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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   33764 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 27, 2023

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The issue with traffic is that more traffic causes more traffic. Freeways are like giant walls running through cities making walking and cycling hard. Car infrastructure takes an absurd amount of space making walking and cycling more difficult. Driving makes every other method of transport far more dangerous. Many parents drive their kids to school because it is too dangerous to walk and the danger is other parents driving their kid to school because it is too dangerous to walk. A person in Houston can't really choose a low car lifestyle in the same way that a person in Barcelona can. Not having a car in a city with a lot of cars really sucks, not having a car in a city with few cars is just convenience.

Public transit works best when transporting relatively large amounts of people relatively short distances. Urban sprawl is absolutely awful for public transit with vast distances and few people in walking distance of each stop. Cars make public transit worse.

Cars only benefit the person in them while slowing everyone else down and making the city worse for everyone else. Car based cities are a giant prisoner's dilemma and the best way to handle the situation is therefore a collective reduction in car usage.

This better than this

Is walking an alternative in the second place? Would you let an 8 year old ride a bike to school through the area in the second photo?

The issue with traffic is that more traffic causes more traffic.

Uh... how? I am severely confused as to how this could be the case. This would imply that cities could generate however much arbitrary economic value they want simply by building more roads and letting the traffic cause more traffic.

Many parents drive their kids to school because it is too dangerous to walk and the danger is other parents driving their kid to school because it is too dangerous to walk.

Is this really true? I would imagine there are more dominating factors in these parents' decisions, such as the desire to see their kid get to school quickly and on time.

A person in Houston can't really choose a low car lifestyle in the same way that a person in Barcelona can.

Is this really true? Downtown Houston seems pretty walkable to me.

Public transit works best when transporting relatively large amounts of people relatively short distances. Urban sprawl is absolutely awful for public transit with vast distances and few people in walking distance of each stop.

See, the reason why not everyone is on public transit (yes, not even in the countries urbanists put on a pedestal like the Netherlands and Japan) is that those people are dispersed over a wide area, so either public transit can't serve everyone or it will get slowed down trying to do so. I know you blame urban sprawl for causing this problem but this is still a problem even in countries without urban sprawl.

Cars make public transit worse.

I don't see how this could be the case, and in general, I'm skeptical of the theory that building one type of infrastructure inherently antagonizes and competes against other types of infrastructure. Such an approach is short-sighted and fails to see the bigger picture.

Freeways are like giant walls running through cities making walking and cycling hard.

Indeed, the Vine Street Expressway cuts Philadelphia in half, preventing travel across it on the North-South streets.

Oh, wait, no it doesn't, because of a neat application of 3D technology called the "overpass", the streets cross the expressway.

Imagine needing enormous amounts of concrete to allow people to walk 20 meters. Overpasses absolutely help, but more people will walk if their outside looks like this. Those overpasses were stuffed with large cars, would you let an 8-year-old walk home from school alone there?

It's not that much concrete really; like bridges, they are engineered to balance weight, strength, and capacity.

Overpasses absolutely help, but more people will walk if their outside looks like this.

Would Philadelphia look like that if it didn't have a freeway?

It would probably be built like cities were built before cars, which is much more similar to the pic.

It would probably be built like cities were built before cars

Why is this probable?

Philadelphia was built before cars.

Before cars, cities were built to accommodate horses and horse traffic, such as horse-drawn carriages. This resulted in wide roads being built, which is not at all like the picture you linked to.

but more people will walk if their outside looks like this.

What is that, some sort of linear prison? Or maybe it's a cruel gaming arena... clearly wheeled vehicles use it, based on the two concrete tracks, so maybe the idea is they come through and the pedestrians have to jump into the little niches to get out of the way?

A place that actually has a culture and where people aren't obese.

This seems very uncharitable. Are you seriously suggesting that "car-dependent" places don't have a culture and people are obese in them? I've seen obese people in all sorts of places; it doesn't seem particularly correlated to "car-dependency". What does it even mean to not have a culture anyway? Culture is simply the way humans do things; it seems impossible to avoid having a culture, even deliberately.

I would absolutely say suburban sprawl is much more atomized, generic and soulless than walkable cities. Suburban sprawl tends to have generic big box stores and consumers who isolate themselves in their cars. There tends to be a lot less community spirit, interactions between people become limited and people isolate more. In a more walkable city people are out moving more and interacting more with the area they live in.

Again, this seems to just simply not be correlated. What say you about Japan, which has a cultural/demographic problem so bad it's the origin of the term "hikikomori", meaning a youth or middle-aged person deliberately socially isolating themselves from society at large? Isn't Japan full of walkable cities? Conversely, suburbs have a culture of their own, not all of them, but many of them do.

Simply put, it seems to me that however much an individual chooses to interact with their environment is completely up to them, and not necessarily correlated with "car-dependency".

If it's like the villages that look just like that I saw in Italy the idea is in the morning vans will drive up those paths to deliver goods to shops before everyone else wakes up. They are not normally driven on besides that.

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