Your first statement is all well and good but your second statement is flat out wrong. That can only happen given a static population. But humans reproduce pretty rapidly. There will always be new customers until we hit a carrying capacity limit, but as technology improves the earths carrying capacity keeps going up, until of course we decimate resources and then it’ll come crashing down.
If it’s not housing, it’s a golf course, or business district or something. The old “if you build it, they will come” plenty of people also don’t spend their lives in the same place so moving to a newer, better facility is enticing to those that can afford it.
I mean, yeah, apartments and such should be widely available. Awesome for high population areas, young folks, temporary housing situations, etc. Had a flat for years and will for at least a few more. However, as a drummer (and general loud music enthusiast) I am very ready to get out of the flat and get into a proper house with a basement, garage, patio for grilling with da boyes, etc.
A good mix of both is ideal. I sure wish we took better measures to mitigate the insane housing prices tho’. Sick of thin walls and and a single room trying to replace 4 rooms.
Yeah I want to see option three where whatever imaginary number of people exactly comfortably fits into either 100 fully detached homes OR 100 apartments in a single block (realistically I don’t think there is a number of people both those things serve equally) intergrate into the natural environment of their new island home in a mutually beneficial way. The fundamental claim of this post is “we cannot coexist with nature. The only viable way for us to provide housing for humans is in a way that is in direct competition with the wellbeing of their environment” is foolish and the root of the issues it claims to be trying to solve.
I would think looking at this comment section most individuals on this sub hate cars, but love homes with large driveways and massive streets. To drive the cars we hate?
Mid-density apartment are a thing, maybe 4-6 floors tall.
Though north america apartment design is another issue IMO. North america apartment floor plates are unfortunately not designed for families. When was the last time you saw a 3 or 4 bedroom apartment?
Edit: I should add, when was the last time you saw a 3 or 4 bedroom apartment that cost less then a full size family home in the suburbs.
I work for a architectural firm, and unfortunately most new high-rise towers, and mid-rise towers, that I see come through my desk prioritize bachelor’s pads, 1 bed, 1 + den, or 2 bedroom usually the second bedroom has no window.
It simply comes down to developer cost and north american fire codes. Two exits stairwells minimum and a exit every 45 meters.
This article demonstrates the concept in greater detail.
Ah that makes more sense, I know there are a lot in the suburbs but I can definitely see it being much less common in highrise or midrise tower apartments.
“fuckcars” people literally and exclusively start and end their philosophy with “fuck cars, bikes rule”. No consideration of secondary or related effects. It’s a culty thing.
A truth most people don’t want to hear is that densely populated cities are overall better for nature and resources. You need less roads and tracks, fewer concrete overall, compact cities are much easier to make walkable, etc.
Really the only argument against tight packed cities is “I don’t like people”. That shouldn’t really be a priority.
For nature to recover we need to give back space. The worst you can do is build rural homes or spread out suburbs.
Really the only argument against tight packed cities is “I don’t like people”. That shouldn’t really be a priority.
There’s also: “I want to have nature around me” - and there’s “I have pets that need to go out” - and there’s “In a big city it can be dirty, smelly and loud” and “People neglected by society hang around big cities” and “Big real estate firms crank up housing prizes”.
What we really need is better city planning, to reduce traffic & roads, and make areas pedestrian only - at that point, quality of life in a city improves. Also, we need to kill big real estate corps and regulate housing prizes. And there needs to be a will in politics to actually address social issues, including but not limited to violent crimes.
Nearby is relative to the quality of public transportation though, as not everyone can afford a car, and even if they can, it kills the environment and quality of living in the city to have traffic. And public transportation infrastructure is sadly still next to non-existent in many metropolitan areas in the world.
Public transport is cheaper too when cities are not sprawling. We are talking about the benefits new dense development, where public transport should be a core consideration and not an afterthought.
Don’t forget “We’ve had a pandemic going for over 3 years, I’d like to not be around a bunch of sneezing and coughing people” at this point, particularly because public transit is objectively better for cities than driving, but also a better place to catch COVID than your car.
You are right, this is of course argumented from an ideal perspective. Building and managing cities like they are now, just denser, wouldn’t work.
In an utopian world that really put the environment first there would be no greedy investors and greedy landlords, no one would feel left behind and instead of using farms we’d have some kind of ultra efficient vertical hydroponics stuff going on.
It would be amazing having sci-fi mega cities, perhaps connected via underground railroads and between them just nature undisturbed. It feels like we are so close from a technological standpoint to make that happen. At least it’s not completely unimaginable.
It would be amazing having sci-fi mega cities, perhaps connected via underground railroads and between them just nature undisturbed. It feels like we are so close from a technological standpoint to make that happen.
I wholeheartedly agree. And I believe we have everything needed to make that happen - but if everyone has good living conditions, that just isn’t profitable / exploitable for the corporate world. Happy people means it’s harder / impossible to scare them or make them angry at some perceived threat / enemy, and exploit their dividedness. All megacorporations without exception and a lot of mid- to large size businesses thrive on exploiting workers who are too divided to unite and demand a fair share of work and profits and acceptable working conditions.
At least in the US which has a lot of non-dense areas, there is so much land that there is still a ton of land for nature, and a lot of the biggest consumers of nature are non-residential developments like farmland
I wish I had a way to share a certain GIS-generated image of projected development growth in my US state over the next 50 years without doxxing myself. Needless to say, it’s ABSOLUTELY INSANE - with planning relegated to Counties (some of which don’t even have zoning), and those counties being ruby red with their local governments captured by builders and developers that don’t care whether the world looks like a strip mall or a forest, sprawl is the name of the game and it is eating into both farmland and forest on a scale that is hard for a person to fully comprehend.
Imo, we should have dense, walkable villages in rural areas to serve farms and whatnot, and they should have train stations connecting to the nearest city. That way neither our cities nor our towns are sprawl, but rather compact, walkable, and transit-oriented.
After all, that’s how we traditionally built cities and villages before all this modern automobile malarkey.
Really the only argument against tight packed cities is “I don’t like people”.
I’m sorry, but that’s a really great fucking argument. I don’t like people. I don’t want to share walls with people. I want a quiet, private, green space to live in without the density porn half of this thread is fellating (and a significant number are also condemning).
Dense cities are uninhabitable to me, and I can say it from experience - having lived in cities having from 1-10m people including NYC, and including not owning a car and being fully dependent on public transit. The city life was always worse in every way than living in the suburbs. In the suburbs, it’s easier to get groceries, it’s easier to enjoy nature, it’s easier to go to the gym, or get to work. Everything about living in the city was harder, shittier, and more expensive.
Here, buying an apartment makes you liable for any structural issues to the whole building, it’s a huge risk and with how terrible build quality is these days I’d never buy an apartment
There are many highrise buildings in Australia with residents paying hundreds of thousands each for issues caused by dodgy builders. The builder simply closes the business during the warranty period and they are off the hook for claims
I am sorry but wouldn’t be the same issue with a house? It’s still done by a builder. Plus in the apartments case the costs are shared, yeah they might be bigger but the house costs are all you.
Cost to build a brand new house is like $200k, and they are typically audited on purchase. You can demolish the house and still have $800k in land value. You don’t own any land when buying an apartment
As someone working in embedded machine learning, I can say two things:
Deep learning models, as powerful as they are, are the epitome of black box. We know they work, but we’re still struggling to understand how they work. Further, they fail in oftentimes really weird and unexpected ways. So if we want to build safety-critical systems that depend on deep learning, that’s a very tall order. And I don’t think we’re there yet with the tech.
I’ve never worked with automotive embedded software, but my understanding is it’s very hard and very complicated, and there’s a real shortage of embedded engineers going into automotive. Trying to build incredibly complex, fault-tolerant embedded software systems for a widespread network of driverless cars sounds like an absolute nightmare and an absolutely gargantuan task.
Theoretically, I don’t think it’s impossible to build this vision of the future, but I think it would be stupendously difficult, take a lot more time than tech bros would like to lead you to believe, and ultimately just be a worse transit system than automated trains.
Not to mention being a pedestrian crossing the street in such a world would be a nightmare.
I think 2 would be massively easier to solve if there were no human drivers. Drop private ownership, every car a self-driving uber. We’d need much less of them, they could coordinate without having to account for irrational human behavior. And they could be mandated to always give way at crossings.
Public transport is still superior of course, but I think it’s something that could make cars less objectionable.
It wouldn’t. Have you seen those massive drone light displays? they lose drones during the shows. Nothing indicates that machine learning would fare better. Because reality is way more complex than a computer can simulate. I mean, even in an entirely humanless car network, a single misplaced traffic cone could send the whole system into shutdown. No system is failproof.
I don’t know about that, it’s all about tolerances. Losing a drone from a cloud is probably considered an acceptable loss.
How many trains crash every year (leaving out poor maintenance for the moment)? Those systems are highly complex and almost fully automated. AI’s not even really needed.
Exactly, in a swarm system, losing a drone is fine. A car fully automated network, as CGP suggest, is a swarm system. If they are cars with people inside of it, it isn’t acceptable to lose units, we can’t accept even a single autonomous car randomly losing control into a tree. No matter that humans do that. The system has to be better than humans, not equally bad. Train systems are inherently free from this variation.
Pretty much my thought process. It’s the humans doing human things that are difficult to code for. Honestly just putting Bluetooth in every car so you can see how fast they are moving and maybe predicting their projectory would be useful.
Im thinking birds eye view like in GTA or something. You can see where you want to go and what obstacles are in the way. Gives you a lot longer to react than if it’s just your view out of the window.
That can be done more reliably with lidar. Adding BT and other wireless dependencies to critical control systems opens up new vulnerabilities and attack vectors. Sociopath hackers would use it to fake an imminent collision and cause crashes.
The most efficient path forward is higher density cities, less low density sprawl, and free mass transit (trains, light rail, and buses) to remove the dependency on private cars, then gradually upgrading to driverless only lanes and roadways as private vehicle traffic is reduced over time; much more realistic than waiting for tech companies and politicians to solve complex technical and regulatory problems that could take many decades.
The government should also be directing investment and subsidies to smaller single-person “pod” transport options too, as it’d be cheaper, easier, and more efficient overall if we could accommodate the majority of traffic in both directions within a single car lane, freeing up space for future transition work — after-all, most road traffic is a single person in a 5+ seater car.
Lidar can’t do that. It can ping things but not beyond those initial ones. ? Correct it’s radar but for light ? Obviously BT would create a whole new havock but it might also make life a lot easier because you know where things are that you can’t see.
You can’t see past the lorry in front of you but you can see a car is a few miles away up the road. You’ve time to pass. In the dark you can’t see but BT can.
Hackers can’t do shit. This always gets blown out. Hackers will screw systems and kill people, hackers will do this and that. Yeah I’m sure maybe a hundred can actually do that. So you’ve got 100 deaths.
I think there’s already been 30 deaths on our roads this year. I think the hacker thing is a red herring.
Absolutely agreed but I don’t live in a city so none of those things help me. Cities are pretty easy to solve some traffic woes. But for country it’s much harder and where I need driverless.
Absolutely agree. I was just thinking about this the other day. I just need a tiny transport vehicle for me. I don’t need 5 seats and a boot 90% of the time.
Waaaaay easier. We already have numerous automated metro systems in the world, from Copenhagen Metro to Vancouver SkyTrain to Montreal REM to Honolulu Skyline to airport people movers galore to probably a whole bunch more systems I can’t name off the top of my head.
Having rails, dedicated infrastructure, and a grade-separated right-of-way works wonders for eliminating variables. You don’t even need AI for automated trains.
If you look at land use maps, you will see that the urban areas are so small compared to the agricultural and livestock area needed to support the population. This is the biggest cause of deforestation, and population density actually makes it much worse, because it centralizes consumption and requires more logistic costs to deliver the needed food, with much higher rates of wastes. If we lived in less dense areas, perhaps we could do with local, smaller-scale agriculture instead.
Do you have anything you can cite for that proposition? I fully acknowledge that there could be something I’m missing, but just thinking about it logically it doesn’t make sense.
It takes X agriculture and Y livestock to feed a person for a year. Economy of scale would allow you to produce more with less in a larger centralized facility compared to many smaller farms. The implements required to support a large facility should be less than the sum of many smaller facilities that produce an equal output. The agriculture and livestock are brought to a central point (the city) as opposed to many decentralized towns.
Happy to be wrong, would just need to see the evidence, because right now my intuition is saying no. Love to see whatever you have!
There are a couple articles I can link when I get home. They studied a similar phenomenon in some Brazilian cities. There are several factors involved, including food losses due to distance to consumption and the fact that smaller producers tend to grow more diverse food.
And the fact that so much food is thrown out, because it spends 75% of it’s expiration date traveling between facilities. That’s why fresh food from big chains starts being bad way faster than local market bough.
Your take on urban density is wayyyyy off base and wrong.
The deforestation being a result of agricultural expansion to support a growing population is spot on.
Urban density increases the efficiency of logistics, you state it makes it worse. The cost-per-unit goes down as density goes up. Economies of scale apply here, logistics almost always becomes cheaper per unit the more of it you do. This applies to farming, transportation, processing, packaging…etc
Logistics are something too complex. Your statement makes me think you’re referring to a scenario with one source of a product and either one consumer area or several ones. In that cass, indeed, a more denser region would make it easier, but the scenario I described consists of production decentralized and closer to consumption, making logistics easier and cheaper, with fewer middlemen.
But maybe I didn’t explain it all very well. I have a couple or articles bookmarked in my pc that I will link here when I have the chance.
I just hope my memory isn’t playing tricks on me, because it so, it’s gonna be really shameful lol.
Low density centralized urban areas require even more logistics, higher waste rates, higher utilities costs, and so on.
As an example: a 10 floor high rise with 40 apartments, can be wired for optic fiber in 1 day. There is no way to wire 40 standalone houses just as fast.
The only reason we have huge farms is because of livestock, not population density. Large farms grow commodity crops, most of which go to feeding livestock, most of which are cows. Farms growing fruits and vegetables for human consumption don’t require anywhere near the amount of land that commodity crops do. You can feed a surprisingly large number of people off of an acre of land if you take large livestock out of the equation.
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