this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2023
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The problem with redesigning cities is that they weren’t exactly built with the possibility of being redesigned in mind. You’re talking about a goal that is hundreds of years of incremental change away. Electric cars are part of the short term solution, but redesigning cities is a much much longer term solution.
Why hundreds of years? American and Canadian cities became car-dependent sprawls in the span of a few decades. A concerted effort to redesign them would not of course have results in months, but 10-20 years are enough to completely transform them.
Also, when we are talking "redesigning", don't imagine SimCity like buldozing and rebuilding. It can start with doing away with zoning regulations mandating single family homes everywhere, doing away with strict commercial/residential zoning, doing away with parking minimums and allowing people to sell off parking lots for development. Then couple this kind of libertarian-style deregulation, with socialistic-like public investment on public transit and amenities (that should be much cheaper for denser neighbourhoods). In the US and Canada, good public transit will probably mean trams and trolleys, or (sigh) buses. Finally, establish norms that require good cycling infrastructure on any new road being built and any old road being repaved. It won't be too long for change to happen.
Finally, one more thing: E-bikes and e-cargo-bikes, along with quick infrastructure fixes (e.g., blocking off some roads or blocking off one direction in stroads with islands to make them transit and bike-only) are a much much better stop-gap solution than electric cars. The vast majority of car trips are with only a single person. Why haul a few tonnes of steel and plastic around? Instead, ebikes need much smaller batteries, and cost only a fraction of the cost. They are fast, and comfortable and can cover larger distances and you don't need to be sweaty when you get there.
The problem is that the current trends reflect what people have wanted, if you want a change in the system then you need a clear cut plan, not just deregulation.
It's not as if there are no people who have thought deeply of this. For example: https://www.strongtowns.org/
The deeper I look at them the more insane cars actually seem. I understand the usage of freight trucks and things like that but cars are genuinely wasteful in most senses.
In cities personal cars are terrible.
In rural areas they are vital.
Agreed but, not always. Not every rural town in the world implies isolated homes. Besides if you look at it more as a principle and less of a rule, as town grows you invest in adding public transportation as needed. But yes the more rural a place is the more car dependent it's going to be, but that's not that bad, most rural places also have much less population so it also has a much smaller impact.
The Netherlands did it in about 30 years, and nowadays we have more knowledge on how to build efficient cities, it can be done.
The US is a different beast from European countries, sure, but it doesn't mean it's impossible or that changing would literally take centuries. And even if it did require hundreds of years, isn't that more a reason to start as soon as possible?
Electric cars aren't here to save the planet, they're are here to save the auto industry. The solution is ditching euclidian zoning and increasing bike lanes and public transport.
I think you should use 'cartesian zoning' unless you have a flat earth agenda.
That aside is both a nitpick (the curvature of Earth is small enough on the local scale of a city that the differences are negligible) and it is wrong, as cartesian coordinates are planar and aren't useful for accounting for spherical curvature. "Euclidean" and "cartesian" are basically synonyms for this purpose.
Euclidian geometry is used for things on a globe.
non-euclidian spaces are those that are not spherical. Such as a flat earth.
Caretesian means to exist in an X-Y plane. Such as a grid in a city. Seems closer to your seeming intent.
This is incorrect. Euclidean geometry deals with planar geometry such as that which cartesian coordinates are used to describe. I mean, here's a quote from Wikipedia:
Spherical surfaces are even used as kind of the classical example of non-Euclidean geometry. For example, you can form a triangle along great circles on the surface of a sphere and have all three angles be right angles (90-90-90); something not possible in Euclidean/planer geometry. See the linked text.
No one is going to bike 15 miles for a dozen eggs, and no one is going to build a supermarket closer than that, and I'm nowhere near an extreme case. It will take more than a century to restructure the US away from individual vehicles, if it's done at an insanely fast pace.
Public transport relies on the value of having a public around the stops, or the ability to concentrate the public in crossroad areas. It's already too late for that in the US, and will take multiple generations of land transfer to fix it. The entire country was literally built on expansionism and isolationism. Fixing our cities is the easy part, and that alone will take more than all government expenditure ever, over half a century at the least. And that's assuming we don't go bankrupt simply supporting the retiring population we have right now, let alone additional expenditures.
Supermarkets would be replaced with multiple markets in walking distance after removing the zoning that excludes retail from being within walking distance of residential areas.
No one is building shit within walking distance of nowhere. There's less than 200 people within 20 miles of me, and I've moved to a more crowded area. No market is going to fix that. The nearest zoning law is probably a hundred miles away. And supermarkets didn't defeat small stores because of zoning, it's because economies of scale are more efficient.
In rural areas where population is the issue and not zoning, that is true.
In any city with 10 thousand residents or more it tends to be the zoning that keeps stores from opening up in the suburbs and other new development. There they tend to go big becsuse they are far enough away that they might as well be big enough to draw from as far away as possible.
Most people live in the latter areas and that is what is being discussed.
They're talking about replacing cars with public transportation which is fucking ridiculous for the majority of the country due to low population density and large distances. There's no amount of zoning changes that are going to fix that. Also, creating walkable cities is a great goal, with zero chance of happening in the US. It would be asking home owners and businesses to throw away existing investments, or forcing them to. Guess how well either of those options is going to go over. Especially in an aging populace with nothing but investment income.
Doable but rather ambitious I would imagine considering how much infrastructure is built to scale without the idea of modularity or portability in mind