One thing I’ve learned in SimCity is that a higher population density means you need a corresponding concentration of utility structures as well. Employment opportunities, hospitals, businesses, and schools all need to be close by and in proportion to serve the population. Not to mention managing waste, water, and electricity. In summary, simply building apartments isn’t the solution.
This is sort of like how I learned by playing Civ that if you bum rush to Nuclear bombs and ICBMs you can simply bombs your enemies until they don’t exist anymore. Which is great fun in a game, but doesn’t exactly equate to IRL (but damn you Montezuma).
Anyways, here’s the deal; you would have the same amount of population no matter what. So whether my population was 1 person per square mile or 100 persons per square mile makes a huge impact. If you have a suburb of 100k people and a city of 100k people you can utilize less piping, less waste water, and less electricity more often since you often have dozens of families living in the same building which can utilize electricity more efficiently.
Not to mention that of course more people means needing more jobs, healthcare and education, but that’s also why you tend to have more of those things. It’s not like suburbs exist as self sustaining parts. They rely on cities with jobs to sustain them. Building higher density living spaces is a great way to solve many problems of modern American/Canadian life. I’m saying all of this as the opposite kind of person you’d find on this group since I live in suburbia and drive a giant truck. I just don’t want other people on the roads with me that suck ass at driving so I support public transportation to get them off the damn roads, plus it’s better for the environment.
Exactly. The key thing a lot of people conveniently ignore is how much infrastructure is needed per capita. Sure there’ll be more pipes/roads/etc. per sq km in a city vs the suburbs, but there’s a heck of a lot more pipes/roads/etc. per capita in the suburbs. I mean, just looking out my window, 100m of street serves hundreds of people, compared to maybe 100m of street for maybe 8 households in suburbia?
Given that there are 8 billion people on this planet, it simply consumes fewer resources to not have everyone in sprawling suburbia.
Right, which is good! It means people aren’t travelling huge distances to reach basic amenities and you don’t need to occupy vast swathes of land just for piping and roads.
Houses. Apartments would mean I’d have to try my luck with the neighbors. A friend of mine has a neighbor upstairs that makes noise at all hours of the night. I’ve heard it. It sounds like his neighbor is constantly moving furniture.
My friend has asked the neighbor to quiet down, talked to the apartment complex about it, and even had to call the police to file a noise complaint one time. (My friend has young kids who might get woken up by the noise. That’s the main reason he’s concerned about it.)
how about i don’t know we maybe just a little thought we could just could call it an train but no that’s already been invented so we can’t hype up the most effective transportation option known to mankind
It sounds like this is about affordability...even though thats not what we're talking about when we're talking road induced demand. Im talking about public congestion, pollution, climate change. Instead of more cars on the road, its more people in the world
I don’t think there’s any evidence at all that more housing increases birth rates. Japan has remarkably affordable housing, even in Tokyo, because of very good zoning codes, but they have a plummeting population. And sure, more housing in a given area means more people in that area, but if you force them out of that area, they’re still going to have to live somewhere. If you force them farther away, they’re more like to drive and they’ll probably pollute more as they have to travel farther to access jobs and amenities.
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