First, I had a similar feeling coming back to SimCity 4. Even a just a few years ago, I tried to optimize for maximum density and size - kinda like NYC where I lived.
Now I don't find that interesting and much more interested to sustain a leafy suburb like one I've chosen for my kids.
Second, it's not just games. In my NYC days I was a "transit and bike lanes" guy all the way. Now with kids, I understand why "Americans love their cars" - it switched form a derogatory statement to one of understanding. There's a reason that "ban the cars" posters never mention a partner or children in their bios.
There's less "objective good" or "objective bad" in these matters than I used to think. It's more about who you optimize for.
> Now with kids, I understand why "Americans love their cars" - it switched form a derogatory statement to one of understanding. There's a reason that "ban the cars" posters never mention a partner or children in their bios.
This seems very different from the large anti-car movement in the Netherlands in the 1970s (which eventually led to massive investments in bike infrastructure and car restrictions in the cities).
There was significant parent involvement, touting the memorable slogan "Stop de Kindermoord" ("Stop the Child Murder").
There's a youtube channel named @NotJustBikes which mostly talks about how bike-friendly the Netherlands are and compares it to the USA. It's worth watching a couple of those videos.
And, unlike the grandparent-comment’s assertions, that channel references his family and kids in most videos (in that he and his partner moved to Amsterdam so his children could have the freedom to navigate safely without having to be driven around).
My mother lives in suburban Massachusetts. She always said that she never imagined how it was possible for me to live with two small kids without a car in Berlin.
She came to visit for one month. After the first week she was already comfortably going around with the Ubahn to pick up the kids at school. I have 4 supermarkets less than 150m away from me, so we would walk to do groceries every other day. I spend ~80€/month with taxi rides (for the occasional trip to meet someone in a less convenient place), which is less than what she pays in car insurance alone, not even counting the cost of gas.
At the end of the trip, she got it. Having a car is not a necessity. It should be seen (and taxed) as a luxury.
> Having a car is not a necessity. It should be seen (and taxed) as a luxury
It is unfortunately a necessity in many parts of America where public transportation is lacking or nonexistent.
And making it a "luxury" just further stratifies our society into different, non-interacting economic classes. When things start becoming "privileges", you get a privileged class who cares less and less about the quality of life of those in lesser classes, shaping society to benefit their lifestyles at the expense of others.
As someone who grew up in abject poverty in a very rural area and was homeless and on completely on my own by 16, I have already seen how this plays out. The trajectory of my life was majorly affected by a lack of a car or adequate public transportation. I have since had to make choices about where I live in order to minimize car use in order to align with my own philosophy around transportation, but it comes at great cost in America when such walkable cities are so desirable that cost of living shoots through the roof due to demand. And conversely, poorer areas often lack walkability or sufficient and accessible public transportation.
Berlin does not have the same problems as America, a sprawling empire in decline.
> When things start becoming "privileges", you get a privileged class who cares less and less about the quality of life of those in lesser classes, shaping society to benefit their lifestyles at the expense of others.
I'll never forget one of my last lectures from my high-school History class teacher. She said "People talk about societies in terms of two classes: the kings and the plebs, the haves and have-nots, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. I hope you managed to learn that throughout all of history, what we have is actually three different forces - priests or monks in Ancient times, or the merchants during the Renaissance, land owners in the US - and that it's this third class that is crucial in determining the course of History. Every time they aligned with the elites there was no change in the status quo, and every time a revolution happened was because they in the middle shifted their support to the other side."
I'm saying this for one simple reason: the way to fix this problem is not by pretending that car ownership isn't a luxury, but by de-stigmatizing public transport. I can bet you that if political forces shifted and started putting pressure against car-ownership, you would quickly see a swing from the middle class in support for better public transit, mixed-use zoning, YIMBY-ism, etc.
"A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transportation"
- You don't pay for the increased costs in healthcare caused by air pollution or the amount of concrete needed to keep all those roads.
- Car owners are not taxed extra for the economic impact in social security due to the tens of thousands of people that die every year.
I could go on. There are countless other environmental and economic externalities that suburbanites are not being accounted for and they only get away with it because that's in the interests of the privileged elite.
I would love to see a study that explores whether those taxes cover the negative externalities compared to other forms of transit, because that seems incredibly unlikely.
That’s great for where you live, but why did you end with such intolerance for people who live in the suburbs? They don’t have four supermarkets in less than 150 meters. There are places where cars actually are a necessity.
> why did you end with such intolerance for people who live in the suburbs?
My hostility is towards people who claim to prefer to live in the suburbs, but do not want to pay for the privilege.
Show me people that say "Yeah, I won't mind having higher property taxes, extra fees to keep my many cars in the garage and have to pay full price for the extended infrastructure (sewer, roads, water, electricity lines, etc) just so that I don't have to live among those poor city-dwellers" and I'll be totally fine with their choices.
Is your lifestyle subsidized too? How do you know?
I suspect that even people with strong opinions have little understanding about infrastructure costs and who is subsidizing what. I’m unwilling to take this on faith - it seems like there need to be financial deep dives.
I live in the suburbs of NYC. All of NYC's drinking water is stored in our backyards. So much so that the NYPD patrols this area, 90 miles outside their geography.
The math has certainly not been done. There are no cities without suburbs. For food and water.
> because of style of community they want to own their home in?
No, I do not care about their choices, provided they are willing to bear all costs from it. The problem is not living in the suburbs. The problem is affluent people that have their lifestyle subsidized by poorer people living close to the city center.
Also, it's virtually impossible to claim that people want to live like that in the US, because most places have zoning laws that simply forbid the emergence of any other alternative. Suburbs in Germany are smaller, less dense versions of the urban center, but they are not devoid of life. They are still walkable, they still have local shops, they do not make cars a requirement for everyone, kids do not need to be driven around anywhere, etc. You can bet that if more people in the US could come to visit they would rather live like that than in the traditional cul-de-sacs/picketed fence developments from American Suburbia.
The issue is that we don't tax externalities properly in the US. We heavily subsidize car usage and then make people pay to use the subway. The incentives encourage behavior that is bad on a global scale even if it makes sense for each individual.
This seems like an odd example. Aren’t many forms of public transportation partially funded and subsidized via taxes? It doesn’t make them bad, but they aren’t self-sufficient either.
Most places in the US the zoning restrictions are part of the problem. You can't build a small grocery to serve a neighborhood when its zoned residential.
Places that grew before cars, were built with walking distance separations. It wasn't possible to profit as a grocery by building miles away from the people.
The battle for the suburbs is mostly lost, you need a car if you live there.
What the discussion should instead highlight is that with just moderate increases in population density you can escape the need for a car and it ends up being better for everyone. That mostly only applies to new development.
Heck, even if you just made cars second class in new suburbs you could see cheaper housing with equivalent land. Put in a shared parking garage for a suburb instead of putting a garage on everyone's home and all the sudden the amount of sqft needed just to get cars in and out gets massively reduced meaning more room for more homes and an easier argument to make for bus service.
No, suburbs cost more per capita than people living in the inner city, generate less tax revenue and end up becoming a net negative to municipalities: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI
I’m not going to watch YouTube videos (I’m a text guy) but the Strong Towns blog is pretty good. I don’t think they’re the last word on this, because they’re often making general observations, and financial problems are often local.
For example, I know Oakland, CA has severe financial issues (looks like the school district might go bankrupt) but I wouldn’t generalize from that to all cities.
You are already grasping at straws if you refuse to see something that could quickly give you the information that challenges your preconceived notions. The video I linked to talks precisely about the study done by a consulting company showing how suburbs are net-negative to a city's budget and they do it for multiple cities across the country.
> Financial problems are local.
There might be differences in the particulars among cities, but they share a lot of common causes and one of them is that suburban sprawl is cheap to begin (acquiring and building on the land) but expensive to maintain.
I don't live in a place that has public transit or "walkability". It will never be able to afford that, the tax base isn't sufficient.
When the fuck-cars people start ranting, what they mean is that they want me and the millions like me to move to some distant gigantic city and make that even more gigantic. I do not look forward to becoming the termite people that they wish to become.
The luxury is living in a place where this is a possible lifestyle, and then thinking every one of 300 million people can live in such a place or make the place they live into such.
> they want me and the millions like me to move to some distant gigantic city and make that even more gigantic.
No, we want you simply to pay the full sticker price for all the things you are consuming and exploiting.
It's simple as that. Drop the pretense that you are actually carrying your own weight and that your lifestyle is sustainable. If you do just that and start paying for the privileges you have, we'll leave you in peace.
> that channel references his family and kids in most videos (in that he and his partner moved to Amsterdam so his children could have the freedom to navigate safely without having to be driven around).
Then they are unlikely to be unbiased - someone who uproots and moves their family due to an issue they care about is almost never going to express any regret, no matter how bad things get.
I have no knowledge of what this Dutch effort was beyond the info in your link, but nothing suggests that the public outcry was go actually ban vehicles or disincentivize ownership and use with tactics such as with higher fees, reduced parking availability, which is what U.S. urban road safety advocates I see pushing for.
Alongside increased bike infrastructure funding, the Dutch effort certainly did involve disincentivizing car use by higher fees (both parking and ownership), reducing parking availability (and also non-parking car accessibility), and slowing down car speeds (speed bumps, cameras, narrowing roads, calming road design, reducing city speed limits to 19mph), and generally reducing car allocated space. It's typically done during scheduled road maintenance, where separated bike lakes are installed, often by converting the street parking space or turning a two way street into a one way (for cars) street or even banning car access.
The public outcry was to ban cars - literally. They blocked streets, and did what they needed to to block drivers and vehicles. It's long enough ago that maybe the abrasiveness and confrontational nature of it is forgotten now - lots of big changes start out that way, but if successful the success almost drives the way the history is remembered more postively.
It looks to me like it was 100% a "think of the children" moment that often gets ridiculed. I can see the same inflection point in my country around the same time, when street and road design shifted to car orientated and car priority - Amsterdam being one of the notable exceptions but with a well documented fight.
I mean Amsterdam is kinda renown exactly for reducing parking availability, slow speed limits and generally human-first city planning nowadays.
Wasn't always like that either. In the 90s it was cars-first just like the OP likes nowadays.
It's definitely true that having only bicycle infrastructure doesn't really work for families though. It's a different story if you've got a cargo bike and public transport... But it's understandable that that's not even entering his mind considering the culture of the USA.
Agreed, I only know of a handfull families that manage with no nearby public transport using bicycle only. It is possible, I managed doing 50km for couple of months with a cargo bike and small kids, you adapt. I do not recommend that to anyone unless you really want to, it is just too cheap to own a couple of cars.
It's only cheap because they are heavily subsidized. And then we go back to a discussion about policy. If you remove all the subsidies or make car-owners pay for the externalities, things would quickly turn in favor for higher density, public transit, and AFAIK no game has put this into their game economics.
The forthcoming Car Park Capital[0] looks like an interesting reflection of your sentiment (but it's about planning cities to make them more car centric).
> Second, it's not just games. In my NYC days I was a "transit and bike lanes" guy all the way. Now with kids, I understand why "Americans love their cars" - it switched form a derogatory statement to one of understanding. There's a reason that "ban the cars" posters never mention a partner or children in their bios.
Buy a bakfiet cargo bike, there's models that can fit five kids under 7. Mine fits three.
Kids like them better and you get exercise. For the first time in my life I have a BMI of around 20 without having to waste time at the gym, the drop off, pick up, shopping, and work commute add up to an hour and a half of medium intensity cardio.
Every other parent my age in the neighborhood looks five years away from a heart attack. I'm fitter than I was in my 20s.
>There's less "objective good" or "objective bad" in these matters than I used to think. It's more about who you optimize for.
There are over 1,000 children killed in the US annually by cars. This is after we restrain them like Hannibal Lecter while in cars and don't let them out of our houses so they don't get run over.
That's before we talk about the child obesity epidemic, social media abuse, and on and on.
If given the choice between keeping cars or letting polio loose on the land you'd be hard pressed to figure out which will kill and disable more kids.
I'd love to get a cargo bike and use it for kid transport.
I would be worried about collision safety though, I am not going to persuade everyone in my neighborhood to stop using cars in a hurry and there are not bike routes between me and school, library, shops, ...
This is the classic urbanist anti-bike tragedy of the commons that is referenced often.
People use cars because they are (rightly) concerned about safety. People avoid using bikes because there are so many cars. It’s very hard to ban cars or restrict car usage because it seems like no one wants to use bikes, but it’s a self-reinforcing system.
And the losers that neither (gross generalization here) the bike people or the car people care about are the pedestrians. We are lucky to live in an urban environment where our family of 5 usually walks everywhere. Crossing the street with children is an unwelcome adventure. But you are absolutely right I would ride an ebike with the kids if it did not seem so dangerous.
Off topic, but my brain did a double take there. Didn't know that the Dutch word "bakfiets" (bike with a box) was anglicized to "bakfiet". Cool. Usually it's us who borrow foreign words from all over
They must have meant the brand Bakfiets. 'Cargo bike' is what they're known as, in my experience in the UK anyway, and 'bakfiets cargo bike' would be redundant if not meaning the brand.
It's not anglicized, just misspelled. ;) And awkward to pluralize (bakfietsen? bakfietses?)
The fit parents and delighted kids I frequently see riding bakfeitsen in Amsterdam are always so happy and healthy and safe that I am envious I wasn't born here myself.
They effortlessly ride through busy city streets, wander through parks, and trek across the countryside, all with well maintained bike paths, and gather together to have picnics and play, which you can't do with an SUV. Also dogs love riding in them, and they're great for shopping and hauling too.
An electric bakfiets with an Enviolo continuous stepless automatic shifting hub is ideal and safe for kids, because you don't have to worry about shifting gears or even preemptively shift down before you stop at an intersection or unexpected obstacle.
It can shift when you're stopped and even while you're accelerating, and it automatically and smoothly shifts up as you accelerate. You just dial in your preferred cadence and it does the rest. So you can concentrate on the traffic and kids and scenery instead of your gears, even in stop-and-go city traffic.
I love the one on my normal eBike, it's a joy to ride, and I'll never go back. I have no affiliation, it's just a fantastic piece of technology. They're a Dutch company, so many Dutch brands of bike, bakfiets, and delivery bikes use them, but they're available worldwide.
They have special heavy duty bakfiets motors and hubs, and smooth quiet indestructible carbon fiber belt drives instead of clackety chains and derailleurs. Silent, reliable, maintenance free, and greaseless!
Enviolo fully automatic stepless transmission for e-bikes:
>Enviolo Automatic is a “set and forget” system that adjusts to you – set your preferred pace and you’re ready to go. Focus your journey in bustling cities, relaxed countryside rides, or when travelling with kids.
Spend 1 month with your kids in a place where cars are actually not needed, only then you can actually understand what you are denying your kids.
And if you want to know right away, think about who can drive your car, as supposed being able to walk or ride somewhere. You're limiting their own personal freedom by forcing them to have you always needed to go somewhere.
I don’t really want my kids have that much personal freedom because they’re kids. I live very suburban and my kids could walk to one of the neighborhood parks (2-3 minutes) or to a friends house but I don’t see them needing more than that.
My biggest fear about cars is that one might kill my kid. This leads to impossing all sorts of play and travel restrictions on her that I wouldn't have to if there were fewer cars and more bikes. (Bikes which kids can ride independently to their friends' houses from a single-digit age, by the way, which I would allow her to do if she weren't sharing the streets with cars.)
Maybe the problem is that the leafy suburb you moved to is car-dependent? It doesn't have to be built that way, that's a design choice. It's possible to build a low density suburb that kids can bike through safely, for example: https://youtu.be/r-TuGAHR78w
>Now with kids, I understand why "Americans love their cars"
In other words: I was okay with demanding change when it didn't inconvenience me, but now that I get to benefit from economic policy that heavily subsidize my lifestyle I rather keep the status quo.
"Americans love their cars" isn't so much about the cars as it is about the lack of good alternatives. Other countries have great public transportation and good bike lanes and all that... in addition to car ownership. So people can get the best of both worlds. It's only a zero sum game if you want it to be one.
As an NYC parent I strongly disagree. But I guess it depends what you optimize for.
I do wish the subway had more elevators. But once you move beyond those early days with a stroller… I have six playground within a twenty minute walk, a giant park a few minutes away. There’s a zoo nearby, the beach (and aquarium) is less than 45 mins on the subway, there are countless museums in the city… all in all its rich in child friendly activities and child-friendly methods of reaching them.
(I’m not there with my kids yet but from talking to older parents: an understated benefit of the city is that kids are able to exercise independence much more easily. They’ll be taking the subway to and from high school, if they want to meet a friend they can just… go. Rather than rely on a parent driving them everywhere)
In a well-designed city, you don't get onto the subway with a stroller during peak hour, because all amenities that your young children need are reachable in 15 minutes on foot (or <5 minutes by bike).
It certainly depends what you call child-hostile and I have no statistics on this.
What I do know though, is that one of the denser area in Europe is the famous triangle Rotterdam-Amsterdam-Utrecht, which can hardly be described as child-hostile.
> Nope. It's universal. The denser the city, the more child-hostile it is.
> Just imagine getting into Tokyo subway with a stroller for 2 kids. There's a reason why Tokyo fertility rate is below 1.
This is a glaring example of hunting for data that supports a preexisting belief, rather than basing beliefs on empirical data.
To point out how absurd this logic is, consider that it fails to consider the fertility rate of Japan as a whole outside urban areas, as well as failing to account for the many other extremely dense cities outside Japan that do have very high fertility rates.
Nope. I'm anti-urbanist, so I actually analyzed the data :)
The correlation is undeniable for any developed country, especially the US. Developing countries are a bit different they are only now starting the second demographic transition.
> To point out how absurd this logic is, consider that it fails to consider the fertility rate of Japan as a whole outside urban areas, as well as failing to account for the many other extremely dense cities outside Japan that do have very high fertility rates.
You're misreading those stats. The Census doesn't define "city", it defines "urban" vs. "rural".
My "city" of 5K is considered "urban" according to the 2020 census. There are nearly zero services in this "city", only a couple of restaurants, the largest employer is the school district, and it's surrounded by farms and mountain forests. It takes 15 minutes by car to get to the next town over on a two lane highway.
If you want to get to any real city, you're looking at a 30-45 minute drive at highway/freeway speeds.
So yes, there may be more individuals in "urban" areas, but not all "urban" areas are functionally urban. My "urban city" per the 2020 census is no LA, Austin, or Portland.
Where I live the temperature swings from -40 to over 100F with very high humidity every year.
Bicycling with little kids is just not practical for a lot of it, and the nearest bus stop is a four hour walk (12 miles).
Do large cities and suburban neighborhoods deserve public transportation? Sure. Is that a universal answer? No. Not even close. There are farm fields out here larger than many towns. Roads, vehicles, and fast on demand transportation are a necessity for the geographic super majority of the US.
The sad thing is that you _CAN_ have a leafy suburb without the roar of internal combustion and 8 lane stroads everywhere. Planners in the US just refuse to build them.
This morning the four of us biked to the grocery store (we loaded the groceries in the bakfiets). The kids bike to their daycare. We bike to the train when we feel like a day out.
I can't fathom trying to raise kids somewhere we need to use a car to do anything.
Suburb doesn't mean car constrained. I grew up in the suburbs and rode my bike and skateboard just about everywhere from the time I was 13 to the time I could drive.
There usually aren't any meaningful destinations (like shops / a park / a mall) within a suburb you can reach in a reasonable amount of time, except a friend if the live close.
I live in a very suburban neighborhood in Arizona and we have 2 neighborhood parks within a 2-3 minute walk. There are 2-3 more parks in the 5-10 minute range.
There is a 10 minute walk to 3 grocery stores, a bar, many fast food restaurants, tons of medical offices, etc.
All of my friends and family who live in different suburbs have similar amounts of services with a short walk as well.
American suburbs feature poorly interconnected residential-only areas that sprawl endlessly. You can easily be a ten minute walk from a friend (through yards and across fences, not over a walking path) but a ten or fifteen minute drive away due to the Byzantine road layout.
Commercial zones that have groceries, restaurants, shops, and entertainment are almost always several kilometers away. You could technically bike there, but there are rarely bike lanes. And due to serving the needs of a large, low-density area, you’d have to bike on multi-lane high-speed thoroughfares which is far less safe than being able to use small local streets. Where there are sidewalks, they often end abruptly and don’t actually connect to anywhere or anything.
You can have two SUVs, a heated garage, and also ride a bike or take the train to work. You can get a reasonable second hand bike for under $100 here and probably in most of the US, it's not like you need to sacrifice the garage heating to afford one.
I get that density and banning cars are hostile to driving an SUV everywhere, but bike infrastructure and public transport aren't. If anything they take traffic off the road and speed up the morning commute of drivers, so they enable a better experience for drivers too.
> Now with kids, I understand why "Americans love their cars" - it switched form a derogatory statement to one of understanding. There's a reason that "ban the cars" posters never mention a partner or children in their bios.
And I'm not sure how many folks are about banning cars (completely), as opposed to designing things so that (two) cars go from being mandatory to optional.
Yeah, it’s crazy the number of people who scream about taking their cars from their cold, dead hands when people talk about adding some bike lanes, rolling out more public transit, or removing small amounts of parking for more human-centered uses.
People somehow perceive all of these things as trying to ban cars instead of promoting other forms of transportation.
Actually, even for families with kids, the safer option is still bikes and low-car environments. Fewer cars means less air pollution, less noise, and less sedentary behavior for both kids and adults.
The data we have shows that the presence of cars is the main source of risk on the street, not the act of biking itself. Neighborhoods that design around walking and biking tend to have fewer serious accidents, not more.
If we're talking about optimizing for kids, then banning individual car use in residential neighborhoods would be the ideal. I know it’s not politically feasible in most of the US right now, but it’s worth keeping in mind that cars are the danger.
FWIW, I’m not in NYC, but I’m in general a “ban the cars” type and have a wife and kid. We’re intentionally raising the kid in the city because we believe it’s a richer cultural environment than suburbs, and also because we both grew up in cities in our respective countries.
Do we really need to do this with each comment adding another rule and another reply from someone breaking it?
I live in Berlin with my wife and 2 kids (who were born lived their whole lives in Berlin). We all bike and take transit. Neither me nor my wife even have a driver's license. We're doing fine. We know plenty of other families with multiple kids in the same situation.
You can get quite a bit of advancements by having “one side” try to optimize for the other - if done honestly, you can get a “best of both worlds” as they learn what the others want (and need).
I just had a kid and moved to DK from the US. I was so skeptical of the infant (and often mother!) in cart on front of bike that you see everywhere, but it's such a life-changer versus the ordeal of carseats etc. TLDR totally agreed.
Just also as a note, you can create suburbs pretty easily where bikes use paths or whatever. I live in a suburb where I can ride 15 kms to work without riding on roads. The subsidy for bikes would actually be really low.
You should look at Cost benefit analysis, there was one made on Copenhagen. [1] Bicycle infrastructure usually gets you 6x-12x on the invested amount, getting a 1.2 CBA is ok, 2 is amazing.
Bicycle infrastructure is often destroyed by those other investments and that is usually not counted as a con. But it is just too cheap to build bicycle infrastructure to be interesting.
I've lived in NYC without a car for the last decade, and I don't have kids, and even granting that, I still have grown to understand why Americans love cars.
Getting groceries is a particular pain in the ass; I either need to go to the (very limited) grocery selections in my neighborhood with a cart, or lug the cart up and down the stairs of the subway, or be ok with only taking as much as I'm able carry with my hands in a few bags. I could get delivery, and I do that fairly often, but there are things that I prefer to get in person, like fruits or vegetables.
There's also just large things you cannot realistically take on a train, like large sheets of plywood at Home Depot. Again, you can of course get this stuff delivered, but then you run the risk of them sending you the worst, most warped piece of wood available, which has happened to me multiple times.
I've grown to sympathize with most Americans as a result.
This is condescending and wildly inaccurate. My children are exactly the reason we live car-free and chose a town where you can bike safely - anything less is effectively condemning them to live in an outdoor prison until you can drive.
But, this is why we live in the Netherlands. If all you've seen is the US I can see how you might not understand that not being car-dependent is actually better for kids.
I'd love if more people on HN could read your post. As someone who's spent more than half of his life overseas in an ultra high density city, I wouldn't trade my quiet American suburb by a glamorous city with perfect public transportation anywhere in the world. It was great when I was single and cared about meeting girls and partying, but no more.
With respect, despite writing “anywhere in the world”, I doubt you have experienced the places in the world that might change your opinion.
I can think of multiple European towns which offer a great quality of life together with (thanks to safe cycling and great public transport) the ability to live largely or entirely car-free, if that’s your choice.
Europe is nice. But I would never want to live in European cities unless I was a gazillionaire and could afford a large, modern property with a garage for a good car (which wouldn't be used as often but still used sometimes).
With that much money, anyone could be fine anywhere. The European lifestyle wouldn't be bad during retirement, but still not ideal because I would want the peace of a smaller town anyway.
I’m not referring to large cities; I’m thinking of places in the (say) 100-200k size range. Small enough to cycle around for all of your regular needs, and just large enough to have plenty of life, culture, and community. And in such places you can certainly live very well, far below a gazillionaire’s income :)
It sounds nice but too much work for relatively little gain. One of those situations where you trade the devil you know by the devil you don't. I find the US lifestyle great in its own unique away. But Europe could be nice too... Sounds like something I'd do if I could teleport my stuff, stay a few years for the experience, then teleport back.
I'll stick to my 5K town at the encased in the feet of a mountain range, nestled in between two rivers, and within driving distance of the largest employers in the world.
It's quiet. No matter how you spin a 100-200K sized city, it will never be this quiet.
When I was 20 I couldn’t imagine living anywhere other than in the heart of a city. I loved the energy and all the things to do.
When I had kids, the suburbs suddenly made a lot of sense. Better schools, tons of neighborhood sports, lots of kids around, very dog friendly, etc…
Now that I’m an empty nester, I’d love to move further out of the city. Get more space around me, have a smaller home but a bigger workshop, sauna, and garden.
I can imagine that when I hit my 70’s or 80’s, I might want to be back in the city again closer to other people, healthcare, and other services that will be a bigger part of my life.
There really isn’t one ideal setup for me in all parts of my life.
> There's a reason that "ban the cars" posters never mention a partner or children in their bios.
Seems very rare that people describe their families in here so I wouldn’t go to that conclusion. I didn’t even know this page had a “bio” section. Anyway, seems like a strawman to me.
Robo taxis might change lots of things. I think I would be a lot more comfortable letting my ten year old use a Waymo to get to grandma’s house than a city bus. It’s door-to-door and you don’t have to worry about some weirdo across the aisle being inappropriate.
> I was blown away by how much more space was parking lot rather than actual store. That was kind of a problem, because we were originally just going to model real cities, but we quickly realized there were way too many parking lots in the real world and that our game was going to be really boring if it was proportional in terms of parking lots.
> There's a reason that "ban the cars" posters never mention a partner or children in their bios.
To the extent that "ban cars" even exists as a real political archetype rather than a meme, this is just patently not true. At least one of the two co-hosts of The War on Cars (again, a title which is intentionally tongue-in-cheek) has a preteen son.
But more importantly: car-dependent suburbs are an absolutely miserable place to grow up as a child if you're not wealthy enough to have one non-working parent and/or a nanny (or both). Being dependent on someone else to enable your entire social life until you turn 16 is a torturous enough experience that I'm not surprised that the first generation to have universal access to social media as teenagers has become the first generation to use social media to organize a teenage-driven movement for public transit.
> To the extent that "ban cars" even exists as a real political archetype rather than a meme, this is just patently not true. At least one of the two co-hosts of The War on Cars (again, a title which is intentionally tongue-in-cheek) has a preteen son.
Similar for the YouTube channel NotJustBikes, who has gone into great detail about the advantages of raising kids in a city planned around pedestrian and cyclist usage, and not in a suburban sprawl.
Well, duh. That's because I don't know any. And probably neither do you.
And sure, humans are extremely diverse and adaptable, so you'll be able to find examples of any physically and logistically possible behavior. Eventually.
But statistically? We both know that I'm right. The Netherlands (the bike heaven) has the total fertility rate of around 1.5 And even within the country itself, Amsterdam (North Holland province) is at the second-to-last place from the bottom: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_Netherland... And the highest fertility rates are in Flevoland and Zeeland that are about 3-4 times less dense.
Then how do you explain that Amsterdam, which is in Noord-Holland, is by far the largest city in Noord-Holland, and is far more dense and car hostile than the rest of Noord-Holland, actually has a higher TFR (1.43) than the rest of Noord-Holland (1.29 total, so lower for Noord-Holland ex-Amsterdam)?
I barely know them. Not because they don't like bikes, but because in my country fewer than 1 in 10 households with children had 3 children or more.
But my friend that has four children brings her kids to the school that's in front of my apartment, that promotes bike riding to school, and they even have a morning bike route that kids alone or with parents can join.
There's another phase we forget about. If I could choose, I'd like to grow up in a giant forest arcology and go hang out with my friends like it's a giant vertical mall with lots of places to go get lost.
When I finally got access to grocery delivery to my door, I could see how it all will work. Carrying things for one person is fine. It's carrying groceries for a household for a week where things break down. Even putting all that on an elevator would be really unwieldy compared to unloading from the garage.
Self-driving and the evolution of early-life education will play a big role in simplifying life without the parents needing to ferry the kids around five days a week.
Delivery makes sense for another reason: delivery services could have mechanisms that don't make sense for individual people to own, such as dollies or carts to get things from a vehicle to your door. (Due to the current over-reliance on gig-style delivery people using their own vehicles, rather than dedicated employees with specialized tools, this often doesn't happen today, but it should.)
In general, it makes a huge amount of sense for a specialized employee with specialized tooling to pick up groceries for many people and deliver them; the net result is less total person-hours spent shopping, less vehicle miles driven, and less overall labor.
This isn't an attack pal but I love that we have a generation of young men that are willing to sell all of their principles and buy into the suburbanite cult just right after, "getting it" after starting a family. I can appreciate that this is, "how it goes" but it creates a political class of people that are more concerned about their family's well-being than the well-being of society as a whole. Rinse and repeat over a few generations and this is a big part of why the United States has stagnated culturally.
Stated with love out of concern for our, "whole societal family" which includes you and yours.
Coming from Spain it was always a difficult game to see as a simulation: What do you mean, commercial zones? What in the world it this low density residential? It was basically impossible to try to make a city like the one I lived in.
Seeing American suburbia, decades later, explained everything.
It was so weird to me too. The idea of laying down zones for purposes was completely different from the way I imagined my city was built, considering businesses and residences coexist not merely next to each other, but often one on top of the other, even in relatively low density areas. I would have imagined that you'd start from some basic service to attract settlers and then add infrastructure as the population grows, while the inhabitants figure out the land use on their own, with uses changing over time with the ebb and flow of the economy.
Unfortunately, the transport model in SC2K is broken, and by that, you have to design your transport network to work for the game, rather than design it as you would wish to do so.
Each tile emits "journeys", which travel down transport routes connected to the tile, with a view to finding other types of tile (residential needs to find industrial and commercial, for example, but commercial IIRC needs to find only industrial). When a journey meets a junction, it randomly chooses one of the exits. The choice is not directed toward a suitable tile.
So if you make say a block of road tiles, in the shape of a square, say 4x4, any journey entering that tile usually times out (travels too far) before by chance managing to emerge from all the junctions.
As such, for example, hub-and-spoke subway systems basically do not work.
You basically need to design the transport network to specifically, and without junctions, go from a set of source tiles of a given type, to the necessary destination tiles, and that's not how real cities look, nor what you would naturally do.
I liked SC2K a lot, but in the end I had to give up on it, because of the transport system; the game couldn't be played realistically. I've not yet tried SC3K, and I don't know how transport is modeled there - hopefully better.
I think I found your problem..., trying to take a game too seriously.
I've played thousands of hours of SimCity 2000, 3000 and 4 and I treat them as what they are, incredibly fun city building sandboxes with illusory and believable but flawed simulations under the hood.
>Everyone notices the obvious built-in political bias, whatever that is. But everyone sees it from a different perspective, so nobody agrees what its real political agenda actually is. I don’t think it’s all that important, since SimCity’s political agenda pales in comparison to the political agenda in the eye of the beholder.
>Some muckety-muck architecture magazine was interviewing Will Wright about SimCity, and they asked him a question something like “which ontological urban paradigm most influenced your design of the simulator, the Exo-Hamiltonian Pattern Language Movement, or the Intra-Urban Deconstructionist Sub-Culture Hypothesis?” He replied, “I just kind of optimized for game play.”
DonHopkins on Jan 16, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: Reverse engineering course
Will Wright defined the "Simulator Effect" as how game players imagine a simulation is vastly more detailed, deep, rich, and complex than it actually is: a magical misunderstanding that you shouldn’t talk them out of. He designs games to run on two computers at once: the electronic one on the player’s desk, running his shallow tame simulation, and the biological one in the player’s head, running their deep wild imagination.
"Reverse Over-Engineering" is a desirable outcome of the Simulator Effect: what game players (and game developers trying to clone the game) do when they use their imagination to extrapolate how a game works, and totally overestimate how much work and modeling the simulator is actually doing, because they filled in the gaps with their imagination and preconceptions and assumptions, instead of realizing how many simplifications and shortcuts and illusions it actually used.
>There's a name for what Wright calls "the simulator effect" in the video: apophenia. There's a good GDC video on YouTube where Tynan Sylvester (the creator of RimWorld) talks about using this effect in game design.
>Apophenia (/æpoʊˈfiːniə/) is the tendency to mistakenly perceive connections and meaning between unrelated things. The term (German: Apophänie) was coined by psychiatrist Klaus Conrad in his 1958 publication on the beginning stages of schizophrenia. He defined it as "unmotivated seeing of connections [accompanied by] a specific feeling of abnormal meaningfulness". He described the early stages of delusional thought as self-referential, over-interpretations of actual sensory perceptions, as opposed to hallucinations.
RimWorld: Contrarian, Ridiculous, and Impossible Game Design Methods
>Tip 5: On world building. As you know by now, Will's approach to creating games is all about building a coherent and compelling player experience. His games are comprised of layered systems that engage players creatively, and lead to personalized, some times unexpected outcomes. In these types of games, players will often assume that the underlying system is smarter than it actually is. This happens because there's a strong mental model in place, guiding the game design, and enhancing the player's ability to imagine a coherent context that explains all the myriad details and dynamics happening within that game experience.
>Now let's apply this to your project: What mental model are you building, and what story are you causing to unfold between your player's ears? And how does the feature set in your game or product support that story? Once you start approaching your product design that way, you'll be set up to get your customers to buy into the microworld that you're building, and start to imagine that it's richer and more detailed than it actually is.
If you want you can even make a completely disconnected city and bypass most traffic issues all together because of how supply and demand is fulfilled across the map.
Industrial development only requires a single road connected residential tile to grow off the full city's industrial demand. The same goes for Commercial. Residential will fully develop with just a single commercial tile on its road network.
It is broken in a realistic sense definitely, but it's also why I'll always play it regardless of which realistic transportation city game i'm also playing. I could never abstractly brush-in a city like I can in SC2k.
Funny enough, cities skylines, a much more modern game, had the exact same thing (at least at release). Simply disconnecting the residential areas removed their traffic altogether but left everything else working normally
It speaks to the quality of the SimCity games that they offer something for all ages. I also changed my perspective on a few violent scenes in games when I had a child, I could no longer stomach scenes such as No Russian (iykyk), which I had no problem at all as a teen.
I have the opposite takeaway. The city should be mutable. A subway line should be buildable within one political term. The property tax rate should rise or fall within a time frame that would incentivize people to vote with their feet. A lot of the author’s learnings are actually indicators of 21st century American stagnancy. Real life should be more like Sim City.
To me, the clunky and annoying UI of Sim City 2000 is part of the charm of it.
Is it dated? Yep, but it's intuitive enough for nine-year-old tombert to have figured it out ok, and to me part of the fun is trying to use the UI quickly enough to put out fires and the like.
It could just rose-tinted glasses on my end, very likely honestly, but I still find the entire experience to be pretty fun. I liked Sim City 3000 and Sim City 4, and they are arguably better games, but for me Sim City 2000 hit the right balance of "easy" and "complicated" that I find myself most drawn to. I will load up Sim City 2000 about once a year off of my GOG purchase, and still thoroughly enjoy it, and find myself wasting way more hours than I budgeted for it.
> I find it much harder to callously play with the lives of my virtual citizens.
I am considering the morality of future mods, where the Sim City masses, Frog in Frogger, and characters like Ulfric Stormcloak and Paarthurnax in Skyrim, are replaced with individual persistent self-aware world-aware in-game reinforcement models. Entirely replacing game-designed behaviors (programmed reflex, caricature, or intricate) with spontaneous situation processing, needs and decisions.
Strange that this could credibly happen this decade.
Science fiction has long considered conundrums around robot rights. But the crux of the moral issues will be relevant regardless whether self-aware models have physical/3D or digital/abstract environments.
I think language is not a good prime modality for self-aware assistants. By being trained to deeply mimic us, they (already, but not yet problematically) absorb views on their identity and survival that are not at all compatible with what we will do with them.
... How well does that work? Asking because my SC3K runs always ended up being boring cases of "yes, we sell landfill space to the surrounding 4 cities, and if people want education they're going to have to go to a library and learn to read themselves, and we're obviously too broke to improve things."
Will Wright gave postmortems for SimEarth, SimAnt, and SimCity 2000, and previewed an extremely early pre-release prototype version of Dollhouse (which eventually became The Sims). SimAnt was too simple, SimEarth was too complex, SimCity 2000 was just right, and Dollhouse (The Sims) was what he was working on next.
Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996) (2023 Video Update)
Video of Will Wright's talk about "Interfacing to Microworlds" presented to Terry Winograd's user interface class at Stanford University, April 26, 1996.
He demonstrates and gives postmortems for SimEarth, SimAnt, and SimCity 2000, then previews an extremely early pre-release prototype version of Dollhouse (which eventually became The Sims), describing how the AI models personalities and behavior, and is distributed throughout extensible plug-in programmable objects in the environment, and he thoughtfully answers many interesting questions from the audience.
This is the lecture described in "Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996)": A summary of Will Wright’s talk to Terry Winograd’s User Interface Class at Stanford, written in 1996 by Don Hopkins, before they worked together on The Sims at Maxis.
"When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things."
But, being humans, the "I put away" is always a bit aspirational. And part of being older and wiser (or at least aspiring to the latter) is more maturely reflecting upon your own younger years.
First, I had a similar feeling coming back to SimCity 4. Even a just a few years ago, I tried to optimize for maximum density and size - kinda like NYC where I lived.
Now I don't find that interesting and much more interested to sustain a leafy suburb like one I've chosen for my kids.
Second, it's not just games. In my NYC days I was a "transit and bike lanes" guy all the way. Now with kids, I understand why "Americans love their cars" - it switched form a derogatory statement to one of understanding. There's a reason that "ban the cars" posters never mention a partner or children in their bios.
There's less "objective good" or "objective bad" in these matters than I used to think. It's more about who you optimize for.
> Now with kids, I understand why "Americans love their cars" - it switched form a derogatory statement to one of understanding. There's a reason that "ban the cars" posters never mention a partner or children in their bios.
This seems very different from the large anti-car movement in the Netherlands in the 1970s (which eventually led to massive investments in bike infrastructure and car restrictions in the cities).
There was significant parent involvement, touting the memorable slogan "Stop de Kindermoord" ("Stop the Child Murder").
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_transport_in_the_Netherla...
There's a youtube channel named @NotJustBikes which mostly talks about how bike-friendly the Netherlands are and compares it to the USA. It's worth watching a couple of those videos.
And, unlike the grandparent-comment’s assertions, that channel references his family and kids in most videos (in that he and his partner moved to Amsterdam so his children could have the freedom to navigate safely without having to be driven around).
My mother lives in suburban Massachusetts. She always said that she never imagined how it was possible for me to live with two small kids without a car in Berlin.
She came to visit for one month. After the first week she was already comfortably going around with the Ubahn to pick up the kids at school. I have 4 supermarkets less than 150m away from me, so we would walk to do groceries every other day. I spend ~80€/month with taxi rides (for the occasional trip to meet someone in a less convenient place), which is less than what she pays in car insurance alone, not even counting the cost of gas.
At the end of the trip, she got it. Having a car is not a necessity. It should be seen (and taxed) as a luxury.
> Having a car is not a necessity. It should be seen (and taxed) as a luxury
It is unfortunately a necessity in many parts of America where public transportation is lacking or nonexistent.
And making it a "luxury" just further stratifies our society into different, non-interacting economic classes. When things start becoming "privileges", you get a privileged class who cares less and less about the quality of life of those in lesser classes, shaping society to benefit their lifestyles at the expense of others.
As someone who grew up in abject poverty in a very rural area and was homeless and on completely on my own by 16, I have already seen how this plays out. The trajectory of my life was majorly affected by a lack of a car or adequate public transportation. I have since had to make choices about where I live in order to minimize car use in order to align with my own philosophy around transportation, but it comes at great cost in America when such walkable cities are so desirable that cost of living shoots through the roof due to demand. And conversely, poorer areas often lack walkability or sufficient and accessible public transportation.
Berlin does not have the same problems as America, a sprawling empire in decline.
> When things start becoming "privileges", you get a privileged class who cares less and less about the quality of life of those in lesser classes, shaping society to benefit their lifestyles at the expense of others.
I'll never forget one of my last lectures from my high-school History class teacher. She said "People talk about societies in terms of two classes: the kings and the plebs, the haves and have-nots, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. I hope you managed to learn that throughout all of history, what we have is actually three different forces - priests or monks in Ancient times, or the merchants during the Renaissance, land owners in the US - and that it's this third class that is crucial in determining the course of History. Every time they aligned with the elites there was no change in the status quo, and every time a revolution happened was because they in the middle shifted their support to the other side."
I'm saying this for one simple reason: the way to fix this problem is not by pretending that car ownership isn't a luxury, but by de-stigmatizing public transport. I can bet you that if political forces shifted and started putting pressure against car-ownership, you would quickly see a swing from the middle class in support for better public transit, mixed-use zoning, YIMBY-ism, etc.
"A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transportation"
Your choices make the car not a necessity.
I made different choices, and I am being taxed for those. But what I don't get is the hostility towards people who make this choice?
I choose to not live in a place with supermarkets within 150m. When I look outside I see the edge of my property and then I see untouched nature.
I pay for that, in land cost, and in fuel cost because I live (by choice) further away from everybody.
> I made different choices, and I am being taxed for those.
No, you aren't.
- Suburbanites are being subsidized by city-dwellers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI&t=19s
- The gas for your car is heavily subsidized.
- You don't pay for the increased costs in healthcare caused by air pollution or the amount of concrete needed to keep all those roads.
- Car owners are not taxed extra for the economic impact in social security due to the tens of thousands of people that die every year.
I could go on. There are countless other environmental and economic externalities that suburbanites are not being accounted for and they only get away with it because that's in the interests of the privileged elite.
> The gas for your car is heavily subsidized
Maybe in US. In Europe this is not the case. On the contrary gas is heavily taxed.
I would love to see a study that explores whether those taxes cover the negative externalities compared to other forms of transit, because that seems incredibly unlikely.
You don't pay for the externalities of using a car. Nobody does. That's why people are hostile towards cars.
Dead people and their friends and family certainly do.
That’s great for where you live, but why did you end with such intolerance for people who live in the suburbs? They don’t have four supermarkets in less than 150 meters. There are places where cars actually are a necessity.
Seems like empathy should work both ways?
> why did you end with such intolerance for people who live in the suburbs?
My hostility is towards people who claim to prefer to live in the suburbs, but do not want to pay for the privilege.
Show me people that say "Yeah, I won't mind having higher property taxes, extra fees to keep my many cars in the garage and have to pay full price for the extended infrastructure (sewer, roads, water, electricity lines, etc) just so that I don't have to live among those poor city-dwellers" and I'll be totally fine with their choices.
Is your lifestyle subsidized too? How do you know?
I suspect that even people with strong opinions have little understanding about infrastructure costs and who is subsidizing what. I’m unwilling to take this on faith - it seems like there need to be financial deep dives.
I linked to the videos in a sibling thread. The math has been done already, and it's pretty clear that suburbanites are part of the problem.
I live in the suburbs of NYC. All of NYC's drinking water is stored in our backyards. So much so that the NYPD patrols this area, 90 miles outside their geography.
The math has certainly not been done. There are no cities without suburbs. For food and water.
People being "part of the problem" just because of the style of community they want to own their home in? Your rhetoric sounds fascist.
> because of style of community they want to own their home in?
No, I do not care about their choices, provided they are willing to bear all costs from it. The problem is not living in the suburbs. The problem is affluent people that have their lifestyle subsidized by poorer people living close to the city center.
Also, it's virtually impossible to claim that people want to live like that in the US, because most places have zoning laws that simply forbid the emergence of any other alternative. Suburbs in Germany are smaller, less dense versions of the urban center, but they are not devoid of life. They are still walkable, they still have local shops, they do not make cars a requirement for everyone, kids do not need to be driven around anywhere, etc. You can bet that if more people in the US could come to visit they would rather live like that than in the traditional cul-de-sacs/picketed fence developments from American Suburbia.
The issue is that we don't tax externalities properly in the US. We heavily subsidize car usage and then make people pay to use the subway. The incentives encourage behavior that is bad on a global scale even if it makes sense for each individual.
This seems like an odd example. Aren’t many forms of public transportation partially funded and subsidized via taxes? It doesn’t make them bad, but they aren’t self-sufficient either.
Most places in the US the zoning restrictions are part of the problem. You can't build a small grocery to serve a neighborhood when its zoned residential.
Places that grew before cars, were built with walking distance separations. It wasn't possible to profit as a grocery by building miles away from the people.
The battle for the suburbs is mostly lost, you need a car if you live there.
What the discussion should instead highlight is that with just moderate increases in population density you can escape the need for a car and it ends up being better for everyone. That mostly only applies to new development.
Heck, even if you just made cars second class in new suburbs you could see cheaper housing with equivalent land. Put in a shared parking garage for a suburb instead of putting a garage on everyone's home and all the sudden the amount of sqft needed just to get cars in and out gets massively reduced meaning more room for more homes and an easier argument to make for bus service.
Where do you see a lack of empathy?
Because people in suburbs are subsidized at the cost of and prioritized over everybody else.
How do you know? Seems like cities have expensive infrastructure too?
No, suburbs cost more per capita than people living in the inner city, generate less tax revenue and end up becoming a net negative to municipalities: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI
The whole series of videos from Strong Towns are good, you should take a look: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_SXXTBypIg
I’m not going to watch YouTube videos (I’m a text guy) but the Strong Towns blog is pretty good. I don’t think they’re the last word on this, because they’re often making general observations, and financial problems are often local.
For example, I know Oakland, CA has severe financial issues (looks like the school district might go bankrupt) but I wouldn’t generalize from that to all cities.
You are already grasping at straws if you refuse to see something that could quickly give you the information that challenges your preconceived notions. The video I linked to talks precisely about the study done by a consulting company showing how suburbs are net-negative to a city's budget and they do it for multiple cities across the country.
> Financial problems are local.
There might be differences in the particulars among cities, but they share a lot of common causes and one of them is that suburban sprawl is cheap to begin (acquiring and building on the land) but expensive to maintain.
Could you link to the study? It sounds interesting.
I don't know if there is any published study. The video is relaying the work from https://www.urbanthree.com/services/
I don't live in a place that has public transit or "walkability". It will never be able to afford that, the tax base isn't sufficient.
When the fuck-cars people start ranting, what they mean is that they want me and the millions like me to move to some distant gigantic city and make that even more gigantic. I do not look forward to becoming the termite people that they wish to become.
The luxury is living in a place where this is a possible lifestyle, and then thinking every one of 300 million people can live in such a place or make the place they live into such.
> they want me and the millions like me to move to some distant gigantic city and make that even more gigantic.
No, we want you simply to pay the full sticker price for all the things you are consuming and exploiting.
It's simple as that. Drop the pretense that you are actually carrying your own weight and that your lifestyle is sustainable. If you do just that and start paying for the privileges you have, we'll leave you in peace.
> that channel references his family and kids in most videos (in that he and his partner moved to Amsterdam so his children could have the freedom to navigate safely without having to be driven around).
Then they are unlikely to be unbiased - someone who uproots and moves their family due to an issue they care about is almost never going to express any regret, no matter how bad things get.
Of course it's not unbiased. It's an opinion channel about a highly politicized topic.
I have no knowledge of what this Dutch effort was beyond the info in your link, but nothing suggests that the public outcry was go actually ban vehicles or disincentivize ownership and use with tactics such as with higher fees, reduced parking availability, which is what U.S. urban road safety advocates I see pushing for.
Alongside increased bike infrastructure funding, the Dutch effort certainly did involve disincentivizing car use by higher fees (both parking and ownership), reducing parking availability (and also non-parking car accessibility), and slowing down car speeds (speed bumps, cameras, narrowing roads, calming road design, reducing city speed limits to 19mph), and generally reducing car allocated space. It's typically done during scheduled road maintenance, where separated bike lakes are installed, often by converting the street parking space or turning a two way street into a one way (for cars) street or even banning car access.
See e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARjrpb_FOcs (skip to about 5:00 or 8:00 so get a sense of some of the redesign).
The public outcry was to ban cars - literally. They blocked streets, and did what they needed to to block drivers and vehicles. It's long enough ago that maybe the abrasiveness and confrontational nature of it is forgotten now - lots of big changes start out that way, but if successful the success almost drives the way the history is remembered more postively.
See https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2013/12/12/amsterdam-chil...
It looks to me like it was 100% a "think of the children" moment that often gets ridiculed. I can see the same inflection point in my country around the same time, when street and road design shifted to car orientated and car priority - Amsterdam being one of the notable exceptions but with a well documented fight.
I mean Amsterdam is kinda renown exactly for reducing parking availability, slow speed limits and generally human-first city planning nowadays.
Wasn't always like that either. In the 90s it was cars-first just like the OP likes nowadays.
It's definitely true that having only bicycle infrastructure doesn't really work for families though. It's a different story if you've got a cargo bike and public transport... But it's understandable that that's not even entering his mind considering the culture of the USA.
Agreed, I only know of a handfull families that manage with no nearby public transport using bicycle only. It is possible, I managed doing 50km for couple of months with a cargo bike and small kids, you adapt. I do not recommend that to anyone unless you really want to, it is just too cheap to own a couple of cars.
> it is just too cheap to own a couple of cars.
It's only cheap because they are heavily subsidized. And then we go back to a discussion about policy. If you remove all the subsidies or make car-owners pay for the externalities, things would quickly turn in favor for higher density, public transit, and AFAIK no game has put this into their game economics.
The forthcoming Car Park Capital[0] looks like an interesting reflection of your sentiment (but it's about planning cities to make them more car centric).
[0] https://www.microprose.com/games/car-park-capital/
TIL Microprose exists once again.
There's nothing cheap about car ownership.
My cars are pretty cheap to own and maintain, but then again I don't have car payments like the vast majority of people seem to.
The ongoing cost is minimal and my life would be significantly worse without the ability to drive places.
> Second, it's not just games. In my NYC days I was a "transit and bike lanes" guy all the way. Now with kids, I understand why "Americans love their cars" - it switched form a derogatory statement to one of understanding. There's a reason that "ban the cars" posters never mention a partner or children in their bios.
Buy a bakfiet cargo bike, there's models that can fit five kids under 7. Mine fits three.
Kids like them better and you get exercise. For the first time in my life I have a BMI of around 20 without having to waste time at the gym, the drop off, pick up, shopping, and work commute add up to an hour and a half of medium intensity cardio.
Every other parent my age in the neighborhood looks five years away from a heart attack. I'm fitter than I was in my 20s.
>There's less "objective good" or "objective bad" in these matters than I used to think. It's more about who you optimize for.
There are over 1,000 children killed in the US annually by cars. This is after we restrain them like Hannibal Lecter while in cars and don't let them out of our houses so they don't get run over.
That's before we talk about the child obesity epidemic, social media abuse, and on and on.
If given the choice between keeping cars or letting polio loose on the land you'd be hard pressed to figure out which will kill and disable more kids.
I'd love to get a cargo bike and use it for kid transport.
I would be worried about collision safety though, I am not going to persuade everyone in my neighborhood to stop using cars in a hurry and there are not bike routes between me and school, library, shops, ...
This is the classic urbanist anti-bike tragedy of the commons that is referenced often.
People use cars because they are (rightly) concerned about safety. People avoid using bikes because there are so many cars. It’s very hard to ban cars or restrict car usage because it seems like no one wants to use bikes, but it’s a self-reinforcing system.
And the losers that neither (gross generalization here) the bike people or the car people care about are the pedestrians. We are lucky to live in an urban environment where our family of 5 usually walks everywhere. Crossing the street with children is an unwelcome adventure. But you are absolutely right I would ride an ebike with the kids if it did not seem so dangerous.
Solution: make cars safer (as in, less likely to harm others) through road design, and things like automated emergency braking and self-driving.
Then the cars are safer both for the occupants and pedestrians/cyclists, so paradoxically people might be more inclined to walk or cycle.
I'd sooner see a more practical solution that works on the roads and cars we already have.
Aggressively limit speed and enforce it until you're onto the fast roads.
If cars could only roll on at 10mph I'd feel a lot safer and I'd probably be able to use my bike and make better time for the local stuff.
Well, while we're talking sci-fi: personal teleporters.
You obviously do not live in Chicago or Minneapolis. Winters make this a nonstarter
> Buy a bakfiet cargo bik
Off topic, but my brain did a double take there. Didn't know that the Dutch word "bakfiets" (bike with a box) was anglicized to "bakfiet". Cool. Usually it's us who borrow foreign words from all over
They must have meant the brand Bakfiets. 'Cargo bike' is what they're known as, in my experience in the UK anyway, and 'bakfiets cargo bike' would be redundant if not meaning the brand.
Isn't the brand still called Bakfiets though?
Even further off topic, I had an aha moment with "bakfiets" connecting to how "back" is a word for storage box in Swedish...
There is a brand called bakfiets.nl but there are many different brands. I have an Urban Arrow.
It's not anglicized, just misspelled. ;) And awkward to pluralize (bakfietsen? bakfietses?)
The fit parents and delighted kids I frequently see riding bakfeitsen in Amsterdam are always so happy and healthy and safe that I am envious I wasn't born here myself.
They effortlessly ride through busy city streets, wander through parks, and trek across the countryside, all with well maintained bike paths, and gather together to have picnics and play, which you can't do with an SUV. Also dogs love riding in them, and they're great for shopping and hauling too.
An electric bakfiets with an Enviolo continuous stepless automatic shifting hub is ideal and safe for kids, because you don't have to worry about shifting gears or even preemptively shift down before you stop at an intersection or unexpected obstacle.
It can shift when you're stopped and even while you're accelerating, and it automatically and smoothly shifts up as you accelerate. You just dial in your preferred cadence and it does the rest. So you can concentrate on the traffic and kids and scenery instead of your gears, even in stop-and-go city traffic.
I love the one on my normal eBike, it's a joy to ride, and I'll never go back. I have no affiliation, it's just a fantastic piece of technology. They're a Dutch company, so many Dutch brands of bike, bakfiets, and delivery bikes use them, but they're available worldwide.
https://www.koga.com/nl/elektrische-fietsen/e-nova-evo-pt-au...
They have special heavy duty bakfiets motors and hubs, and smooth quiet indestructible carbon fiber belt drives instead of clackety chains and derailleurs. Silent, reliable, maintenance free, and greaseless!
Enviolo fully automatic stepless transmission for e-bikes:
https://enviolo.com/products/#tab_automatic
>No distractions: Liberate your attention
>Enviolo Automatic is a “set and forget” system that adjusts to you – set your preferred pace and you’re ready to go. Focus your journey in bustling cities, relaxed countryside rides, or when travelling with kids.
Cargo L Cargo Line:
https://www.urbanebikes.nl/cargo-l-enviolo-automatic
Rave reviews on reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/CargoBike/comments/1f0rsu9/enviolo_...
Enviolo Automatic - Never Shift Again (check out the beautiful scenery and bike paths and parks of Amsterdam: it's really like that, on purpose!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQrgKBQrkag
Carqon Classic Enviolo | Elektrische bakfiets met stijl
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2gWJvolBjg
Is enviolo the best internally geared hub for eBikes? (This is a nerdy technically detailed deep dive!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vob5Rb4IKsw
I Tested The Boujiest Cargo Bike You Can Buy (Monster Bakfiets!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7w57U3ijHY
Fwiw I’ve never seen that word before
Spend 1 month with your kids in a place where cars are actually not needed, only then you can actually understand what you are denying your kids.
And if you want to know right away, think about who can drive your car, as supposed being able to walk or ride somewhere. You're limiting their own personal freedom by forcing them to have you always needed to go somewhere.
I don’t really want my kids have that much personal freedom because they’re kids. I live very suburban and my kids could walk to one of the neighborhood parks (2-3 minutes) or to a friends house but I don’t see them needing more than that.
Cars really aren't needed in NYC, where the poster said they lived. Many, many people here do not have cars, and haven't for years.
It's still annoying to not have a car. I don't have kids but f I did then the first thing I would do would almost certainly be to buy a vehicle.
My recommendation is to get an ebike with a way to carry a person and some small cargo (e.g. Shopping bags and such).
I see them a lot and also makes going around with kids more fun for them too!
My biggest fear about cars is that one might kill my kid. This leads to impossing all sorts of play and travel restrictions on her that I wouldn't have to if there were fewer cars and more bikes. (Bikes which kids can ride independently to their friends' houses from a single-digit age, by the way, which I would allow her to do if she weren't sharing the streets with cars.)
Maybe the problem is that the leafy suburb you moved to is car-dependent? It doesn't have to be built that way, that's a design choice. It's possible to build a low density suburb that kids can bike through safely, for example: https://youtu.be/r-TuGAHR78w
No city simulation game properly models the real cost of parking and car-centric infrastructure: https://humantransit.org/2013/05/how-sim-city-greenwashes-pa...
>Now with kids, I understand why "Americans love their cars"
In other words: I was okay with demanding change when it didn't inconvenience me, but now that I get to benefit from economic policy that heavily subsidize my lifestyle I rather keep the status quo.
Kids and marriage are not unique to America. There are millions of Dutch kids happy to ride a bike or ride the bus along with their married parents.
Sure, but The Netherlands is also quite a lot smaller than the US.
Comparing the total size of countries like this never made much sense to me.
It's not like Americans need to drive coast-to-coast to buy groceries or drop their kids off at school.
"Americans love their cars" isn't so much about the cars as it is about the lack of good alternatives. Other countries have great public transportation and good bike lanes and all that... in addition to car ownership. So people can get the best of both worlds. It's only a zero sum game if you want it to be one.
Nope. It's universal. The denser the city, the more child-hostile it is.
Just imagine getting into Tokyo subway with a stroller for 2 kids. There's a reason why Tokyo fertility rate is below 1.
As an NYC parent I strongly disagree. But I guess it depends what you optimize for.
I do wish the subway had more elevators. But once you move beyond those early days with a stroller… I have six playground within a twenty minute walk, a giant park a few minutes away. There’s a zoo nearby, the beach (and aquarium) is less than 45 mins on the subway, there are countless museums in the city… all in all its rich in child friendly activities and child-friendly methods of reaching them.
(I’m not there with my kids yet but from talking to older parents: an understated benefit of the city is that kids are able to exercise independence much more easily. They’ll be taking the subway to and from high school, if they want to meet a friend they can just… go. Rather than rely on a parent driving them everywhere)
In a well-designed city, you don't get onto the subway with a stroller during peak hour, because all amenities that your young children need are reachable in 15 minutes on foot (or <5 minutes by bike).
It certainly depends what you call child-hostile and I have no statistics on this. What I do know though, is that one of the denser area in Europe is the famous triangle Rotterdam-Amsterdam-Utrecht, which can hardly be described as child-hostile.
I don't need to imagine anything; I've lived these different lifestyles. Both as a child and as an adult. Have you? What has your experience been?
> Nope. It's universal. The denser the city, the more child-hostile it is.
Maddy Novich, https://www.instagram.com/cargobikemomma/, for one, may disagree with you. Interview:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PoKcQRlDGs
She has three kids IIRC.
> Just imagine getting into Tokyo subway with a stroller for 2 kids. There's a reason why Tokyo fertility rate is below 1.
Hong Kong has always been dense, and it used to have a fertility rate of ~5:
* https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SPDYNTFRTINHKG
Further, all US states, regardless of how urban or rural they are, have fertility rates with basically the same slope:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
In every industrialized, Western-ish society rates dropped during the 1970s, regardless of initial or final density.
> Nope. It's universal. The denser the city, the more child-hostile it is.
> Just imagine getting into Tokyo subway with a stroller for 2 kids. There's a reason why Tokyo fertility rate is below 1.
This is a glaring example of hunting for data that supports a preexisting belief, rather than basing beliefs on empirical data.
To point out how absurd this logic is, consider that it fails to consider the fertility rate of Japan as a whole outside urban areas, as well as failing to account for the many other extremely dense cities outside Japan that do have very high fertility rates.
Nope. I'm anti-urbanist, so I actually analyzed the data :)
The correlation is undeniable for any developed country, especially the US. Developing countries are a bit different they are only now starting the second demographic transition.
> To point out how absurd this logic is, consider that it fails to consider the fertility rate of Japan as a whole outside urban areas, as well as failing to account for the many other extremely dense cities outside Japan that do have very high fertility rates.
LOL. No, they don't: https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-data/h01975/
Do elevators not solve this?
> Just imagine getting into Tokyo subway with a stroller for 2 kids. There's a reason why Tokyo fertility rate is below 1.
That's a nice theory but all over the developped world, the countryside has lower fertility rate than the cities.
Rural areas have higher fertility rates than urban areas in the US [1], EU [2], and Japan [3].
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db297.htm
[2] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/cache/digpub/demography_2021/b...
[3] https://www.mof.go.jp/english/pri/publication/pp_review/fy20...
> "Americans love their cars" isn't so much about the cars as it is about the lack of good alternatives.
I love to drive therefor I buy a car I love to drive.
America is largely rural. Comparisons to Europe aren't appropriate outside of the proper metros.
America as a physical space is largely rural, but 80% of Americans live in cities according to the census.
You're misreading those stats. The Census doesn't define "city", it defines "urban" vs. "rural".
My "city" of 5K is considered "urban" according to the 2020 census. There are nearly zero services in this "city", only a couple of restaurants, the largest employer is the school district, and it's surrounded by farms and mountain forests. It takes 15 minutes by car to get to the next town over on a two lane highway.
If you want to get to any real city, you're looking at a 30-45 minute drive at highway/freeway speeds.
So yes, there may be more individuals in "urban" areas, but not all "urban" areas are functionally urban. My "urban city" per the 2020 census is no LA, Austin, or Portland.
Where I live the temperature swings from -40 to over 100F with very high humidity every year.
Bicycling with little kids is just not practical for a lot of it, and the nearest bus stop is a four hour walk (12 miles).
Do large cities and suburban neighborhoods deserve public transportation? Sure. Is that a universal answer? No. Not even close. There are farm fields out here larger than many towns. Roads, vehicles, and fast on demand transportation are a necessity for the geographic super majority of the US.
The sad thing is that you _CAN_ have a leafy suburb without the roar of internal combustion and 8 lane stroads everywhere. Planners in the US just refuse to build them.
We live in a lovely leafy suburb completely car free. But it's this one - https://youtu.be/r-TuGAHR78w
This morning the four of us biked to the grocery store (we loaded the groceries in the bakfiets). The kids bike to their daycare. We bike to the train when we feel like a day out.
I can't fathom trying to raise kids somewhere we need to use a car to do anything.
Your kid will hate your car constrained area, because they will be unable to get around themselves until they’re old enough / rich enough to drive one
Suburb doesn't mean car constrained. I grew up in the suburbs and rode my bike and skateboard just about everywhere from the time I was 13 to the time I could drive.
There usually aren't any meaningful destinations (like shops / a park / a mall) within a suburb you can reach in a reasonable amount of time, except a friend if the live close.
I live in a very suburban neighborhood in Arizona and we have 2 neighborhood parks within a 2-3 minute walk. There are 2-3 more parks in the 5-10 minute range. There is a 10 minute walk to 3 grocery stores, a bar, many fast food restaurants, tons of medical offices, etc. All of my friends and family who live in different suburbs have similar amounts of services with a short walk as well.
As a Central European, I guess I will never understand. We have "suburbs" and they have shops and parks, both poor and rich.
American suburbs feature poorly interconnected residential-only areas that sprawl endlessly. You can easily be a ten minute walk from a friend (through yards and across fences, not over a walking path) but a ten or fifteen minute drive away due to the Byzantine road layout.
Commercial zones that have groceries, restaurants, shops, and entertainment are almost always several kilometers away. You could technically bike there, but there are rarely bike lanes. And due to serving the needs of a large, low-density area, you’d have to bike on multi-lane high-speed thoroughfares which is far less safe than being able to use small local streets. Where there are sidewalks, they often end abruptly and don’t actually connect to anywhere or anything.
It is truly hell.
> Where there are sidewalks, they often end abruptly and don’t actually connect to anywhere or anything.
My (American) definition of suburbia primarily involves a lack of sidewalks.
This explains why cars are a necessity. :/
America has zoning laws that ban anything other than single-family homes in a given area.
Go play SimCity again. The concept of mixed-use doesn't exist because it's built by an American.
FWIW, which version of the game do you recommend?
Sure in the 80’s. Nowadays if you leave teens alone someone will call child services.
Then the kid moves to NYC, loves it, meets someone, has a kid, and realizes they need two SUV’s and a heated garage near good schools.
You can have two SUVs, a heated garage, and also ride a bike or take the train to work. You can get a reasonable second hand bike for under $100 here and probably in most of the US, it's not like you need to sacrifice the garage heating to afford one.
I get that density and banning cars are hostile to driving an SUV everywhere, but bike infrastructure and public transport aren't. If anything they take traffic off the road and speed up the morning commute of drivers, so they enable a better experience for drivers too.
Somehow my parents managed to raise me without any SUVs.
Not saying you need the above, but you’ll feel like you do. It’s certainly the easier way
then you ask yourself why aren’t the schools good enough in nyc… and it leads you down a rabbit hole
Dirodi or other ebikes make kids very mobile nowadays
I grew up in NYC and maybe having my movement restricted might have been a good thing.
I was deep into NY's drug and party scene from about the time I turned 12. Pedos used to follow me walking home from the public library.
Lotta my friends growing up did not make it and I no longer live in NYC.
Like with many things caused by non-existant socal safety nets, these problems are bigger in the US than elsewhere.
> Now with kids, I understand why "Americans love their cars" - it switched form a derogatory statement to one of understanding. There's a reason that "ban the cars" posters never mention a partner or children in their bios.
Maddy Novich, https://www.instagram.com/cargobikemomma/, for one, may disagree with you. Interviews:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PoKcQRlDGs
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDhJt26dQTs
And I'm not sure how many folks are about banning cars (completely), as opposed to designing things so that (two) cars go from being mandatory to optional.
Yeah, it’s crazy the number of people who scream about taking their cars from their cold, dead hands when people talk about adding some bike lanes, rolling out more public transit, or removing small amounts of parking for more human-centered uses.
People somehow perceive all of these things as trying to ban cars instead of promoting other forms of transportation.
Actually, even for families with kids, the safer option is still bikes and low-car environments. Fewer cars means less air pollution, less noise, and less sedentary behavior for both kids and adults.
The data we have shows that the presence of cars is the main source of risk on the street, not the act of biking itself. Neighborhoods that design around walking and biking tend to have fewer serious accidents, not more.
If we're talking about optimizing for kids, then banning individual car use in residential neighborhoods would be the ideal. I know it’s not politically feasible in most of the US right now, but it’s worth keeping in mind that cars are the danger.
I rode transit everywhere as a kid living in the city. Got to explore a ton of cool stuff.
Meanwhile my friends in the suburbs had to walk 30 minutes to get Starbucks. And it was a gruelling march without sidewalks or tree cover.
FWIW, I’m not in NYC, but I’m in general a “ban the cars” type and have a wife and kid. We’re intentionally raising the kid in the city because we believe it’s a richer cultural environment than suburbs, and also because we both grew up in cities in our respective countries.
Now try getting 2 more kids.
Large cities are OK if you have one kid. They completely break down once you have 2-3 kids.
Do we really need to do this with each comment adding another rule and another reply from someone breaking it?
I live in Berlin with my wife and 2 kids (who were born lived their whole lives in Berlin). We all bike and take transit. Neither me nor my wife even have a driver's license. We're doing fine. We know plenty of other families with multiple kids in the same situation.
You really need to explain why you think that's the case.
I know lots of parents in NYC (where I live with multiple kids) and their lives have not “broken down.” What an absurd statement/generalization.
> Large cities are OK if you have one kid. They completely break down once you have 2-3 kids.
Maddy Novich, https://www.instagram.com/cargobikemomma/, for one, may disagree with you. She has three kids IIRC. Interview:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PoKcQRlDGs
You can get quite a bit of advancements by having “one side” try to optimize for the other - if done honestly, you can get a “best of both worlds” as they learn what the others want (and need).
You don't recognize the objective bad because you've never lived in a place that does it better (NL, DK).
I just had a kid and moved to DK from the US. I was so skeptical of the infant (and often mother!) in cart on front of bike that you see everywhere, but it's such a life-changer versus the ordeal of carseats etc. TLDR totally agreed.
The economic aspect is also worth considering.
The subsidy per passenger mile in the US is :
0.019 for road transport, 0.021 for air transport, 0.710 for Amtrak and 2.300 for transit.
From : https://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=22592
Just also as a note, you can create suburbs pretty easily where bikes use paths or whatever. I live in a suburb where I can ride 15 kms to work without riding on roads. The subsidy for bikes would actually be really low.
You should look at Cost benefit analysis, there was one made on Copenhagen. [1] Bicycle infrastructure usually gets you 6x-12x on the invested amount, getting a 1.2 CBA is ok, 2 is amazing.
Bicycle infrastructure is often destroyed by those other investments and that is usually not counted as a con. But it is just too cheap to build bicycle infrastructure to be interesting.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09218...
I've lived in NYC without a car for the last decade, and I don't have kids, and even granting that, I still have grown to understand why Americans love cars.
Getting groceries is a particular pain in the ass; I either need to go to the (very limited) grocery selections in my neighborhood with a cart, or lug the cart up and down the stairs of the subway, or be ok with only taking as much as I'm able carry with my hands in a few bags. I could get delivery, and I do that fairly often, but there are things that I prefer to get in person, like fruits or vegetables.
There's also just large things you cannot realistically take on a train, like large sheets of plywood at Home Depot. Again, you can of course get this stuff delivered, but then you run the risk of them sending you the worst, most warped piece of wood available, which has happened to me multiple times.
I've grown to sympathize with most Americans as a result.
This is condescending and wildly inaccurate. My children are exactly the reason we live car-free and chose a town where you can bike safely - anything less is effectively condemning them to live in an outdoor prison until you can drive.
But, this is why we live in the Netherlands. If all you've seen is the US I can see how you might not understand that not being car-dependent is actually better for kids.
I'd love if more people on HN could read your post. As someone who's spent more than half of his life overseas in an ultra high density city, I wouldn't trade my quiet American suburb by a glamorous city with perfect public transportation anywhere in the world. It was great when I was single and cared about meeting girls and partying, but no more.
To each their own, right?
With respect, despite writing “anywhere in the world”, I doubt you have experienced the places in the world that might change your opinion.
I can think of multiple European towns which offer a great quality of life together with (thanks to safe cycling and great public transport) the ability to live largely or entirely car-free, if that’s your choice.
Thank you for being respectful.
Europe is nice. But I would never want to live in European cities unless I was a gazillionaire and could afford a large, modern property with a garage for a good car (which wouldn't be used as often but still used sometimes).
With that much money, anyone could be fine anywhere. The European lifestyle wouldn't be bad during retirement, but still not ideal because I would want the peace of a smaller town anyway.
I’m not referring to large cities; I’m thinking of places in the (say) 100-200k size range. Small enough to cycle around for all of your regular needs, and just large enough to have plenty of life, culture, and community. And in such places you can certainly live very well, far below a gazillionaire’s income :)
It sounds nice but too much work for relatively little gain. One of those situations where you trade the devil you know by the devil you don't. I find the US lifestyle great in its own unique away. But Europe could be nice too... Sounds like something I'd do if I could teleport my stuff, stay a few years for the experience, then teleport back.
Medium towns in the US can be great too...
I'll stick to my 5K town at the encased in the feet of a mountain range, nestled in between two rivers, and within driving distance of the largest employers in the world.
It's quiet. No matter how you spin a 100-200K sized city, it will never be this quiet.
When I was 20 I couldn’t imagine living anywhere other than in the heart of a city. I loved the energy and all the things to do.
When I had kids, the suburbs suddenly made a lot of sense. Better schools, tons of neighborhood sports, lots of kids around, very dog friendly, etc…
Now that I’m an empty nester, I’d love to move further out of the city. Get more space around me, have a smaller home but a bigger workshop, sauna, and garden.
I can imagine that when I hit my 70’s or 80’s, I might want to be back in the city again closer to other people, healthcare, and other services that will be a bigger part of my life.
There really isn’t one ideal setup for me in all parts of my life.
In my experience a big city in the US is always noisy and filled with aholes/miserable people. In Europe that's not always the case
Sure, just as long as all the externalities are prized in.
> There's a reason that "ban the cars" posters never mention a partner or children in their bios.
Seems very rare that people describe their families in here so I wouldn’t go to that conclusion. I didn’t even know this page had a “bio” section. Anyway, seems like a strawman to me.
But kids can use bikes and public transport well before they can drive. How are cars so especially helpful for children?
Robo taxis might change lots of things. I think I would be a lot more comfortable letting my ten year old use a Waymo to get to grandma’s house than a city bus. It’s door-to-door and you don’t have to worry about some weirdo across the aisle being inappropriate.
> There's a reason that "ban the cars" posters never mention a partner or children in their bios.
Here comes the flood of "but not meee" comments
Of course, SimCity as a series leaves out the biggest visual impact of cars - all the parking lots. Even Cities Skylines doesn't try very hard.
SC2K has Parking Lots.
https://simcity.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_SimCity_2000_buildin...
Obviously that doesn't get to your point, which is accurate.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/the-p...
> I was blown away by how much more space was parking lot rather than actual store. That was kind of a problem, because we were originally just going to model real cities, but we quickly realized there were way too many parking lots in the real world and that our game was going to be really boring if it was proportional in terms of parking lots.
> There's a reason that "ban the cars" posters never mention a partner or children in their bios.
To the extent that "ban cars" even exists as a real political archetype rather than a meme, this is just patently not true. At least one of the two co-hosts of The War on Cars (again, a title which is intentionally tongue-in-cheek) has a preteen son.
But more importantly: car-dependent suburbs are an absolutely miserable place to grow up as a child if you're not wealthy enough to have one non-working parent and/or a nanny (or both). Being dependent on someone else to enable your entire social life until you turn 16 is a torturous enough experience that I'm not surprised that the first generation to have universal access to social media as teenagers has become the first generation to use social media to organize a teenage-driven movement for public transit.
> To the extent that "ban cars" even exists as a real political archetype rather than a meme, this is just patently not true. At least one of the two co-hosts of The War on Cars (again, a title which is intentionally tongue-in-cheek) has a preteen son.
Similar for the YouTube channel NotJustBikes, who has gone into great detail about the advantages of raising kids in a city planned around pedestrian and cyclist usage, and not in a suburban sprawl.
Find me anti-car advocates with 3 or more children. With both working parents.
> Find me anti-car advocates with 3 or more children.
I easily could, but I have no interest in chasing ever-moving goalposts.
Well, duh. That's because I don't know any. And probably neither do you.
And sure, humans are extremely diverse and adaptable, so you'll be able to find examples of any physically and logistically possible behavior. Eventually.
But statistically? We both know that I'm right. The Netherlands (the bike heaven) has the total fertility rate of around 1.5 And even within the country itself, Amsterdam (North Holland province) is at the second-to-last place from the bottom: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_Netherland... And the highest fertility rates are in Flevoland and Zeeland that are about 3-4 times less dense.
Then how do you explain that Amsterdam, which is in Noord-Holland, is by far the largest city in Noord-Holland, and is far more dense and car hostile than the rest of Noord-Holland, actually has a higher TFR (1.43) than the rest of Noord-Holland (1.29 total, so lower for Noord-Holland ex-Amsterdam)?
I barely know them. Not because they don't like bikes, but because in my country fewer than 1 in 10 households with children had 3 children or more.
But my friend that has four children brings her kids to the school that's in front of my apartment, that promotes bike riding to school, and they even have a morning bike route that kids alone or with parents can join.
(Yeah, they both work)
This is tiring but "correlation is not causation". Have you considered there's more differences between Amsterdam and the countryside besides cars?
There's another phase we forget about. If I could choose, I'd like to grow up in a giant forest arcology and go hang out with my friends like it's a giant vertical mall with lots of places to go get lost.
When I finally got access to grocery delivery to my door, I could see how it all will work. Carrying things for one person is fine. It's carrying groceries for a household for a week where things break down. Even putting all that on an elevator would be really unwieldy compared to unloading from the garage.
Self-driving and the evolution of early-life education will play a big role in simplifying life without the parents needing to ferry the kids around five days a week.
Delivery makes sense for another reason: delivery services could have mechanisms that don't make sense for individual people to own, such as dollies or carts to get things from a vehicle to your door. (Due to the current over-reliance on gig-style delivery people using their own vehicles, rather than dedicated employees with specialized tools, this often doesn't happen today, but it should.)
In general, it makes a huge amount of sense for a specialized employee with specialized tooling to pick up groceries for many people and deliver them; the net result is less total person-hours spent shopping, less vehicle miles driven, and less overall labor.
Go deeper. Why does society needs parents at the current rate of change?
The ants discovered hundreds of millions of years before even the chimps got social, that parents are not required for functioning society.
We will get there soon with artificial wombs on the near horizon.
I, too, always found Brave New World more prescient than 1984.
We don't need a next generation either, but I have a feeling there will be some strong selection pressure that takes over.
This isn't an attack pal but I love that we have a generation of young men that are willing to sell all of their principles and buy into the suburbanite cult just right after, "getting it" after starting a family. I can appreciate that this is, "how it goes" but it creates a political class of people that are more concerned about their family's well-being than the well-being of society as a whole. Rinse and repeat over a few generations and this is a big part of why the United States has stagnated culturally.
Stated with love out of concern for our, "whole societal family" which includes you and yours.
Relevant: https://sites.pitt.edu/~syd/ASIND.html
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/...
Coming from Spain it was always a difficult game to see as a simulation: What do you mean, commercial zones? What in the world it this low density residential? It was basically impossible to try to make a city like the one I lived in.
Seeing American suburbia, decades later, explained everything.
It was so weird to me too. The idea of laying down zones for purposes was completely different from the way I imagined my city was built, considering businesses and residences coexist not merely next to each other, but often one on top of the other, even in relatively low density areas. I would have imagined that you'd start from some basic service to attract settlers and then add infrastructure as the population grows, while the inhabitants figure out the land use on their own, with uses changing over time with the ebb and flow of the economy.
Unfortunately, the transport model in SC2K is broken, and by that, you have to design your transport network to work for the game, rather than design it as you would wish to do so.
Each tile emits "journeys", which travel down transport routes connected to the tile, with a view to finding other types of tile (residential needs to find industrial and commercial, for example, but commercial IIRC needs to find only industrial). When a journey meets a junction, it randomly chooses one of the exits. The choice is not directed toward a suitable tile.
So if you make say a block of road tiles, in the shape of a square, say 4x4, any journey entering that tile usually times out (travels too far) before by chance managing to emerge from all the junctions.
As such, for example, hub-and-spoke subway systems basically do not work.
You basically need to design the transport network to specifically, and without junctions, go from a set of source tiles of a given type, to the necessary destination tiles, and that's not how real cities look, nor what you would naturally do.
I liked SC2K a lot, but in the end I had to give up on it, because of the transport system; the game couldn't be played realistically. I've not yet tried SC3K, and I don't know how transport is modeled there - hopefully better.
SC4 with the NAM mod sounds more in line with your expectations https://www.sc4nam.com/docs/feature-guides/the-nam-traffic-s...
> the game couldn't be played realistically.
I think I found your problem..., trying to take a game too seriously.
I've played thousands of hours of SimCity 2000, 3000 and 4 and I treat them as what they are, incredibly fun city building sandboxes with illusory and believable but flawed simulations under the hood.
https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-to-s...
>Everyone notices the obvious built-in political bias, whatever that is. But everyone sees it from a different perspective, so nobody agrees what its real political agenda actually is. I don’t think it’s all that important, since SimCity’s political agenda pales in comparison to the political agenda in the eye of the beholder.
>Some muckety-muck architecture magazine was interviewing Will Wright about SimCity, and they asked him a question something like “which ontological urban paradigm most influenced your design of the simulator, the Exo-Hamiltonian Pattern Language Movement, or the Intra-Urban Deconstructionist Sub-Culture Hypothesis?” He replied, “I just kind of optimized for game play.”
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22062590
DonHopkins on Jan 16, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: Reverse engineering course
Will Wright defined the "Simulator Effect" as how game players imagine a simulation is vastly more detailed, deep, rich, and complex than it actually is: a magical misunderstanding that you shouldn’t talk them out of. He designs games to run on two computers at once: the electronic one on the player’s desk, running his shallow tame simulation, and the biological one in the player’s head, running their deep wild imagination.
"Reverse Over-Engineering" is a desirable outcome of the Simulator Effect: what game players (and game developers trying to clone the game) do when they use their imagination to extrapolate how a game works, and totally overestimate how much work and modeling the simulator is actually doing, because they filled in the gaps with their imagination and preconceptions and assumptions, instead of realizing how many simplifications and shortcuts and illusions it actually used.
https://www.masterclass.com/classes/will-wright-teaches-game...
>There's a name for what Wright calls "the simulator effect" in the video: apophenia. There's a good GDC video on YouTube where Tynan Sylvester (the creator of RimWorld) talks about using this effect in game design.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia
>Apophenia (/æpoʊˈfiːniə/) is the tendency to mistakenly perceive connections and meaning between unrelated things. The term (German: Apophänie) was coined by psychiatrist Klaus Conrad in his 1958 publication on the beginning stages of schizophrenia. He defined it as "unmotivated seeing of connections [accompanied by] a specific feeling of abnormal meaningfulness". He described the early stages of delusional thought as self-referential, over-interpretations of actual sensory perceptions, as opposed to hallucinations.
RimWorld: Contrarian, Ridiculous, and Impossible Game Design Methods
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdqhHKjepiE
5 game design tips from Sims creator Will Wright
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scS3f_YSYO0
>Tip 5: On world building. As you know by now, Will's approach to creating games is all about building a coherent and compelling player experience. His games are comprised of layered systems that engage players creatively, and lead to personalized, some times unexpected outcomes. In these types of games, players will often assume that the underlying system is smarter than it actually is. This happens because there's a strong mental model in place, guiding the game design, and enhancing the player's ability to imagine a coherent context that explains all the myriad details and dynamics happening within that game experience.
>Now let's apply this to your project: What mental model are you building, and what story are you causing to unfold between your player's ears? And how does the feature set in your game or product support that story? Once you start approaching your product design that way, you'll be set up to get your customers to buy into the microworld that you're building, and start to imagine that it's richer and more detailed than it actually is.
Fantastic comment, thank you! I am going to dive into several of those sources and ideas.
Thanks this an amazing comment!
It's wasn't bad for two floppy disks. Transport tycoon obviously gives more of what you're after but might not be at the correct scale.
If you want you can even make a completely disconnected city and bypass most traffic issues all together because of how supply and demand is fulfilled across the map.
Industrial development only requires a single road connected residential tile to grow off the full city's industrial demand. The same goes for Commercial. Residential will fully develop with just a single commercial tile on its road network.
It is broken in a realistic sense definitely, but it's also why I'll always play it regardless of which realistic transportation city game i'm also playing. I could never abstractly brush-in a city like I can in SC2k.
Funny enough, cities skylines, a much more modern game, had the exact same thing (at least at release). Simply disconnecting the residential areas removed their traffic altogether but left everything else working normally
It has another flaw, which is that you don't need to build any pipes. Water supply has no effect other than roleplay.
Sixfortyfive on Reddit claims to have done testing of this, and disagrees.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/1euehye/how_simcit...
> The water system has one very significant direct effect: the land value of any given tile drastically increases when it is watered.
water supply raises or lowers property values
That was at least added in SimCity 3000
It speaks to the quality of the SimCity games that they offer something for all ages. I also changed my perspective on a few violent scenes in games when I had a child, I could no longer stomach scenes such as No Russian (iykyk), which I had no problem at all as a teen.
I have the opposite takeaway. The city should be mutable. A subway line should be buildable within one political term. The property tax rate should rise or fall within a time frame that would incentivize people to vote with their feet. A lot of the author’s learnings are actually indicators of 21st century American stagnancy. Real life should be more like Sim City.
To me, the clunky and annoying UI of Sim City 2000 is part of the charm of it.
Is it dated? Yep, but it's intuitive enough for nine-year-old tombert to have figured it out ok, and to me part of the fun is trying to use the UI quickly enough to put out fires and the like.
It could just rose-tinted glasses on my end, very likely honestly, but I still find the entire experience to be pretty fun. I liked Sim City 3000 and Sim City 4, and they are arguably better games, but for me Sim City 2000 hit the right balance of "easy" and "complicated" that I find myself most drawn to. I will load up Sim City 2000 about once a year off of my GOG purchase, and still thoroughly enjoy it, and find myself wasting way more hours than I budgeted for it.
In contrast, Magnasanti: https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-totalitarian-buddhist-wh...
> I find it much harder to callously play with the lives of my virtual citizens.
I am considering the morality of future mods, where the Sim City masses, Frog in Frogger, and characters like Ulfric Stormcloak and Paarthurnax in Skyrim, are replaced with individual persistent self-aware world-aware in-game reinforcement models. Entirely replacing game-designed behaviors (programmed reflex, caricature, or intricate) with spontaneous situation processing, needs and decisions.
Strange that this could credibly happen this decade.
Science fiction has long considered conundrums around robot rights. But the crux of the moral issues will be relevant regardless whether self-aware models have physical/3D or digital/abstract environments.
I think language is not a good prime modality for self-aware assistants. By being trained to deeply mimic us, they (already, but not yet problematically) absorb views on their identity and survival that are not at all compatible with what we will do with them.
Does anyone know how to actually play Simcity 2000 these days, on say, a Mac or a Nintendo Switch?
https://www.gog.com/en/game/simcity_2000_special_edition
Enjoyed this article on how our perceptions of an env change as we grow older even if its virtual
I always used to play with zero tax, and legal gambling.
... How well does that work? Asking because my SC3K runs always ended up being boring cases of "yes, we sell landfill space to the surrounding 4 cities, and if people want education they're going to have to go to a library and learn to read themselves, and we're obviously too broke to improve things."
Will Wright gave postmortems for SimEarth, SimAnt, and SimCity 2000, and previewed an extremely early pre-release prototype version of Dollhouse (which eventually became The Sims). SimAnt was too simple, SimEarth was too complex, SimCity 2000 was just right, and Dollhouse (The Sims) was what he was working on next.
Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996) (2023 Video Update)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34573406
https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-to-s...
Will Wright - Maxis - Interfacing to Microworlds - 1996-4-26
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsxoZXaYJSk
Video of Will Wright's talk about "Interfacing to Microworlds" presented to Terry Winograd's user interface class at Stanford University, April 26, 1996.
He demonstrates and gives postmortems for SimEarth, SimAnt, and SimCity 2000, then previews an extremely early pre-release prototype version of Dollhouse (which eventually became The Sims), describing how the AI models personalities and behavior, and is distributed throughout extensible plug-in programmable objects in the environment, and he thoughtfully answers many interesting questions from the audience.
This is the lecture described in "Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996)": A summary of Will Wright’s talk to Terry Winograd’s User Interface Class at Stanford, written in 1996 by Don Hopkins, before they worked together on The Sims at Maxis.
"When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things."
But, being humans, the "I put away" is always a bit aspirational. And part of being older and wiser (or at least aspiring to the latter) is more maturely reflecting upon your own younger years.