Totally agree. It doesn’t change preferences. It can change the end result, though. Using your Lexus…sometimes people buy a car that is not a Lexus. If they cannot afford a Lexus, perhaps they go for a KIA. Give peeps options, and let them decide.
An example of a project or two. Disclaimer, these are not “my projects.” I have no inside inofrmation
Start in SF, where the issue is Market Street. SF plan is to reducr autos and get dedicated bus and rail service. This illustrates an impotratant point. If you pur in light rail, or increase bus routes, they have to be faster than using a car. There is no way to be more convenient than a personal vehicle, so MT has to win on speed. You can improve convenience by making increasing the busses peer hour. Have them running every 10 minutes instead of 30 minutes. Big difference to users.
I stumbled across this article about Houston, reportedly the only major us city without zoning. Seems to be working fine for them, and density does indeed happen when it’s not artificially restricted by zoning.
Check out this 20 year transition where a lot of single family residences were replaced my more dense townhouse infill.
Thanks. I have to point out that your list includes the three largest cities in Germany, but I don’t think that is terribly important for this.
I’ve had fun with Google maps and Hanover. This is my impression. The blocks look similar to London. Solid walls of apartment buildings right up to the sidewalk. From the air, it is open figures with red roofs and green gardens inside the block. I assume apartments have windows toward the street and toward the garden. Corners have two walls that face streets. I looked at one block that happened to be a rectangle with buildings 400x170 feet. I’d guess floor space for 50 people per level or 200 on the block. With roads, a collection of 3x6 blocks like that is a quarter mile on a side and would have 3600 adults. Enough to support local businesses of a few restaurants and small food stores. A half mile square makes for more business possibilities. Businesses were concentrated on “main” streets.
The blocks like that weren’t appealing from street level. Just a 50 foot wide space with cars lining both sides of the narrow street. In some neighborhoods, lots of bikes locked to low fences. My guess is parking for one car for half of the two-person apartments.
Other blocks had wider streets, more green, more interesting facades and sometimes different parking arrangements. They seemed to have deeper buildings. Maybe the deeper buildings kept the density up.
Hanover has urban trains, sometimes below grade. It’s hard to get a feel for the walk to one because transit maps aren’t drawn to scale.
The city has large forest preserves. I can see that many people could ride a bike on city streets for a half mile and be into a preserve. So the overall city density isn’t so terribly high because the compact neighborhoods are offset by large share open areas.
I get the attraction of that. We have friends who moved to Berlin on a two year contract many years ago and never came back. I remember them talking about small food shops and local parks and clean, safe public transit.
I’m trying to see how you transfer it to a US city. It seems like a city would have to have a large piece of available land someplace close to a city center. It wouldn’t work to do just a few blocks.
I meant that the dollar amount wouldn’t be large enough to change the result.
I definitely agree. I’ve always figured the advantage of subways is they don’t have to deal with surface traffic. The riders’ time loss from waiting for the train is offset by the faster travel once on board. When I lived in Chicago, I could take the El downtown at least as fast as I could drive, if you include being thrifty about parking.
The Minneapolis article is interesting. I assumed getting rid of single family zoning would mostly result in older two story houses being converted into duplexes, with very little new construction. We rented the first floor of a two story when we lived in Lincoln, NE. I assumed conversions were common around the university. I wonder if Minneapolis upscales parking when they convert.
unlikely on the upscale parking. The 40 year urban plan is decidedly non auto.
They just banned all new construction of drive thru businesses. Not a good signal if your looking for something for the drivers.
It already is. That’s part of the homeless problem. Even at the unadjusted tax, those bottom 2 quantiles are SOL. They can forget about getting their “preference”. And for folks in the top 2, well, they will probably not be affected. They have the money.
I agree that it would take a big change for Des Moines to become somewhat like Hanover. I liked Hanover when I stayed (been there a couple of times) and I probably used light rail more than the subway.
You’re probably right that it might have to happen in sections of bigger cities, like Denver, Portland, Seattle, Boston, SF or LA to densify close to transit before the smaller cities will show any interest. Apologies for including Berlin, Hamburg and Munich - they’re much bigger than I thought they were when I visited!
That’s a fascinating photo comparison. He doesn’t give a location. I tried finding it with Google maps, but I couldn’t. I see lots of single family close to downtown.
I did notice freeways in Houston. They can be real barriers.
I think it was discussed here a year or two ago - we need a dedicated highway lane for driverless trucks. They could travel very close to one other - maybe even connected with a walkway between them. Perhaps there will be one person in the foremost truck to make sure everything goes smoothly. The foremost truck should also be sloped to be more aerodynamic. We could also have the trucks drive on metal tracks so that the there is less friction and the trucks don’t veer into the other lane.
Some of these trucks might even contain passengers. In this case we might need an elevated platform so that the passengers can get in and out of the truck when it’s stopped.
If you were the CEO of America and I was the CFO, I’d want to caution you about investing more resource in infrastructure with a limited future. Adding on roads, lanes, and single family homes is good money after bad. Not saying that people wouldn’t like it to stay the way it is, but we are facing a huge bill down the road (no pun intended).
People gonna live somewhere. People gonna work somewhere. They’re going to need to get back and forth somehow.
Completely tangential is the concept of “a 3rd place”. In Britain it’s called a pub. This is where neighbors gather and get to know others in the community. In todays America, these are uncommon. How many of you drive to work, put in the hours, then drive home. (A nice place, I am sure, with many conveniences and comforts.) But Never interacting with anyone outside your workplace or socio economic sphere? This is voluntary, yet ultimately hurts the sense of community. We don’t know our neighbors. Sometimes I think that is one of the underlying issues wrt our divided political landscape.
Interesting article on how Vienna has addressed housing its citizens. Subsidies have been directed towards renting rather than owning with excellent results.
Article does a thorough job comparing the US and Vienna’s very different approaches to housing subsidies over the past 100 years.
Vienna approach would be anathema to the US for many reasons. For example, we would not accept the integrated type of subsidized rental housing that Vienna has where a wide range of socioeconomic groups live together. We prefer our poorer folks to be in housing ghettos just for them.
Also the American dream is to own rather than to rent. Our housing subsidies are massively focused on promoting home ownership as a result.
My comment referred only to housing as that is what this thread is about. Home ownership is a policy goal by governments in some countries, like the US.
Cars are generally a depreciating asset so owning one versus leasing one doesn’t usually build up wealth like home ownership traditionally has.
