Wouldn’t fast efficient light rail been generally better? From a social and economic perspective it would be more efficient. The real problem with that only tends to be political, namely there is a strange aversion to properly built public infrastructure
I think effective light rail is really hard to get right in the US. Think about Houston, its already a a massive asphalt parking lot nightmare, its not very walk-able, it gets hot and humid in the summer. It simply won't work in most of the US. This is not a build it and they will come situation.
> its not very walk-able, it gets hot and humid in the summer.
You Americans are so funny. Japan is hotter and more humid yet public transit and walking are not an issue. Taipei similar story, rapidly building out rail in a hotter place.
You build the rail, then upzome the areas around stations and over time those giant ashfault lots go away and become urban centres.
Having spent time outside in both Tokyo and Houston in July, Tokyo might be slightly cooler but the humidity makes it more unbearable than Houston (even though Houston is already very humid).
People like you are funny too but its easy to make posts like yours. Density in most urban parts of Japan and Taipei are wildly higher than say a Houston Texas. Again like I said, you are oversimplifying the problem which I get it, its easy to do. I don't think this is as simple as "build the rail, then upzone the area around stations", would happy to be wrong but I think like all of the world there are cultural and historical reasons for the difference.
It would take decades, you need buy in from both tax payers, commercial buildings, retail spaces, home builders etc.
It would be great if you could have a central planner like a China to just build a city with all the infrastructure in place but in places like America, that does not happen and so its a very tough egg to crack. Keep in mind its not just about being hot, definitely lots of Japan and Taiwan are very humid but you are also in city centers that have 8-9x the density of Houston. Lots of things to do and often you are most likely not walking that far, relative for city walking. I could walk a mile in Houston and still have not left my starting spot.
Houstonites do not want to live in dense cities. “Just live like East Asians” doesn’t work when the people you are talking to despise the lifestyle of East Asians.
I do think there is room for more these "New Urbanist" style developments which I have seen a few of in Texas. w the builder puts retail buildings centralized in the development. Lots of real parks and other type of shared resources for the community. Something where you still have a house with a yard but you can walk to the coffee shop in your neighborhood.
Yes, they'd rather spend 2 hours a day commuting and then grow fat and die young from heart disease. And before anyone says anything: I used to live in Houston. Truly an awful, awful place to live. It's not even a concrete jungle, it's more like a concrete prairie.
I'm going to blow your mind: people are different! I have lived in several cities in the PNW and New England and now live in Houston metro by choice. It is far easier, more efficient, and more economical for my family which are our priorities. (Also infinitely more diverse, which is a big plus, but doesn't really have anything to do with urban planning). We like it a lot here.
Houston can be very cheap, but it comes with the steep cost of having to live in Houston.
I'm being harsh, Houston isn't completely terrible. There is a lot of culture and diversity. But you can't really get to it because everything is too far, and you're already tired from commuting 10 hours that week.
I live in the area and agree it's quite miserable in some ways. Anything inside 610 is effectively a no-go zone for people who have the capacity to participate on HN. The entire point of Houston is that it's approximately the cheapest place you can live that still has things like an international airport and an Apple Store.
You don’t have to agree with them, but yea, that is legitimately the way they want to spend their life. I think that’s the issue with these urbanism discussions. Your preferences are so different that you can’t even comprehend them so you end up talking past each other.
And I can respect that - the problem is that urbanism, at it's core, is an organization problem. It internetly involves other people, regardless of if any one of them wants it to or not.
I mean, ideally, I could say I want to live all on my own in a mansion far away from everyone else. But I still want access to the world's best food, entertainment, and socialization. But it's just not possible.
Everything is compromises. We can't be erecting hundreds of miles of road and acres of parking lots so people have a 10 by 10 foot lawn, you know? And ultimately it will come back to them, too. Because commuting does suck, and I think most people know it sucks. They just can't, or won't, put two and two together on their lifestyle and commuting. They're inherently linked!
Of course there are trade offs. Suburbanites are just happy to spend time commuting in exchange for a big house with a big yard. You are still talking like they don’t realize the tradeoff they’re making instead of accepting that they’ve considered that and come to the conclusion that it’s worth it. They think living in apartments with no personal space sucks more than commuting.
I'm talking like that because even you're not understanding the tradeoff.
The tradeoff isn't live like rats. That's the tradeoff RIGHT NOW, because we designed our cities for maximum suckage.
But really, you can have reasonable space and a decent commute. Light rail goes a long way, and not spending 50% of your land on parking lots does too.
When you design your cities around cars, there are really no winners. People might think that's just the natural cost of having a home, but it's just not. You can have denser cities with more space per person. Because, remember, most of the space in Houston is currently worthless. It can't actually be used by people.
So it's still dense where it matters. The pockets of goodness are just that. Between the roads and parking lots there's little dense pockets of life, and that's where everything actually happens.
Look, think of it this way. If we don't spend 50% of our most valuable space on parking lots, your home can be 50% larger. AND in an area where it matters, instead of in Timbuktu.
I lived in Chicago for 30 years. I didnt own a car for a decade. I’ve been to east Asia. There are massive downsides to living in cities even when done well. People in Tokyo live in tiny spaces compared to American suburbanites. In the parts of Chicago where you don’t really need a car no one has a yard. Public parks are not the same as private yards. People in New York who aren’t Uber wealthy live lifestyles that I personally can not stand. I got out of nyc as soon as I could because I hated living there. Seriously nyc is by far my least favorite of places I have lived. Going back to anything like that is unimaginable for me. I don’t like Houston either but I understand why people do and it’s not because they’re deluding themselves or because they’re close minded to the wonders of urbanism.
Light rail is terrible and anyone acting like it’s not is immediately written off as a non thinker imo. If you’re gonna do rail do it right.
Lots of healthy people that live in Houston too. Your lack of being able to see that the world is diverse and people have different preferences is a shame.
Look, I'm not looking down at your life choices, I'm just saying it probably sucks and you would probably prefer it if it wasn't like that.
Meaning, I don't think people are commuting 2 hours or three or whatever because they LIKE to. Rather, they're victims of poor poor urban design, and most of them, too, would prefer not that.
I don't think a single soul is moving to Houston because of the commute. They're doing it in spite of the commute. But wouldn't it be nice if they didn't have to do that?
Ultimately its optional, it's a choice. We could have Houston without the commute. Everyone could live the life they want without a commute, if we just put in the time and effort to design our urban spaces around that. And, if people really do want to commute - more power. I don't think that's a desire that will ever be rare to find. But we probably shouldn't be optimizing for shit, right? Or, at least, what I think we both agree most people think is shit.
I live in NYC and for the majority of my trips the subway gets me there faster than a car would.
Sure you can find plenty of random places it would take longer for me to get to by train, but for places I actually want to get to, the subway is faster.
OK, you live in the one and only city in the entire USA that is dense enough to make the subway a better option.
I live in the DC area which has an excellent Metrorail system, and it is still nowhere near close enough to being able to replace the average trip by car unless you in DC proper.
Now imagine how much worse things would be in Houston.
You're welcome to try to Trail of Tears everybody into your preferred walled cities, but the attempt would go badly for you.
Absent that we'll need to wait for population growth (not happening, if anything we're going the other way) or immigration (ha) to fill our cities up to NYC density.
Note that NYC itself used to be even more dense than it is today. No other U.S. city is likely to reach even NYC's current density in any near- to medium-time scale.
> Absent that we'll need to wait for population growth (not happening, if anything we're going the other way) or immigration (ha) to fill our cities up to NYC density.
Nope: One need only wait for the financial collapse that is fast approaching nearly every municipality in the US due to the relative scale of infrastructure buildout + maintenance as compared to its tax base.
The "standard" American city is 100% unambiguously completely financially impossible.
This is obscured by the fact that cities traditionally account for their infrastructure as depreciating assets whose value goes to zero rather than as perpetual liabilities with exponentially increasing maintenance costs, where the expected maintenance burden of a road already far exceeds its "asset value" on day one of its creation (when it's added to the city's balance sheet as "an asset.")
The American sprawl pattern is financially impossible.
i am pro-rail and also pro toll/congestion pricing. i think we need to be realistic that rail is not a solution to all of our problems, and also not really feasible in many parts of the US until we fix the union+environmental review problem.
>there is a strange aversion to properly built public infrastructure
It costs money which taxpayers don't want to pay (unless it benefits them personally,) it requires long term planning which governments are incapable of, and it smells like socialism.
In the medical scenario, having medical workers sit around waiting for the train after they've driven to the station would be a problem if their presence is needed quickly. Or did you also want everyone to cram into high rises clustered around stations?
Idk, man, Europe and like... half of Asia seem to have figured this out, and their healthcare outcomes are better. But sure, this contrived pro-car scenario is why trains don't work.
