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this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2023
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We need better development patterns. Many suburban and strip mall style developments end up costing more to maintain, service and repair than they bring in with taxes. Being able to survive without owning a car by walking, biking or transit would also help a lot. People really shrug away the costs of car ownership (and the costs of maintaining all that infrastructure and parking lots).
Yeah, the total direct monetary cost of maintaining low-density car-dependant cities is extremely high: road construction & maintenance, plumbing and electrical, parking lots taking valuable space that could be used for housing or workplaces, insurance for personal and commercial vehicles, maintenance and upkeep, gas, and probably many more I've missed.
And on top of all of that, the externalized monetary costs are also high: medical costs from all the deaths or injuries due to collisions (the stats are honestly depressing), medical costs due to less physical activity across the population, environmental damage, time wasted due to traffic, slower delivery times for long-haul trucks, and probably many more I've missed.
And on top of all of THAT the intangible costs are also high: isolation from the people and communities directly around you, less customers for small businesses that rely on foot traffic and have no parking space, increasing polarization between urban/suburban/rural populations, and probably many more I've missed.
Side note for the people that still really need cars in their lives (workers in rural areas, people living in suburbs, etc.), pushing for better transit and city planning will directly benefit you. If less people have cars: gas prices will be lower (supply and demand), road construction and upkeep will be cheaper, traffic will be better for you directly, and more. I always fear that pro-transit, pro-urban planning folks (me included) come off as dismissive. There are definitely people who will still need cars in their lives. The goal is to catch the many millions of people who could probably replace their car usage if transit systems and cities were built better.
People will always do what is easiest/best for them, we need to keep pushing towards systems that make sense.
Eh, I'm still not sold on transit (for people). If you live in a well designed city, everything should be right there in front of you, no more than steps away. The need to move further than your feet (or wheelchair, if that's your thing) can reasonably allow is a straight up urban planning failure.
I can buy into the idea that, given our existing urban planning failures, it is better than nothing. As a bandaid, sure. But in the context of looking to build the world in which we want to live, why settle for bandaids? Why not go straight to building cities properly, thereby having no need to move people around with external propulsion at all?
Those in the rural parts are a harder problem, but it seems you think the car is still their best option. So, when does transit become useful?
Is it the freight transit infrastructure you see as needing improvement? It is true that, even with the best laid plans, we are not in a place to give that up yet. As interesting as vertical farms are, the technology just isn't there yet to supplant food grown in rural areas, never mind things like lumber and other commodities that aren't usually found in cities.
But when it comes to people, concentrating them close together is kind of a city's whole deal. Why then pretend it is a rural area that requires travel over long distances?
What if I have a friend on the other side of town and we are meeting up at a restaurant on their side of town? Or maybe there is a high speed rail connecting a few cities and now I can visit my parents the next city over by taking the train. Or maybe I didnt manage to find a job in the more walkable part of town (we cant fix cities over night) but the transit hub can connect me to my job. Or maybe I usually walk the 20 minutes but I injured my leg and its only 5 minutes of walking if I take the bus.
I think transit belongs within a well designed city and for intercity connections. Even with the best urban planning, some cities will just be too big to get everywhere in the city just by walking. Some people might be fine staying in their neighborhood but others will want to see other people, try different restaurants, shop different places.
I would add people who change jobs and households with more than one worker.
Nobody is going to move every time they change jobs.
Approximately nobody is going to live close enough to the workplace of everyone in the household who works.
Not to mention connections for high schools, colleges and medical institutions. Transit can be so good if done right.
Then who is going to be left to support the walkable economy? You need approximately every working person who lives within that community to be active in the walkable economy, else you will quickly find that services are no longer within walking distance.
Are you imagining that you'll hop on the train to go work on the other side of town, while someone living on that side of town hops on the train to work in your neighbourhood? That is not a good reason for transit at all. That's just silly.
There are many problems with the idea that every community should be so maximally walkable that you don't need any other modes of transit. Some urban uses like parks require local low density in an urban setting and they can easily get large enough where 20min walking barely gets you across. Also the social network of people even just including the closest friends and family usually even in dense cities spreads out at least a few km. Also super tall buildings aren't actually particularly efficient. Also some services greatly benefit from a certain centrality that can never be in walkable reach for all people of large cities e.g. universities or other more specialised institutions. Transit and bikes are huge enablers for people to freely live their life as they see fit, and some level of global interconnectedness is probably needed forever. Build one efficient medical supplier, steel mill, semiconductor FAB or generally any larger factory and walkability is immediately gone just because these facilities need lots of space, and their entire supply chain would be much less (thermally/CO2/resource) efficient if we were to split theses factories to enable local production.
Who do you think is going to maintain friendships across a few kilometres? Maybe the hardcore walkers, but the average person is just going to find new friends, just like they do now when distances become too great.
That's a feature. Have you seen how much Canadians bitch and moan about wealth inequality? Splitting up central operations into small, local operations is how you beat wealth inequality.
But I get it. Change is scary.
Nah Change isn't scary, maximizing any single concern in the real world is just too shortsighted. Also not accepting transit or bikes as a part of walk-ability is just confused. Last month I traveled ~400km 206 bike 180 transit and just 8km on foot and 1km in a car. The 180km transit were traveled in a time slightly longer than the 8km walking. This travel is only for maintaining social connections, I don't commute and I have 2 Supermarkets on my street still it is very important to me to be able to move in this way. Even if I could easily find new friends or get my family to move so close walking would be viable, still travel would be important to me just to experience a diverse collection of places and people. Nobody in a modern Context will ever consider a few km a far distance, you can feasibly walk 40+km in a single day bike 140+km in a day and take a train almost 2000km in a day, its nonsensical to discard the later two just because they use technology, especially in places where this technology exist.
Sure generally I agree splitting and localizing things might be part of a way to more equitable wealth distribution but at the same time, for some essential industries it is largely impossible, just because of the limitations physics gives us. We should take control from the owners of these industries and hand it over to the workers for real democratic control and not destroy thermally efficient production processes. Because thermal efficiency is actually not the same as profit, which is the primary reason for wealth inequality. But I get it even the slightest threat to property rights is scary :P
The workers already do have full democratic control over these industries. The perception of ownership is something invented by the workers. That's the thing about democracy, though, democracy favours the strong and pushes the weak aside. We're here because the workers scare easily. They just want their little acreage out in the middle of nowhere where they can hide from other people. Hence why our cities ultimately end up like rural areas, with isolation from people and requiring vehicles to do anything when they occasionally decide to emerge from their shell.
All you've suggested is that the workers should start to exercise their democratic rights more. That's not scary. That's how it is supposed to work. But good luck. It is quite true that talking to your MP/MPP/MLA/councillor is a scary proposition for most. The few who are not bothered by it thereby take control of the wealth.
People don't do much of anything other than work when they're at work, other than maybe go out for lunch.
I work in construction. Do you expect me to move next to a new project every 3 years? What about people who work on multiple projects a day?
You can't expect people to change their housing to be right next to their work or change their work to be right next to their housing. You're silly.
You can't expect people to change at all.
Let's be real, they aren't going to magically start supporting transit either. Maybe you've forgotten, but we tried that already, building out a huge transit network in the 1800s, with streetcar systems lining the streets of the cities (not just Toronto) and the train connecting even the smallest of towns. We eventually ripped up almost all of it because nobody wanted to use it.
But as we're discussing an invented dream world, why do you cling to the transit bandaid when we can simply design cities property?
Designing cities for transit is designing them properly. Designing them for only walking is a fairy tale thought up by a 12 year old with no real world experience. Look how well transit works in European and Asian cities. Vancouver is even halfway decent (tons of room to improve still).
Accept that it is a pointless luxury and make new friends who are within a more reasonable distance? If the same friend was on the other side of the world, are you are hopping on jets to meet up at a restaurant? We do have the technology. But having the technology doesn't mean its use is warranted.
20 minutes by foot is a huge distance. Why would you need to walk that far? If you want to walk that far for enjoyment, when you are able, sure, but in terms of everyday life? That's not a well designed city.
That's fine, but now you're living the rural lifestyle. Why bother living in a city at all if you want to become a rural dweller?
More importantly, why hold back progress for people who actually want to live in cities just because you have some fascination with rural life? That ever-present dream of living on farm like our ancestors is exactly why our cities are so poorly designed. Unless you are an actual farmer providing a valuable service providing food to the cities, perhaps it is time to let that dream go?
I'm not sure if you're trolling or really immature.
"Sorry X, visiting you is a pointless luxury, I'm going to find a new X that lives in a more reasonable distance"
Where X: a friend you've known for 20 years, a parent, a cousin, a person you share a niche interest with.
I think that's the goal. All of your essentials are available within walking distance, while your workplace is accessible by transit. Obviously, you can't move every time you switch jobs, so transit is still necessary. It also provides mobility for when you want to, y'know, shop at another grocery store or eat at another restaurant.
Yeah there is no possible way that everywhere a person needs to go can be within reasonable walking distance.
Fortunately, the serious advocates for more walkable cities aren't calling for absolutely everything to be within walking distance, only the most commonly accessed things.
Where do you go in a typical day or week or month? Groceries, restaurants, gyms, entertainment, maybe the doctor/dentist?
I think we are on the same page, my comment was meant to agree with you.
All of the most common essentials (groceries, pharmacy, etc.) along with some shops/restaurants have enough patronage to justify high density / be within walking distance of most people in an urban environment. While things that are farther away (both less common essentials and non-essential) should be accessible through transit.
Trouble is, if there is somewhere you need to go that is so unique that a dense city population cannot support it locally, within walking distance, you also won't have the ridership necessary to support transit to that destination. Just you sitting on the train doesn't work – even the original comment said that cars are necessary in such cases. Mass transit requires mass ridership.
Our "solution" to that problem is to make cities wannabe rural areas, where the services are many kilometres away from where the people live, requiring a trip by car/train/bus/whatever just to do anything. Then you have some guarantee of mass ridership. But having to get into a vehicle to do anything is a horrible way to live. It's the worst part of living rurally with none of the upside of living rurally. If you are going to live in a city, why not embrace it? I get having a large rural acreage is everyone's ultimate dream, but maybe it is time to accept it is not in the cards and start to love the one you're with?
Who provides to the local (walkable) economy if the people are hopping on transit to get to work? People who live in other communities also jumping on transit? Isn't that rather silly?
That is exactly the kind of thing you would expect from a poorly designed city, sure, but the discussion taking place here is looking for better.
What city do you live in?
I don't anymore. There is no well designed city in Canada. It would be strange to continue subject myself to that. I live in a well designed small town. Everything I need to carry out life is available within a five minute walk. This is why I can't figure out why the cities want to pretend to be rural areas. If you want to pretend that you are living on a farm, why not just live on a farm?
Good for you. I'm just surprised that as a former urbanite you are against public transit? I live in Montréal and can't imagine the city without the metro.
I'm against poorly designed cities. Once you have a well designed city, what would you need transit for?
About all we've been able to come up with is that one guy who wants to have lunch with his far away friend. Is that a good reason to build transit? If so, where do you draw the line? People are going to have friends all over the world. Do we need a train straight to Japan so I can connect with my friends who live there? I'd enjoy having lunch with them, sure.
Live amongst wannabe farmers and you're going to need wannabe tractors, for sure. That's outside of the discussion taking place here, though. We're talking about working towards building cities for people who actually want to live in cities.
You are making no sense. What wannabe farmers are you talking about? We are talking about cities, not villages. Do you expect 40000 UQAM students to all live in the Quartier Latin? Do you expect 70000 UdeM students to all live in Cote de Neiges? What about their professors, the admin staff? Do you expect that the spouse of a professor would not need to have a job in a different part of town? What if you have a couple where one works at the Botanical Garden and the other at the National Library that are in different parts of the city?
Do you imagine that in an ideal city there are no big centralized institutions with thousands of people working there? Universities, hospitals, public services, cultural amenities (theaters, stadiums, museums, ...), shopping districts, etc? Dense, livable cities cannot exist without public transit.
Are you talking about "cities" and imagining suburban sprawl?? Because you're not making any sense.
Why? They say you will meet 10,000 people in your lifetime. What is to be gained by having the 30,000+ other people there?
What if they got jobs locally? You can't have a local economy without local workers.
There exists communities in this world with over 150,000 inhabitants in a square kilometre. What is the 150,001st person providing you that the 150,000 other people can't?
By dense, are you imagining having a few acres of land to call your own? That's fine, but that's the rural life, not the city life. If you want to live rurally, why not live rurally?
A UNIVERSITY
Honestly, you have no idea what you are talking about. You're either a troll, a kid, or an idiot.
A university is not defined by a set number of people. Sure, you need some minimum number of people to see a meeting of the minds, but surely there is diminishing returns after a couple of hundred people? What kind of meeting of the minds are you making with the tens of thousands of people that you cannot possibly meet?
The ad homiem is telling.
I live in an urban part of my city, and I still have plenty of reasons to leave my 15-minute walkable area. A friend far to the north, a friend on the other side of the river, family on the outskirts. Restaurants I love all over. My office downtown. Theatres near the university. Festivals and expos spread out across all the parks and venues and other walkable areas. I can use my bike to access pretty well all of those things in the warmer months but transit (and sometimes, unfortunately, a car) keeps it accessible year round.
If you don't see any reason to use transportation in a city, you either don't appreciate the breadth of experiences that come with city life, or you live in a really boring city.
That may be, but you're living the rural lifestyle. That is what rural people do – they get into a vehicle and have it move them to where friends are, where restaurants are, where work is, where theatres and festivals are, etc.
Which is fine. There is nothing wrong with rural living. But what set urban areas apart is being able to do all those things only steps away – not needing a vehicle to get you to and fro. The value proposition of urban life is lost if you are back to needing a vehicle to do anything.
I see the need for transportation in our poorly designed cities. The question is: Given the discussion about inventing our dream world, why use transit as a bandaid when we can do a better job in city design instead? If you had a well designed city, not the wannabe-rural cities of Canada, what would you need transit for?
Even the best designed city will have different things in different parts of it. I've been all over the planet - from the backwoods hickville I grew up in to beautiful metropolises in Europe to Asian megacities and no matter where I went there was always a reason to travel around. A particularly beautiful park. A temple floating on a lake. The best damn hamburger you'll ever eat. That doesn't change just because I live in a place, and it doesn't mean it's poorly designed. Different people in different parts of the city make those parts of the city different.
I noticed you completely glossed over friends and family living in different places. That's not just some side point. People travel to see other people. I can't force *everyone *I love to live within a 15 minute walk of me - even if I could, they have their own friends and family, and they have theirs, and they all need to work, probably not in the same buildings. If I'm friends with a Construction worker, a tech bro, an RN, a Highschool teacher, a personal trainer and a genetics researcher, are we all going to be able to live in a 6 block radius? Possibly. But it'd be a lot easier for all of use if we could live a little farther apart (maybe near where we each work) and just take a train to hang out somewhere central.
Life sprawls. It doesn't mean rural, it doesn't even mean suburbs (even though that's how people seem to want it today). But it does mean transportation is a requirement.
I've addressed that many times already. What new and edgy details have you brought to the table that warrants a new response?
Once every few years, sure. You are an exceptional individual if you are jetting off to China each week to lunch with your friend. That is not the norm at all. People normally only keep regular ties to those who are convenient.
Well, if you don't all live nearby, who is going to support the local economy? An economy needs all of those functions.
Why's that? Given a properly designed city, what would you need it for?
I get you want to vacation once in a while, and while it is a stretch to think that is a requirement, without regular traffic there won't be the ridership to support transit even granting it as a luxury. You're back to needing car .
I've read your response to me, not all the comments you've made to whoever else you're talking to. If you think you've explained away people living in different parts of a city not being a problem to someone else, copy and paste it. I won't go looking for it.
In the rest of your statement you seem to have conflated when I said that "I've been to other cities" with "I always go to other cities to do various things" and that's just not what I said. Nothing except my first paragraph explaining how other (much better designed) cities than my own that I've been to have a distribution of experiences throughout them was about travelling between cities. Only within.
This city, the one I live in, has many things in many places. Some of those things are restaurants or parks or events, some of those things are people. I must travel within my city to experience them, and they physically cannot all be within a 15 minute walk, even if my city were much better designed. Not everyone I am friends with will be able to live within a 6 block district. Not every restaurant I would like to eat at will be in my district. Not every sports team or theatrical performance will take place in my district.
I'm not talking about things that take place in other cities. I'm talking about my city, where the opera theatre and the hockey arena are a 15 minute train ride apart. Where the research university and downtown business district are a 10 minute train ride apart. Where there are 7 sizeable hospitals that it would be hard to arrange a couple million people into walking distance around (and only some of which have the capability to offer certain specialized types of care). Where the best bars and restaurants are mostly concentrated onto a handful of streets already, but some streets are not walking distance from the others.
You can call this a problem of design, but the city can only support one hockey arena, so "The hockey arena is far away from the University" isn't something you can solve without moving billions of dollars of infrastructure (and likely creating entirely new problems) or designing good transportation - unless your solution is professors and students can't go watch live sports. Similarly "The hospital I live near doesn't have a Gamma Knife program to excise my brain tumor," can't just be hand waved away. That's a multi-million dollar machine requiring highly specialized staff and it doesn't need to be at every facility to manage the patient load.