I grew up in a high density city overseas and I can see the appeal of both types of city. I personally prefer low density, car centric cities (obviously we need to finish solving the emissions problem from cars, but that's separate).
We Americans are a nation of people who spend the vast majority of our waking hours inside. We go from building to building via car isolated from the world and each other. It’s an enormous waste of land and resources since every building has to have its own parking. Most parking lots at stores sit empty most of the time. It’s unhealthy that we walk so little. It’s unhealthy that we interact so little with those around us. It’s unhealthy that we spend so little time outside. We are a nation of zombies addicted to fast food, rage (caused by living virtually in information bubbles designed by Facebook and others), and a fear of interacting with each other.
The ability to walk in quiet, open spaces with low pollution is one of the top advantages of low density suburbia.
Low density suburbia can, and usually has, plenty of walking spaces with a ton of nature around. I lived in multiple suburban neighborhoods and I was always either within a short (and easy) drive to a park or had great walking areas in the neighborhood itself. Contrast with high density, where you have to deal with pollution, noise and potentially crime just to walk to a park (and in the park itself)
Regarding "fear or interacting", in my experience I have a lot of more interactions, of the cordial and polite kind, with the few neighbors I have in my low density area than I've ever had when I lived in a high density city where you can feel like an ant in a colony.
I lived in a suburb with lots of walking paths and within walking distance of a grocery store. This is a rarity in the U.S. Even on nice days very few people out and about. It was rare for me to encounter more than one person on a hour long walk. While some suburbs have walking paths (and many do not) my experience is that few take advantage of it.
I understand your point that citizens in a democracy get the government they deserve. Choices are not made in a vacuum. Path dependence can lock us into local maxima. A series of rational reactions can sometimes lead to an irrational result. People complain about energy price volatility, traffic jams, and climate change but are unwilling to plan meaningful change. Short term concerns and lack of easy solutions tilt us into the same old ways of car dependency, restrictive zoning, tax funded and congested highways, parking minimums, and ever higher housing prices.
The market doesn't want this, it wants to make the most out of land near cities. It's the government (local) that bans density and mandates car-centric development.
Forget about the emissions issue, I just hate driving and having to depend on its supporting infrastructure (repair shops, gas stations, insurance...) for my day-to-day needs. I live in a US suburb. Can't even get a sandwich or buy milk or see someone without strapping myself into my fucking car. This is no way to live.
If I could, I'd give up ever having to drive again in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, here we have few realistic options given where employers are located and how poor the transportation options that remain. It's a racket.
I moved to SF specifically to avoid having a car. Everything about owning a car pisses me off. Insurance and registration are a racket. Parking is either expensive or miserable. Traffic and seeing how other people behave makes me hate my fellow man. Every time I try to merge onto a crowded highway I realize I’m risking my life.
I’m angry that urban design for decades, almost a century, was planned around these machines. Obviously in rural areas they are incredibly freeing and useful. But having traveled the world I’ve come to realize and hate how peculiarly dependent we are on them in the US. We are heavy outliers among developed countries in how much we rely on cars and eschew public transit. They’re dangerous, expensive, and an annoying. In most cities in the developed world it’s normal to be able to get to a convenience store in a 5-10 minute walk.
Moving to Thailand I haven't missed having a car. I bought a motorbike and that works really well without taking up as much space (though are louder than I like and there's no infrastructure for electric alternatives).
The part that rubs me is in both Thailand and Vietnam, despite Bangkok and Hanoi being dense with inexpensive and comprehensive public transportation, even the current youth generation still want cars. When I ask "why?", it's still about status and other reasons are secondary.
Yeah I noticed in Thailand there's many people living in corrugated iron sheds with a big brand new pickup parked beside it. They really have weird priorities :)
I feel just the opposite. I enjoy driving. It puts me in a thoughtful state and the feeling of being free to take whatever turn, shortcut, or scenic route I want at a whim is great. I don’t look forward to the day a human driving is a weekend, closed course activity for the privileged.
But you can do all those things when walking or on a bicycle too. When I want to disconnect I just had to the natural park in the mountains beside the city I live in. It's huge and there's always new things to explore.
what is your point exactly? I can't literally choose to drive my car anywhere, as I am not the dictator of my local DOT. but there are many pleasant routes that do exist near me, and I can choose to take them any time.
> I live in a US suburb. Can't even get a sandwich or buy milk or see someone without strapping myself into my fucking car. This is no way to live.
Where I live has walkability by accident but the car infrastructure is so massive here, to support as many (probably more, TBH) employees who commute to our area for work as there are people who live here, that it destroys your ability to walk anywhere quickly. The street crossings turn a 10 minute walk, one way, into a half of an hour or longer.
> If I could, I'd give up ever having to drive again in a heartbeat.
Try it. I lived in Chicago years ago, where cars are expensive and inconvenient to own, at least by American standards. I would walk to the grocery store, which was about 4 blocks I guess, about a 10-15 minute walk. So your shop is limited to what you can carry back, so you have to shop every day or every other day, with the walk there, the shop, and the walk home taking the better part of an hour. Every other day or so. And on the way you are accosted by at least one street person asking for money, and with your hands full of grocery bags you feel a bit defenseless. And then there were the rainy days. And the cold days. Not fun walking 10-15 minutes at 6 degrees F with a 20mph wind in your face.
It had its charms, but overall it sucked. I prefer my rural house and easy weekly shop with a car now.
In Copenhagen, I can walk to several grocery stores in 5 minutes.
Although since my 15 minute cycle to work takes me directly past seven (yes, seven) grocery stores, I usually stop at one of them on the way home from work. It is essentially like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYHTzqHIngk
I agree, I moved to a city in Europe and not needing a car anymore feels really liberating. Not having to worry about costs, damage, fuel, maintenance, the stress of driving...
I'd sell my soul to basically never drive again. Once you find yourself In a situation that just works with out driving the concept just seems stupid. To be fair I do my fair share of ubering but at least Im reading or on my laptop while someone else deals with the incredible shittynsss of driving. For me there is no good trip where I have to drive
It means you are dependent on cars for one, which also means insurance companies, gas,car payment, etc... I am actively trying to ditch cars in a car city because of this. You wastr so much space for parking lots too. You interact with a lot less people because you are always at some destination with the journey barring you from interacting with the people of the city. Physical fitness and health is also affected.
It is ridiculous. In order to have food and shelter you need to be dependent on not just a landlord and grocery store but also insurance companies, car dealers, oil and gas companies, DMV/DPS,mechanics,etc... and infractions against driving law can leave you unable to work, get food, go to the doctor (outside of ER),etc... a traditional city does not require a regulated license for teansporation and you don't spend almost as much as rent on transportation. Especially for low-income people, liquidity is important, it is the reason behind why it is expensive to be poor. Think if all the tragic social cost that can be avoided if people can instead spend money on their other needs instead of cars.
I read somewhere how car makers bribed and played dirty to prevent things like rail cars from being adopted by cities. To me it relfects on how much corporate-run the city is.
From what I can tell, depending on the "car lord" is getting worse and worse too. There may have been an era when cars got more affordable due to greater reliability and longevity. I'm concerned that the car makers have figured out how to defeat that idea by charging fees to use the electronics in your car, and that servicing the batteries is going to be a rent-seeker's heaven.
This is why it's so important to own and maintain the good older vehicles. Resto-modding reliable chassis like 1990s Lexus LS should become more popular. Developments in rapid prototyping, additive manufacturing, etc... all make this easier. I'd love to see more open-sourcing of aftermarket parts as well.
But then again, I'm a weirdo who pulled out a car's entire wire harness to install a CAN-BUS system and solid-state power distribution modules....
Putting all preferences aside, American suburban living is fiscally unsustainable and supported by massive borrowing.
That’s one major reason American infrastructure is so bad. Towns have to balance their books, and that means they cannot afford to maintain their infrastructure until the federal government, which is not legally required to balance its books, borrows a ton of money to give away for basic infrastructure to be maintained.
>Putting all preferences aside, American suburban living is fiscally unsustainable and supported by massive borrowing.
This is commonly stated but is not backed up by any real world evidence. Infrastructure costs are on the order of 10-15% of government cost. The cost of government is almost all in paying salaries (and pensions) to employees providing services. Governments that have gotten into fiscal trouble are there because of ballooning pension cost.
I don’t think this makes much sense. It’s mostly big cities like Chicago or Boston (still dealing with Big Dig debt) with trouble financing themselves, suburbia seems to do very well financing itself with its property tax base.
> American suburban living is fiscally unsustainable and supported by massive borrowing.
These are city dweller opinions, and they're not going to change continued suburban and rural development.
Suburbanites shouldn't have to pay for city subway and potholes. Those are city problems.
Suburban and rural land is cheaper, the air is less polluted, and the low crime environments are ideal for raising families. If people want to live there, it's their prerogative.
You can buy a 2,000 square foot house for your family in the suburbs at a cost lower than a 700 sqft box in the city.
With remote work, it's not even clear that cities are an essential construct anymore.
"Suburbanites shouldn't have to pay for city subway and potholes."
Then city residents shouldn't have to pay for the roads that make car-centric suburbs possible or the various subsidies given to rural residents. Honestly, one of the benefits of civilization is that we help each other out even when it does not immediately benefit us as individuals. Rural and suburban life would not be possible without cities, and cities would not be possible without rural and suburban residents.
Cities form naturally because of industrial operations that are more efficient when they are concentrated in a single place. Remote work changes nothing about it because there are still plenty of jobs that cannot be done remotely, including many of the jobs needed to support remote work (e.g. data centers, warehouses, intermodal terminals). Suburban life depends on industries that make no sense in suburbs or whose presence will ultimately transform suburbs into cities.
If suburbs were as superior as you suggest, cities would not be growing and real estate in cities would not be as valuable as it currently is. People are choosing to live, work, and raise families in cities more than they are choosing suburbs. Remote work has not changed anything and will never change anything. COVID-19 led only to a transient spike in demand for suburban homes that is already declining as people realize that the pandemic is already in its final stage.
Migration patterns overwhelmingly demonstrate that people are migrating from high density cities to low density, "hardcore suburban" cities. In the US, high density living is a boutique lifestyle choice that is constrained in the offer side (NIMBY), thus the prices. The fact that there are people willing to pay for this lifestyle doesn't mean that they are a majority, or even a significant percentage of the overall population.
Is this really true though? Every infrastructure project in cities seems to cost billions of dollars (Boston’s Green Line Extension, New York’s 2nd Avenue Subway). It would take quite a lot of suburban road, gas, electric etc infrastructure to add up to anything close to that.
The infrastructure costs in cities are more expensive but service many more people and economic activity, they are amortized much more efficiently than a suburban bridge to nowhere.
Is this true? As a case study, Boston’s population is about 700k, call it a million people living in a genuinely urban environment in greater Boston, of a metro area of 3 million. I think there’s more suburbanites than urbanites in most American metros.
Where do the suburbanites work? That tunnel, rail, or subway is allowing who to get into and out of the city easier?
> The Green Line Extension (GLX) project will extend the existing MBTA Green Line service north of Lechmere Station and into the communities of Somerville, Cambridge, and Medford.
> The Green Line Extension (GLX) is a construction project to extend the light rail Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) Green Line northwest into Somerville and Medford, two inner suburbs of Boston, Massachusetts.
I’m not familiar with the Boston area, are Medford and Somerville mainly urban extensions of Boston?
They cost billion of dollars but they are also supporting places that also pays a lot more taxes.
With suburbia, you get low cost infrastructure, but also low tax revenue. You better hope that your tax revenue exceeds the costs of supporting suburbia.
> Cities are subsidizing your excessive consumption and land use not the other way around.
You're making value judgments about me, and they're not even factual. I happen to live in the city. I just see the value of suburbs and the incredible waste, inequality, and ineptitude of cities.
Servicing suburbs isn't expensive. With wind and solar, they'll grow even cheaper. Suburbs often have their own municipal water supplies paid for by their tax base. Roads aren't as expensive to build or maintain, and many people own trucks that can drive on dirt, gravel, and potholes.
Cities have pollution that contribute to cancer and pulmonary diseases. Noise that increases stress. Busy people that have less sense of community.
Name a city where an average American can even afford to buy a home.
I didn't intend to, I meant cities are subsidizing suburbia.
You sure went off on a tangent and didn't address a single point, correctly - but mostly at all, I or the article made. Pipes are expensive, underground utilities are expensive, roads are expensive. All of those things scale much better within a city and its population & density. Servicing suburbs IS expensive compared to cities. Water is typically metered and paid for as a user rate not from the general tax fund.
Sense of community is on you, not where you live. Either you're not getting involved or people don't want to be around you.
You are talking right past me to be heard, with subjective facts, not to have a discussion.
Where is pollution coming from? Cars generate lot of noise and pollution when they through city streets or on highways. Motorcycles can be especially loud if nobody bother to muffle them.
This is a reference to the NIMBY/YIMBY fight, where the YIMBY position is that most non-single-family-home developments, other than the super high end, have been effectively been made illegal through a combination of zoning laws, neighborhood review processes that add extraordinary costs, unreasonable requirements and delays, and other arbitrary veto points.
Cars are the main source of noise pollution and air pollution in cities, nothing else comes to mind. Factories and such were either moved to other continents, or zoning was updated to ban them in population centers. I guess fossil fuel combustion contributes as well, but that's on its way to becoming less of a problem.
Why should cities be expected subsidize rural and suburban living? Those higher infrastructure costs are rural and suburban problems, no need for states to transfer tax revenue simply because cities make more money for less infrastructure costs.
You’ve set up a bit of a straw man argument there. The person you’re replying to isn’t saying suburbanites should pay for city potholes, they’re saying suburbanites need to be able to pay for their own (suburban) potholes, and the ugly truth is that suburban infrastructure maintenance is economically unfeasible. Suburban development has only progressed as far as it has via ponzi-like borrowing schemes that are entirely dependent on new growth.
I don’t like StrongTowns personally, it just doesn’t grok with my experience that many suburbs are wonderful communities where neighbors know each other and kids play together and folks go watch high school football games. I’ve found that cities make you more anonymous. Living in a high rise in a city I knew just about zero of my neighbors, in my suburb I know all of my neighbors by name.
Yeah, I can definitely relate with you on that point.
I grew up in a mid-size suburban town where I knew many families in my neighborhood and generally felt a strong sense of community. I’ve lived in various cities over the years since, and I’ve never quite felt the same connection with my immediate neighbors. I still know and identify with many people in the area I live now, but they’re much more interspersed.
This varies a lot across the country. Most of the local suburban streets are maintained through a combination of local city/county and gas taxes and don't come from the "city money" general tax pool. Not to mention that most states don't have a dense city to speak of, so they are in practice >95% low density.
The federal government maintains the highway infrastructure (and subsidizes other non-highway building) which does help enable suburban living in many places. I suppose that you aren't advocating to get rid of that because the immense usefulness of such system (travel, trucks, buses etc), though.
Eliminating the suburban lifestyle wouldn't have a massive impact on sustainability of the system because a lot of it isn't maintained by the federal government or simply needs to be maintained anyway. Reducing the number of cars that are on the road due to the suburban lifestyle will reduce the amount of money that comes from the federal government and shared money pools, but probably not too much in the grand scheme of things.
Thus, I think that saying that "suburban living is fiscally unsustainable" is an exaggeration and we should instead say "we need to better allocate the costs of suburban life to suburban taxpayers" (which wouldn't make such a huge difference anyway, especially if we also remove the city living subsidies that come from rich suburbs).
Cars are expensive and use an enormous amount of energy. You can buy dozens of e-bikes for the price of one EV, and charge dozens of e-bikes from one fully charged EV battery. EVs do not fix the emissions problem, as most emissions are from brake and tire residue.
>>> most emissions are from brake and tire residue.
That's not plausible... think about how much gas a car consumes per year, compared to the amount of mass of tires and brake pads consumed. Even minimizing my car use, I fill up the tank every few weeks. The wear from my tires is barely visible on a week-to-week basis. I don't think they're even within an order of magnitude.
I grew up in a high density city overseas and I can see the appeal of both types of city. I personally prefer low density, car centric cities (obviously we need to finish solving the emissions problem from cars, but that's separate).