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Suburbs should not exist. I get Urban, i get rural, but there is absolutely nothing justifying suburban.
When rural community populations increase, should we advocate for euthanasia or forced relocation?
That's not how suburbs happen. That's how small towns happen. Not the same thing. Small towns can be cool.
Small towns can eventually turn into suburbs... In my area, most suburbs were founded in the 1600's, later became incorporated into a town, and later into a city. It's proximity to a major nearby city makes it a suburb.
Living within 30 minutes of my job in the city costs $3,000/month in rent for a 800sf apartment. Living within walking distance would cost $4,000 if I could even find anything to rent.
Living an hour away costs $750/month in rent for a 1200sf trailer. My car note is $450/month and I spend about $300/month on gasoline on average. All in my rent, vehicle, and gas is half the cost of just the rent in the city.
Yeah - there's an extra hour lost every day to the drive, but the savings comes out to around $75/hr for that commute. And I have the freedom to travel anywhere I want with my vehicle on top of that.
So yeah, I live suburban and fuck anyone who criticizes me for making that sensible economic decision.
I don't criticize you at all.
But that is a urban planning problem. Because they didn't build enough housing and public transportation.
Nobody's saying 'fuck you' for being forced into suburbs. Were saying 'fuck you' to the people who built suburbs instead of high density housing and made housing near your job unaffordable.
And the people who genuinely had the choice (I might argue you didn't) and chose to pay extra for suburb.
I mean to be fair people might be more open to it if high density housing didn't suck ass. The exact same shitty template copy pasted a thousand times. It's honestly not even that it's the same that's the problem it's that the template sucks ass.
There is a middle ground between high-density housing and showing you into a tiny poorly put together space but nobody seems willing to build that. Give me a suburb house, a full two floors, with a standard layout. And turn that into high density housing and I'm willing to bet a lot more people would be fine with it.
It's not like that's even all that difficult to imagine, we build fucking skyscrapers 100 plus stories tall there's zero reason we couldn't just take a two-story suburb townhome and just stack 50 of them on top of each other. Then the only thing lost is a dedicated garage and your own private backyard which some people will still heavily want but it's a much easier pill to swallow versus the "shitty cramped poorly designed apartment layout"
Also it should be mandatory that high density housing has a minimum of one dedicated parking spot per unit, the first two floors of any high-density buildings should be dedicated to a parking garage. That is the other thing that makes people say fuck you to high density housing is it's always a shit ton of units crammed into not enough parking and it's a huge pita to deal with. Do we need better design the cities that are less reliant on cars for transport? Yes, but you should still expect at least one car per unit regardless it's just the reality of America
I agree we do dog shit architecture, especially residential.
We do not need more parking spaces though. We need trains. I'm sorry, but its too late to be putting more fucking cars on the road; even 'clean' electric ones.
Even if you got rid of all the bureaucracy bullshit and started building trains everywhere tomorrow that would not remove the need for people to have cars. And the idea that you should be able to build a building that does not have enough spaces for everyone that lives there to have one is unreasonable.
Even if I could literally walk outside and immediately outside of my door get onto a train there are still going to be times I would need a vehicle. Even if I only use it once a year I would still like to be able to own my own. I would like to live somewhere that I only need to use my vehicle a couple times a year but I still need to have somewhere to put it
You really don't ever need a car, with good public transit. You can use the delivery van or rent something twice a year, I'm sure.
Depending on geography, even delivery vans may be unnecessary; cargo bikes work pretty well on flat terrain.
I haven't ever had a car. Not in a hypothetical world where we built public transit, but here, in the present/past real world. Most of the times this has been a problem were caused by other people using cars, and I don't consider becoming part of the problem to be a solution there. It can be done.
I would be really annoyed having to rent something every time I wanted a new bed, tv, dresser, that sort of thing. It's nice having my own vehicle that can do it.
Like I said we should absolutely have good robust public transportation everywhere so that I only need to use it on those very specific occasions which will drastically cut down on the problems with so many cars but I should still be able to have one. Trying to outright remove cars from people will never lead to anything useful because they will fight you tooth and nail.
Make it so that I don't need it but can still have it if I want it and suddenly they will be on the road significantly less often, I'm glad that you have been able to get by without one and are happy but not everyone is going to be the same. I mean hell I regularly make trips between the states almost every other week for seeing friends and I would really hate to do that on public transportation because it would take what's already a 6-hour round trip and probably turn it into a 10 hour round trip.
re: interstate public transit:
Have you ever taken a train? Amtrak is a fucking joy.
Like genuinely a pleasant experience, and I don't just mean the joy of not getting dry fucked by sandpaper and barbed wire. Its really comfy, the scenery is often quite nice, there's decent WiFi and a bar, you can wander the train and fuck off to the bar if you get bored reading or whatever-not a great bar; beer and wine only no coctails, but we could fix that too.
And if we actually cared about rail, especially passenger rail, the speed caps on that are so much fucking higher than you could possibly get with individual cars. Trips would be more frequent, too.
Yes I'm familiar with riding trains, both in and out of the us. It is enjoyable but it is much slower than just hopping in my car and going straight to where I'm going. For the sake of those trips where I'm hopping around between states and coming back in a single day I would not want to have to do it by train. When I'm going out of state and staying out of state for a couple days train is perfectly fine and as long as the Amtrak lines up with my schedule I generally will
Do you want those states to have living things in them in fifty years? Do you want exterior temperatures under 105f/40c most days?
Because you can't have both that and cars. This isnt me being your mom, this is me telling you youre the reason I don't bother with savings, because I have an inkling what the world is gonna be in twenty years if we don't fix shit now, and I'm not eager to see that shit.
Dude its not worth the space (and maintenance, insurance, etc) of an entire car for two deliveries a year, thats fuvking insane, get over yourself. And people can include rental/delivery in cost of the item or wherever. Or we can gave full communism and they just do it.
Plus, and I say this living in California; cargo bikes really do work fine most places. Even here (not all, but most) youre just being afraid of change, And it's cringe.
I'm sorry, but the earths carrying capacity does not have room for your pathological american bullshit.
And what if it's pouring down rain? Or snowing? And I just don't feel like becoming completely soaked just to go to the grocery store. There are lots of reasons someone might want a car over a bike. I actually have a bike and I do use it, fun fact I'm also a bus driver so I'm pretty fond of public transportation because it directly feeds my livelihood. However I have this neat little thing where I don't really sweat much even if I'm basically on the verge of heat stroke. So if it's anything more than like 60° F outside and sunny and I'm doing some type of cardio such as biking i will start to overheat.
So the majority of my bike riding is in the fall and winter months, but I do very much enjoy during those months when I can take the bike to work thankfully I don't have to go very far and I get to ride the local transit for free as a bus driver.
The carrying capacity of Earth is already handling the majority of Americans owning multiple cars, I'm literally only asking for enough parking for one car for each individual in the design of a building. Which is literally just a couple floors of a parking garage and you're over here asking like I want the end of the world. If you ever want to see Improvement in public transportation you need to stop being so extremist because it pushes people away from the idea entirely
Dude, youve never seen a good transit system have you? You shouldn't be walking more than a couple blocks
Or get shit delivered
Or, hey, what if we stop driving cars so we can stop global warming getting worse? And more people don't have this fucking problem?
the carrying capacity of earth is already handling
No its fucking not and if we keep going like this literally everyone dies. I dunno about you, but I can think of much more pleasant ways to go out than climate apocalypse.
you'll never get better transit if you jeep being so radical
What I'm hearing here is "I fucking hate public transit and enjoy fucking my car! witness me!
Who pays extra for suburbs? Suburbs are significantly cheaper than the city.
Because they're subsidized to Fuck and city costs are inflated. Suburbs are ecological nightmares, and cannot continue to exist if you want a green earth in 80 years.
How are suburbs subsidized and how are city costs inflated?
City costs are inflated by exploitative landlords.
Suburb costs are subsidized by basically all the infrastructure for them; none of it pays for itself. Not the roads not the wiring not the water and sewer. Yes I know everywhere has roads, but suburbs demand a high standard of them and don't produce anything with them.
Youre not being space efficient like a city, or (whatever degree of) self sufficient like the country, so everything is just car trips, any time you leave the house. Like in OP.
I did the same math and my results came out the opposite way - in a much cheaper country however. I had a rent free situation over an hour away, but ended up renting an apartment near work. My time alone was worth it, being able to pay the month's rent using one week's commute time for freelancing after work. And the monthly fuel cost itself would've been 2/3 of my month's rent.
Everyone's circumstances are different. I made what I believe was the most sensible economic decision - paying to get out of commuting. For you, the opposite was sensible, commuting to reduce rent. Can't really judge you for doing what's best for your wallet in these tough times we're living.
Sure, there are inconveniences with living in the suburbs, but there are some positives. A dollar typically goes further than in the city, meaning more space for gardening, hobbies, kids, etc. You get to have neighbors without literally living on top of eachother. Usually more quiet then urban settings,etc.
You don't have neighbors though. Not in american suburbs at least. Not in any good way.
What a ridiculous thing to say...
I mean if you get urban and rural, what's there not to get about the suburbs? It's the best and worst of both. More open lands and less congestion but also rush hour sucks and people suck at driving. It's far to go get something, but car rides with buddies is its own fun.
It's not the best of both though, it just the worst of both.
The best of both are small towns along railways, with a dense core with some amenities surrounded by decreasing density until it quickly becomes pure countryside, and thanks to the station it's easy to get to and from the big city.
And if you only want rural surroundings you can have train halts basically in the middle of nowhere, there's a couple like that in my region and it's absolutely delightful.
Oh my fuck that sounds so cool. I think youre right. Trains, as always, are key.
So do you put a population limit on small towns? How do you think major Metropolitan areas got started? They didn't just appear one day, they grew over time from small port and station towns...
huh? why would suburbs magically be exempt from that idea?
Yes, places grow, this is why it's important to apply good urban planning and use as much high density housing as possible, otherwise you get the miserable car-dependent sprawl we see in america and much of the rest of the world.
By centering around transit stops you get rid of the need for all the parking and roads that takes a ton of space (which lets urban areas be smaller while containing the same amount of living space), and by having many small towns with high density centers spread out like this you maximize how many people can live close to the countryside.
many small towns with high density centers
This is a perfect description of the Netherlands
and surprise surprise the netherlands is really nice
My point is that what you described is basically a city with suburbs on a reduced scale. If a town is nice and successful, you're gonna have people that want to move there, so your options are to build outward, upward, or not at all. It sounds like you'd prefer towns build upward rather than outward, which is obviously valid, but it's a matter of preference. People who don't mind living in an apartment will move into the city center, people who value space over commute will move to the suburbs.
Where I think things get turned around (in the states anyway), is the lack of community-run programs and local business owners. Community gardens, neighborhood solar cells, locally owned farms, grocers, and corner stores are all things I'd like to see way more of in suburban areas.
Not the best. The best of rural is nature wildness and independence. The ability to wander off into your backyard and shoot something and not get an eyebrow raised. The ability to pick a direction, and start walking, and not turn around until your water gets low, then go home, and not meet another person unless you choose to. The option to just dig a big ass hole or marvel at the intricacy of the ecology. Maybe have a few dozen semi feral cats, so nobody xan quite say you are ir arent the creepy cat lady. The best of rural is room to experiment and play, to be entirely food independent, etc. And oh my god it can get so quiet! Its nice. Peaceful, if a little rough. And if something goes horribly globally wrong? Might not even be your problem.
Suburbs have... A little privacy indoors, I guess? Room for a small garden, if your house is old, maybe some fruit trees? A garage to play with if you don't drive, which is a major sacrifice?
The best of urban us art culture and people at your fingertips, connectedness and depth. Walking two blocks into an entirely different world, hopping on the train/bus to a dozen art museums and twice as many different cuisines and so many options. Knowing that there are friends for you nearby, if you just find them. Enemies too, probably. Its collaboration and history and the intense humanness of the designed world around you, and oh my god the architecture. At its best, which I admit is rare, its the very very almost imperceptibly low grade version of the thrill of collaboration all the time. And if something goes horribly globally wrong, at least you know youre not alone. Its pretty cool. I'm a fan.
Suburbs have none of this. They pretend at the restaurants, but they're all chain shit, homogenized to pointlessness.
Suburbs are garbage. Youre as dependent on long ass supply chains as an urban core, but you're all tiny little ratter dogs pretending to be wolves on the tundra, so you don't acknowledge or embrace it. You get all the isolation with none of the solitude. It takes almost as long to get anywhere, but you can't just chill on your farm or go forage in the woods, so you need to go.
Suburbs ate garbage poison and ecologically unsustainable. One can argue modern cities are unsustainable too, but there's room for doubt on that one; there are economies of scale to take advantage of.
Anything with the prefix SUB is garbage except subtitles or submarines.
Or...you know... rawr
Rawr rawr
We're talking about sex, right?
Hopefully
I like suburbs because it's relatively calm, I can build a workshop in my garage, and there's still pretty good amenities. And it's significantly cheaper than the city.