This makes me so angry, every time. Over 100 in a 45mph zone? … Get this man off the road, asap. It’s unbelievable what you get to hear as a cyclist, but driving like this is somehow excusable with: “It was road Rage!” …
It’s so twisted. I live in Europe, and it’s not as severe here with cars in comparison to the US but it’s still shocking to me how people drive here every day. On the Highway it’s especially crazy to me, people just don’t care. They tailgate, they don’t indicate they want to change lanes … like at all. And I don’t even have a driver’s licence, it’s just driving me nuts from the passenger seat.
I don’t have a Reddit anymore, otherwise I’d be over there adding my support — I blindly bought cities 2 thinking that it MUST have good alternate transportation building in the year 2023
The “15-minute” city is a term used to describe a type of neighbourhood (or preferably whole city) where, for everyone, all their day-to-day needs can be met with stores that are at most a 15 minute walk or bike ride away.
Transit-oriented development refers to planning the land around transit stations (trains stations, tram stations, etc) to be designed as much as possible with destinations in mind. That means housing, offices and shops, instead of large parking lots for commuters.
The two concepts refer to different things, but they are not incompatible with each other. In fact, they complement each other.
I would say neither is better than the other, and they are best used together.
Great idea, but they are taking it too far. People should be allowed to have a car, but it should be parked at the edge of the neighborhood and only be allowed to come in for loading and unloading of heavy things.
That way you have all the benefits and almost no inconvenience at all. We have that in many places in Denmark and it works great.
I would take it one step further and say there should probably be small (single lane) roads that run through the neighborhood or an underground carpark with a few freight elevators that run directly into the buildings. Why? For a same reason you mentioned that they should allow cars. If you get a new fridge, imagine trying to walk that sucker from the street to your apartment. You probably wouldn’t need very many freight elevators or access roads to significantly decrease the amount of effort required to get bulky and/or heavy objects to your apartment while still maintaining the general feel and spirit of a car-less community.
You really don’t need new fridges that often, the couple times you do just put them on boards on casters and shove. If you can’t: ask your neighbors, it’s a good bonding experience.
It’s not just one street, though. It’s a series of connected streets. They’re actually quite comparable to superblocks in Aarhus, Copenhagen and Aalborg.
People should be allowed to have a car, but it should be parked at the edge of the neighborhood and only be allowed to come in for loading and unloading of heavy things
I’ve always wondered what you need that big a car for, unless of course if you live somewhere in the wilderness of nomandsland.
Here in Europe it is rather rare to see a truck, which I guess makes sense as don’t have as wild and unsettled nature as the USA, and that our parking spots are too small for trucks.
The cabin is likely larger than the bed or if not, off by foot. because of Redneck Luxury > Utility.
Can you imagine the engineers at Nissan, they must have had trouble releasing this vehicle because since day one draft to first production they were laughing at the ‘u like hotdog u like hamburg big fat americans’…and those americans, bought the truck. probably for over ~65k USD after the Lease and a comically sized 30 year car loan interest rate.
my car is a 1.4 Four Cylinder that has 7 gears? idk what hyaundai is doing giving smol car lambo gears but, i have no issues keeping up with traffic from rural, to highway, to road. And there are aftermarket roof racks should i need to “carry something big in my boot”
I just drive a subcompact hatchback and it’s perfect. Yeah I can’t haul a bunch of crap with several people in the car, but that’s a rare situation to even want. I can fit a fair bit in my trunk when I need to and 5 people when I need to. All with crazy high mpg for a non hybrid, an insane turn radius, and the ability to fit into tiny parking spaces.
And as someone reasonably tall, I fit fine. My wife was hesitant to get such a small car with such a tall wife, but I know a guy in the upper 6’ range who was totally comfortable driving a subcompact for years and loved the thing.
I’d prefer a bikable area with comprehensive public transit, but since I need a car I try to use as efficient as I can.
I’m seeing more and more American import trucks downtown. Seen one with a bunch of American-political stickers on it, including a confederate flag. It’s baffling how successfully America exports its culture to places where it isn’t welcome.
I don’t like the fact that bad history and terrible political views are considered American culture, but I guess I can’t exactly blame anyone for seeing it that way.
The Kremlin supports the political extremes on both sides in the US in order to cause division and dysfunction. They mostly do it on social media, which is where a lot of people get their info about the US.
The Kremlin wish they had that kind of influence. The political divide in America is entirely a home-grown issue. As long as you folk are fighting red vs blue, you’re not talking about the real issues.
Titans XDs are weird. They sit between 1/2 ton 3/4 ton. You’d get it if you need to tow a medium sized power boat, RV, or heavy/multiple cars but don’t want to upgrade to a true 3/4 ton.
In this image I can’t help but notice how much infrastructure cost there is here. Consider need for water treatment pipes run to and from each house for water and sewage as well as sewage treatment infrastructure. Keep in mind that failure rate increases with each house and by length of these runs that you are adding and fire hydrants being added every so many feet, shut off valves. Don’t forget that we now have significantly bigger demand for water as we now have a lot more vegetation to manage and a higher reliance on emergency services as we are spread out over a larger area so we now have to increase ems, fire, and police spending. Then you add the costs for electrical infrastructure with your sub stations and transformers and all the costs set to maintain that especially since these are underground lines apparently and ofcourse we have increased risk of failure again per service and foot run and higher demand on those services which will require more workers which turns into money being spent outside of the community. You then add the cost of data lines and phone lines including the costs associated with maintaining and upgrading those which are also apparently underground which means your upgrades may be significantly more expensive and will take much longer to deploy. Now that we have all these houses separated we will now have a population that will be more dependent on vehicles so now we have to factor in all of our road maintenance costs and our public services will not require far more vehicles as well which means we will also need mechanics to repair and maintain these vehicles. Now with roads alone when we consider the costs involved things get rather expensive quickly. Cost to maintain roads, even roads that are seldom used, is surprisingly expensive and require a lot of workers to build and maintain as well as vehicles, machinery, and land to store, recycle, and create materials needed to repair and build the roads. On top of that there is also an often missed statistic of vehicles which is public safety as they are a leading cause for injury which is another stressor on our little community.
This is far from all the possibly missed costs of our suburban/rural neighborhood but I feel these are some of the important ones people live to overlook.
You’re absolutely correct. Suburbia is subsidized. sprawling, car-dependent suburbs are almost universally financially insolvent on their own, as they literally don’t produce enough tax revenue to cover the colossal cost of infrastructure needed to serve it. They require the financial backing of denser communities to prop themselves up.
The scale of money needed for car-centric development is astounding. Consider Massachusetts:
Using publicly available data, the authors put the annual public tab at $35.7 billion, which amounts to about $14,000 for every household in the state. Those that do own vehicles pony up an additional $12,000 on average in direct costs.
Using the numbers from the article, Massachusetts literally spends over 10% of their GDP on cars, more than half of that being public subsidy. Absolute insanity.
Consider need for water treatment pipes run to and from each house for water and sewage as well as sewage treatment infrastructure.
Someone has never heard of “well and septic”.
Out in the country, you have enough biological diversity around you that sewage is just fertilizer for your lawn. You don’t need the extensive network of sewers to concentrate it, the chemicals to treat it, and the sufficiently large body of water necessary to dilute it back down to something that nature can tolerate.
Much the same with potable water: there’s no need for an extensive system of water treatment plants, chlorination, the network of underground piping when you are just pulling water up out of the aquifer. It has been filtered through hundreds of feet of sand and gravel, in the absence of oxygen. All the biological material has been filtered out, leaving just water and some trace minerals.
Electrical infrastructure is moving away from centralized fossil fuel plants to distributed solar and wind power. Spreading the load out allows generation to be moved closer to the point of consumption, which reduces the total load at any point on the grid, and increases redundancy and resiliency.
Spreading homes apart introduces a natural firebreak between them, reducing the demand on fire services. A single kitchen fire in an apartment complex can put hundreds of people out of their homes. High-rise fires are especially dangerous. It’s much easier to attack a house fire than an apartment fire.
Roads are not reduced: food and raw materials used by humanity come from the countryside. Transportation infrastructure must stretch out to the farms and mines. Housing farmers and miners in the cities just increases their commutes on top of their long work days.
Wireless data can be much more feasible in the country than the city. Less building interference; less RF interference.
No, I’m afraid you’ve overblown the cost difference considerably.
I started to respond to this but it’s so full of obvious bullshit it’s not worth the time. Dump raw sewage into the ground in suburbia? What the fuck kind of capitalism hellscape do you live in?
Well and septic are viable options down to as little as half-acre lots, yes. Raw sewage is dumped into the first of 2-3 tanks, where it is biologically processed with virtually no intervention, before the nutrient-rich effluent eventually flows into a leach field and soaks into the topsoil.
Municipal sewage processing does it much the same way. The problem is that the cities don’t have sufficient biomass, so they have to discharge their effluent over a very large area. A city typically converts a nearby river into a massive leachfield.
You have a problem with individuals processing their own sewage and discharge it to vegetation on their own lands, but you support massively upscaling that process and dumping the effluent directly into waterways.
“Capitalism hellscape” accurately describes one of these scenarios, but not the one you’re thinking of.
When I left home this afternoon, I briefly disturbed two doe and four fawns eating ground ivy in my front yard. When I get home, I’m going to hear crickets in the woods behind my house, and bullfrogs in the pond. I’ll probably hear the big owl in my neighbor’s tree, talking to his girlfriend down the road.
While I was last in the city, I saw a homeless guy pissing on the sidewalk, dozens of boarded buildings, and hundreds of broken windows. I heard four sets of gunshots. The local “park” has nothing growing in it; it has an asphalt basketball court and a gravel playground with busted equipment. An industrial site has a methane flare burning overhead 24/7.
The reason you are having a rough time explaining what’s wrong with my argument is that you are accustomed to the dystopian nightmare of urban living, and expect everyone to accept and tolerate that nightmare.
Sorry dawg I grew up in a rural area. I have to return to rural areas frequently to visit family and I currently live in a suburban area so… sorry? But your anecdote is pretty awful
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.
That’s true but I virtually never call tradespeople to do work for me. I like to be as self sufficient as possible and I derive happiness from working with my hands. I’m in my workshop almost every day, repairing and creating. I love the feel of materials and the heft of hand tools, it’s my happy place.
In the past I’ve used off site workshops and they have their advantages but usually what happens is that I use them less and they are more vulnerable to thieves. They’re far more expensive too.
If an apartment block had a shared workspace in the basement, that could work. I’ve never seen one like that. People who live in apartments tend not do things for themselves and have no need for tools.
I think I’d join a maker’s space or other shop-type coop if I lived in a city again. That said, cities stress me out - I can only handle the overstimulation for so long before I start sprouting white hormone hairs randomly out of my forehead.
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