my employer is located in the suburban part of town), to me the additional cost and time that I spend on transportation is well worth it (I don't particularly enjoy having neighbors any closer than a few hundred meters/yards, and my wife enjoys keeping a couple of horses). I suspect that those people who live in the suburbs enjoy their 3/4 acre lots with enough space to put in a swimming pool and a McMansion (say what you want about them, but McMansions are nice places to live ... although I live in a relatively modest 1500sqft/140 m^2 house). "Different strokes for different folks" really seems to apply here.
All the man-hours and natural resources spent building all those roads and paying for all that gas to move around on them could have instead gone to expanding production.
For instance, funding new companies, scientific research, and so on.
That is the point of the article.
Of course, the article is fallacious in that expanding production is not inherently better than consumption, so consumption is not necessarily "wasteful."
If people had preferred to live in an apartment and invest their money, they would have. Other things being equal, suburban sprawl reflects peoples' economic preferences. People are willing to pay for all the resources to make suburban sprawl possible.
Once it's built out, a portion of society is forced to dedicate their careers and extract public funding just to maintain the existing status quo of the infrastructure.
Consider what a large city budget could be spent on if a large portion of it didn't go towards maintaining the roads, maintaining the streetlights and accompanying infrastructure, and hiring extra police force to properly cover the expanded driving area.
I live in NYC, but I grew up in the Florida panhandle, a mile down a road from the main highway, at the beginning of which had no houses in sight, and passed about 5 visible houses on the way home. There was one house visible from our ranch-style house. To the side and back was swamp. To the front was all woods. I walked in the woods, stepped on ant hills and got bitten, and found rattle snakes, cotton mouths, mocassins, and garter snakes. Mosquitos, yellow flies, biting gnats, and horse flies combined to ensure that I would always have a few red splotches and bumps on my body when I came in. We even found gators once in a while.
We made long-time friends with a family a mile away by road, but I could get there in a quarter of a mile or so by woods and swamp. The trick to walking through the swamp was to try to step on clumps of grass sticking out of the muck. I would come across rotting tree trunks and knock them over to watch the termites. Sometimes our outdoors cats would join me and follow from a distance.
My dad drove 30 minutes to work, about 25 miles away, where he struggled to run a discount auto-parts distributorship employing too many people to be profitable. My mom stayed at home with me and my little brother.
My friends loved coming over. If we walked far enough past the swamp, we would be on the bay, which smelled kind of funky for being fresh-water, too far from the sea water to be even brackish though. It was just us, and maybe our neighbors who mostly stayed indoors. We didn't worry about break-ins. We left our door open a lot.
I currently pay a lot of money for a doorman for that kind of sense of security in NYC. As for being able to walk in the woods by myself, that's just about impossible, and you can't put a price tag on it. Unless I'm home alone, there's almost always someone in my field of view. I'm kind-of used to it, but a lot of people have a visceral distaste for it. Seems like I can't even get to work without getting into a subway car that smells like something died in it.
An economist might not have a direct way to measure the value we created for ourselves, but you might say we created a lot of value for ourselves by living where we did.
An individual with the choice of living in the city or in suburbia is faced with a conundrum. Although you would think that by living in the city the individual will save money by expending significantly less natural resources and dramatically lowering his carbon footprint, it ironically costs him less money to do the exact opposite by living in the suburbs. This is because if the individual chooses to live in the city he must pay an extraordinarily high commission in the form of capital gains or rent to land lords. From a financial standpoint living in the suburbs is the only rational choice.
This type of counterintuitive behavior only occurs because we live in an era where oil is dirt cheap. This is the only time in human history where living farther away from the city is actually cheaper then living closer to it. Before the advent of the automobile, urban infrastructure centered around walkable cities as you will see throughout Europe. One day, as we start running out of oil, the suburbs will become the new ghettos.
In the last decade, that's exactly what's happened in NYC. young college graduates have flooded the city, pushing poorer people to the outskirts, and unlike their parents have not chosen to retreat to the suburbs to raise kids.
One time inner city ghettos like Bushwick, Bed-Stuy, and Crown Heights are gradually being gentrified into middle class neighborhoods. Property values are even rising in what were once the most entrenched slums, like East New York.
Meanwhile, the inner suburbs are beginning to decay as middle class professionals no longer move there to raise families. Low income residents displaced from the inner city are being pushed into these areas where rent is low - but still not saving money because they have to buy a car and pay for gas just to get groceries, and if they take transit to work it's now the 3-10x more expensive commuter rail rather than the affordable subway.
The outer suburbs where McMansions dominate are still thriving, but a few years ago I drove around the middle ring suburb where my dad grew up. In his childhood and even in mine it had been a solidly middle class Levittown clone. Tidy homes and yards, well-kept strip malls, and all. Now it's a textbook example of suburban decay. Entire blocks of houses that desperately need paint jobs and repairs. Deserted parking lots in strip malls with half the storefronts empty and the pavement cracked so badly a small child could get lost in the gaps. Independent businesses boarded up. Old people pushing grocery carts along nearly deserted sidewalks -- probably two or three miles each way to the supermarket. Not a pretty sight.
You see the same in Detroit, among other places. A suburb populated by wealthy or even middle class taxpayers can afford to keep up the infrastructure and economic engine to make it a pleasant place to live. One populated by low income people can't -- it soon becomes unlivable. That's going to be a conundrum for us to solve in this century. I hope we address it by building upwards and expanding public transit to make city-style living affordable again for everyone (which would also be a more efficient use of taxpayer dollars than repaving thousands of miles of roads and keeping up sprawling electric and water/sewer lines in suburbs where people wouldn't live if they could afford the city), but fear we haven't the political will to do so.
Only short-term. Once you factor in gas, ownership of multiple cars, etc it's cheaper to live in the city. Doubly so if your time isn't worthless (time sitting in traffic is working for free)
Nimbys are causing havoc in Austin. My old VP bought a giant house on the west side of town and now wants to prohibit building there so as to keep up land values. There are also lots of groups that dont want high rises, etc. Property prices are shooting up now.
This is not something I see in a city like Chicago. Even with a thinning population in the city proper, there are a wide variety of jobs reaching out from the city to the suburbs and more than adequate transportation with plenty of "walkable" neighborhoods. This is an interesting idea to explore, and I definitely have seen some more sprawling areas in this country (L.A., San Jose), but New York and Chicago don't fit under this umbrella from my point of view.
The article is also a little thin without concrete examples. Looking at other countries, parts of Japan are almost completely connected but this somehow works with the large amount of natural resources they have while also supporting a huge population. Economic measures have to look at more than just the monetary value of things. I know this looks at social and environmental factors, but there are network effects to consider too.
Chicago also has, for the most part, segregated neighborhoods for work and living. If you're wealthy, you can afford to live within walking distance of white collar jobs, if not you're stuck.
Also, Chicago is a bit of an abnormality in the US for paying some attention to cycling infrastructure.
I disagree. If you live in, say Westmont or Downer's Grove and want to get to O'Hare or Midway by public transport, you might as well give up before you start. It's a minimum two hour train journey that involves going all the way to Union station and then to the airport.
It's not just the airports. My wife works at ANL. There are exactly two buses a day which go from our place to the lab. And this is after a ten minute walk. If you miss those, you either have to drive or take a taxi. There are no other options whatsoever.
Maybe public transport works well in the city, but good luck surviving in the suburbs without a car.
Suburbs cannot compete with cities for fresh talent. Most businesses I know are opening city offices to Broaden their candidat pool. Its worth noting that sprawl legends like the Dc Metro area, San Fran and Boston lead the nation in job openings. Suburbs are demographically and geographically disadvantaged.
Suburbs are horribly designed, case in point Irvine CA. Worst place I have ever been too. Giant 8 lane surface streets but still endless traffic. No useful public transit so everyone is sitting in a car.
The future looks bleak for socal unless population normalizes.
>case in point Irvine CA. Worst place I have ever been too.
Ha, no way. If it's the worst place you've been to, then I can only imagine you have not been to many places. Admittedly it lacks good mass transit, but that's true of most of California (I personally would say all, because SF mass transit isn't great either, it just happens to make the rest of California look barbaric - I say this as a proud Californian). And the car culture is especially strong in SoCal. Not to mention Irvine was originally intended to be a suburban community, not a metropolis. A measure was put forth to add light rail a few years ago, but the "not in my backyard" folks voted it down.
It has 8 lane surface streets precisely because of forethought (it's a planned city, btw). Most of the north-south roads have 65 mph speed limits. You don't get that without proper planning and zoning. It operates its own shuttle service independent of the county. Then there's the high ratio of parks, green belts, wildlife reserves, and dedicated bike lanes relative to its neighbors. Demand to live there is outstripping supply, which leads to traffic, which admittedly sucks and hopefully Californians will realize you can't keep throwing more lanes at the problem. I'm in Manhattan now, and sure, Irvine can seem like a quaint provincial town in comparison, but the worst place you've ever been to? Horribly designed? Cue eye-rolling.
My favourite part of suburbs is the grid of street maximally designed to make driving over them less efficient than avoiding them.
Intuitively one would think this decreases traffic but instead it turns the neighbourhood into a kind of watershed where all traffic quickly converges to the same few progressively broader street.
The harder the grid planner tried to inhibit through-traffic, the worse the effect.
Irvine is the business hub of Orange County - more people commute into Irvine than out of Irvine. It has giant, well designed surface streets and very little traffic (compared to the rest of SoCal, especially cities the same size). Irvine is one of the nicest, most well designed cities in America.
[+] [-] tomazz|11 years ago|reply
It's interesting how the standards of living differ between us. It seems to me that a lot of people crave a suburbian house in the US. I'd love to live there for a while to get a feel of the society and why it thinks in this way.
There's a TED talk I stumbled upon some time ago - only 5mins but perfectly approaches part of the problem we are discussing here ;) "How to reinvent the apartment building" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-KnaYZJg48
[+] [-] stevep98|11 years ago|reply
Straight roads, boring 'architecture', giant parking lots between the sidewalk and the retail buildings.
Compare Atherton, UK - nice, homely "typical UK" town with busy high-street.
https://www.google.com/maps/@53.523623,-2.491372,3a,75y,92.9...
Now, San Jose, CA, USA suburbia: https://www.google.com/maps/@37.323192,-121.972195,3a,75y,25...
Boring. Thankfully planners seem to have recognized this, and now the trend is to build high-density housing, and right out to the street.
James Howard Kunstler has a FANTASTIC Ted talk about this subject, which cracks me up every time. Highly recommended:
http://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_subu...
[+] [-] pyre|11 years ago|reply
If you want to compare to a similar city in the US look at Portland, Oregon. The city proper has 500k ~ 600k (~2.5m if you count the 'metro area' -- for comparison Toronto Canada has ~2.7m people in the city proper).
[+] [-] acveilleux|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bane|11 years ago|reply
The two inner cores are pedestrian dreams, for obvious historic reasons, but automotive nightmares. The wealthier parts of town tend to be in these inner cores, and the low-end workers tend to live in the outskirts.
The outskirts areas of European cities are generally pretty abysmal by American standards. Unkempt, graffiti-filled, feel dangerous. This is where all the train yards are. They remind an American of what we call "inner-city" projects, only they surround their home city.
Because of the income levels that live there, and being tightly wrapped around the more prosperous inner cores, they are however, better informed by the pedestrian friendly natures of those inner cores. So they usually have great integrated bus service and passable mass-transit (if the city has it).
The reasons for this outer ring are numerous, but it's usually a mix of rapid construction after the war (people needed houses, FAST), mid-century social experiments (public housing projects), and the inertia created by those two things.
What's outside this ring? Generally farmland, dotted with small towns and villages. I've never seen density drop off in the states as quickly as I do in Europe. You're in a city and then you're immediately in the countryside -- there's very little transition. It's not true everywhere in Europe. But it's fairly consistent.
Cities in Europe are also pretty close, Glasgow to Edinburgh is ~1hr driving. Glasgow to Manchester is ~3.5hrs, to London in 6.5, and Paris in 11. If they weren't so close, inter-city transport would be unbearable. But because they're so close, national rail ends up working like commuter rail and you can hop a train from Glasgow to London in 4 hours.
Heck, Glasgow to Kiev is 31 hours, or about 4 days of driving.
Or here's a trip I did once in Ireland. Dublin to Belfast to Dublin to Galway. It crosses the entire country a couple time and the whole thing takes around 6 hours.
Here's a comparison of Scotland vs. a state in the U.S., Virginia. https://mapfight.appspot.com/scotland-vs-us.va/scotland-virg...
Virginia has 3 major urban areas, the North (near Washington D.C.), the Capital at Richmond, and the South Eastern Coast around Norfolk.
The North of Virginia is a bit like London, a continuous conglomeration of several adjacent areas and small towns and cities. It has about 3 million people in it, but it's worth looking at a piece at a time:
Arlington, VA has about the density of Glasgow, has several interesting neighborhoods, is highly walkable, has subway service, buses, is bikable.
A walk from Celtic Park to Ibrox Stadium in Glasgow will take you about 1.5hrs. While a similar length walk in Arlington from the Potomac Overlook Park to the National Cemetery takes you about 1.5 hrs. Here's what the core looks like from the air (the circles are areas around the subway stations) https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3d/Arlingto...
It only has about 1/3 of the population of Glasgow, but most purposes it's a fair approximation of a place like Glasgow in the U.S. If you figure in Neighboring Alexandria, VA (also part of the North), you get even closer to an American Glasgow. It's every bit as reasonable a place as most European cities.
But Arlington and Alexandria aren't particularly important areas in the U.S. They're just parts of the Washington D.C. metro area, which has around 6 million people, the 7th largest in the U.S.
Now drive 2 hours South to Richmond, which by American standards is old, founded in 1737 (before the U.S. existed!) And even though it's half the density of Arlington and Glasgow, is still highly walkable in most of the city. It doesn't have a subway, but it has extensive bus service, a major university, government buildings, etc. It feels like a small European city in those ways.
Go 2 hours East and you end up in Norfolk, which is basically a conglomeration of military bases and ship builders. With about as much thought put into city planning as that sounds. It's not very walkable, suffers from all of the criticisms ever levied against American cities, requires a car to get around etc.
Now what's in the rest of the state? Farmland, small towns, villages. But Virginia doesn't have to rely on Virginia for farming. There's a million square miles in the middle of the U.S. that do nothing but grow food, and most of that land sits unused, and unfarmed.
So most of Virginia's farmland is nonproductive. It sits there unused and non-productive. So what do you do with a bunch of cheap land that's only costing farmers money? You sell it, chop it up and offer houses to people who want to raise families outside of a city, but don't want to live in the isolation of the wilds. You create suburbs.
So 2 out of 3 ain't bad. I've just described 2 minor American urban areas that are as reasonable as most places in Europe. You can even take a train between them.
Suburbs are not a uniquely American thing. As European agricultural productivity and economic integration has increased, American style suburbs are also becoming popular in Europe.
Here's Glasgow again
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Uddingston,+Glasgow,+Glasg...
and a listing
http://www.s1homes.com/Houses-for-sale/2015031712003303.shtm...
Even the architecture looks like an American suburb!
[+] [-] hippich|11 years ago|reply
The thing is, money "lost" are spend on wages for people building roads, infrastructure, houses, etc. And this type of work more often done by local workforce, not some international company with bank accounts in caymans.
So... how exactly money are "lost"? Lost by whom exactly? People found jobs, which otherwise would not exists, and more infrastructure is built. Which in turn bring more people to live there, which in turn brings more local jobs (i.e. mom-n-pop AC/plumbing/electric company, Homedepot, etc)
And built roads are not quite wasteful too - as far as I know roads drive economy, not subdue it.
[+] [-] danjayh|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] javert|11 years ago|reply
All the man-hours and natural resources spent building all those roads and paying for all that gas to move around on them could have instead gone to expanding production.
For instance, funding new companies, scientific research, and so on.
That is the point of the article.
Of course, the article is fallacious in that expanding production is not inherently better than consumption, so consumption is not necessarily "wasteful."
If people had preferred to live in an apartment and invest their money, they would have. Other things being equal, suburban sprawl reflects peoples' economic preferences. People are willing to pay for all the resources to make suburban sprawl possible.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
edit: though living in an apartment will be more expensive, so that wasn't a great example.
[+] [-] prostoalex|11 years ago|reply
Consider what a large city budget could be spent on if a large portion of it didn't go towards maintaining the roads, maintaining the streetlights and accompanying infrastructure, and hiring extra police force to properly cover the expanded driving area.
[+] [-] aaronchall|11 years ago|reply
We made long-time friends with a family a mile away by road, but I could get there in a quarter of a mile or so by woods and swamp. The trick to walking through the swamp was to try to step on clumps of grass sticking out of the muck. I would come across rotting tree trunks and knock them over to watch the termites. Sometimes our outdoors cats would join me and follow from a distance.
My dad drove 30 minutes to work, about 25 miles away, where he struggled to run a discount auto-parts distributorship employing too many people to be profitable. My mom stayed at home with me and my little brother.
My friends loved coming over. If we walked far enough past the swamp, we would be on the bay, which smelled kind of funky for being fresh-water, too far from the sea water to be even brackish though. It was just us, and maybe our neighbors who mostly stayed indoors. We didn't worry about break-ins. We left our door open a lot.
I currently pay a lot of money for a doorman for that kind of sense of security in NYC. As for being able to walk in the woods by myself, that's just about impossible, and you can't put a price tag on it. Unless I'm home alone, there's almost always someone in my field of view. I'm kind-of used to it, but a lot of people have a visceral distaste for it. Seems like I can't even get to work without getting into a subway car that smells like something died in it.
An economist might not have a direct way to measure the value we created for ourselves, but you might say we created a lot of value for ourselves by living where we did.
[+] [-] dennisgorelik|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crimsonalucard|11 years ago|reply
This type of counterintuitive behavior only occurs because we live in an era where oil is dirt cheap. This is the only time in human history where living farther away from the city is actually cheaper then living closer to it. Before the advent of the automobile, urban infrastructure centered around walkable cities as you will see throughout Europe. One day, as we start running out of oil, the suburbs will become the new ghettos.
[+] [-] cauterized|11 years ago|reply
One time inner city ghettos like Bushwick, Bed-Stuy, and Crown Heights are gradually being gentrified into middle class neighborhoods. Property values are even rising in what were once the most entrenched slums, like East New York.
Meanwhile, the inner suburbs are beginning to decay as middle class professionals no longer move there to raise families. Low income residents displaced from the inner city are being pushed into these areas where rent is low - but still not saving money because they have to buy a car and pay for gas just to get groceries, and if they take transit to work it's now the 3-10x more expensive commuter rail rather than the affordable subway.
The outer suburbs where McMansions dominate are still thriving, but a few years ago I drove around the middle ring suburb where my dad grew up. In his childhood and even in mine it had been a solidly middle class Levittown clone. Tidy homes and yards, well-kept strip malls, and all. Now it's a textbook example of suburban decay. Entire blocks of houses that desperately need paint jobs and repairs. Deserted parking lots in strip malls with half the storefronts empty and the pavement cracked so badly a small child could get lost in the gaps. Independent businesses boarded up. Old people pushing grocery carts along nearly deserted sidewalks -- probably two or three miles each way to the supermarket. Not a pretty sight.
You see the same in Detroit, among other places. A suburb populated by wealthy or even middle class taxpayers can afford to keep up the infrastructure and economic engine to make it a pleasant place to live. One populated by low income people can't -- it soon becomes unlivable. That's going to be a conundrum for us to solve in this century. I hope we address it by building upwards and expanding public transit to make city-style living affordable again for everyone (which would also be a more efficient use of taxpayer dollars than repaving thousands of miles of roads and keeping up sprawling electric and water/sewer lines in suburbs where people wouldn't live if they could afford the city), but fear we haven't the political will to do so.
[+] [-] ars|11 years ago|reply
That is not in the slightest true. Your thing about oil is a red herring.
Urban areas (farms back then) were ALWAYS cheaper than cities.
[+] [-] BrainInAJar|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] enjo|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] javert|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hayksaakian|11 years ago|reply
then you can separate the source of energy from the consumer of energy.
[+] [-] ageek123|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IndianAstronaut|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m3talridl3y|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xigency|11 years ago|reply
The article is also a little thin without concrete examples. Looking at other countries, parts of Japan are almost completely connected but this somehow works with the large amount of natural resources they have while also supporting a huge population. Economic measures have to look at more than just the monetary value of things. I know this looks at social and environmental factors, but there are network effects to consider too.
[+] [-] droopyEyelids|11 years ago|reply
Chicago also has, for the most part, segregated neighborhoods for work and living. If you're wealthy, you can afford to live within walking distance of white collar jobs, if not you're stuck.
Also, Chicago is a bit of an abnormality in the US for paying some attention to cycling infrastructure.
[+] [-] wsxcde|11 years ago|reply
It's not just the airports. My wife works at ANL. There are exactly two buses a day which go from our place to the lab. And this is after a ten minute walk. If you miss those, you either have to drive or take a taxi. There are no other options whatsoever.
Maybe public transport works well in the city, but good luck surviving in the suburbs without a car.
[+] [-] rrggrr|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] javert|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] happytrails|11 years ago|reply
The future looks bleak for socal unless population normalizes.
[+] [-] moogleii|11 years ago|reply
Ha, no way. If it's the worst place you've been to, then I can only imagine you have not been to many places. Admittedly it lacks good mass transit, but that's true of most of California (I personally would say all, because SF mass transit isn't great either, it just happens to make the rest of California look barbaric - I say this as a proud Californian). And the car culture is especially strong in SoCal. Not to mention Irvine was originally intended to be a suburban community, not a metropolis. A measure was put forth to add light rail a few years ago, but the "not in my backyard" folks voted it down.
It has 8 lane surface streets precisely because of forethought (it's a planned city, btw). Most of the north-south roads have 65 mph speed limits. You don't get that without proper planning and zoning. It operates its own shuttle service independent of the county. Then there's the high ratio of parks, green belts, wildlife reserves, and dedicated bike lanes relative to its neighbors. Demand to live there is outstripping supply, which leads to traffic, which admittedly sucks and hopefully Californians will realize you can't keep throwing more lanes at the problem. I'm in Manhattan now, and sure, Irvine can seem like a quaint provincial town in comparison, but the worst place you've ever been to? Horribly designed? Cue eye-rolling.
[+] [-] acveilleux|11 years ago|reply
Intuitively one would think this decreases traffic but instead it turns the neighbourhood into a kind of watershed where all traffic quickly converges to the same few progressively broader street.
The harder the grid planner tried to inhibit through-traffic, the worse the effect.
[+] [-] eclipxe|11 years ago|reply