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this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2023
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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.