Because bikes are a way too efficient (on the short distances) and long lasting products to be lucrative. Public transportation as well didn’t guarantee the same annual income of fresh money that the car market do.
My favorite part of daily walking / train / bike share commute is using a particular mid block crosswalk with flashing lights to stop 4 lanes of traffic at rush hour.
It’s funny because they’re starting to build a ddi near me and the whole time I’m thinking how this will basically cut off a whole community from pedestrian access. Also, I lived in Florida for a while and I have to say that state is where the range of mediocre to abysmal civil engineers go to find work. Everything is designed in the most stupidly thought out way possible.
I won’t consider living in apartment buildings unless they have good soundproofing and proper open spaces. I don’t want to be cramped in with noisy neighbors and have no privacy.
There are limits to how many trees, how big they can be and how close to the house you can have them. There is also a ton of car infrastructure that needs to be spread out across all the houses that takes up a good percent of the land no matter how you slice it
The most important difference though is that each person only has access to their stamp of nature that is 1% of the island. With the apartment all 100 people living there have access to 96% of the nature on the island.
It doesn’t have to be just nature either. You can use it to build playgrounds, outdoor gyms, running tracks, community centers and tons of other public use things.
I hate apartments, I believe humans should spread out and live in lower densities. Cities are important in our current infrastructure and a necessary evil.
I’ve moved away from a city and been living in a small town past 2 years and cars are more important here than ever which is just shifted me from one evil to the next. Public transport becomes less relevant the more remote you go.
Wonder if there’s a perfect balance between pollution and nature. I’m in the mountains so bikes aren’t the most comfortable either and useless in case of emergency with an elderly.
Yes, this is important, too (see !nolawns). But no-lawns doesn’t reduce car traffic, neither does it single-handedly create more walkable and public-transport-friendly communities. But you’re right to notice that OP’s meme doesn’t make a compelling argument in itself.
This is something I’m seeing A LOT in this thread, this NIMBY notion that if we just refuse to build housing that the rest of the population needing housing will just poof and disappear.
There are 8 billion people on this planet. We can either choose to build sprawl-for-all and destroy the planet, or we can build denser, more walkable, more transit-oriented cities.
Give me a European style apartment with high ceilings and generous space and you have yourselves a deal!
That said, I’ve been working in my local building industry for almost 20 years and the trend that I see is that though there are more apartments being built, the quality has tanked. We have huge issues with mould, flammable facades, exploding glass, alternatives are rampant through the roof and price gouging.
Unfortunately this has fed the idea that apartment living is no good.
For my local industry, at least, generally houses are built better (not that they’re that great compared to houses built in the 80s or earlier) because the materials aren’t bought in bulk like they do for apartments and there’s less opportunity to ‘off spec’ (cheap alternative products).
That’s not to say that cheap materials aren’t used but there’s a lot less pressure to go bottom of the barrel. Plus, the home owner also has a bit more control than an apartment owner during construction.
There’s also a lot more that can go wrong in an apartment than in a house. Lifts, for example. We had an issue in one of the high rises in the city where a lift was broken and there was a huge queue. Whereas in houses, the main issue I’ve been seeing in housing is poorly built housing extensions from unqualified builders.
All in all, it’s more liveable to be in a poorly built house than in a poorly built apartment.
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