I have 4 supermarkets in a 10 min walk radius, to reach one of them I don't even need to cross a single public street. Same for schools, I know of 3 in my street, there are probably more but as I don't have kids I wouldn't know.
I think you missed the entire point, it's a design choice, if you design everything around cars of course going grocery shopping will require a car... my supermarkets don't even have parking lots.
> it's a design choice
Yes. Americans chose big houses and yards.
They by and large don’t though. Instead, big houses and yards are the only options on the table for most Americans because of zoning regulation and developers just copy/pasting designs to save money.
There isn’t an option for new brick house in neighborhood built before cars were a thing. You either have the existing housing stock, which is astronomically more valuable, or you don’t. There’s no developer building those formats anymore.
>big houses and yards are the only options on the table for most Americans because of zoning regulation
Worse, they're not an option for more americans specifically because of zoning and regulation. If not for government micro management there'd be more density, more cheap housing and you wouldn't need to drive 4hr out of the city to find a single family that's affordable.
>There isn’t an option for new brick house in neighborhood built before cars were a thing.
There would perhaps be if not for all the regulation. Maybe not brick, probably something with brick veneer, but someone would be shoehorning them into small lots.
> There isn’t an option for new brick house in neighborhood built before cars were a thing
Every time I look those houses are on lots of similar sized to modern lots. People back then choose space as well. They did allow stores in those neighborhoods though, so you could do some of the basic things in life without getting on the streetcar or walking. Those neighborhoods were also closer to jobs or close to a streetcar (depending on era) because you obviously couldn't drive. However the size wasn't much different from today.
Brick is much less common today - but that is because brick is a terrible building material if you look at it like an engineer. It is hard to change, has a poor R value, it is expensive, and slow to put up. People whose knowledge of building comes from "the three little pigs" think brick is great and sticks are bad, those who understand real engineering understand the real complexity and trade offs. You can get brick today if you want - but it is almost always a decorative facade for engineering reasons.
The mixed-use development, which was practically banned during the automobile era, is a great example of doing more with less. As you mention, being able to walk over to your local school, or park, or market, or clothing shop, etc. helps reduce the need for car travel for small things, which allows us to have fewer cars on the road, spend less on infrastructure, and make driving a little more pleasant.
But there are other benefits. That local coffee shop or clothing store is better able to compete, because they don't have to compete on efficient product delivery which is something that you see in the suburbs Ala Starbucks or Wal-Mart. This increases entrepreneurial activities and helps money spread instead of concentrate. It's no coincidence in my mind that income inequality has increased partially because of tax rates, but also because of concentration of businesses that can best realize supply chain efficiency.
To your point about brick, sure yea homes don't have to be brick, but generally plastic siding sucks visually, plus suburban houses are built incoherently, so if we could just get something that looks good that's half the battle. But perhaps the most important part, which I'm not sure suburban housing design can really accommodate, is the layout and streetscape design that enables a healthy mix of SFH, apartments, and other living arrangements mixed with businesses and amenities.
I think you are making an actively counterproductive conflation between "banning random crap" and the automobile. I think they only happened together because of luck and timing.
Zoning became a thing during the height of the greatest generation's political relevance[1]. Pretty much everything that generation did was use government authority and planning as a cudgel. It's understandable that they would make this error considering that when they were young they saw central authority save the world. But they banned a hell of a lot of things that didn't need banning and they had the government meddle in all sorts of things that would've naturally turned out fine. This worked initially, but the problem is that democratic-ish government always leans toward stabilization and status quos and existing interests and whatnot. They are always re-active and never pro-active because it literally cannot be any-active until after the public cares so much as to vote based on it (whereas a dictator or whatever is substantially more free to take speculative action).
Now, here we are generations later with a substantially different society, different economic situations, different problems, the institutions those people created have run the usual course of expansion and co-option over time, etc, etc, and it's clear that what they built is acting as a force that tries to keep society stuck doing things that are no longer appropriate. What was fine to have the government regulate in favor of when there were half as many people, twice as much opportunity and everyone shared mostly the same values and desires no longer works.
Doing more of the same, having government intervene and micro manage cars, use zoning and other rules to encourage "the right kind" of development (which is exactly what they were trying to do back when they adopted zoning) or transportation or whatever won't work because the entire premise that we can do it this way and get good overall results is flawed. The whole approach we are trying to use does not work except for nearby local maximums and on short timelines. We need to get the government out of managing land use, out of managing transportation, or at least as out of these things as it possibly can be, and let the chips fall where they may. Developers will build slummy SROs, people will sit in traffic, but eventually it will all work itself out and reach equilibrium. But the longer we dam up demand behind regulation the higher the pressure the leaks we are forced to chase are.
[1] Dare I say it came about partly a reaction to the fact that they had to start sharing society with the quality of adults that resulted from their "quantity has a quality all it's own" approach toward producing children.
I broadly agree with you, and frankly what I'm advocating for is to get the government out of zoning and transportation precisely because of the problems you mention, but also because of the negative externalities caused by it.
Today we do not have market choices, because the Federal Highway Administration and every state department of transportation enforces and reinforces centralized design patterns that as we can see today no longer work (and likely never did). It's baked into their raison d'être. Unfortunately, as you also note, items like roads and housing developments live in the public sphere and so we can't and won't completely divorce the government from managing those projects or regulations, but we can examine what works well and increases attributes we want more of and do our best to drive regulation toward those attributes, and in some cases remove regulation to see more of those attributes. In my mind, work that increases walking, biking (or other similar transportation), and rail provide the best mix of low government regulation and effective development patterns which preserve most of the other things we like, such as cars and convenience.
I'm not sure I'm in favor of banning random crap, or maybe you read something into my comment that I didn't intend?
Plenty of big houses with yards in the surburbs in European cities, almost exclusively actually, and very often cheaper than much smaller flats in the city centers. They're still connected to the public transport system too.
If that’s what they choose then why make it illegal to build anything else?
Design won't mean you won't get soaked if it happens to rain when you need to walk to the nearest bus station to get to work. You can reduce the issues with public transport somewhat (at the expense of its density and cost advantages) but you can never completely eliminate them compared to personal vehicles that get you from door to door.
> Design won't mean you won't get soaked if it happens to rain
Sometime I wonder in what alternative world people live in which rain is a problem... Yes it's life, sometimes it' warm, sometimes cold, sometimes dry, sometimes wet. Buy a $10 rain poncho or umbrella and move on lol. How fragile are you that you can't deal with basic things like rain ? There are hard things in life, like your kid getting diagnosed with leukemia or your spouse dying, rain is waaay down the list.
We need a reality show about you people, I don't pay for netflix but I'd pay for that
Rain has been solved: with enclosed vehicles that take you from your home to your destination.
If you have streets as narrow as in e.g. Florence, the rain can only hit you from above, whereas in car-centric suburbia rain can hit you from the sides in basically all directions - so an umbrella blocking the top isn't enough, you need a car.
In other words, the problem here that the car is solving, is a problem that the car is causing.
Yes. People at ancient times like the 20th century had technologies that could protect them from the rain while they walked.
It's too bad that we lost that knowledge. But we could probably rediscover it with a moderate investment on research.
There's things like umbrellas, you know.
No need to wrap yourself in two tons of steel, aluminum and plastic. 100 grams is enough.
You can also design things so that people are not crammed in at a rate of hundreds of thousands per square km. Then, car-based infrastructure gives you a lot of freedom to place homes and businesses far apart and have reasonable travel time and capacity for everyone.
When I moved from Manhattan to an "evil" suburb full of "stroads," my door-to-door time to pretty much everything decreased. Getting rid of waiting for the elevator was a big time saver. Waiting 10-15 minutes if you get unlucky about the arrival of the train was pretty bad. Added all up, most walks took at least 10 minutes to go each direction and non-local trips took 30 minutes or more.
> You can also design things so that people are not crammed in at a rate of hundreds of thousands per square km.
Yeah I mean that's like 99.9% of the surface of the world, nobody is preventing you to go live your dream. We're specifically talking about cities, a city without population density is not a city by definition
For some reason, urbanists like to attack suburbs while also saying that everything is so far apart and takes so long. If you want to live in a city, live in a city, but don't pretend that it's the only way to live.
Sure. Now tell us how much time it took to get to your office in Manhattan and how much it cost to park there. The suburb is built around the fact that people live there but travel to the main city every day.
Now if you have decent train service to the main city, this is starting to be interesting urban design.
There is great train service from the suburbs to Manhattan, but I worked from home and moved to a different metro area. As it stands, parking by the office in the city I live near is about $150-200/month. Taking the train there and back every day from somewhere in the city would be about $150/month.
> Now tell us how much time it took to get to your office in Manhattan and how much it cost to park there.
Most people do not work in Manhattan. I'm not sure about OPs situation, but there are a lot of other places people work in New York City, not to mention other cities.
You're just rejecting his hypothetical - Manhattan is dense.