Growing upward as opposed to outward helps in numerous ways. It pollutes less, costs less in services, takes up less land and the list goes on. The issue isn’t apartment buildings, the issue is badly built, uninsulated in every way and overpriced apartment buildings.
There should be some sort of regulation as to how soundproof each apartment must be. Soundproof enough to not her casual sex and whatnot, but not too quiet as to never hear someone screaming for help. Add in filters into the hallways or whatever to manage smells and it would be pretty great.
Blocks of flats are awful places. No garden to put up a workshed, or greenhouse or anything at all, or play with your dog or kids (and no dog - it would be cruel to keep a dog in a flat and not have it able to roam a garden all day), they’re noisy, loud neighbours can be above, below, to the left, to the right, and in front …
You can’t modify your home how you’d like, can’t choose what utility companies run into your home, can’t let your kid cycle up and down the street and still be able to see and hear them from the windows etc.
I see your point about density absolutely, but I HATE flats. Awful places.
I also hate how people have started trying to make them sound fancy and posh by calling them “apartments” to try to sound fancy and European/French, as if that will make them more appealing.
I agree with you fully, except the last part. Which is just a regional gripe, as to say "apartments" in the States is just as degrading/non-special. So it's interesting that you find specialty in that term when my region is anything but.
can’t choose what utility companies run into your home,
This is the most farcical complaint. I guess sometimes you can pay a lot to get a new utility option to your owned home, but that's usually not an option.
In a lot of apartments you have no choice of ISP regardless of whether the building has a choice, which might be what they're on about. But I've never owned a home where I could choose which utilities were available. (Except for electric choice which works in apartments, too.)
even then it’s a problem we choose to have, in my apartment area we have a platform that allows us to choose between like, i think around 30? different ISPs, and switch between them freely at any time.
Not everyone wants a yard and/or a dog! Very, very, few people modify their houses in ways that wouldn’t be applicable to apartments/flats too - interior changes are common, but exterior is usually far too much money for far too little in return. And if you’re complaining about people calling them “apartments”, which is what they’ve always been called in the US, I assume you’re in the UK where terraced houses are the most common form of housing, and neighbours are on both sides anyway. (Is it possible you’re hearing people calling flats apartments because of the influence of American TV? Where are you getting “fancy” from, or assuming it’s just because the same word is used in French? Do you avoid American TV shows? They were extremely common on British TV when I was growing up. If you’re not in Britain, apologies! But it seems likely, given most other English speaking countries I can think of use the term too.)
I personally disagree with anyone who promotes a one-size-fit-all approach to housing etc, but I don’t actually think most advocates of density really are doing that. They’re usually Americans fighting the completely insane zoning laws and building practices in the US that force people to own cars, make public transport uneconomic except with massive subsidies, and require Americans own houses that are far bigger and more expensive to maintain than they need. Nobody’s actually better off because of these laws, not even the people who want to live outside of real cities and drive to work - it ends up taking just as long to get to the supermarket to get a gallon of milk in a suburb where you have to leave your home, get into your car, drive it, drive out of your residential neighbourhood where businesses like supermarkets are banned, drive it past large numbers of buildings built for individual businesses each with enough parking to support the maximum number of customers it might conceivably need, 5-10 minutes later getting to the supermarket’s parking lot, which is again, absurdly oversized because it has to have one parking spot per potential customer, finding a spot, walking across this vast expanse to the supermarket, and then doing the same thing in reverse. Time savings? Nil. Tesco was five minutes walk away when I lived in the UK, and while that was unusual, most places I’ve lived in the UK had some kind of supermarket within walking distance. Money savings? Worse: my grocery bill tripled when I came to the US and I had to pay gas prices and for car maintenance on top of that. Not surprising when every store needs 4X as much land as it needs in the UK, just so it has enough parking.
So that’s what the pictures are likely about. The option of high density housing ought to be available to everyone, in the UK it is for the most part, hence it looks odd to you and you’re assuming the intent is to take your detached or semi-detached house from you. But in the US, no it isn’t, the few places that have good high density development are either impractical to live in, because you still need cars to work, or uneconomic for most people because those places are in such high demand to live the property prices are astronomical (think SF or NYC.)
Here in Portland we have the bike bus. It recently got enough attention that the state legislature passed a bill allowing schools to use transportation funding to promote/organize their own.
The train tracks being down the middle of the highway makes a lot of sense, you are keeping the noise away from housing and it’s an effective use of space since nothing else really works there, plus you already have the right of way.
Might make sense for the station to be off to whichever side has more people, and the tracks to go under the highway briefly but I bet that adds a bunch of cost.
Sure but the opportunity cost of not paying extra to place your train tracks well? No one rides it. The health cost of allcof this noise pollution on riders encourages them to find other transportstion options. No destination at the end. You get off the train and there’s no development because it’s surrounded by loud, ugly highway.
Because it makes USAians think of sleeper agents, which are communist, which is anti-capitalist, ergo sleeper trains are made by communists to weaken the capitalist of Americania, which is immoral and deeply unpatriotic. /s
Seriously though, good video. Regulation is very important.
People are calling for radical change to their cities as they realize the poor economics of urban sprawl and suburban development. You do have a good point though as transit, density, and mixed zoning all work best when used together.
The shift to transit and walkability will actually make exisiting roadways and highways less congested and better serve any delivery vehicles using them. We won’t rip out all existing roads, but we will stop building a new lane every 5 years.
I think you’re making it out to be a bigger problem than it really would be. Nobody is going to push personal and commercial vehicles out, but there would be a lot less of them, they’d only be as big as necessary, and they’d be more environmentally friendly.
Trains are great but people want their own personal bubble and don't want to stand around outside waiting for a train especially since the timetable is out of their control
What people want and what is sustainable may be two different things and some people will just have to deal with that. Leave earlier and dress for the weather 🤷♀️
We don't need to ban cars, we just need to stop structuring literally everything around accommodating them. Also a difficult task, but far easier than banning cars.
This has been my sticking point with trains. In theory, it sounds fantastic and I’m all for it. The problem is is that Having a vehicle is so much nicer. Air conditioned and private transportation, whenever you want. Listen to what you want, go where you want.
Maybe if the train was much more convenient? I like the idea for travel more.
Public transit can solve these problems with more frequency and routes. Sometimes public transit goes places private transport can’t!
Or, hell, just get one of those foldable ebikes that are all the rage these days. Technology is coming for cars just as it came for horses and nobody even realizes it.
If you look at old maps of streetcar networks in cities (before they ripped up the tracks to replace them with cars), one thing that stands out is just how dense the networks were. For instance, here’s the old Montreal streetcar map:
And Montreal has some of the best modern-day urbanism in North America, mind you; most cities are far worse. But it really makes you imagine what our cities could be like if we made many/most streets car-free and just had ultra-dense networks of trams again. Maybe even cargo trams to deliver goods to stores as well. Trains would be ubiquitous and ultra-convenient.
This is key. Urban planners and environment folks focus so much on their respective fields and don’t consider dignity enough. Of course we’d all like cheap, fast, sustainable transportation, but not if that means being packed into bench seating, plagued with delays, and sometimes even risk our safety due to other passengers. Trains don’t have to be bad, but the penny-pinching planners often ruin the experience.
I drove through Atlanta at rush hour once. I’ll never go there again, if I can help it. That was kind of the opposite of what I think of when I think of “dignity.”
Quite frankly as an American, I think it’s very American to even consider the timetable as out of your control. For a lot of places, the trains come so fast that you’re not even waiting for a few minutes - like most drivers take longer to get settled into their car seat before driving. The sorry state of American transit is absolutely not the pinnacle of transit.
I can walk everywhere in my city (Barcelona), but still fuck cars. Thankfully they are pedestrianising a lot of roads here too, as there are still far too many cars.
Same here, i don't often use trams or trains, i'd much rather walk or bike or whatever. But the peoblem might be the people who don't even want walkable cities, because a whole bunch of people don't walk.
I was walking through the city the other day and i was in the middle of a bunch of people. A tram was approaching from behind and pretty much everyone around me was pucking up the pace, because they wanted to catch it. It then dawned on me that most of them are way out of shape and/or overweight. I kept walking normally because i had bo rush, and i was still just as fast as the people doing the fast walk while being super exhausted after their 50m sprint.
I wish I lived closer to the city so I could walk more. Walking is the best. But I live about 17 miles from the city and couldn’t afford to move closer if I wanted to.
I took my Kona Private Jake with me (nowhere near that bike, but $2-3k) which I would expect to be gone in an instant in the UK. I kept placed my bike on the balcony of the monthly apartment in Roppongi, which was only on the 2nd floor, and would check it at night as I thought someone would nick it
This shortly progressed to leaving it outside when going to the conbini, etc
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