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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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 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.