this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2023
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Nearly every city on the planet with a subway system disputes your bullshit.
It sure is nice that everyone gets to live in New York, London, and Washington.
A better solution is to reduce how much people need to travel. Instead of building trillion-dollartransit systems so people can to to the office we should be taxing the everloving shit out of office spaces for jobs that can be worked remotely.
Why not both? I live in Stockholm and work from home. I have amazing trains that I could take to work, and I've never had a commute longer than 40 minutes. But a 0 minute commute is still shorter than 5minute commute.
Because not everyone can live in fucking Stockholm.
An apartment within 40 miles of my office in the city costs 5x as much per month as where I live. I can't get a fucking pizza delivered to my house, much less a bus. And unless I want to smell like a gym at work the 5+ months a year it's over 100° outside, I need to drive to the nearest bus station if I want to take transit. So I'm already having to drive and park somewhere. Then I have to pay to park at the bus station and pay again to ride the bus that drops me off 9 blocks from my office, where I'd have to walk the rest of the way.
All told it'd add 2-3 hours to my commute and be more expensive than driving.
But if 100% of the work I do is on the computer at the office. The real solution is to not have the fucking office at all.
There are obviously other systemic problems. Cities being designed around cars isn’t the only one.
But your rage shouldn’t be directed at the people who want to make public transit options suck less.
His solution isn't to make it suck less. His just says how great it is to live somewhere that was designed around walking because when the city was established that was pretty much the only option.
The Southern US is designed around cars because until fairly recently it was very sparsely populated, so everything had to be designed around cars and air conditioning in order to develop. It was the correct decision at the time, and changing it now is much more difficult than simply saying "be like this city that was established before the steam engine."
Oh I feel you. I’ve spent a decent amount of time in the southern US. Lots of wide open spaces and cities built on massive scales.
There won’t be any immediate fixes for these places. But there are steps that can be taken. And plenty of cities that are more densely populated, even in the north, Midwest, and west coast are just as terribly designed. Those are what infuriate me most. Los Angeles just makes me mad. It’s a giant concrete jungle full of absolutely necessary cars and it doesn’t need to be that way. 1 in 35 Americans live in LA County and yet it’s one of the worst cities in terms of public transit.
Yeah that's definitely a challenge, and I believe it is a failure of city planning.
My condo is worth $300k and is within 15min of central Stockholm. The housing crisis is definitely a problem around the world, but European cities that don't have the missing middle problem are in a much better place.
Back on topic, even if you could work from home, it would still take you over an hour to go grocery shopping or buy a pizza, which is a huge problem. Both of those things are within a 15 min walk for me.
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the missing middle problem
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I think the point here is that suburbs and cities have such dogshit public transit and bike infrastructure that people do everything by car. Nobody is telling those who live in rural areas to bike 30km to get groceries.
Guess where most people live and want to live?