The suburbs don't actually present a solution to this. There is no more nature in them than there is in any other urban environment. It's all manicured lawns and endless pavement, and you can't even walk to a park, because getting anywhere requires hopping into a car.
If you want to see nature, you have to live way out in the boonies, on at a minimum, two-acre lots. If everyone lived like that, we'd all have two-hour commutes on twenty-lane highways.
I wasn’t advocating for suburbs. There are more options besides suburbs and urban areas—you should check them out!
> If you want to see nature, you have to live way out in the boonies, on at a minimum, two-acre lots. If everyone lived like that, we'd all have two-hour commutes on twenty-lane highways.
What a strange comment! Millions of people live with reasonable access to nature and most of them don’t have 2 acre lots nor do they need “twenty-lane highways”. Y’all urban folks need to venture out of your cities once in a while—it’s a biiiiggg world out there.
I don't quite get your point, are you suggesting to live near nature or to have the ability to access nature when you want to?
If the second, I really don't see how taking cars out of urban centers and making nice walkable people-focused areas stops you from taking a bus out and biking the rest of the way, or even renting a car once you're out of the city part
> I don't quite get your point, are you suggesting to live near nature or to have the ability to access nature when you want to?
Both? I’m not really sure how these are different given that proximity is the limiting factor in access.
> If the second, I really don't see how taking cars out of urban centers and making nice walkable people-focused areas stops you from taking a bus out and biking the rest of the way, or even renting a car once you're out of the city part
I’m not sure what you’re arguing here. I certainly don’t have a problem with making urban areas more walkable. That said, an hour of driving after work isn’t going to get you past the suburbs in most US cities, which means you’re limited to weekend trips and if you’re spending every weekend trying to get out of the city it’s worth asking if city life is optimal for you.
> Both? I’m not really sure how these are different given that proximity is the limiting factor in access.
Think about what happens if everyone does this. There are about 613,000 households in my city; what does it look like if all of them were to move out of the city and go somewhere closer to nature? Well, they'd probably each take up a lot more space, and... well, that sounds a lot like suburban sprawl! And suddenly you're not quite so proximate to nature anymore.
No, I'd rather let cities build up, and build/maintain better access to nature outside the city via transit. Leave nature be, and make it easy to get to when you want to.
The US has 2.2 BN acres which is 7 acres for every man, woman, and child, and yet each person resides on maybe 0.05 acres (average lot size is .2 acres divided by average household size of 2.5 people/household is 0.08 rounding down because tens of millions don’t live in a single-family building). There is a tremendous amount of space that isn’t inhabited—much of that is used for farming, but we farm far more than we need—millions of acres could be used for housing.
Anyway, I’m not saying everyone needs to pack up and move out of cities—only that the gospel of urban density sounds dystopian to me.
Sure, there’s plenty of space out in the middle of nowhere. But can you imagine the scale of the infrastructure that would be required to turn so much of that into living space? Think streets, water, sewer, power, food distribution, etc.
Anyway, I’m not saying everyone should live in concrete jungles either. Think more like the Netherlands than New York City.
> Sure, there’s plenty of space out in the middle of nowhere. But can you imagine the scale of the infrastructure that would be required to turn so much of that into living space? Think streets, water, sewer, power, food distribution, etc.
My position is "we don't need to move everyone into cities or expand public transit infrastructure to every corner of the country". It is not "we should move everyone out of the cities and distribute them uniformly across the country".
> Anyway, I’m not saying everyone should live in concrete jungles either. Think more like the Netherlands than New York City.
The Netherlands has 10x the population density of the US, and the US probably would come to resemble NL if we didn't have the luxury of space. The US has a whole range of density, however--if you want something like NL, we certainly have it on offer, and I'm fully on board with making urban and suburban areas more people-friendly. I just disagree with people who think we all need to live urban lives.
Okay, because we haven’t actually touched on many of the reasons us pro-density folks think it’s a good thing: how do you suggest we reduce our emissions as much as we need to in the coming decades? Keeping in mind that a large proportion of emissions are from light-duty vehicles and heating/cooling buildings, both of which increase with lower densities.
In any case, I don’t think everyone needs to live an urban life, I just think suburbia should get quite a lot more urban, and both cities and suburbs should be easier to get around without a car. That’s where the vast majority of people live anyway.
> Okay, because we haven’t actually touched on many of the reasons us pro-density folks think it’s a good thing: how do you suggest we reduce our emissions as much as we need to in the coming decades? Keeping in mind that a large proportion of emissions are from light-duty vehicles and heating/cooling buildings, both of which increase with lower densities.
Massive projects to resettle people in urban areas or dramatically extend public transit networks will take many decades to break even from a carbon emissions standpoint. It's much faster (and far more politically tenable) to electrify as much transportation (e.g., EVs) and heating/cooling as possible while moving our grid to clean energy.
> In any case, I don’t think everyone needs to live an urban life, I just think suburbia should get quite a lot more urban, and both cities and suburbs should be easier to get around without a car.
I mostly agree with this, although I think we can decouple density and walkability. My grievance was with folks who want to impose an urban lifestyle on everyone.
I don't think anyone wants to force you to live an urban lifestyle. I personally wish there were places I could move that was walkable, bikeable, and without having to cross 4 lanes of loud polluting traffic.
Those places don't really exist, since most major US cities have been built to accommodate cars first. And even those are way less affordable (because people want to live in cities and theres not enough housing to cover it) forcing people who would rather live in cities to move to suburbs instead. That's what people are lamenting.
I'm sure there are some people like you're describing ("I just wish there was a walkable place for me"), but many people regularly argue that almost everyone needs to move into cities because suburban/exurban/rural sprawl is taking over the world, we're running out of space/nature, it's the only way to save our planet from climate change, infrastructure outside of cities is financially unsustainable, etc.
For what it's worth, I'm bought into walkability/bikeability/etc. I'm just tired of the density, social problems, and distance from nature associated with most US cities. I think it would be really cool to get some like-minded people together and build a little village with walkability/bikeability/nature in mind.
> It's much faster (and far more politically tenable) to electrify as much transportation (e.g., EVs) and heating/cooling as possible while moving our grid to clean energy.
Improving public transit doesn’t have to mean huge rail projects though, it can just mean running buses more frequently and giving them their own lanes to skip traffic. And we don’t have to massively resettle people, we can let (and encourage) towns to densify and build more bike/ped/transit infrastructure.
This also isn’t necessarily fast, no. But I don’t think it’s either/or; I think we need both.
> although I think we can decouple density and walkability.
I don’t think we can. The two are directly opposed to each other. The less dense a place is, the further apart everything is, which inherently makes it less walkable. Certainly you can (and should) build sidewalks anywhere if they don’t already exist, but past a low enough density nobody is going to walk anyway unless they’re forced to.
> Vehicle turnover is very slow, so I don’t expect this to happen as quickly as you might be thinking
The best case for getting people to uproot and move to cities in significant numbers is still measured in generations, not years or even decades. The best case for extending public transit to every suburb and exurb (never mind rural community) is probably on the same order. The worst case for EVs is a couple of decades (to 80% of cars on the road; obviously there's a long tail that diminishes).
> Improving public transit doesn’t have to mean huge rail projects though, it can just mean running buses more frequently and giving them their own lanes to skip traffic.
The only people who are likely to take buses in the suburbs (with few exceptions) or exurbs or beyond are those who can't afford cars or who lack a driver's license. An extra lane to skip traffic isn't compelling because traffic is a mild problem outside of cities (perhaps with the exception in certain city-adjacent suburbs). Frankly, the same is true of rail.
> This also isn’t necessarily fast, no. But I don’t think it’s either/or; I think we need both.
I like the idea of more public transit and walkability, but I don't think there's any legitimate case to be made that these initiatives will meaningfully reduce our carbon footprint in the necessary timescales.
> I don’t think we can. The two are directly opposed to each other. The less dense a place is, the further apart everything is, which inherently makes it less walkable.
Walkable doesn't mean you can get to every place by foot, it just means you can get to the places you need to go to by foot. Today, suburbs and exurbs have huge zones for residential and commercial such that most people have to drive to get to the commercial areas, but we could easily rezone to allow for a finer-grained patchwork of residential and commercial zones. The finer-grained patchwork means that less of any zone needs to be reserved for parking/cars (it's not just breaking one big parking lot into many smaller lots with the same total area--in a finer-grained patchwork, fewer people need to drive so the total area for parking/cars is lower) which in aggregate means more space for other things. It may never be as walkable as a dense city, but there's still tremendous opportunity for improvement.
> The best case for extending public transit to every suburb and exurb (never mind rural community) is probably on the same order. The worst case for EVs is a couple of decades (to 80% of cars on the road; obviously there's a long tail that diminishes).
Why are you using the standard of "public transit to every suburb and exurb" for transit and "80% of cars" for vehicle electrification? There's a lot of low-hanging fruit in the first-ring suburbs that we can tackle before the exurbs; those may be a lost cause for now, but a lot of people live in those inner suburbs!
And that aside, we need to at least stop the bleeding, right? If metro area growth boundaries keep expanding outward, that means more cars on the road and more energy and materials needed to make that happen. If we don't allow existing towns to build up at all, the only way for them to build is outward.
> I like the idea of more public transit and walkability, but I don't think there's any legitimate case to be made that these initiatives will meaningfully reduce our carbon footprint in the necessary timescales.
Alone they won't, just like vehicle electrification alone won't. We need to both reduce VMT and electrify, and we need both now.
> but we could easily rezone to allow for a finer-grained patchwork of residential and commercial zones. The finer-grained patchwork means that less of any zone needs to be reserved for parking/cars (it's not just breaking one big parking lot into many smaller lots with the same total area--in a finer-grained patchwork, fewer people need to drive so the total area for parking/cars is lower) which in aggregate means more space for other things.
This isn't separating walkability and density, this is higher density. This is the kind of thing we need!
> The suburbs don't actually present a solution to this. There is no more nature in them than there is in any other urban environment. It's all manicured lawns and endless pavement, and you can't even walk to a park, because getting anywhere requires hopping into a car.
That's not a suburb, at least not many of them.
In past topics I've asked for concrete examples of these suburbs where you can't walk anywhere and have not received many answer. Can you name a handful?
There is a ton of nature near my suburb, to an extent that is impossible in a city. A 5 minute bike ride gets me into the forest (not a manicured city park, actual forest) which extends for a long distance. I can ride my mountain bike all day without getting into built areas.
From my extensive experience of a few different suburbs, neighborhoods are often separated by large stretches of nature. Perhaps we have a different understanding of what a suburb is, but they absolutely contain way more nature than any city.
If you want to see nature, you have to live way out in the boonies, on at a minimum, two-acre lots. If everyone lived like that, we'd all have two-hour commutes on twenty-lane highways.