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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32949 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 27, 2023

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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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