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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   37970 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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YIMBY sentiment on this forum has (I think) been mostly focused on increasing the density of existing residential zones. However, it may be worth noting that there is an alternative: converting existing agricultural or unused land to low-density residential use (i. e., continuing to "sprawl"). In this article, a former employee of the libertarian Cato Institute accuses that organization of focusing exclusively on high-density housing, and of smearing as racist people who are not interested in long-term high-density living and clamor for more single-family houses. (In his view, upzoning imposed from the top down is not libertarian, because the existing owners have a sort of property right in the zoning of their neighborhood as a substitute for deed restrictions that could or should have been used instead of zoning codes.)

Wouldn't that just worsen social car dependency?

I don't think he sees "car dependency" as a problem.

Every city in America is a 15-minute city if you take automobiles into account. Thanks to automobiles, the typical U.S. urban resident lives within 15 minutes of more than 100,000 jobs, several different supermarkets that compete hard for their business, one or two shopping malls, parks and other recreation facilities, a variety of health care facilities, friends and relatives, and many other potential destinations and activities. Even the densest cities in the world can’t provide that kind of variety and opportunity within 15 minutes on foot.

An older article:

According to the 2000 census, Los Angeles is the densest urban area in the United States, and 89.5 percent of Los Angeles commuters usually drive to work. Just to the south, San Diego is only half as dense as L.A., and 90.9 percent of its commuters drive to work. Atlanta is only half as dense as San Diego, and 93.5 percent of its commuters drive to work. And Lompoc California is about half as dense as Atlanta, and 94.4 percent of its commuters drive to work. So doubling density might get a little more than 1 percent of commuters out of their cars. That’s not much.

Low densities, large parking lots, and other indicators of sprawl are effects of automotive technology. They don’t make people auto dependent; they enable people to be auto liberated. Density and various design features planners want to impose will have, at best, marginal effects on the amount of driving people do.

Furthermore, even in FRANCE, 69% of urban workers commute by car:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1017215/car-usage-to-go-to-work-by-residential-area-france/

Cars are so popular because they are incredibly useful and greatly improve the lives of those who use them. I find it curious that so much effort is spent trying to reduce the quality of life of car owners, and not in improving the quality of life of non-car owners.

That's because many proposals for improving the quality of life of non-car owners, such as building pedestrian bridges, are ridiculed by urbanists for improving the quality of life of car owners too.

That's because many proposals for improving the quality of life of non-car owners, such as building pedestrian bridges, are ridiculed by urbanists for improving the quality of life of car owners too.

The issue with pedestrian bridges is that unless the road they cross is a freeway, they make the quality of life worse for pedestrians (and better for drivers) compared to a crosswalk, by adding an unnecessary vertical component to the journey. The bridge only helps pedestrians if the baseline is no crosswalk. Assuming that there is a pedestrian route crossing the road with sufficient traffic to justify building the bridge, this is not a sensible assumption. Pedestrians have the same right to cross a road safely that cars in a cross street do, and everyone agrees that cars in a cross street are entitled to some kind of arrangement allowing them to cross at-grade within a reasonable waiting time (generally 30 seconds typical, 60 seconds maximum) - usually a traffic light.

A crosswalk costs less than a pedestrian bridge - even if you install a push-button operated traffic light to fairly allocate priority between cars and pedestrians (as opposed to a zebra crossing where pedestrians have priority at all times). The additional cost to build the bridge has negative benefit to pedestrians (climbing the steps takes longer than waiting for the green man), so it isn't pedestrian infrastructure.

If your response is "But the crosswalk would never be built, but the bridge might be" then you have to ask why. The reason is probably "because it is politically impossible to ask cars to wait for pedestrians the way they wait at red lights for cars in cross streets". If your community is serious about that, then I suppose the bridge does benefit pedestrians, in much the same way that a mugger benefits you if he lets you keep your ID while he takes your cash and credit cards.

Unless the vertical component is excessive (e.g. several ramps), I don't think it's "unnecessary". The pedestrian bridges in Las Vegas have a simple staircase and elevator and they get plenty of foot traffic.

Pedestrians have the same right to cross a road safely that cars in a cross street do, and everyone agrees that cars in a cross street are entitled to some kind of arrangement allowing them to cross at-grade within a reasonable waiting time (generally 30 seconds typical, 60 seconds maximum) - usually a traffic light.

Okay, but this conflicts with many of the positions espoused by urbanists I've seen that say that pedestrians and cars are different and therefore should be treated differently in some respects. E.g. urbanists ridicule when pedestrians are told to make sure they look both ways when crossing the road, even though when cars cross the road, they are taught (at least in drivers' ed) to look both ways too. The standard here doesn't seem to be consistently applied.

In any case, underpasses (which don't have a vertical component) are ridiculed by urbanists too. They also ridicule even at-grade solutions like HAWK signals.

If your community is serious about that, then I suppose the bridge does benefit pedestrians, in much the same way that a mugger benefits you if he lets you keep your ID while he takes your cash and credit cards.

This analogy does not follow. No one is being "robbed" here in any metaphorical sense.

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