Have you not heard of mixed density? There should be houses, semi, townhomes, 3 story walk-ups and apartment buildings. You could probably do all that and still keep 50% of the island nature.
Not only this, but in the second picture, that other 96% is ripe for rezoning - money men will not stop until they buy off enough politicians to develop it into something resembling the first picture.
Edit: I’m not saying I like it, I’m just stating facts.
The shores become resort property. The rest becomes a mini-mall. The resort buys the apartment complex a year later. With any houses, all houses get bought by cooperations and rented out as overpriced Airbnb houses. Fuck we can’t have anything nice with unfettered capitalism.
Yes. And also importantly, I live in a city that has an abundance of missing middle housing, meaning it’s probably the most affordable major city in North America, has a very high quality of life, has terrific walkability and bikeability, and punches well above its weight in terms of rapid transit.
The result is I live in a good quality apartment, in a very convenient location, without roommates, all for a surprisingly affordable price.
But because so many cities make it extremely hard – if not straight up illegal – to build anything but suburban sprawl, those cities are far more expensive and far more car-dependent.
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.)
I wonder how well Tesla’s tech would handle train engine development. The cars run on Li-ion batteries while electric trains are continuously fed with energy. Either way, Tesla engineers’ time would be better spent designing next-gen affordable rail.
Not really what you were saying, but I just want to take this opportunity to jump on the box you left out and scream that battery trains are stupid and anyone who suggests installing them needs to be slapped. The lifecycle cost of rolling stock batteries easily dwarfs the cost of electrification in pretty much any application.
All the class 1 RR companies on the US are absolutely allergic to any kind of capital expense. They will literally turn down very profitable business expansions to avoid increasing their costs because they view maintaining a good cost/revenue ratio as more important than increasing profits.
It's pretty mind-blowing how poorly-run these companies are.
Well, they’re basically in the early stages of vulture capitalization. This is where businesses just sort of coast, they stop trying to grow, and just don’t replace things as they break. I think the long term plan is to milk it for whatever they can before getting bought/bailed out by the federal government. We’ll get CONRAIL again for a few years and maybe some pretty sick Amtrak expansions as the government goes around fixing about half of the most critical rail lines, but then the cycle will start over and we’ll sell CONRAIL and our freshly repaired alignments off to some genius investor for pennies on the dollar just so they can vulture capitalize anew and talk about what a business genius they are.
Like way way more expensive. I know that in France electrification is around 1M€/km, so when you’re working on a long line with a few train, it might be cheaper to use batteries, diesel train or even hydrogen (even though it’s mostly prototypes for now).
And I’m only talking about economic cost, think of the ecological one, if you have to deploy +100kms of wires, sub electrical stations and maintain them, all for a handful of trains a day then there’s simply no interest
I mean, ecological cost of electrification vs burning diesel seems like a pretty clear choice. In terms of economic cost, though, the US would probably balloon that price out to $20M/km, because how else would contractors get to take the taxpayer over the coals?
US rail infrastructure is also more expensive just as a simply supply and demand problem -- we have very, very little supply compared to in Europe. We've fallen so far behind in the technology that most major projects involve bringing in contractors from Italy, Germany, and France to do the work. We even import most of our new rolling stock (and the Class 1s nearly never buy new rolling stock anyway, if they can help it). We're buying and building so little rail that we've lost the capacity to do it well ourselves and so have to import it at a premium.
Plus the US federal system -- and its general philosophy with e.g., city departments competing with each other for budget -- just makes infrastructure projects super expensive in general.
We need to start investing in it again to see the cost drop but people refuse to invest in it because the cost is so high. That might just be starting to change with Cali HSR, Brightline, the mid-Texas HSR project, Amtrak ConnectUS, etc., but we'll see.
There’s a confluence of factors that make infrastructure projects such a nightmare in the US, but the big ones seem to be:
-Not institutional knowledge. State DOTs don’t retain people who can plan and manage this stuff, it all gets farmed out to contractors or their people get scalped by contractors willing to pay 2-3x the wage the state will pay. So, they’re completely at the mercy of contractors.
-Overreliance on contractors and subcontractors. Nuff said. There’s a lot of shitty contractors out there whose whole game is to take the taxpayers for as big of a ride as possible, regardless of whether the work actually gets done. Because of Reagan era “reforms” (those are sarcasm quotes, to be clear), we use contractors for all kinds of stuff, and it’s easy for shitty contractors to game the system.
-Stations: the US has a hard-on for building large stations, when they’re very reliably the most expensive part of building any kind of rail infrastructure. We could substantially reduce rail project costs be re-examining our station designs and opting for more utilitarian choices. I’m not against making stations look nice, mind you, I’m not advocating for a brutalist, khaki concrete cube approach here; just saying that we can make more pragmatic choices than CAHSR’s fantasy-future ribcages.
Again, the ecological cost of electrical infrastructure is bigger than the one for diesel train, so when you got 2 trains a day it might make sense to keep Diesel
Just fine? Whether it’s in a car, train, freight train, it’s just an electric motor. You can have a AC or DC motor, if AC you need a converter. The issue has always been battery capacity. *But I agree with the other guy, running an overhead power line is the way to go.
As has been pointed out in the article, this would result in several of the cars tested no longer functioning. And is not even allowed in all the cars small print.
I’m sure it’s an issue for self-driving cars. And that sucks. For the rest of us, it’ll just disable internet-based features like on-star, which is kind of the point.
As for “not allowed”, I don’t know what that even means unless it’s a lease. Is the manufacturer going to come steal my car from me? There’s not much small print when I hand the dealer a cashiers check. Just standard title transfer paperwork and such.
So far I’m liking this, that in Reddit fuckcars and other subs would become full circle jerks, with any discussion squashed and “me too” comments ruling the day.
So far, I’ve enjoyed that me balanced conversations emerge in Lemmy communities.
Fuck cars have had a lot of good points, but buried in falling to understand other perspectives. Here folks can actually see perspectives that would block their goals, and maybe actually talk about some paths forward that might get both sides living with it.
I would literally kill myself if I ever had to live in apartments again. I have severe social anxiety and agoraphobia and general anxiety. I started hallucinating when I lived in apartments (but never before or since). I became paranoid of people. There was never any solitude. Plus right now there’s no way to get around apartments without landlords (though I understand ideally there might be ways around this, it’s not likely to happen any time soon). When I lived in an apartment I considered just being homeless and hiding in the woods (and stupidly, isn’t legal).
We sure could stand to make more stores and businesses into high rises though. I live near Detroit (but not IN Detroit) and going down our streets it’s just a ridiculous waste of space. How many tire shops do we even need? Why does every business need its own lot with so much space around it? Everything being more “mall” style would waste less space.
You might have a point but you’re being an insensitive ass and it’s definitely possible that there are under-researched/discussed potential mental health side effects to apartments / city living. There is certainly a conversation to be had.
No, because it’s such a small number of people it’s not worth changing the whole of society for. Obviously, people with disabilities will be accommodated for. This one person having agoraphobia doesn’t change the fact that society-wide we should be striving for more dense housing.
That’s not really true though, most people are much happier in a house and have far fewer sources of stress in their life. Also high density housing is an awfull place to bring up kids, that’s the exact reason London is knocking down all the old tower blocks like elephant and castle, all the studies showed it was a horrible place to live for everyone there.
I know you want this solution to work because no one likes American suburbia but it doesn’t have to be a choice between two types of hell, there are actually good options like European suburbs with local shops, bus and cycle routes to pedestrianised shopping areas and lots of green spaces.
Studies actually show that medium density low rises allow for more housing and are more ecologically efficient than supposedly high-density high rises. I was surprised, but the models are irrefutable. It’s mainly due to the structural footprint of large buildings.
So that’s my ideal. Paris, not Manhattan. Side benefit is it just looks nicer and feels better.
I’m sure New York has areas similar to Montmartre where only rich people can afford to live, and areas like Seine Saint Denis where they cram all the poor people in awful environments which result in criminality and cyclical poverty
There’s a great point in here about ‘business density’. Shops and restaurants would benefit from higher density in world less populated by cars.
Another important idea here is that higher population density requirements should build in protections for residents’ mental well-being: Sound proofing, minimum square footage per person requirements, ceiling heights, green spaces, and convenient access to goods and services. People aren’t meant to live in cages.
Imo it’s because most of the “fuckcars” types are not “pro density” or “pro transit” types. They literally only care about “fuck cars, bikes rule”. Usually upper middle class WASPy types. High overlap with NIMBYs.
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
What about the psycho neighbor who questions everyone’s identity every time they get off the elevator, aggressively blocking the hallway?
No, she doesn’t work for the building. Yes, the cops have been involved multiple times. She is compulsively obsessed with monitoring everyone who moves through the hallway.
Anecdote of course, and the suburbia part of the meme sucks. But humans are the most dangerous thing around and I’m so happy to not be in that building any more (friend still lives there so I’m aware it’s still happening). More space please! (But no monoculture, limit impact, reduce car usage whenever possible (gogo bike trails)). That’s the ideal balance.
Having trees != ecosystem. The mere presence of tons of roads, buildings, and infrastructure (not to mention monocultured grass lawns, pesticides, herbicides, etc.) is super disruptive to ecosystems. If our cities needlessly sprawl all over the place, we’re forced to drive more, pollute more, spend more (all that infrastructure and cars are super expensive!), and our built environment disrupts much more actual ecosystems.
fuckcars
Hot
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.