I’m traveling through Puerto Rico. On every nice beach, when there are people, they are playing loud music. Now that is part of the local culture. To me (a European), it is abhorent, ruining the supposedly relaxing atmosphere of a beach (even more so that the music to me seems extremely repetitive).
I could not convince anyone here to stop doing this. Again, for locals, this is their culture.
Similarly, I don’t think most Americans can grasp the difference between American cities (including in Puerto Rico) built for cars vs for pedestrians. Most will argue (including here), that this is a function of the size of the place. And America is big, and in places sparsely unpopulated, undeniably. But this is not the reason. Europe too is big. With many less populated places. And there are cars everywhere, most people own one.
It’s now cultural. Culture can change, but when combined with architecture at an industrial scale, I’m afraid the change will take much longer than a natural human lifetime.
I'm Puerto Rican and this hurt to read because I wish the noise problem was limited to beaches. Multiple cases of noisy, inconsiderate neighbors (in different apartments and cities) drove me insane, to the point where I left and don't plan on ever coming back. The way it affected my sleep during my formative years probably did irreparable damage.
Feeling like you don't belong in your own country is maddening and difficult to accept.
Similar experience for me (As an Austrian) often hiking in Hong Kong where everyone (old and young) walks with tiny speakers dangling from their backpack blasting music during the whole hike. I never even thought people would consider that.
I would also argue that pedestrian friendly depends a lot on when the city was built.
If you look at the US, the old (by American standards) cities like Boston, NYC, are pretty car-free friendly. Same with the cores of European cities which are much older.
The further west you go, the newer the city and the more they are designed around having a car.
This is true in the US but not a law a nature. Its the result of policy. There are whole cities built from scratch (outside the US) within the last 70 years that did not choose this model. And there are many new developments in older cities all over the world that reject the "car-only" model. There is no unstoppable flow of history at work here. It's politics and policy.
Can you really include uninhabited ice regions? The point is that the size of the country incentivized car based transportation and large distances between destinations. I guess if you flattened the entire contingous european continent(from portugal to Moscow) as one large standardized country and really only developed most of it after cars became a thing, you'd potentially have the same system as the US.
(Keep in mind that picture was taken when the US has 58 million less people or 17% smaller than today)
But we also have to understand that the US continent could grow to a billion people and still only have the density of France. That is not a matter of lack of land, its a matter of political will.
Anyway given that the land is sparsely populated it is still a fair comparison: When you have such a small population but access to such abundant resources that few others have on the planet, you are going to end up in a scenario like what the US has now.
This really is nonsense but somehow every time this topic comes up people being it up. The size of the country or its population density is not really relevant.
People in Europe dont take a train from Greece to Sweden. They fly. In fact most fly Vienna to Amsterdam.
In the same way somebody from New York would definitely fly to LA. (They are not driving now btw)
That doesn't preclude the existence of public transport connecting NY to Philadelphia. It also does not preclude NY from being walkable! Or bikeable. It doesn't stop NY from having good public transport! It doesn't force you to drive to work in NY.
The point of excluding inhabited ice regions is not due to lack of population its due to lack of potential developable land. My point is to put yourself in American shoes when they developed after WW2, there was so much abundance of developable land, resources, and wealth plus this new automobile coming onto the scene, it was natural that it was going to develop the way it did.
Meanwhile, the Netherlands was completely car centric just like the USA until the 1990s, when they decided to start redesigning roads to prioritize walking and cycling. Are you sure these things are really inexorably linked to geography?
It's something that put me off staying in Dahab Egypt. It was pleasant and very cheap but everywhere played terrible music! It's also something I like in Singapore - the people there are quite studious so you can generally sit and read peacefully without people banging things etc.
Going to Vieques in 2011 was one of the most sublime and wonderful experiences of my life. I never felt like I was at an undiscovered treasure more than I did there: The beaches, the biolumniscent bay, the feral horses, the view over the bay in Esperanza, all of it so breathtaking.
People can rant and rail about America's car-centric culture, or they could just accept that the culture is what it is and work to mitigate the negative aspects of it. I don't get why so many people feel they need to tilt at windmills this way.
That's the issue. You can't mitigate it. Especially when even the lowest hanging fruits (eg: protected bike lines) face similar opposition as any radical change.
America already bulldozed through walkable streetcar towns for cars less than a century ago. So, the precedent for the change is there. It's not like cars are the way of the ancestors
As another comment mentioned, car infrastructure is an unsustainable spend. America is entering an era of expensive labor, lower fertility and bi-polar super powers. Therefore, unsustainable systems are beginning to give.
It's tempting to call car centrism a personal preference. But North America stands alone against a near-global consensus on what urban infrastructure should look like.
> At some point, there’s going to be a large number of cities where a majority of homeowners are too old to drive.
If you're too old to drive you're probably also not in the best position to walk far or walk while carrying shopping/groceries. Combined with the obesity epidemic many people simply aren't healthy enough to walk 1km.
Mobility challenged people can take electric wheelchairs along sidewalks and bike routes, and board buses and trains with level boarding. These usually have storage for groceries. Some elderly people are physically capable of driving a car but can be a danger on the road.
Probably why so many are moving to 'retirement communities' so they can downgrade to golf carts. You can take the car away from the person but the soul of the boomer is the automobile.
> People can rant and rail about America's car-centric culture, or they could just accept that the culture is what it is and work to mitigate the negative aspects of it.
Honest question: What's the difference? Mitigating the negative aspects involves making others aware of the negative aspects, but many people see that as ranting and railing. What does a productive conversation look like?
People acknowledge that America is bigger than their country with challenging geographical features. They also stop comparing their best country (UK) with America’s worst state or, even worse, the entire US landmass.
China has a high-speed rail network whose size spans about half of the United States'. Some old US cities had better transit systems in the 1950s than they do now. No one expects every US city to be on the level of Tokyo, but there is no excuse for being so far behind.
Forget about the cost. Do you take public rail? I used to and even if the trains get 1000% better the people are still the same: talking loud, no respect for others, just all in their own bubbles.
This is the polar opposite of Europe. I've taken even the run down ugly german trains that they still run on irregular routes and even though the trains are antiquated, they make sense and get the job done. People are respectful even if the train is packed. I wouldn't want to go back to trains in America other than for sparse occasional trips.
But then i'd probably just take an airplane for most trips because 1-2 hrs of leg cramps with a typically quiet passenger crew is better then a misbehaved train carriage.
Fixing the trains is not fixing the society. The trains are probably broken because the society is broken.
You can’t get away from it in this country short of moving into the woods. One of the neighbors has a motorcycle. Literally like clockwork when he comes home from work it shakes my apartment and sets off the same three aftermarket alarms from cars parked on the street. Every time. Last apartment neighbor a floor below me was into house music. Here even the army flies ospreys and chinooks overhead that shake everything for a good 30 seconds until they pass; I never knew a helicopter could be so loud. You can’t win. You have to learn to just roll over and take it.
People try. They move to neighborhoods with higher wealth. People hate to think about it but that is a indicator that reduces these kinds of nonsense things. They use cars instead of public transit and prefer politicians that vote for more of that. They are not even going out in public spaces as much anymore. I do concede that these are not perfect solutions and bring their own issues, so I guess you can't win. I am not sure if it was always like this though.
The size of the country has almost no bearing on the way we develop our towns and cities, subsidize car production, assume/require car ownership in public policy, etc.
It's also quite the stretch to claim the UK as the best country in the EU and even more to claim that it doesn't also have a car culture. And it's not just "America's worst state", the vast majority of US town and cities are car dependent.
Any time someone uses the excuse that “the size of the USA” prevents this or that, then ask why New Jersey can’t do this or that. Some states are the same size and density of the average European country.
NJ has an extensive train network. Its crap for the following reasons(only referring to main interstate rail, their city light rails are different):
1. The stock is divided into two sets: single decker trains that are falling apart but are still better than new stock because they were designed during an era where there was actual consideration given to comfort. They are old and run down but more comfy.
The new double decker trains are a design by committee nightmare: they have uncomfortable molded chairs made mostly out of plastic, super cold, noisier due to the terrible shifting whine of the electric motors, and now poorly maintained (god help you if you have to use their rest rooms).
2. They are constantly stopping due to priority given to amtrak and commercial rail. In the best case scenario the train takes ~45 mins to get from central NJ to NYC with stops. For about ~20 miles of track distance, that averages out to ~29-31mph. If Amtrack stops you that time is extended.
3. Very slow speeds due to old track technology.
4. Rising ticket costs for the same lousy service. (~$21 round trip from central NJ to NYC) I guess being able to have a digital ticket helps? (It probably helps them more than it helps you)
5. Pure depression because outside the main routes going into NYC and Hoboken, the dregs of society are the only ones riding these trains. This really grates on you if you take the train for years like I did.
6. Recently, they couldn't even provide working windows so people can see the 'beauty' of NJ. ( To be fair after all the TikTok meme videos called them out on this they finally got embarrassed enough to start replacing them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-a3r6i4hiQ )
It all priorities. People in the US just dont want mass rail over other priorities. The people who do are internet keyboard warriors.
Don't forget one of the most famous and visited destinations in the country is a walkable neighborhood served by great public transportation and uses a rat as a mascot.
You looked at that transportation recently? It is collapsing due to legacy, graft, and cost overruns. I don't presume you are European but I HATE when they use this system as an example or public transit that works in America. Its a dump. The worst trains in France and Germany run miles around it.
Your criticisms are absolutely right. I upvoted you, but just fyi I think your response may come off as too blunt/rude, and get “downvotes”. It doesn’t really matter here, but maybe helpful to know in general, if you didn’t already.
Fair enough! You're right it's a bit blunt. I didn't take very much time to edit it. Hopefully folks are able to look past any gruffness and find the substance in it.
... I'm not sure many would agree that the UK, of all places, has good public transport. _London_ does, but it more or less ends there.
(Possibly you mean by some other metric, but I'm struggling to think of _any_ metric by which the UK could be said to be the best country in Europe. Sitcoms, possibly. It does a good sitcom. Even outside London!)
I don't think we need to give up cars entirely, but I also don't think we'll be able to address the negative aspects without some amount of change.
An example: I live roughly 200m from the Costco in the center of town, but there's a major 4 lane road between us. Walking would be so convenient, but it's so much safer to drive. A footbridge would address this without impacting drivers. I have no intentions of giving up my car, but this particular activity would be so much nicer without it!
The simple geometry problem of how much space cars take up is arguably the worst now (given tailpipe emissions are on their way out), and there is no solution to that outside of fewer and much smaller cars.
The problem is that mitigation of any kind is an affront to car driving culture.
One big problem people have, for example, is that we just focus so much on roads and there is literally no safe infrastructure for other kinds of people; but drivers also balk at using taxpayer money to build said infrastructure, particularly if it is perceived as reducing driver convenience even by mere seconds. Or even pausing the construction of new, dangerous infrastructure.
95% of people drive because 95% of transportation funding goes to enabling that choice.
People at large are rational and will make rational transportation choices given incentives. The incentives are all aligned towards driving right now because that benefits the auto industry.
You cannot make assertions about how Americans behave, "culturally," based on their transportation choices because these choices are not happening in a vacuum.
Case in point: when Americans visit Disneyland, or NYC, or Amsterdam, they do not typically insist on driving through those places.
You seem to be implying there is something nefarious about how the incentives were created. Yes there has been efforts to push cars over other options and thats well documented but you can't just ignore that part of the incentive naturally leaned towards utilizing the large amount of available land. Its just human nature to use all available resources if they are available to you.
“Tilting at windmills” makes it sound like a pointless and impossible task. I don’t even agree that this is a culture problem. It’s an infrastructure problem wrapped up in tyranny of the minority NIMBY politics.
But even if we accept your premise that American “culture” prefers cars (rather than being a result of decades of expanding as fast and as cheaply as possible across the country), culture can change. It does change.
Changing road design is not necessarily a cultural change from driving.
My country had very bad traffic deaths record. few decades later, traffic is much more intense and there're many more cars, but traffic deaths are waaaaaay down. Thanks to better infrastructure, better cars and better culture especially when it comes to drink and drive...
Policy is decided by people. "Car-centric culture" is just a description of the material status quo, much of which was built by people who are dead, who have changed their minds about cars, or who see different conditions in their city and now want a different approach.
An orientation towards adopting new ways of living when the old ones become impractical or harmful can be just as part of a person's "culture" as a piece of technology.
Well yes, corporations are considered 'people'. I think it was some of these 'people' that tore up the streetcar networks in order to replace them with buses.
So, I think the problem is that the culture is unsustainable [1] [2]. Look at new vehicle prices [3]. Look at the operating cost of a vehicle [4]. For many, currently, this cost is at least if not more than $1000/month (car note, insurance, fuel, etc) and very roughly, ~60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. Vehicle repos [5] and auto loan delinquencies [6] are hitting historical highs. America built a structurally deficient urban planning model. In Iowa, for example, they are allowing roads to go back to gravel because they lack the resources to maintain the status quo of road infra [7]. Also, consider rural america continues to wither and clear out [8]. This is all important ground truth to have to mitigate the negative aspects as you say, versus throwing good money after bad.
Maybe we could encourage folks to migrate to college towns from the exurbs with subsidies and job guarantees, versus them staying in place while where they exist today rapidly declines. They would then continue to support the town as residents through their social security or pension income they would spend locally through retirement until death. New urban builds take decades while retrofits and reconfigurations take much less time, effort, and fiat. "Skate to where the puck is going to be."
To bring it down to a real and concrete case, we can do so much better than each family ferrying their children to school/activites, then driving everywhere in single-occupant cars. That's a world where children and senior citizens have greatly reduced independence and community.
How would it look like if there were reduced day-to-day car dependency? Maybe something like this: a "walking schoolbus" where senior citizens and schoolchildren connect with one another as they get exercise on the way to school. Who wouldn't want that? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeYBL5u97c8
I really like the Barcelona Superblocks model [1] for existing urban environments, but subsidizing families to relocate closer to schools is also an option imho. You have to find the intersection of what is politically palatable and the resources available; the next 100 years is going to see structural demographic decline, declining working cohort participation, less growth and productivity, continuing rapid fertility rate decline, declining household sizes, etc so creativity and flexibility will be required (imho). I am also a fan of what Culdesac [2] is doing, and is a pattern to be scaled.
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” got us cars, and I think the new question is "How do we deliver locality and mobility for quality lives without cars, when possible?" Cars are not going away, but we should not build for them specifically as if they were the default option, as this cost burdens the future with potentially unnecessary and expensive personal mobility and infrastructure obligations. Even today, they are unaffordable for a substantial population of people, based on the evidence in my comment above.
The US has a housing shortage [1] (~3M-8M units) that will persist long into the future due to a shortage of tradespeople [2], artificial land scarcity due to new builders constraining supply [3], etc. Upzoning and YIMBY are important components in increasing housing supply and affordability, but relocating folks closer to critical social systems (schools for families with school age children, hospitals and care facilities for seniors) versus expecting everyone to have a car or expecting school bus service when that transportation system
is already reaching failure [4] [5] is also of some measurable value (imho). Remember, fertility rate is rapidly declining in almost every state [6] [7], so there should be fewer children in each subsequent educational cohort and families requiring locality near schools should trend downward over time (demographics are tricky and can change, so lots of assumptions relying on current trends as of this comment).
A potential solution is for cities and communities to issue bonds, purchase housing near schools when the economics are favorable (ie try to avoid overpaying), and hold it as public affordable housing for families (perhaps in concert with upzoning; buy adjacent parcels, demo, and rebuild as more dense multi family). Political will is the wildcard.
Housing Supply and Housing Affordability - https://www.nber.org/papers/w33694 ("The decline in housing affordability over recent decades has promoted an enhanced interest in housing supply. This chapter presents descriptive evidence about the evolution of us housing prices, quantities, and regulations since 1980, indicating that supply constraints appear to be increasingly binding. We then provide an overview of the various approaches used to model construction and land development for homogeneous and heterogeneous housing in static and dynamic contexts to understand housing supply. Our treatment incorporates empirical implementation and policy implications throughout. Finally, we provide an overview of quantitative evidence on the consequences of relaxing various types of supply constraints.")
> The US has a housing shortage [1] (~3M-8M units)
It doesn't. It really, really doesn't. The per-capita housing units are close to the historical highs. And per-household stats are _even_ _better_: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=15tRv
What the US has is the density-despair spiral going. It's creating denser and denser pits of despair in the urban centers via economic forces.
After all, what use is housing in Iowa if you _have_ to live in New York? Because there are no jobs for you in Iowa. And housing in New York will NEVER be cheap.
I don’t think many US parents would accept their child independently walking or bicycling to school, even over short distances. The Stranger Danger mainstream media has them absolutely terrified that their kid is going to be kidnapped as soon as they leave their front doors.
Just to consider this on a small scale where, it would actually need to be implemented, one neighborhood at a time, I live in a medium-sized town where the school district has chosen to reject free land that developers attempted to donate to the district for the construction of schools, in favor of just assigning the families who move into these new-build homes to the schools in the other part of town where schools have ample capacity due to the large 4+ bedroom single-family homes mostly being owned and occupied by empty-nest Boomers.
We live somewhere in between the "new builds" part of town and the area that has a bunch of schools, so the walk from our neighborhood to our assigned (and closest) middle school is only 2.5 miles, a 55 minute walk with 155 ft elevation change. This walk takes you across a road with a 60MPH speed limit, basically an expressway. The elementary school is a bit closer, only a 40 minutes, 2 mile walk, but same expressway.
Oh, and they don't even offer a school bus of any kind. I suppose the gen-x parents killed that idea off 25 years ago because they were so worried their kids would be out of direct supervision even walking to a bus stop, so each child is chaufferred door to door, rain or shine, until 16 when they receive their own cars.
I agree with you that all this is absurd. Kids are capable of walking to school and shouldn't have to leave a medium-sized neighborhood to do so. But significant demolition of neighborhoods and construction of schools, local grocery markets, etc. is the only prescription for our ills that would provide anything resembling an alternative to cars for the residents of the tract homes that make up a significant part of our car-dependent suburbs.
This is why I think whoever upthread is arguing that people aren't exactly being reasonable expecting the America we inherited from the 20th century to stop stalling and transform itself into 1,000 Amsterdams. Even though the places that share that awesome non-car infra are highly sought-after.
It's not. It's the right design idea. But it's just missing one factor that will make it far superior to ANY other urban model: self-driving vehicles.
Imagine children being able to just get a self-driving taxi and ride to school by themselves. Or to other locations. All while having plenty of space at home, a yard to play, etc.
I'm not so convinced that I'd prefer to live isolated and "just" get a robotaxi for every excursion anyone wants to do. I'd rather my kids walked about a quarter mile to school with several neighbors. Exercise and being outside are good!
Even assuming we turned smarter and built clean nuclear plants everywhere, just all the paving of roads, tires etc. takes a lot of resources.
> I'm not so convinced that I'd prefer to live isolated and "just" get a robotaxi for every excursion anyone wants to do. I'd rather my kids walked about a quarter mile to school with several neighbors. Exercise and being outside are good!
I believe that robotaxis will enable totally new behaviors. For example, if you don't live immediately near a park, you won't often go there. It's just too tiresome to use public transit to visit a park just for a short walk/run/play. And personal cars are not available for children.
With robocars, you'll be able to text your friend: "hi, meet you at the park corner in 10", jump into a car, and arrive there. This will have zero friction, so it's far more likely to become a habitual behavior.
> Even assuming we turned smarter and built clean nuclear plants everywhere, just all the paving of roads, tires etc. takes a lot of resources.
Ha. One line of Manhattan subway now costs as much as 1500 miles of modern 6-lane freeway. Urban construction is EXPENSIVE.
I understand from your question you struggle to comprehend that this is possible. I assure you it really is. People who have money take the train. People who own cars take the train. The modal split for Vienna generally is about 25% by car. I would guess more than 50% for public transport for journeys to nearby nature. The trains in Austria are excellent: safe, clean and very punctual. If you get in a train to nature you will be surrounded by people with overpriced hiking gear.
In my comment, I am using it as signal wrt infra cost affordability. I agree it is not a bad solution as population declines continue where it occurs, versus having no road. Look at infrastructure cost projections to understand if it is within the light cone of economic affordability. If it can't be paid for with a combination of taxes and debt, it isn't possible.
No one is forced to buy a car at the median price.
You can buy these cars new under $25K.
Toyota Corolla LE ($23,460), Hyundai Elantra SE ($23,025), Kia K4 LX ($21,990), Nissan Sentra S ($21,590), Mazda3 2.5 S ($24,150), Subaru Impreza Base ($23,495).
I make decent money and I would never spend more than $25K on a car. Of course you can also get used cars with low mileage.
As far as people in rural areas. They deserve every negative thing that they keep voting for.
They probably find it equally abhorrent that a European would come and police their culture. Please don't travel somewhere and complain about local culture. You're a guest, possibly and unwanted one.
How do we know that this is "Puerto Rican Culture Plays Loud Music on Beaches"?
What if it's some obnoxious rebellious college kids who think they can get away with it?
What if it's some tourists, like from Cuba or Argentina, who are rich and so nobody in authority will handle complaints against them, because tourism feeds PR's economy so effectively?
What if most Puerto Rico residents don't really go hang out at the beach at all, and they stay home with their families, and they cook in the kitchen and they enjoy conversations?
What if Puerto Ricans are mostly like Americans, and their faces are all in their smartphones, and some of them play loud music and some ignore it, and some hate it but don't complain, and some complain but also play their own loud music to try and drown it out?
What if Puerto Ricans don't have one monolithic culture that you can generalize while we're here on an English-speaking forum, based on the mainland USA? What if Puerto Ricans don't actually eat elephants or giraffes? https://youtu.be/mzK9_TbzReQ?si=-QsUIwt_0SIcY-gt&t=28
It’s too easy for a vocal minority to veto good policy, like building more housing. You see this all across the country, in college towns and in California overall. It is formalized as “zoning” but that is just an official way of implementing a shortsighted policy.
If you do not zone for housing you are zoning for homelessness. Plain and simple.
There are plenty of rich people in San Francisco which has a severe housing shortage and homelessness issue. Homelessness is the exhaust fumes of rapid growth, which SF and CA as a whole have experienced. Smart politics knows this and plans ahead to handle it, rather than allowing exploding housing costs stunt the growth of the city. There are many talented people who otherwise would have went to SF who didn’t.
You don’t have to go far from SF to get to single family houses, which should not be possible. They can solve this by adding a land value tax inversely proportional to the distance from specific city functions.
Hate to be the bearer of bad news but you could build infinite housing in San Francisco and the streets would still be riddled with drug-abusing vagrants. They may technically stop being "homeless" if you give them all a free apartment but it's not a magic wand that will solve SF's problems.
You can only have beautiful, clean and safe cities if you're willing to forbid people - who can walk in from anywhere at any time no matter how much you subsidize yesterday's batch with free housing - from making them ugly, dirty, and unsafe, and SF doesn't have the heart to make anybody do anything. They used to halfheartedly try to go through the motions, and for about 10 years now, they have given up even that.
I think some people should get subsidized housing, but when I say build more housing I’m talking about increasing the supply and putting it on the market so that regular people can afford it.
As it stands now housing is completely unaffordable. The median income in San Francisco is $120k which means half the people there don’t even make that. I would like my kid’s elementary school teacher to be able to afford not to have roommates.
Also for what it’s worth 70% of the homeless in SF are from SF.
(Self reported) - and why would you tell some survey taker you came in on a Greyhound from Bakersfield because you know they have far better amenities for you in SF?
Isn’t it bizarre how in college short distances, walkability and building high capacity accommodations on a budget are a priority to create productive, collaborative, social and affordable environments but after college, people move to suburban hell
When you're young and not tied down, and also likely lack much money, you prioritize a different lifestyle and are also in college to, presumably, accomplish your goal of getting a degree and learning something.
For many, once they get older and desire a slower, calmer, quieter life, and especially if you want more space with kids, the suburbs start holding more appeal. And that also factors in constraints about job availability.
Suburbs don't need to be car-dependent. The suburban appeal in fact has nothing to do with cars.
In Germany as just one example, there was (when I lived there) excellent, reliable bus service in and between suburbs. And connecting the suburbs to light rail, which connected to the city center.
The big complaint I had in my 20s was that the light rail stopped running before midnight.
Probably true, but unless you have infinite money, building enough housing with expensive rail infrastructure is pretty tough. We can only manage truly world-class(ish) transit in (parts of) one city, NYC, and plenty of people still routinely choose to move out of Manhattan upon having kids instead of staying, either because they can't afford enough space to reasonably make a go of it, or because it's so much easier to do the car-dependent suburb. So, the people themselves are choosing it. Whatever anyone thinks of it, there is plenty of evidence that a lot of people who have a choice choose something other than the urban walkable deal.
PS: Don't come at me please, I loved living in a big urban city, but moved out because I refused to choose only one of: big enough home, safe neighborhood, decent schools, reasonable commute distance. And honestly to stay in the urban core where I used to live, only "commute distance" was even available.
Rail infrastructure is actually cheaper than car infrastructure, though, on a passenger-mile basis. However, the car infrastructure is paid for by the government, and rail is not.
Most cities and towns were built hundreds of years before most cities and towns in America were, so they're dense (because people needed to walk everywhere), which is perfect for rail.
Take a look at a satellite view of the suburban areas where most Americans actually live. They're mostly post-1950 and were built with basically the opposite assumptions as Europe:
1. Homes spaced generously with residential districts stretching out tens of miles in every direction from the dense-ish core.
2. Homes fully isolated from business districts (i.e. anywhere anyone would want to go)
3. High-speed arterial stroads or, in tonier suburbs, basically expressways, which serve as the connection between neighborhoods.
4. Offices and other workplaces dispersed into strip malls, long stroads, and industrial parks throughout an area, rather than concentrated in a primary central business district.
Turning all that into a cool Dutch city or town where people are going to bike or take trains everywhere pretty much requires bulldozing and starting again. Again I say this with no judgment, I think 'Not Just Bikes,' for instance, makes a perfectly good case that our way is lame and the Dutch are doing great. But realistically I would never hold my breath expecting the US to transform even 1/10 of the way to the Europe style of transport.
So the 'young and not tied down' that are fortunate enough to go to college get to experience a more suitable environment while it suits them, but the less fortunate young people that don't get the opportunity to live in a college town get no such consideration I guess.
I dunno, I moved off of campus as soon as I could, and kept moving farther away each year. Most people lived a year, perhaps two at most in the dormatories, and only the alcoholics actually stayed close to campus.
If colleges represent the ideal social environment, count me out.
And we were forced, I mean, highly encouraged to live on campus for the first year or two. I can't recall anyone spending more than a couple years on campus before moving out.
People change. As they get older that suburban hell often looks more like a suburban paradise and those condensed anthills of a city can make one shudder. My 2c.
Yeah, I absolutely and honestly loved cities most of my life. I grew up in London, lived in Seattle and Philadelphia, spent a semester teaching in Berlin, frequently went to NYC ... loved it all.
I'm 61 now, and for the last 6 years I've lived in a very small village in rural NM. Those big cities? Well, I'll go if I have to and will not complain the way some folks would. But I certainly do not love them the way I once did, and it's not because they changed.
Well they certainly aren't able to buy within walking distance of their office job. Even if housing exists, is not dangerous, or they could afford it, it won't work if a couple doesn't work in same exact area, unlike strolling around campus between classes.
I like city density myself, but you do have to remember that "high capacity accommodations" in this case means "sharing a room with a stranger and a bathroom with twenty."
This interview needs to be edited a bit; just posting the transcript of the zoom call really hampers the readability and flow. What works for a podcast is not the same as what works for a written piece.
Let's not forget that in America, when you have a college or university, you have historically created a money funnel from the government/parents, through the students, to the city. There's an outsized incentive to cater to that opportunity and get the students accessing the business areas.
Also, American liberal culture tends to follow higher education, which not only means a desire for certain things, but also a love of rules to block "bad things". This often means preserving old cities.
In my experience the transient nature of the college town population means that they're all kind of run down in a particular kind of way, especially housing (how many drunken ragers can a 1 bedroom apartment really handle?). It's nice that they can be beacons of culture in otherwise rural areas, but there's definitely downsides to having a bunch of kids move in and out constantly.
They aren’t failing structurally, they are just in a perpetually ugly state because a landlord doesn’t care about keeping a property attractive that students will abuse.
So you end up with worn out carpet, paint flaking, broken door handles, etc etc.
That’s why there is a different much smaller but much better pool of properties for people willing to do an 18+ month lease.
A big part of why college towns work so nicely is economic circumstances of the student body. Simply put most students aren’t bringing a car to campus and by definition now need to live somewhere closer to get to class. And on top of that the town is a monocrop where maybe the couple tens of thousands of kids are the vast majority of the population.
This is why it can’t really play out as nicely everywhere. You might work across town from your partner vs merely across campus, or in another town. Your location is compromised by definition and not benefiting from economies of scale like it was when it was at least compromised with another 40k people in your demographic with a similar commute and life pattern within 2 square miles. And you don’t have to pay a couple thousand a year for parking privileges either so you might be taking the car on trips that would have been a forced walk in college for lack of car.
The disneyland point is a bit tired and worn imo among internet urbanists and doesn’t even make sense in practice if you’ve ever been to disneyland. Main street isnt the draw. It is this strip of shops you are obligated to walk through as you enter the park to try and tempt you from your dollar. You can’t even hang out there; all the shops are packed with people looking at merchandise, all the restaurants on main are like coffee and ice cream “please leave and keep walking” places, and during fireworks display it is a miracle and a testament to the staffing that there isn’t a crowd crush from people leaving through the bottleneck as well as people staying to see fireworks framed with the castle. In these situations they actually open up a staff only alley to the public that is parallel to main street to relieve some of this bottleneck.
Isn't the article about college towns in America? It's not theoretical there.
A more universal example is probably towns with large seasonal influxes, such as ski towns or beach towns, but unlike a college town, these locations attract people of all ages and incomes. College towns in the US have an influx of specifically 18-22 year olds who can afford college but might not have a lot of disposable income, and most leave during the summer.
> Ryan Allen is a professor of international education at University of America in Southern California
What in the… what? That’s not a university. That’s not even a university system. The only sort of person I would expect to call… I don’t know, USC?… that has never observed the name of an American state university used in context in the English language.
Enormous red flags in like the first three sentences.
I unironically agree with this. 100 years ago, Skid Row and Bunker Hill in Los Angeles were full of SROs, boarding houses and long-term hotels. The people who lived there didn't disappear, they're just all sleeping in the street now.
I guess you never had the misfortune of sleeping in a flophouse to say something like that.
One time I had this project in Switzerland and my co-worker, who also travelled there, figured he'd save money if he rented a bunk bed in illegal (due to density) quarters.
Terrible experience, which got him fired eventually because he quickly lost steam due to having to share a tiny room with three other people.
I on the other hand moistened every Swiss Frank banknote with tears, but splurged thrice the amount on a proper room and survived until the end of my involvement in that project.
As an aside you can see why it is hard/impossible for a homeless person to pull bootstraps when a successful person can't keep their job living not-even-homeless.
The current American urbanism is from the past! The assumption that other urbanisms somehow represent a blast from the past, while 70 year old American car-centric urbanism embodies the eternal modern 'now,' simply doesn't hold up to scrutiny. There are numerous contemporary urbanisms, and newer approaches increasingly tend to be far less car-centric.
The thing is, the 70-era anti-urbanism made the US the leading country.
The "modern" urbanism (flophouses, shoebox-sized apartments, 15-minute don-you-dare-to-walk-out neighborhoods) is leading only to decay of the country. Evidence: it absolutely helped to elect Trump.
Another observation is that college towns are a fake/planned environment, and much is controlled in a very authoritative way. The population is very uniform and willingly gives up many freedoms.
higher ed has drifted toward more of an “all inclusive resort” model over the last 50 years where students get to live in a “parallel” version of the city with their own police force, medical center, dining halls, entertainment venues, etc. this is an intentional move to let them live in a utopian setting that pacifies them to prevent widespread student activism like the 70s
I like the organic mix of university and city development that University of Michigan has in Ann Arbor. It feels like the two grew together and coexist. I do get that feeling you describe when in Wayne State downtown though
I’m traveling through Puerto Rico. On every nice beach, when there are people, they are playing loud music. Now that is part of the local culture. To me (a European), it is abhorent, ruining the supposedly relaxing atmosphere of a beach (even more so that the music to me seems extremely repetitive).
I could not convince anyone here to stop doing this. Again, for locals, this is their culture.
Similarly, I don’t think most Americans can grasp the difference between American cities (including in Puerto Rico) built for cars vs for pedestrians. Most will argue (including here), that this is a function of the size of the place. And America is big, and in places sparsely unpopulated, undeniably. But this is not the reason. Europe too is big. With many less populated places. And there are cars everywhere, most people own one.
It’s now cultural. Culture can change, but when combined with architecture at an industrial scale, I’m afraid the change will take much longer than a natural human lifetime.
I'm Puerto Rican and this hurt to read because I wish the noise problem was limited to beaches. Multiple cases of noisy, inconsiderate neighbors (in different apartments and cities) drove me insane, to the point where I left and don't plan on ever coming back. The way it affected my sleep during my formative years probably did irreparable damage.
Feeling like you don't belong in your own country is maddening and difficult to accept.
Similar experience for me (As an Austrian) often hiking in Hong Kong where everyone (old and young) walks with tiny speakers dangling from their backpack blasting music during the whole hike. I never even thought people would consider that.
I would also argue that pedestrian friendly depends a lot on when the city was built.
If you look at the US, the old (by American standards) cities like Boston, NYC, are pretty car-free friendly. Same with the cores of European cities which are much older.
The further west you go, the newer the city and the more they are designed around having a car.
This is true in the US but not a law a nature. Its the result of policy. There are whole cities built from scratch (outside the US) within the last 70 years that did not choose this model. And there are many new developments in older cities all over the world that reject the "car-only" model. There is no unstoppable flow of history at work here. It's politics and policy.
> I’m traveling through Puerto Rico. On every nice beach, when there are people, they are playing loud music. Now that is part of the local culture
A lot of American beaches will have signs up saying no music. As well as no beer etc but they aren't always followed.
In America, “no beer” often really means “no glass bottles” and if you avoid that, nobody cares.
Europe might be big to some people but America is really big.
[1]:https://i.imgur.com/6Af0Yip.png
[2]:www.thetruesize.com
Those look pretty similar in size? Especially including Scandinavia in Europe
Can you really include uninhabited ice regions? The point is that the size of the country incentivized car based transportation and large distances between destinations. I guess if you flattened the entire contingous european continent(from portugal to Moscow) as one large standardized country and really only developed most of it after cars became a thing, you'd potentially have the same system as the US.
Can you include the barely inhabited Rockies, the Badlands, the arid low and high deserts, the Sierras?
First of all there are population centers there but I guess if you look at a night picture they aren't large at this time: https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2000/geo/popul...
(Keep in mind that picture was taken when the US has 58 million less people or 17% smaller than today)
But we also have to understand that the US continent could grow to a billion people and still only have the density of France. That is not a matter of lack of land, its a matter of political will.
There have been attempts to push this idea: https://ui.charlotte.edu/story/why-not-1-billion-americans-o...
Anyway given that the land is sparsely populated it is still a fair comparison: When you have such a small population but access to such abundant resources that few others have on the planet, you are going to end up in a scenario like what the US has now.
This really is nonsense but somehow every time this topic comes up people being it up. The size of the country or its population density is not really relevant.
People in Europe dont take a train from Greece to Sweden. They fly. In fact most fly Vienna to Amsterdam.
In the same way somebody from New York would definitely fly to LA. (They are not driving now btw)
That doesn't preclude the existence of public transport connecting NY to Philadelphia. It also does not preclude NY from being walkable! Or bikeable. It doesn't stop NY from having good public transport! It doesn't force you to drive to work in NY.
This is much more about local policy.
Different solutions at different scales!
There are only 7 states with more population than Sweden. Only 2 with more than Scandinavia: California and Texas.
The point of excluding inhabited ice regions is not due to lack of population its due to lack of potential developable land. My point is to put yourself in American shoes when they developed after WW2, there was so much abundance of developable land, resources, and wealth plus this new automobile coming onto the scene, it was natural that it was going to develop the way it did.
What makes you think these states only developed after WW2, and how does this explain the US having the world's best passenger rail system in 1920?
Here's a map of it; see how densely it links up this vast country: https://vizettes.com/kt/rta/maps/usa-rr-1920.gif
Meanwhile, the Netherlands was completely car centric just like the USA until the 1990s, when they decided to start redesigning roads to prioritize walking and cycling. Are you sure these things are really inexorably linked to geography?
It's something that put me off staying in Dahab Egypt. It was pleasant and very cheap but everywhere played terrible music! It's also something I like in Singapore - the people there are quite studious so you can generally sit and read peacefully without people banging things etc.
America is big, but most people live on coasts. The density of population is larger there.
FWIW… head the Vieques, rent a small SUV, and hit Chiba beach or the other south coast beaches in the nature reserve area.
Almost empty. The only noise is nature and waves.
Going to Vieques in 2011 was one of the most sublime and wonderful experiences of my life. I never felt like I was at an undiscovered treasure more than I did there: The beaches, the biolumniscent bay, the feral horses, the view over the bay in Esperanza, all of it so breathtaking.
People can rant and rail about America's car-centric culture, or they could just accept that the culture is what it is and work to mitigate the negative aspects of it. I don't get why so many people feel they need to tilt at windmills this way.
That's the issue. You can't mitigate it. Especially when even the lowest hanging fruits (eg: protected bike lines) face similar opposition as any radical change.
America already bulldozed through walkable streetcar towns for cars less than a century ago. So, the precedent for the change is there. It's not like cars are the way of the ancestors
As another comment mentioned, car infrastructure is an unsustainable spend. America is entering an era of expensive labor, lower fertility and bi-polar super powers. Therefore, unsustainable systems are beginning to give.
It's tempting to call car centrism a personal preference. But North America stands alone against a near-global consensus on what urban infrastructure should look like.
Another potential factor driving the US’s reckoning with car centric development is the aging of the boomer generation.
At some point, there’s going to be a large number of cities where a majority of homeowners are too old to drive.
> At some point, there’s going to be a large number of cities where a majority of homeowners are too old to drive.
If you're too old to drive you're probably also not in the best position to walk far or walk while carrying shopping/groceries. Combined with the obesity epidemic many people simply aren't healthy enough to walk 1km.
Mobility challenged people can take electric wheelchairs along sidewalks and bike routes, and board buses and trains with level boarding. These usually have storage for groceries. Some elderly people are physically capable of driving a car but can be a danger on the road.
Probably why so many are moving to 'retirement communities' so they can downgrade to golf carts. You can take the car away from the person but the soul of the boomer is the automobile.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/7leRLIxw7oc
Tesla FSD is already very good. Maybe a good thing the Boomer generation can do is to help make automatic cars legal.
> People can rant and rail about America's car-centric culture, or they could just accept that the culture is what it is and work to mitigate the negative aspects of it.
Honest question: What's the difference? Mitigating the negative aspects involves making others aware of the negative aspects, but many people see that as ranting and railing. What does a productive conversation look like?
People acknowledge that America is bigger than their country with challenging geographical features. They also stop comparing their best country (UK) with America’s worst state or, even worse, the entire US landmass.
China has a high-speed rail network whose size spans about half of the United States'. Some old US cities had better transit systems in the 1950s than they do now. No one expects every US city to be on the level of Tokyo, but there is no excuse for being so far behind.
China has a different distribution of population I think. But yeah I agree the US can use some better railways. Then again I shiver at the cost.
Forget about the cost. Do you take public rail? I used to and even if the trains get 1000% better the people are still the same: talking loud, no respect for others, just all in their own bubbles.
This is the polar opposite of Europe. I've taken even the run down ugly german trains that they still run on irregular routes and even though the trains are antiquated, they make sense and get the job done. People are respectful even if the train is packed. I wouldn't want to go back to trains in America other than for sparse occasional trips.
I often look at maps like this and think maybe that would be amazing: https://i.imgur.com/srMhE1X.png
But then i'd probably just take an airplane for most trips because 1-2 hrs of leg cramps with a typically quiet passenger crew is better then a misbehaved train carriage.
Fixing the trains is not fixing the society. The trains are probably broken because the society is broken.
You can’t get away from it in this country short of moving into the woods. One of the neighbors has a motorcycle. Literally like clockwork when he comes home from work it shakes my apartment and sets off the same three aftermarket alarms from cars parked on the street. Every time. Last apartment neighbor a floor below me was into house music. Here even the army flies ospreys and chinooks overhead that shake everything for a good 30 seconds until they pass; I never knew a helicopter could be so loud. You can’t win. You have to learn to just roll over and take it.
People try. They move to neighborhoods with higher wealth. People hate to think about it but that is a indicator that reduces these kinds of nonsense things. They use cars instead of public transit and prefer politicians that vote for more of that. They are not even going out in public spaces as much anymore. I do concede that these are not perfect solutions and bring their own issues, so I guess you can't win. I am not sure if it was always like this though.
What are these "challenging geographic features"?
Total strawman argument.
The size of the country has almost no bearing on the way we develop our towns and cities, subsidize car production, assume/require car ownership in public policy, etc.
It's also quite the stretch to claim the UK as the best country in the EU and even more to claim that it doesn't also have a car culture. And it's not just "America's worst state", the vast majority of US town and cities are car dependent.
Any time someone uses the excuse that “the size of the USA” prevents this or that, then ask why New Jersey can’t do this or that. Some states are the same size and density of the average European country.
NJ has an extensive train network. Its crap for the following reasons(only referring to main interstate rail, their city light rails are different):
1. The stock is divided into two sets: single decker trains that are falling apart but are still better than new stock because they were designed during an era where there was actual consideration given to comfort. They are old and run down but more comfy.
The new double decker trains are a design by committee nightmare: they have uncomfortable molded chairs made mostly out of plastic, super cold, noisier due to the terrible shifting whine of the electric motors, and now poorly maintained (god help you if you have to use their rest rooms).
2. They are constantly stopping due to priority given to amtrak and commercial rail. In the best case scenario the train takes ~45 mins to get from central NJ to NYC with stops. For about ~20 miles of track distance, that averages out to ~29-31mph. If Amtrack stops you that time is extended.
3. Very slow speeds due to old track technology.
4. Rising ticket costs for the same lousy service. (~$21 round trip from central NJ to NYC) I guess being able to have a digital ticket helps? (It probably helps them more than it helps you)
5. Pure depression because outside the main routes going into NYC and Hoboken, the dregs of society are the only ones riding these trains. This really grates on you if you take the train for years like I did.
6. Recently, they couldn't even provide working windows so people can see the 'beauty' of NJ. ( To be fair after all the TikTok meme videos called them out on this they finally got embarrassed enough to start replacing them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-a3r6i4hiQ )
It all priorities. People in the US just dont want mass rail over other priorities. The people who do are internet keyboard warriors.
It's obviously nonsense. Nobody is walking from Paris to Berlin. But you can walk in Paris and Berlin.
Don't forget one of the most famous and visited destinations in the country is a walkable neighborhood served by great public transportation and uses a rat as a mascot.
You looked at that transportation recently? It is collapsing due to legacy, graft, and cost overruns. I don't presume you are European but I HATE when they use this system as an example or public transit that works in America. Its a dump. The worst trains in France and Germany run miles around it.
I'm talking about Disney World, not NYC :P
They can catch a train from Paris to Berlin (and every disco they'll be in)
Most people would not. Paris - Berlin is dominated by flying.
Well, Werner Herzog, possibly.
Your criticisms are absolutely right. I upvoted you, but just fyi I think your response may come off as too blunt/rude, and get “downvotes”. It doesn’t really matter here, but maybe helpful to know in general, if you didn’t already.
Fair enough! You're right it's a bit blunt. I didn't take very much time to edit it. Hopefully folks are able to look past any gruffness and find the substance in it.
... I'm not sure many would agree that the UK, of all places, has good public transport. _London_ does, but it more or less ends there.
(Possibly you mean by some other metric, but I'm struggling to think of _any_ metric by which the UK could be said to be the best country in Europe. Sitcoms, possibly. It does a good sitcom. Even outside London!)
You’re assuming all of the negative aspects require giving up cars to solve
I don't think we need to give up cars entirely, but I also don't think we'll be able to address the negative aspects without some amount of change.
An example: I live roughly 200m from the Costco in the center of town, but there's a major 4 lane road between us. Walking would be so convenient, but it's so much safer to drive. A footbridge would address this without impacting drivers. I have no intentions of giving up my car, but this particular activity would be so much nicer without it!
The simple geometry problem of how much space cars take up is arguably the worst now (given tailpipe emissions are on their way out), and there is no solution to that outside of fewer and much smaller cars.
The problem is that mitigation of any kind is an affront to car driving culture.
One big problem people have, for example, is that we just focus so much on roads and there is literally no safe infrastructure for other kinds of people; but drivers also balk at using taxpayer money to build said infrastructure, particularly if it is perceived as reducing driver convenience even by mere seconds. Or even pausing the construction of new, dangerous infrastructure.
95% of people drive because 95% of transportation funding goes to enabling that choice.
People at large are rational and will make rational transportation choices given incentives. The incentives are all aligned towards driving right now because that benefits the auto industry.
You cannot make assertions about how Americans behave, "culturally," based on their transportation choices because these choices are not happening in a vacuum.
Case in point: when Americans visit Disneyland, or NYC, or Amsterdam, they do not typically insist on driving through those places.
You seem to be implying there is something nefarious about how the incentives were created. Yes there has been efforts to push cars over other options and thats well documented but you can't just ignore that part of the incentive naturally leaned towards utilizing the large amount of available land. Its just human nature to use all available resources if they are available to you.
“Tilting at windmills” makes it sound like a pointless and impossible task. I don’t even agree that this is a culture problem. It’s an infrastructure problem wrapped up in tyranny of the minority NIMBY politics.
But even if we accept your premise that American “culture” prefers cars (rather than being a result of decades of expanding as fast and as cheaply as possible across the country), culture can change. It does change.
Because 40,000 people a year die on roads as a result of their design.
Please don’t accept 100 extra funerals a day. It can and will get better.
Changing road design is not necessarily a cultural change from driving.
My country had very bad traffic deaths record. few decades later, traffic is much more intense and there're many more cars, but traffic deaths are waaaaaay down. Thanks to better infrastructure, better cars and better culture especially when it comes to drink and drive...
Policy is decided by people. "Car-centric culture" is just a description of the material status quo, much of which was built by people who are dead, who have changed their minds about cars, or who see different conditions in their city and now want a different approach.
An orientation towards adopting new ways of living when the old ones become impractical or harmful can be just as part of a person's "culture" as a piece of technology.
> Policy is decided by people.
Well yes, corporations are considered 'people'. I think it was some of these 'people' that tore up the streetcar networks in order to replace them with buses.
The problem is that there's not really a way to mitigate those negative aspects. Car centric culture is almost universally miserable.
So, I think the problem is that the culture is unsustainable [1] [2]. Look at new vehicle prices [3]. Look at the operating cost of a vehicle [4]. For many, currently, this cost is at least if not more than $1000/month (car note, insurance, fuel, etc) and very roughly, ~60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. Vehicle repos [5] and auto loan delinquencies [6] are hitting historical highs. America built a structurally deficient urban planning model. In Iowa, for example, they are allowing roads to go back to gravel because they lack the resources to maintain the status quo of road infra [7]. Also, consider rural america continues to wither and clear out [8]. This is all important ground truth to have to mitigate the negative aspects as you say, versus throwing good money after bad.
Maybe we could encourage folks to migrate to college towns from the exurbs with subsidies and job guarantees, versus them staying in place while where they exist today rapidly declines. They would then continue to support the town as residents through their social security or pension income they would spend locally through retirement until death. New urban builds take decades while retrofits and reconfigurations take much less time, effort, and fiat. "Skate to where the puck is going to be."
[1] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2024/7/22/what-strong-to...
[2] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2022/9/20/the-suburbs-ar...
[3] https://www.financialsamurai.com/average-new-car-price/
[4] https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/auto-loans/total-co...
[5] https://www.pymnts.com/transportation/2025/car-repos-hit-lev...
[6] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-03-06/late-car-... | https://archive.today/dfCjJ
[7] https://iowacapitaldispatch.com/2024/03/11/who-will-be-left-...
[8] https://carsey.unh.edu/publication/rural-america-lost-popula... (draw your attention to "Figure 2. Population Change In Nonmetropolitan Counties, 2010 To 2020")
(think in systems)
To bring it down to a real and concrete case, we can do so much better than each family ferrying their children to school/activites, then driving everywhere in single-occupant cars. That's a world where children and senior citizens have greatly reduced independence and community.
How would it look like if there were reduced day-to-day car dependency? Maybe something like this: a "walking schoolbus" where senior citizens and schoolchildren connect with one another as they get exercise on the way to school. Who wouldn't want that? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeYBL5u97c8
I really like the Barcelona Superblocks model [1] for existing urban environments, but subsidizing families to relocate closer to schools is also an option imho. You have to find the intersection of what is politically palatable and the resources available; the next 100 years is going to see structural demographic decline, declining working cohort participation, less growth and productivity, continuing rapid fertility rate decline, declining household sizes, etc so creativity and flexibility will be required (imho). I am also a fan of what Culdesac [2] is doing, and is a pattern to be scaled.
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” got us cars, and I think the new question is "How do we deliver locality and mobility for quality lives without cars, when possible?" Cars are not going away, but we should not build for them specifically as if they were the default option, as this cost burdens the future with potentially unnecessary and expensive personal mobility and infrastructure obligations. Even today, they are unaffordable for a substantial population of people, based on the evidence in my comment above.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=barcelona+superblocks
[2] https://culdesac.com/
> subsidizing families to relocate closer to schools
Without changing the US' urban model to actually allow more homes, all that will do is keep the status quo and make everything more expensive.
The US has a housing shortage [1] (~3M-8M units) that will persist long into the future due to a shortage of tradespeople [2], artificial land scarcity due to new builders constraining supply [3], etc. Upzoning and YIMBY are important components in increasing housing supply and affordability, but relocating folks closer to critical social systems (schools for families with school age children, hospitals and care facilities for seniors) versus expecting everyone to have a car or expecting school bus service when that transportation system is already reaching failure [4] [5] is also of some measurable value (imho). Remember, fertility rate is rapidly declining in almost every state [6] [7], so there should be fewer children in each subsequent educational cohort and families requiring locality near schools should trend downward over time (demographics are tricky and can change, so lots of assumptions relying on current trends as of this comment).
A potential solution is for cities and communities to issue bonds, purchase housing near schools when the economics are favorable (ie try to avoid overpaying), and hold it as public affordable housing for families (perhaps in concert with upzoning; buy adjacent parcels, demo, and rebuild as more dense multi family). Political will is the wildcard.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42277358 (citations)
[2] https://www.haas.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/Howard_Wang... (pages 22-23, 27 specifically)
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VryFaFsKhVE
[4] https://www.epi.org/blog/the-school-bus-driver-shortage-rema...
[5] https://www.ncsl.org/state-legislatures-news/details/states-...
[6] https://usafacts.org/articles/how-have-us-fertility-and-birt...
[7] https://usafacts.org/articles/what-will-americas-population-...
Additional citations:
Construction Capacity: America's Diminishing Housing Pipeline - https://www.governance.fyi/p/construction-capacity-americas-...
Housing Supply and Housing Affordability - https://www.nber.org/papers/w33694 ("The decline in housing affordability over recent decades has promoted an enhanced interest in housing supply. This chapter presents descriptive evidence about the evolution of us housing prices, quantities, and regulations since 1980, indicating that supply constraints appear to be increasingly binding. We then provide an overview of the various approaches used to model construction and land development for homogeneous and heterogeneous housing in static and dynamic contexts to understand housing supply. Our treatment incorporates empirical implementation and policy implications throughout. Finally, we provide an overview of quantitative evidence on the consequences of relaxing various types of supply constraints.")
> The US has a housing shortage [1] (~3M-8M units)
It doesn't. It really, really doesn't. The per-capita housing units are close to the historical highs. And per-household stats are _even_ _better_: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=15tRv
What the US has is the density-despair spiral going. It's creating denser and denser pits of despair in the urban centers via economic forces.
After all, what use is housing in Iowa if you _have_ to live in New York? Because there are no jobs for you in Iowa. And housing in New York will NEVER be cheap.
Per capita housing numbers in a country with as much empty land as the US are useless and deceptive.
No, they are not. It indicates that the problem is not the lack of housing.
I don’t think many US parents would accept their child independently walking or bicycling to school, even over short distances. The Stranger Danger mainstream media has them absolutely terrified that their kid is going to be kidnapped as soon as they leave their front doors.
The real danger is them getting hit by a car driven by another parent dropping off their kid at school. It's a difficult equilibrium to break out of.
Just to consider this on a small scale where, it would actually need to be implemented, one neighborhood at a time, I live in a medium-sized town where the school district has chosen to reject free land that developers attempted to donate to the district for the construction of schools, in favor of just assigning the families who move into these new-build homes to the schools in the other part of town where schools have ample capacity due to the large 4+ bedroom single-family homes mostly being owned and occupied by empty-nest Boomers.
We live somewhere in between the "new builds" part of town and the area that has a bunch of schools, so the walk from our neighborhood to our assigned (and closest) middle school is only 2.5 miles, a 55 minute walk with 155 ft elevation change. This walk takes you across a road with a 60MPH speed limit, basically an expressway. The elementary school is a bit closer, only a 40 minutes, 2 mile walk, but same expressway.
Oh, and they don't even offer a school bus of any kind. I suppose the gen-x parents killed that idea off 25 years ago because they were so worried their kids would be out of direct supervision even walking to a bus stop, so each child is chaufferred door to door, rain or shine, until 16 when they receive their own cars.
I agree with you that all this is absurd. Kids are capable of walking to school and shouldn't have to leave a medium-sized neighborhood to do so. But significant demolition of neighborhoods and construction of schools, local grocery markets, etc. is the only prescription for our ills that would provide anything resembling an alternative to cars for the residents of the tract homes that make up a significant part of our car-dependent suburbs.
This is why I think whoever upthread is arguing that people aren't exactly being reasonable expecting the America we inherited from the 20th century to stop stalling and transform itself into 1,000 Amsterdams. Even though the places that share that awesome non-car infra are highly sought-after.
> I agree with you that all this is absurd.
It's not. It's the right design idea. But it's just missing one factor that will make it far superior to ANY other urban model: self-driving vehicles.
Imagine children being able to just get a self-driving taxi and ride to school by themselves. Or to other locations. All while having plenty of space at home, a yard to play, etc.
I'm not so convinced that I'd prefer to live isolated and "just" get a robotaxi for every excursion anyone wants to do. I'd rather my kids walked about a quarter mile to school with several neighbors. Exercise and being outside are good!
Even assuming we turned smarter and built clean nuclear plants everywhere, just all the paving of roads, tires etc. takes a lot of resources.
> I'm not so convinced that I'd prefer to live isolated and "just" get a robotaxi for every excursion anyone wants to do. I'd rather my kids walked about a quarter mile to school with several neighbors. Exercise and being outside are good!
I believe that robotaxis will enable totally new behaviors. For example, if you don't live immediately near a park, you won't often go there. It's just too tiresome to use public transit to visit a park just for a short walk/run/play. And personal cars are not available for children.
With robocars, you'll be able to text your friend: "hi, meet you at the park corner in 10", jump into a car, and arrive there. This will have zero friction, so it's far more likely to become a habitual behavior.
> Even assuming we turned smarter and built clean nuclear plants everywhere, just all the paving of roads, tires etc. takes a lot of resources.
Ha. One line of Manhattan subway now costs as much as 1500 miles of modern 6-lane freeway. Urban construction is EXPENSIVE.
I live in Vienna and people take public transport to nature all the time.
Define "all the time" and "people".
I understand from your question you struggle to comprehend that this is possible. I assure you it really is. People who have money take the train. People who own cars take the train. The modal split for Vienna generally is about 25% by car. I would guess more than 50% for public transport for journeys to nearby nature. The trains in Austria are excellent: safe, clean and very punctual. If you get in a train to nature you will be surrounded by people with overpriced hiking gear.
>In Iowa, for example, they are allowing roads to go back to gravel because they lack the resources to maintain the status quo of road infra [7].
A gravel road to a dying town doesn’t seem like a failure mode to me.
They don’t build train lines to dying towns in Europe either.
In my comment, I am using it as signal wrt infra cost affordability. I agree it is not a bad solution as population declines continue where it occurs, versus having no road. Look at infrastructure cost projections to understand if it is within the light cone of economic affordability. If it can't be paid for with a combination of taxes and debt, it isn't possible.
No one is forced to buy a car at the median price.
You can buy these cars new under $25K.
Toyota Corolla LE ($23,460), Hyundai Elantra SE ($23,025), Kia K4 LX ($21,990), Nissan Sentra S ($21,590), Mazda3 2.5 S ($24,150), Subaru Impreza Base ($23,495).
I make decent money and I would never spend more than $25K on a car. Of course you can also get used cars with low mileage.
As far as people in rural areas. They deserve every negative thing that they keep voting for.
These sources are garbage. This paycheck to paycheck thing is just nonsense. This is just a gish gallop.
I am open to other sources of these metrics, please feel free to provide them.
Here's one: 3 months emergency savings is the median position https://www.federalreserve.gov/consumerscommunities/sheddata...
There's a good summary on Matt Yglesias's blog of Matt Darling (economist at Niskanen Center and Twitter debunker of this paycheck to paycheck myth) on the subject: https://www.slowboring.com/i/149683266/the-median-financial-...
Thank you! I will reference these in the future on this topic.
They probably find it equally abhorrent that a European would come and police their culture. Please don't travel somewhere and complain about local culture. You're a guest, possibly and unwanted one.
I think you completely missed the point.
No, I’m sure I didn’t.
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How do we know that this is "Puerto Rican Culture Plays Loud Music on Beaches"?
What if it's some obnoxious rebellious college kids who think they can get away with it?
What if it's some tourists, like from Cuba or Argentina, who are rich and so nobody in authority will handle complaints against them, because tourism feeds PR's economy so effectively?
What if most Puerto Rico residents don't really go hang out at the beach at all, and they stay home with their families, and they cook in the kitchen and they enjoy conversations?
What if Puerto Ricans are mostly like Americans, and their faces are all in their smartphones, and some of them play loud music and some ignore it, and some hate it but don't complain, and some complain but also play their own loud music to try and drown it out?
What if Puerto Ricans don't have one monolithic culture that you can generalize while we're here on an English-speaking forum, based on the mainland USA? What if Puerto Ricans don't actually eat elephants or giraffes? https://youtu.be/mzK9_TbzReQ?si=-QsUIwt_0SIcY-gt&t=28
It’s too easy for a vocal minority to veto good policy, like building more housing. You see this all across the country, in college towns and in California overall. It is formalized as “zoning” but that is just an official way of implementing a shortsighted policy.
If you do not zone for housing you are zoning for homelessness. Plain and simple.
You can do what rich people do: force others to take care of your problems by kicking out the homeless.
There are plenty of rich people in San Francisco which has a severe housing shortage and homelessness issue. Homelessness is the exhaust fumes of rapid growth, which SF and CA as a whole have experienced. Smart politics knows this and plans ahead to handle it, rather than allowing exploding housing costs stunt the growth of the city. There are many talented people who otherwise would have went to SF who didn’t.
You don’t have to go far from SF to get to single family houses, which should not be possible. They can solve this by adding a land value tax inversely proportional to the distance from specific city functions.
Hate to be the bearer of bad news but you could build infinite housing in San Francisco and the streets would still be riddled with drug-abusing vagrants. They may technically stop being "homeless" if you give them all a free apartment but it's not a magic wand that will solve SF's problems.
Having sufficient housing doesn’t mean you can’t also have basic law enforcement. SF is doing neither. I am saying to do both.
We can have beautiful, clean and safe cities that are much more affordable. It is a choice not to.
You can only have beautiful, clean and safe cities if you're willing to forbid people - who can walk in from anywhere at any time no matter how much you subsidize yesterday's batch with free housing - from making them ugly, dirty, and unsafe, and SF doesn't have the heart to make anybody do anything. They used to halfheartedly try to go through the motions, and for about 10 years now, they have given up even that.
I think some people should get subsidized housing, but when I say build more housing I’m talking about increasing the supply and putting it on the market so that regular people can afford it.
As it stands now housing is completely unaffordable. The median income in San Francisco is $120k which means half the people there don’t even make that. I would like my kid’s elementary school teacher to be able to afford not to have roommates.
Also for what it’s worth 70% of the homeless in SF are from SF.
> 70% of the homeless in SF are from SF.
(Self reported) - and why would you tell some survey taker you came in on a Greyhound from Bakersfield because you know they have far better amenities for you in SF?
Isn’t it bizarre how in college short distances, walkability and building high capacity accommodations on a budget are a priority to create productive, collaborative, social and affordable environments but after college, people move to suburban hell
Not at all.
When you're young and not tied down, and also likely lack much money, you prioritize a different lifestyle and are also in college to, presumably, accomplish your goal of getting a degree and learning something.
For many, once they get older and desire a slower, calmer, quieter life, and especially if you want more space with kids, the suburbs start holding more appeal. And that also factors in constraints about job availability.
> the suburbs start holding more appeal.
Suburbs don't need to be car-dependent. The suburban appeal in fact has nothing to do with cars.
In Germany as just one example, there was (when I lived there) excellent, reliable bus service in and between suburbs. And connecting the suburbs to light rail, which connected to the city center.
The big complaint I had in my 20s was that the light rail stopped running before midnight.
> Suburbs don't need to be car-dependent
Probably true, but unless you have infinite money, building enough housing with expensive rail infrastructure is pretty tough. We can only manage truly world-class(ish) transit in (parts of) one city, NYC, and plenty of people still routinely choose to move out of Manhattan upon having kids instead of staying, either because they can't afford enough space to reasonably make a go of it, or because it's so much easier to do the car-dependent suburb. So, the people themselves are choosing it. Whatever anyone thinks of it, there is plenty of evidence that a lot of people who have a choice choose something other than the urban walkable deal.
PS: Don't come at me please, I loved living in a big urban city, but moved out because I refused to choose only one of: big enough home, safe neighborhood, decent schools, reasonable commute distance. And honestly to stay in the urban core where I used to live, only "commute distance" was even available.
Rail infrastructure is actually cheaper than car infrastructure, though, on a passenger-mile basis. However, the car infrastructure is paid for by the government, and rail is not.
Then why have most cities and towns in Europe been able to do it without much trouble?
Most cities and towns were built hundreds of years before most cities and towns in America were, so they're dense (because people needed to walk everywhere), which is perfect for rail.
Take a look at a satellite view of the suburban areas where most Americans actually live. They're mostly post-1950 and were built with basically the opposite assumptions as Europe:
1. Homes spaced generously with residential districts stretching out tens of miles in every direction from the dense-ish core.
2. Homes fully isolated from business districts (i.e. anywhere anyone would want to go)
3. High-speed arterial stroads or, in tonier suburbs, basically expressways, which serve as the connection between neighborhoods.
4. Offices and other workplaces dispersed into strip malls, long stroads, and industrial parks throughout an area, rather than concentrated in a primary central business district.
Turning all that into a cool Dutch city or town where people are going to bike or take trains everywhere pretty much requires bulldozing and starting again. Again I say this with no judgment, I think 'Not Just Bikes,' for instance, makes a perfectly good case that our way is lame and the Dutch are doing great. But realistically I would never hold my breath expecting the US to transform even 1/10 of the way to the Europe style of transport.
So the 'young and not tied down' that are fortunate enough to go to college get to experience a more suitable environment while it suits them, but the less fortunate young people that don't get the opportunity to live in a college town get no such consideration I guess.
I dunno, I moved off of campus as soon as I could, and kept moving farther away each year. Most people lived a year, perhaps two at most in the dormatories, and only the alcoholics actually stayed close to campus.
If colleges represent the ideal social environment, count me out.
And we were forced, I mean, highly encouraged to live on campus for the first year or two. I can't recall anyone spending more than a couple years on campus before moving out.
People change. As they get older that suburban hell often looks more like a suburban paradise and those condensed anthills of a city can make one shudder. My 2c.
Yeah, I absolutely and honestly loved cities most of my life. I grew up in London, lived in Seattle and Philadelphia, spent a semester teaching in Berlin, frequently went to NYC ... loved it all.
I'm 61 now, and for the last 6 years I've lived in a very small village in rural NM. Those big cities? Well, I'll go if I have to and will not complain the way some folks would. But I certainly do not love them the way I once did, and it's not because they changed.
Yeah, the reason I moved away from the city. I'd even do that if I had the money to buy a house in the city.
Too noisy, too dirty and the bad traffic...
> but after college, people move to suburban hell
Well they certainly aren't able to buy within walking distance of their office job. Even if housing exists, is not dangerous, or they could afford it, it won't work if a couple doesn't work in same exact area, unlike strolling around campus between classes.
> high capacity accommodations
I like city density myself, but you do have to remember that "high capacity accommodations" in this case means "sharing a room with a stranger and a bathroom with twenty."
This interview needs to be edited a bit; just posting the transcript of the zoom call really hampers the readability and flow. What works for a podcast is not the same as what works for a written piece.
Let's not forget that in America, when you have a college or university, you have historically created a money funnel from the government/parents, through the students, to the city. There's an outsized incentive to cater to that opportunity and get the students accessing the business areas.
Also, American liberal culture tends to follow higher education, which not only means a desire for certain things, but also a love of rules to block "bad things". This often means preserving old cities.
In my experience the transient nature of the college town population means that they're all kind of run down in a particular kind of way, especially housing (how many drunken ragers can a 1 bedroom apartment really handle?). It's nice that they can be beacons of culture in otherwise rural areas, but there's definitely downsides to having a bunch of kids move in and out constantly.
> how many drunken ragers can a 1 bedroom apartment really handle?
Depends on how they were built. For some college halls in the UK, maybe a few hundred years worth?
They aren’t failing structurally, they are just in a perpetually ugly state because a landlord doesn’t care about keeping a property attractive that students will abuse.
So you end up with worn out carpet, paint flaking, broken door handles, etc etc.
That’s why there is a different much smaller but much better pool of properties for people willing to do an 18+ month lease.
A big part of why college towns work so nicely is economic circumstances of the student body. Simply put most students aren’t bringing a car to campus and by definition now need to live somewhere closer to get to class. And on top of that the town is a monocrop where maybe the couple tens of thousands of kids are the vast majority of the population.
This is why it can’t really play out as nicely everywhere. You might work across town from your partner vs merely across campus, or in another town. Your location is compromised by definition and not benefiting from economies of scale like it was when it was at least compromised with another 40k people in your demographic with a similar commute and life pattern within 2 square miles. And you don’t have to pay a couple thousand a year for parking privileges either so you might be taking the car on trips that would have been a forced walk in college for lack of car.
The disneyland point is a bit tired and worn imo among internet urbanists and doesn’t even make sense in practice if you’ve ever been to disneyland. Main street isnt the draw. It is this strip of shops you are obligated to walk through as you enter the park to try and tempt you from your dollar. You can’t even hang out there; all the shops are packed with people looking at merchandise, all the restaurants on main are like coffee and ice cream “please leave and keep walking” places, and during fireworks display it is a miracle and a testament to the staffing that there isn’t a crowd crush from people leaving through the bottleneck as well as people staying to see fireworks framed with the castle. In these situations they actually open up a staff only alley to the public that is parallel to main street to relieve some of this bottleneck.
This seems like a strangely theoretical argument, as if the world outside America simply does not exist.
Isn't the article about college towns in America? It's not theoretical there.
A more universal example is probably towns with large seasonal influxes, such as ski towns or beach towns, but unlike a college town, these locations attract people of all ages and incomes. College towns in the US have an influx of specifically 18-22 year olds who can afford college but might not have a lot of disposable income, and most leave during the summer.
> Art Deco City From Time and Jerry
You mean Tom and Jerry?
> Ryan Allen is a professor of international education at University of America in Southern California
What in the… what? That’s not a university. That’s not even a university system. The only sort of person I would expect to call… I don’t know, USC?… that has never observed the name of an American state university used in context in the English language.
Enormous red flags in like the first three sentences.
It appears to be the Soka University of America.
https://www.soka.edu/about/faculty-staff/ryan-allen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soka_University_of_America
Uh well https://ua-edu.us/
Why not go into even more past eras? Urbanism from the era of bunk beds in flophouses is the future, after all.
I unironically agree with this. 100 years ago, Skid Row and Bunker Hill in Los Angeles were full of SROs, boarding houses and long-term hotels. The people who lived there didn't disappear, they're just all sleeping in the street now.
I guess you never had the misfortune of sleeping in a flophouse to say something like that.
One time I had this project in Switzerland and my co-worker, who also travelled there, figured he'd save money if he rented a bunk bed in illegal (due to density) quarters.
Terrible experience, which got him fired eventually because he quickly lost steam due to having to share a tiny room with three other people.
I on the other hand moistened every Swiss Frank banknote with tears, but splurged thrice the amount on a proper room and survived until the end of my involvement in that project.
The person you're responding to suggested Single Room Occupancies, flophouses, etc. are a better alternative to sleeping rough (on the street).
You suggested that flophouses are worse than a proper room.
Both of these things can be true.
As an aside you can see why it is hard/impossible for a homeless person to pull bootstraps when a successful person can't keep their job living not-even-homeless.
The current American urbanism is from the past! The assumption that other urbanisms somehow represent a blast from the past, while 70 year old American car-centric urbanism embodies the eternal modern 'now,' simply doesn't hold up to scrutiny. There are numerous contemporary urbanisms, and newer approaches increasingly tend to be far less car-centric.
The thing is, the 70-era anti-urbanism made the US the leading country.
The "modern" urbanism (flophouses, shoebox-sized apartments, 15-minute don-you-dare-to-walk-out neighborhoods) is leading only to decay of the country. Evidence: it absolutely helped to elect Trump.
Wild assertions with another wild assertion as 'evidence'
Another observation is that college towns are a fake/planned environment, and much is controlled in a very authoritative way. The population is very uniform and willingly gives up many freedoms.
One of my more tin-hattish ideas:
higher ed has drifted toward more of an “all inclusive resort” model over the last 50 years where students get to live in a “parallel” version of the city with their own police force, medical center, dining halls, entertainment venues, etc. this is an intentional move to let them live in a utopian setting that pacifies them to prevent widespread student activism like the 70s
I like the organic mix of university and city development that University of Michigan has in Ann Arbor. It feels like the two grew together and coexist. I do get that feeling you describe when in Wayne State downtown though