Americans often think the shitty experience they have in their country applies universally. Ex: The bus & light rail is bad and slow, so therefore it will always be bad everywhere. Americans haven't lived or even travelled to places in europe and asia with functional transit systems and do not realize what they are missing.

Another common american assumption is: apartments are only for the poor, so they will always be made shitty with bad soundproofing when you can make them with good soundproofing as a standard and a good amount of square feet. Or metros are always dirty, dangerous and the gross homeless live there, while that is also a pure policy choice of america.

I grew up in north america, lived in places with good metros and good apartments, and then moved to America. America doesn't know how bad they have it.

You should meet some of my old coworkers in large cities in Asia... (you don't SIT on the train at all in rush hour!)

In a smaller city it can work great! But in a small NA city, everything is a 5-to-10-minute drive from everything and everyone's also happy about that. That's easy mode. But London, NY, Paris, Beijing, etc - those are the cases that are somewhat broken everywhere, affordability-wise and commute-wise.

This is actually an argument for transit systems. Los Angeles, San Francisco/San Jose, Dallas, Phoenix -- could be (and should be) a global metropolises, with a populations and cultural relevance rivaling Tokyo or Hong Kong. They would be, if not for the car. There are people who commute daily from the suburbs of Stockton to the SF bay area.

Yes!

> with a populations and cultural relevance rivaling Tokyo or Hong Kong.

YES!

> They would be, if not for the car.

...what?

They are not because their local governments prohibit construction and actively oppose growth, which is only vaguely related to the car. Approximately zero "global metropolises" have single-family zoning in 95% of their inner core land area. Not "have single family homes", sure maybe Tokyo has that. But zoning that prohibits denser development in such a way that most (yes, most) current housing in those areas is too dense to be built today under current rules. (This last part is true even of NYC.)

The US went hardcore anti-density in the 70s. And sure, that has something to do with the car.

The reason we zone this way is because people are unable to imagine their lives without being able to drive around. The very first thing people say in my town when an apartment tower goes up is "where am I going to park? Do they have a plan for moving the parking spots that this tower displaced? Traffic on tower St. is going to get so much worse!"

If the expectation is that everyone owns a car, upzoning is a huge problem -- it actually is, because everything that scares a car brain ("I can't park!" "It's going to be loud!" "This will increase traffic!") is actually true. Rather than limiting cars, of course, we choose to limit zoning. Which is actually quite a logical thing to do if everyone is to own a car.

If you get rid of cars you get rid of collectors, arterials, onramps and offramps, turn lanes, parking spots... Those are things that are fundamentally incompatible with a major, dense, vibrant city. You can easily fit 50,000 people, their workplaces, senior care homes, schools, and restaurants into the land area of a 4 way cloverleaf that is designed to service 50,000 round trip commutes by car.

To make alternatives you can look at what the Netherlands does. They have much more relaxed lot coverage, height limits, parking requirements, etc. so they get the same single family square footage in way less geographic area and they intermix that with much higher density so their cities proper are 3-4 times denser than where I live while not feeling cramped. They didn't get rid of the car, what they did do was ensure people had great walking, biking and transit options to fulfill the normal trips that make up their lives. That is vs where I live where I am fine getting downtown with transit, but to my kids schools, groceries, or any other workplace outside of the core, I am screwed. The extra density makes providing these transit options possible (along with reasonable regulation on other areas leading to reasonable density)

But in the US, at least, the underlying argument is about class, and race. If you haven't already, it might be worth reading about redlining, the historical practice of outlining which neighborhoods were "safe" to issue mortgage loans in because they were white and not at risk of non-whites moving in. This was about race, primarily.

Redlining became illegal starting in the '70s in many places, and its replacement was exclusionary zoning---a practice that continues to this day that relies instead on race's strong correlate, wealth. Apartments and other similar higher-density arrangements are much more affordable--and as a result, accessible to racial minorities (and the crime, etc. that racial minorities were "associated" with).

All the modern arguments around traffic jams, neighborhood character, transit, etc.---these are all modern-day variants of the same old arguments, because again, who can afford a 1:1 ratio of cars to people-in-household to get around the low-density suburbs?

So when you hear people say "I can't park! It'll be loud!" consider if they're really saying "I don't want those other people who rely on transit in my neighborhood", but using the words "there won't be room for me to park!"

Building subways is impossible for no good reason nowadays. But it's quite easy to put light rail, bike lanes, and BRT in. People find a way to get around.

You don't need to take cars by force; you just need to let market forces do it. That starts with getting rid of parking, setbacks, and exclusionary zoning requirements for new development in areas of town that are underdeveloped (it's not hard to find these areas in even medium sized American cities). If people really do want cars in those built-up areas, they will rent a monthly space. It's a funny thing though, people seem to re-evaluate how valuable a car is once they have to pay $400/mo for a parking space.

If what you say is true, and everyone truly must have a car, rents will fall in those areas to compensate (developers, not having to deal with onerous parking and setback requirements, still turn a profit). In practice, this does not happen, because places without cars are nice places to live. They appreciate and attract investment, which puts money in the city coffer to improve transit options.

It does not take much land to do this. An area the size of 10,000 single family homes -- often a single neighborhood. In San Diego that's Midway, in SF it's Berkeley and the Sunset, in NYC it's Staten Island. These places all have developers who will break ground in months on collectively hundreds of thousands of new housing units if they are allowed to do it and earn a profit.

It is not fundamentally hard to do this, at all, if you can picture in your mind a human being not owning a car.

The fear was real :(

Another option would be to set policies that encourage greater economic development and job growth in Stockton so that residents aren't forced to commute long distances. There's nothing special about the SF Bay Area: it's just another place.

It is not really that people living in Stockton already are commuting into the Bay, but Bay Area workers are being displaced into Stockton. The Bay Area has added more jobs than housing for a while now.

    # Service accurate enough to set a clock by.
    # Service mesh that provides walk-able freedom.
    # Safety and cleanliness (both a culture and enforcement issue)

My main point is that “move the jobs” in a sufficiently large city is not generally a working way to reduce commute times.

The Bay Area is extremely special. It's the only place to go to get a good job! There are probably 500,000 people who would move in next week if we had the apartments to house them. That is absolutely not true of Stockton.

Someone who commutes to SF from Stockton isn't a resident of Stockton. They're a resident of SF who is priced out!

Personally I wouldn't want to live in SF proper even if it was cheap. Most of the city is kind of a shithole and the governance is atrocious in a way that goes far beyond just failed housing policies.

It's always the same answer.

Something that I think often makes this discussion tough is that there are a LOT of well-known historical European cities that are at under-2M population that I don't think Americans typically realize are THAT much smaller than, say, an Atlanta. I think the challenges of serving a growing city of 5M+ are much harder than a well-established old city of 2M.

I will say using US definitions, commute times are very sticky around the 30 minute time period. Longer commutes and people have a large incentive to move closer, short ones and they don't generally bother.

So in the US Tulusa Oklahoma population 400,000 (1M metro) has a 20 minute commute and NYC population 8,800,000 (20M metro) is 50% worse at 32 minutes average and ~100 cities between those extremes. https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/planes-trains-and-...

Edit: This suggests allowing people to move easily move around the metro area would meaningfully lower the need for transportation infrastructure. I suspect NYC has issues with people living in rent controlled apartments having long commutes but being unwilling to leave their cheap apartment, but don't have data backing it up.

Cars are not really an option when it comes to moving people en mass. It's just too low capacity.

Rome's metro system in particular is stymied by buried Roman artifacts and laws for archaeology. That's not really the worst thing, given that NYC subway construction cost are some of the highest in the world.

That said, I saw what Atlanta looks like. Aside from down Atlanta, a lot of Atlanta is literally just low rise, even downright suburban sometime. It's a smaller city than people thought, given that only half a million people lives within its border proper, but nonetheless traffic is somehow a nightmare.

“Do you have examples of cities that are literally utopia? No? Checkmate, urbanists!”

The best transit is generally thought to be in NYC.

The NYC Subway is a relic from a foregone age, from a time when we built things and wasn’t mired in bureaucracy and carbrained thinking.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_New_York_City...

Tokyo (I heard)

Mumbai

And I don't follow your second question. If the trains OR freeways are full of people who can't afford to live closer to their jobs and have hours-long commutes, isn't that bad? And if it can happen even with extensive public transit, what does that tell us about fundamental assumptions about "city should grow forever, number must always go up!"?

The urban mega cities are a prop that the CCP puts on display for the world. There's a reason that China's GDP-per-capita lands somewhere between Kazakhstan and Cuba.I would know because I've been there. If you go to a random exurban part of China you're going to find people living in makeshift tin structures, a lack of running water, oxcarts used as serious transportation, and a society that is functionally in the 1930s.

The CCP are masters of propaganda though, and flood Youtube and social media with influencers riding around on maglev trains and showing off new airports and architecture. Even on American Social Media, if you look for videos of "The Real China", or "Chinese Poverty" you'll get carefully curated propaganda that does not line up with what I saw first hand.

https://www.youtube.com/@serpentza

I once had a commute longer than 15min in Silicon Valley and decided I'd never do it again.

    > you don't SIT on the train
    > at all in rush hour!

What’s a properly designed city? Even in Tokyo a car usually beats the train unless it’s an inter-regional trip. Im a huge Japan nerd and love their train system. But I just got back from carting three kids around Tokyo and daily life is just far easier in my American exurb.

Do Americans have it bad? The median Parisian spends 69 minutes per day commuting: https://www.mynewsdesk.com/eurofound/news/budapest-paris-and.... The median commute time in Dallas is under an hour round trip: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/B080ACS048113 (28 minutes one way). And the folks in Dallas live in huge houses compared to those in Paris.

Priority seating

It isn't.

It's about changing incentive structures over the long-term, so more people choose options which have a better set of societal externalities.

Outside of Boston and NYC (well, maybe not NYC right now), I hear of no one happy with public transit in the US. We need to stop pretending that if we just move into cities, the problems will address themselves. Make public transit attractive and more people will want to live there.

The solution is policy. Use public money to make that 2 hour transit shorter and everyone wins, not just those of us with cash

Also can be done in today s time:

https://youtu.be/XfonhlM6I7w?si=ZcnbH6lmNWuQ6oE9

Whether this is true or not, what matters to me - a person living in the US - is that public transit in the US is a relatively poor experience compared with driving. Until that changes, I will keep driving and I will resist efforts that would force me to use public transit. I don't care if it's better elsewhere because I don't live there nor do I want to move there.

I want our public transit to be good, but that simply isn't the case right now. Walkable cities with quality public transit and good community infrastructure sound great, but until they are a reality here I will have no interest in living in a dense urban ___location.

About 10 years ago I had a project and stayed in an apartment in haugong, a residential area about 6 miles from my office. Uber was the only realistic commute - about 15-20 minutes. Public transport was about an hour to do the journey.

This may be changing. You see a growing awareness of the shabbiness of certain American norms in parts of so-called "populist" circles (left and right).

I think that shared ride self driving cars have a lot of potential in both types of cities. They give you a lot of what's good about private cars (door to door, good average speed, comfort, some privacy), and a lot of what's good about metros (higher density on the road than private cars due to sharing and less need for parking)

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/transit/comments/113n0ee/average_sp...

1. Shared ride AVs can deliver multiple people per trip to their jobs, and they can also make multiple trips in the morning, and multiple trips in the evening. Private cars generally take one person, have to sit in a parking spot all day, and then go home.

2. AVs can park relatively far from their destination. After they drop off their passenger, they can go somewhere else to park.

3. AVs, if they can coordinate or be remotely controlled by a parking lot, can park way more densely than normal cars. In a normal parking lot, maybe half of the space is aisles for cars to drive to and from the parking space. If cars could dynamically get out of the way, you would only need a small portion of the space empty. A very simple strategy would be for there to be only room for one aisle for a big parking lot, and all of the cars would just move forward or back to make the single aisle appear wherever it was needed.

In all, this probably reduces the need for parking by maybe 6x relative to human driven cars.

So instead of, say, having rush hour start at 4pm, with people leaving work, you have a new, free, bonus rush hour at 2, of empty cars driving near the places where they'll need to be picked up. Same thing near any other rush hour: Every added mile kills. It's not even just cars that have this problem: You'll find that in American cities with transit, which often are built with very few key destinations, there are large depots for trains downtown! Bart has no need to use most of their trains most of their day, so you'll find trains that just go downtown and stay there, parked.

What drives efficiency, always, is fewer miles traveled, and having the need for transport be as even as possible. Something like car-centric stadium is terrible: You need major infra to support a game, with many lanes, and many parking places, just to support game days. But then there might be as few as 10 game days a year, so all that extra infrastructure is wasted the other 355 days.

Self driving, rented cars probably make the first worse, and don't really make huge differences in the second. I think that they have advantages: fewer people dying from drunk driving, or someone doing 80mph in a city street running people over, like we had last week in St Louis. Younger people and older people retaining some independence in areas where now they are wholly dependent of others to go anywhere. But the efficiency gains story is a pipe dream. We will see more miles driven, and therefore more total congestion.

First, there's traffic, and there's parking. The claim you're making is that the lack of need for parking in dense areas creates traffic while the SDCs go to park. That may be true, but if the SDCs are delivering say, 5-9 people to work every day between shared rides and multiple trips, the fact that one SDC then has to make an extra drive out of the business district, at the end of the morning rush hour is not that significant.

The hope is also that SDC driving behavior is also a lot more consistent and predictable, leading to more smoothly flowing traffic. Sometimes a few crazy drivers, or worse, drivers that cause accidents, can foul up traffic massively. I'd expect that this would be reduced in a mostly SDC world.

We should be aiming for some degree of density. I would hazard a guess that size is largely dependent upon what a person wants out of life.

Infrastructure is very expensive to build and maintain, and everyone demands it in multiple forms (roads, water, sewage, and power at a minimum). Containing the costs by reducing either extent or capacity would allow us to allocate those resources to other things, things that could improve the collective quality of life.

As for decentralization, it depends upon how it is done. I've lived in or visited towns with a few thousand people. Nearly everything one needed was within walking distance, though people often left town for things they wanted. I've also lived in similarly sized urban communities where virtually nothing one needed was within a reasonable walking distance. Suburban communities often take the latter to the extreme. What was the difference? Everything in the small town was centralized, yet businesses and services in those urban communities were effectively decentralized.

Let's say you build a bunch of small towns to decentralize the population and get away from feeding money back into the hands of those who own and control cities. You now have another major consideration: are people going to live most of their daily lives in those towns, or are they going to live in one town and work in another? A big part of the reason why people spend so much of their life commuting, whether it is by car or train, is because opportunities (may it be home ownership or careers) don't necessarily fall in the same place.

Yes, you can get an affordability crisis anywhere you make it illegal to build housing. Nobody is arguing that. The point is that you also get an affordability crisis simply by pushing the transportation infrastructure to the point of failure, and then reject density.

>Is "make today's cities larger and denser forever" really the solution? Or can we figure out ways to disperse and decentralize things instead of just feeding more money back into the hands of those who own and control the current cities?

This is literally what's happening in every tech satellite city, the point is that many-if-not-most of our urban centers are already at their transportation capacities, simply because that is the suburban development model: it's extremely cheap until suddenly it's no longer functional. The suburban model has no equilibrium, it's a cascade, once the planned automobile infrastructure reaches capacity, you cannot increase it at a rate that is sustainable. Thus, once that capacity is gone, suddenly the real estate in the core becomes extremely valuable -> which incentivizes density -> which further strains peak infrastructure -> which increases the value of core real estate -> which further incentivizes density -> etc. -> etc. -> etc.

We can't wish this away, beyond wishing other people just didn't exist. It's like wishing that other people would take the bus, but not wanting to take it yourself. Nobody in the bay area wants to move to affordable Red Bluff, CA, without a reason, much less the CEO of a major corporation moving their entire company there out of the kindness of his heart we he or she already has a house and friends in Atherton.

Not to say, in a vacuum, multi-family housing won't provide more housing units per unit of land area than single-family. Clearly, it will. But unless you build every city from scratch to house 20 million people, whether you started with single-family or multi-family, the most desirable cities will end up in a future state whereby more people want to live there than housing exists for, and even if regulations and zoning allow you to build higher and denser than is currently done, to do it where people want to live, you'll have to tear down existing buildings, including existing housing, and many of the owners and occupants of that housing won't want that. You'll also need to run more utility lines, build new pipes, run them under existing roads, which means shutting down those roads, and even if they're perfect utopian European roads that have zero cars on them and only have pedestrians and bicycles, the user of those roads are still going to get annoyed and inconvenienced, and it's going to cost more to do this than building new housing where nobody currently lives, pretty much no matter what.

Why are you acting like driving a vehicle and being a passenger in a vehicle are the same experience? One is clearly more demanding and inhibiting than the other.

On a train you can work, read, listen to a podcast, sometimes eat... Lots of things you can't do while in a car. Unless your job is driving. Which, if you commute for work, it kinda is.

I commuted for awhile between Baltimore and DC on Amtrak and apart from being hellaciously unreliable it was great for working. But my commute from the upper west side to east midtown when I lived in NYC was completely different—being crammed into the 1/2/3 and then fighting through the masses to take the S across town.

I see lots of people watching movies/series or reading books (physical or ebooks) while standing up in various Paris transit during rush hour.

I just plugged in upper west side and midtown Manhattan into google maps... It said 18 minutes via transit. Maybe your commute had more complications, last mile and so on.

I do all of those things in my car while driving too. Maybe not read but I’ve listened to audiobooks. I also sit in Teams meetings, read and respond to emails and IMs on my phone as well when I’m at a stop light. Maybe some people can’t do these things while driving but plenty of us do.

It's not that those people are unable. It's that they're not idiots that risks other's lives.

You write as if you believe you're a better driver than most, but that's wrong. People doing the things you mention are bad and dangerous drivers.

But it's fine, the poors (pedestrians, cyclists) deserve to die, anyway.

The pandemic showed that millions of us can work from home. My office was closed for about 2 years. Our stock price shot way up.

There were lots of stories about the environmental benefits. Air pollution in big cities decreased dramatically. Wildlife started returning in places.

We keep building commercial real estate and most people I know have little desire to commute to the office and sit in a cubicle disturbed by other people constantly.

I would severely limit commercial real estate building permits, encourage companies to have employees work at home via tax breaks or whatever. This will help with the housing issues, greenhouse gas emissions, decrease the need for new roads because of less traffic.

Everyone wins except dumb control freak managers and restaurants that do lunch in the business areas.

This would imply that a company's stock price is directly influenced by its productive output; in reality, it's only very tangentially so. Especially for low-profit, high-growth tech companies, I'd wager the federal funds rate's effect on the stock price is way higher.

I joke in meetings that we just need to go back home and we will make more money.

I work for a fabless semiconductor company that makes chips for data centers and other applications, not a software company.

> 2020-21 and then we went back to the office in 2022 and our profits and stock price dropped

The broad stock index rallied like crazy 2020-21 with ZIRP, then all of 2022 was a bear market that followed rate hikes. The S&P 500 rose almost 50% from January 2020 to December 2021, then lost about 20% in 2022. So it's not unreasonable that your company's stock price followed that trajectory.

Biden Calls for Federal Workers to Return to the Office

August 2023

https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/news/employee-relations/bi...

The government wants people in the office because it helps boost the economy.

I suggest the exact opposite.

Are we serious about climate change? Which is a more effective strategy? Encourage people to switch to electric cars or just have them drive their existing gas car less? My monthly gasoline bills dropped from $250 to $70 during the pandemic.

How much are we spending on health care? How many people don't have the time to exercise? I had an extra 60 minutes a day to take a walk instead of commuting.

Unless forced to due to scarcity, dense development does not really clump up together all at once for good reason, since clumping up will drive up costs in a hyper local area. Tokyo for example, has a lot of detached housing, even in the central wards. The density there is more pockmarked and random, and notably never really concentrates all that highly; there is not a single Japanese building in the top 100 skyscrapers, because skyscraper concentration is an artifact of how we force dense developments only in certain places.

If it’s not any of these it’s owned and thus controlled by someone.

^this is the real issue.

But we dont want to tackle the real issue of few ppl wanting to own the whole world :)

If we cut out that cancer ppl everyone on Earth could have a lot better living standards than we do now.

Yes the issue are ultra rich and yes they will propaganda everything to hide it keep it safe.

Almost the entirety of coastal California (and Oregon and WA as well.) It's insane. It's the best climate on the planet and the most protected from climate change.

Tokyo Metro handles 6m+ riders a day with a population of 40m. So, yes, at least until you surpass 40m people.

> Or can we figure out ways to disperse and decentralize things instead of just feeding more money back into the hands of those who own and control the current cities?

“Disperse and decentralize” is exactly how every city I have ever been to is built.

Everyone complains about the city’s endless verticalização (verticalizication) because they like the idea of old houses, but I say keep it coming.