Fuck Cars
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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Lets go a step farther and put that bus on tracks, which will make it even easier and safer to implement self driving.
Tracks are cool but kinda difficult to cover the suburbs with them!
You know what, you're right.
We should knock down the suburbs and use that land for sustainable energy generation, food production, or let it re-wild to support conservation efforts!
I'd be with ya except for one tiny issue, living in high density housing sucks ass
Could we/should we condense suburbia down? Absolutely. Should we get rid of it entirely in favor of high density? Fuck no
High density, which in my opinion starts with mixed use apartment buildings have business underneath them on the ground floor, are way better than suburbs.
Mixed use allows for businesses to integrate with the community in literally the same footprint, which adds walkability and drives commerce. Plus, the more mixed use you have, the easier it is to have laborers live closer to their place of work, reducing commute time and costs while promoting more balanced lifestyles.
Obviously mixed use is one solution of many, but there are so many benefits to higher density living compared to suburbia.
Don't think we're in disagreement, btw
My issue is more on the "apartment building" aspects. Apartments suck, sharing walls/floors/ceiling with others sucks. Lots of apartments means lots of opportunity for just one apartment to get infested with something that will quickly spread to others even if they do nothing to attract said pests (e.g. keeping a really clean place)
Or just one dumbass flooding the place or a fire breaks out
Apartments also means constantly having to worry about being too loud or dealing with others who don't care
If there's a version of high density that also allows for Single Family Housing for those who want it, id be cool with that
I think all of your complaints can similarly be made in suburbia. You may have a neighbor that's drunk, and plays music loud into the night. Someone may have bright flood lights that shine over their yard into yours. Someone may grow a certain plant that's invasive, and it travels by wind to your yard. The wood the neighbor 3 hours down installed attracts pests, which could make their way to your house, eventually. Someone could start a fire, and the wind carries it to the neighbors next door or next street over, like what we saw in California earlier this year.
While yes apartments mean we all live closer together, that doesn't mean people will be twats. People can be twats anywhere.
The solution to this obviously is to live more and more rurally so your impact is less and less to your neighbors. But that sounds antithetical to your beliefs. And no, regulating people's lives with HOAs isn't the solution. HOAs suck.
There is single family, high density housing. Explore your closest big city. The closest one to me is Chicago, where a lot of the northern neighborhoods have super dense, single family homes.
It's called decent quality. All the problems you mentioned fall back on every corner being cut in our profit-driven societies. Just because you're in an apartment doesn't mean that ANY of that should ever happen. We somehow have giant buildings housing dozens or, rarely, hundreds of companies, and they have protective measures in place for fires and water damage.
High density housing comes in many forms, and all of them suck way less ass than suburbia.
Suburbs ditch all the convenience of a walkable, urban environment and replace that with all the transportation woes of living out in the boonies.
High density isn’t the only alternative to suburbia. Walkable villages — the way people lived pretty much everywhere in Europe outside of Paris, London, Berlin etc. — are not suburbs but they’re also not high density apartment blocks.
The difference between a village and suburbia is specialization. Suburbia is specialized to housing only whereas a village is a self-contained community with both housing, small businesses, an industry or two, and surrounding wilderness as well as agricultural land.
Villages are not sprawling, they’re fairly small, and they’re connected into a network of other villages as well as larger towns and cities. In the past, this connection was via a road network (usually unpaved dirt roads for walking or horses, but some cobblestone roads too). Today this connection could be via train and even high speed train.
The real problem though is that we can’t just start over. We’re stuck with the infrastructure and planning choices we already made.
"High density" doesn't just mean high rise apartments. Your example of a small, walkable village with combined/mixed-use space necessarily has high density housing. High density housing just means housing options that reduce sprawl and make public services easily accessible, usually by foot.
So we agree that sprawl and specialization are the problems, which is the important bit. I was being hyperbolic when I suggested we knock down all the suburbs, but I do think that suburbs are a terrible way to plan a community, and we should stop building them now and convert the ones we have into denser, more walkable communities.
Or maybe we could rip all the car sewers out and put a nice park in instead. It would make high density housing a lot nicer, yah?
High density is pretty sweet. I walk outside and there's like 3 groceries within a short walk. Sprawl and wastelands kind of suck
Have you seen any of the mixed use suburb development concepts? I think they're really cool, basically a whole block that has a wide range of housing options and amenities all self contained from single family to apartments
If it's high density with the option of single family housing integrated, I'm fine with that. I just hate apartments