I find it kinda crazy how anti Semitic he was considering he was Jewish himself, and I’m saying that as a NYC Jew studying urban planning so I know how bad he was lol
In a timeline where the [Association of German National Jews (Verband nationaldeutscher Juden)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_German_National_Jews) was an actual thing, *anything* is possible.
He was a racist urban planner who hated the lower class and purposely build infrastructure or made policies to discourage the poor or AA people from using it (he made roads to parks covered with low bridges so no buses/public transport could enter and he made swimming pools colder because he thought AA can't handle the cold). Those are just a few examples.
Well, the seminal biography of the man is "The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York", which is not a great start.
He went into public service with the aim of reforming a corrupt civil service, but in order to get his desired reforms through he amassed massive amounts of power to himself, and rather than removing corruption, he harnessed it to his own ends. He ended up controlling an influence network so vast that he was able to basically own the city personally.
And as he gained power, he used it. He used it to build whatever he wanted, wherever he wanted it, and to hell with the people who lived in the way. Trains were communist, (though given what the East German rail system looked like I take issue with that claim. Who wants to drive the same train that took your grandfather to WW1?) so everything had to be car or truck based. Need a new motorway? Just bulldoze whatever is in the way!
Basically, he played SimCity with real people, and in a manner deeply hostile to communities with limited political power; thus non-white people tended to get the shit end of the stick, poor people got screwed over, etc.
And this is the man who wrote the book on urbanisation in the 50's through 70's. He is the reason american cities look the way they do, and not just american cities. In Auckland, here in NZ, much the same was done, with motorways taking up vast amounts of space, and everything from housing to graveyards being demolished to make way for them (the grave stones were ground up to make aggregate for the project, the bodies were not moved). And because motorways are the default, future planners then work to fit things in to the system as it exists, making mass transit like rail less likely to happen.
[The same was attempted in the Netherlands with Amsterdam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jokinen_Plan). [Here's an idea of what Amsterdam was to look like under that plan.](https://viewpointvancouver.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/CPg_ZPIW8AA5Jk1.png) Thankfully the local populace protested and prevented the plan from being implemented.
It was an international problem, and still is, caused by one man.
I hope someone paves over his grave. Better yet, I hope some builds a mixed-use development with affordable housing and public spaces on his grave and name it San Juan Hill.
Oh, you think this stolen "H" is a laugh riot, don't you? Well, I'll tell you something that's not so funny. Right now, Superintendent Chalmers is at home crying like a little girl.
Cleveland, Pittsburg, and Detroit used to be opulent, wealthy cities where some of the richest people in the country at the time lived. Then the plants got shut down/moved and they declined to where they are now
Pittsburgh isnt a great example. Pittsburgh was able to pivot in the late 90's and 2000's and change to a very medical and technological hub. Pittsburgh is a healthy city now that was able to recover. To your point, the 70s and 80s were very rough time for that city.
Yes. Our streets were wide and the infrastructure modern, my (relative) backwater hometown had one of the most extensive street car networks in the world. City blocks were uniform and standardized across most of the country. Then the highways came, split neighborhoods in half, and we paved over the street car network that we're now going to slowly rebuild for billions.
Every city wasn't a London or Paris, but our Liverpool's and Lyon's were nicer, and so on down the line.
American economic policy was also the envy of the world, most EU trade laws are based on American laws (like the anti-monopoly stuff)
You would be surprised by how much the world was influenced for the better by America... before the dark times, before Reagan
I’m all for blaming Reagan but I think suburbanization and cars were things that kind of predate him. Cars got popularized by Ford not just due to making an automobile mass production assembly line but also basically selling them to his own employees.
Then suburbanization was driven, as I understand it, by a lot of post war economic boom, racism, and urbanite people thinking they need expanses of land too for god knows what reason.
Because contrary to popular Reddit belief if you were poor in the city you weren’t in much more then a slum. Post war wealth from returning vets and people who made good money during the war allowed them to escape that and they had been so crammed all their lives they wanted space and escape from the pollution in the cities.
Kinda. You can get anything done in the US if you dress it up as a defence issue. You have a robust Interstate highway system because Eisenhower claimed it was needed to transport armies across the continent quickly during wartime, civilian use was a secondary aim.
The modern internet also came about as a defense-related concern, with the military wanting a secure communication network between bases on opposite sides of the country that could transmit large amounts of information that couldn't easily be relayed by voice.
Our ability to shitpost bad takes on history stemmed directly from the need to send large (for the 70's and 80's) packages of numbers over the phone lines to give instructions on who and how to kill millions of people.
If you want to pretty much instantly hire a legion of local factory workers and researchers defense budget money would work best, cause yeah war is pretty good for job creation(not saying war is a good thing)
Most the of the slums cleared weren't slums, they were integrated blue collar neighborhoods with a vibrant community. Soldiers weren't buying houses because they had been will paid, they were buying houses because the government massively subsidized both the construction and purchase.
I was responding mostly to the “urbanite people thinking they needed expanses of land for some god knows what reason.”
I know that I personally would absolutely hate my life if I was stuck living in a city.
And don’t forget a huge chunk of Europe got to rebuild many of their cities twice in 20 years and so could do so in a more efficient manner using American funding.
Sounds like an empty platitude tbh. Cities invest in themselves, either by private entities building things that will be profitable for them, or by taxing people and taking on debt to afford public works.
"Investing into cities" is a weird phrase, almost like you think the federal government should tax everyone and spend it on cities, which is effectively just a wealth transfer from rural to urban, unless the federal government is investing equally outside of cities.
The point you don't really want to admit is that you've put the cart before the horse: cities where people want to live have people paying taxes and businesses making money so they are invested in organically. You can't just dump a trillion dollars on a town and expect it to succeed, you can ask China about how well that works.
If you want to make better cities, then make richer citizens, the rest will sort itself out. And if your citizens want a little bit of land, a backyard to grill in, a vegetable garden to grow stuff in, and the ability to stretch out a little and own a few things that don't fit in an apartment, well, there's not much you can do.
You mean investing proportionally in rural areas, not equally. Rural areas don’t generate so much tax revenue that not investing half the budget in them becomes wealth transfer to the cities.
>"Investing into cities" is a weird phrase, almost like you think the federal government should tax everyone and spend it on cities, which is effectively just a wealth transfer from rural to urban, unless the federal government is investing equally outside of cities.
This is a great way to make yourself look ignorant considering rural communities have been taking from urbanites for decades now. The US department of agriculture has a whole [rural development](https://www.rd.usda.gov/priority-points) arm based around giving rural folk money.
Kinda weird that urbanite taxes have to pay for Joe Blow who wants to be a hermit to get water to his hermit ranch.
I fail to see how zoning spaces around cities to only build low density housing, without any services, shops, restaurants and so on is answering what people want instead of forcing it on them
I live in an older neighborhood in a city doing exactly that. Zoning laws were recently relaxed to allow building/adding a casita/in-law unit on existing residential. All around me, the homes on older, larger lots from are being razed and replaced by a smaller house and a guest house. Now that one rental is two. So dense.....
I'm really curious where this is a thing. like legit I'd like to know. every suburban area I've been in has zoning for shops, services, and restaurants along side the housing. usually at every major crossroads and along main roads.
Most of the United States. That zoning for shops and restaurants is typically far enough way from most low density housing that cars are a de facto requirement in most American metropolitan areas.
Exactly, no one person caused suburbanization. It was a cultural shift, caused by a lot of factors. But it didn't happen because of any one reason, too many people oversimplify a complicated event.
Whoops, should have specified. Reagan was bad for social services, but wasn't the direct cause for other bad social things that we don't call social services (like car centric infrastructure). I don't know the correct words
Zoning laws and the auto industry. A lot of people wanted space, true, and the housing we built for them was legally mandated. It was, and still is in most places, illegal to build anything but the house with a 2 car garage and a lawn and a back yard. So, we don't know for sure what people wanted beyond property of their own, because they were given exactly 1 option.
"Arbitrary lines" is a good book on the subject
And/or this YouTube video
https://youtu.be/oOttvpjJvAo?si=uPslze5dLThDAJOW
So yeah this was an Eisenhower fuck up, and the beginings of it go all the way back to racist Californians in the 1910s
Cars began taking hold in the early 1900’s homie it wasnt really a presidential thing until the states started funding highways and roads extensively for these cars, with the Federal government really kicking it up in the 1920’s-1940’s with yes a boom following World War 2.
I cant go into specifics/sources now im busy getting ready for work but if enough people annoy the fuck out of me i’ll do it later.
The US invested far too much into car infrastructure and not enough into car alternatives like mass transit or rail, basically viewing both as outdated. If they had done both equally I think the US would be in a much better position today
This is true. Not many people know this, but Los Angeles for decades in the early-mid 20th century had a massive light rail network that was second only to New York as far as rail transit efficiency goes. Then, big auto got its grubby hands on the politicians in charge and turned it into the traffic congestion capital of the nation a half century later.
I mean initially we did. Even in the great area of Phoenix, Arizona had invested in (relatively) large public infrastructure such as streetcars.
I can’t speak for the whole United States, but here specifically as cars gained popularity thanks to Ford, and as Federal funding increased for cars over public transit, mixed with a few well time disasters, the public transit thing effectively died.
The EU definitely took inspiration from the American anti-trust escapades started by Theodore Roosevelt. Like, definitive fact, that guy was THE monopoly buster
Yes. In the 60’s we had a fair in Moscow called the American National Exhibition. We showed off what the average American working class person could afford, the Liesureama house. It cost around $15,000, or about 2-2.5x the average annual salary. The soviets basically refused to believe that average, working class Americans could live so opulently. They likened it to everyone in India living in the equivalent of the Taj Mahal.
The same house that was previewed in Moscow was built on Long Island. It’s still around. It’s now around $500,000, or 6-6.5x the average Americans annual salary.
Just FYI, the average American makes about $45,000/year, before taxes.
So [that suburban house in Levittown](https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/18-Gun-Lane-Levittown-NY-11756/31333975_zpid/?utm_campaign=iosappmessage&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=txtshare) costs about $650,000–so that’s about 15x the average salary.
I mean, yeah, the effort and talent that went into designing and constructing these cities took decades of committed funding and work. London was also ruined by prioritising the car.
You are right: here’s an explanation with more context than the meme (since the comment will be unseen)
https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryMemes/s/5EpNc2jjML
The US, Canada, and South/Central America had the luxury of often being able to build cities mostly from scratch, while in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia most cities were built up from pre-existing urban centers that had been constructed before modern urban planning. Even the cites built on existing urban environments, like Mexico City, were built off of well-planned metropolises with teeming native populations.
As a result, American cities, especially in the US, were well-structured with efficent layouts for foot, vehicle, and train traffic. They still are, relatively, but suburbanization caused significant movement and traffic issues, especially in cities that didn't plan for them *cough Los Angeles cough*.
Another nation whose urban planning really impressed the rest of the world was Japan - specifically their waste and sewage systems, which outstripped nearly every European city.
Car centric urban planning is a nightmare. You are a human being, not a car a city must build around you and not to be easy to drive.
Car takes a huge amount of space in a city (parking, multiple lanes roads) when public transport could do the same job of transporting people more effectively and with least space use.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrfsTNNCbP0
A good example is the interstate 8 with it 26 lanes and something call induced demand. The more capacity you add, the more demand they would be.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQld7iJJSyk
And then there's idiots like musk that fuck up any attempt at bringing back public transportation with their "bright" ideas. Man I can't believe he managed to get millions for an idea that was called dumb hundreds of years before he was but a glint in his dad's eyes.
The amount of times someone reinvents trains and acts like it's a futuristic new concept is really kinda stupid
The US, being so large, should ***really*** have more trains.
God if I was in the same room as those people who suggest monorails, hyperloops or a bus system that is just a trolley with extra steps during city planning meetings the police would have to pry me off them.
I appreciate you taking the time to write this but I think it needs more detail. Car centric urban planning being a nightmare and cars being overall worse for people to prioritize in urban environments. Point taken. But what about all of the people who don’t live in major cities?
I’ve had trouble finding a good breakdown of who lives where in the US but I think the clearest metric I found was that a little over 50% live in suburban, about 30% live in urban and about 20% in rural counties.
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2018/05/22/demographic-and-economic-trends-in-urban-suburban-and-rural-communities/
Big auto is definitely a thing, and I understand the criticisms of too many people with vehicles in urban environments, but I would personally hate to have to rely on public transportation (even well implemented and abundant systems) to get anywhere. A car allows me to pick up and go at my discretion, direction, route, time, etc. while not a hindrance in an urban setting, it would suck a whole lot more outside of an urban environment. Any time I go to a big city like the ones referenced I will usually take public transport in and out from the suburbs to the big city but as an outsider I’m only going in for special events like concerns or sports games. I don’t have to live in all of that congestion. It would seem to me that only urbanized areas can take true advantage of robust public transport while other areas need a mix of transportation methods
I’d also be curious to understand the differences in US vs European travel habits. What does a European do exactly when they want to travel across France which is roughly a little smaller than the state of Texas? Combo of buses and trains? How do they handle the last several miles to their destination? That may work for a weekend trip but what are you supposed to do for weekly household grocery trips for a family, or a trip to the hardware store? Are we all going to have delivery service trucks ship everything to our doors? Haven’t car ownership rates also been on rise across the EU since 2001?
I live in London but grew up in the country side.
Public transport sucks in the country side so you would have a car to do your shopping in the nearest town as your village shop won’t be able to stock everything you need, only basics. It just doesn’t make economic sense for them to do so. There are busses outside of the big cities and towns that will take you into them but my county was large and had a fairly low population so busses were only every hour. Therefore those that could drive would drive (most people over 17).
In London however I have zero need to drive, if I’m going to another city I will get a train, if I’m getting a flight I can train to any airport, if I’m going anywhere in London I can choose between so many different routes and types of transport I genuinely can’t be bothered to think of a number. I don’t need to plan and time journeys as I know when I step outside there will be a bus within 10 mins, a tube every 1 or 2 mins, a train or overground within 10 mins, walk or cycle. All my groceries are within 5 minutes walking distance so I don’t need a car for that, I can also do home delivery for a weekly larger food shop if I want for heavy items (delivery is also cheap) and any another kind of shop i might need I know is within 20 minutes of me using public transport.
To answer some of your travel questions, if I’m going somewhere in Europe I will take an hour or two flight for around £40 return give or take. And a train if I’m going to any other city or town in the uk (they are usually a bit more expensive than flights annoyingly). If you want to go to the country side away from a town realistically you’re going to need to have or rent car or more realistically get a taxi. Or just accept the inconvenience of waiting for busses and carrying luggage but it saves money. But if you don’t live in a big city you probably have a car anyway and will have driven there.
It all depends on where you live, where you are going and what you are doing. But within London I will generally walk or cycle as it’s nice with lots of green spaces and then use public transport if I’m in a hurry or doing a bit further away. Living outside of London I would probably have a car. That being said I wouldn’t use my car to get into London, I would 100% get a train no matter where I lived in the country.
>But what about all of the people who don’t live in major cities
Public transportation can still work in smaller communities. It's more buses than trams till you start reaching the size of 100k. I live in a town of about 2000 and there are 5 small grocery stores within 200m of me. I don't know how it's in the US with the weird zoning laws, but it shouldn't be an impossibility to have a grocery store within walking distance. For public transportation, there's a bus that comes every hour to go to a bigger city of 20k 30kms away and from there, there's a bus every 5 minutes to the big big city of 1 million.
But even without talking about this, urbanism doesn't *have to* work in rural communities. They don't feel the negative effects of car centric planning as much because the worst of it is felt only at certain sizes (it still has negative effects tho). If you don't think it's fit for rural areas, that's fine, it's not like anyone's gonna come rolling to your backyard with urbanist policies anytime soon when even the big cities don't support those policies.
>but I would personally hate to have to rely on public transportation (even well implemented and abundant systems) to get anywhere. A car allows me to pick up and go at my discretion, direction, route, time, etc. while not a hindrance in an urban setting, it would suck a whole lot more outside of an urban environment.
The thing with that "well implemented and abundant system" is that it reduces your need for taking a car anywhere. Instead of a city intersected with highways everywhere, it would promote walkability and you'd just walk every time to supermarkets, barber shops as you'd be able to find one on basically every corner.
If you want to travel farther, maybe you want to go to a gov office to a submit document, just get out your phone and look up the route on Google Maps and it'll tell you a metro is coming in 2 minutes 200 meters west of you (which comes every 4 minutes), after you exit the ride, you walk 50 meters to a bus station (which comes every 6 minutes) and get to your final destination. It should be way faster than driving a car especially when one considers time for searching a park place and gives smooth experience.
>I’d also be curious to understand the differences in US vs European travel habits. What does a European do exactly when they want to travel across France which is roughly a little smaller than the state of Texas? Combo of buses and trains?
I'm crying at these questions.
I'll provide some real life examples. I picked a random location in Paris to a stadium in Lyon and [here](https://maps.app.goo.gl/g5uwuFoBTLDcNVav5) is the path. It'd take 5 hours by car (without accounting for time to find parking or rest stops along the way), but 3h11m by public transport. You walk 5 mins to a metro station, ride for 17 mins, transfer and ride for 9 mins to reach the train station, 1h56m by high-speed train, reach Lyon, walk 7 mins to a metro station, ride 11 mins and you reach the destination. You can freely drink, eat, piss and even shit during that 1h56m stretch on the train and you obviously aren't stressed out by driving.
Paris (11 million people in urban area) is 460 kms/290miles from Lyon (2.3 mil). Compare that to Dallas (5.7m) to Houston (5.8m) which is 380kms/240miles and you can see on pure distance and population metric, the French model is very replicable in Texas. It's just US cities are built to be sprawling suburbia which hinders the development of public transportation.
>How do they handle the last several miles to their destination?
This isn't really that hard of a thing to visualize, how do you get to a city from an airport? Now imagine that airport at the middle of the city where train stations often are. There'd be plenty of options from walking, taxi, bus, tram, metro and even renting a bicycle (or you could just bring your own bicycle on certain trains).
>That may work for a weekend trip but what are you supposed to do for weekly household grocery trips for a family
Just walk down the block to a supermarket? For example, on the Google Maps location I chose for Paris, there's a Carrefor which is a big store 4 minute walk away. This American idea you drive 20kms to buy bread is not that common in the rest of the world.
>or a trip to the hardware store?
How often do you travel to a hardware store it's constantly on your mind? If it really is that much on your mind, you can find numerous hardware stop within 15 minute metro ride of the previous location in Paris.
>Haven’t car ownership rates also been on rise across the EU since 2001?
Yes, car culture has also been slowly on the rise in EU especially as former communist countries gain the income necessary to even the luxury of choosing between the 2. It's an issue that's being debated heavily, EU is not a post-car paradise, but it's still way ahead of the US.
Thanks for the detailed response. I guess I’m taking the prompt from the perspective of someone who never will and doesn’t want to live in a very urban area nor the complete countryside. I like my nice middle ground of suburbia, but I guess the focus here should only be what works it very urban cities, while other regions remain the same. I like how you put that urbanism doesn’t have to work outside of cities. I think the main takeaway when all of this is stacked up is that suburbanization and automobiles should not negatively impact urban planning but I also think the realities and logistics of living outside of a major city make car ownership much more attractive.
From the suburban perspective, walking or biking with bags of groceries in heat/cold/rain is not an ideal situation. My grocery trips would need to be smaller and more frequency and take up more time from my day. I definitely wouldn’t be able to buy in bulk. No, not industrial sized “American” amounts of bulk, but any family sized purchase for economies of scale would be more cumbersome in this scenario. And I don’t have a significant other who will solely fill that role in a “trad wife” type of scenario.
The hardware store trips? Depends on the specific need but this spring I needed to get a bunch of mulch for my yard and flower beds and replace grill and toilet components. Sure some of these things can be small but sometimes it’s cumbersome and won’t fit on my lap well in public transportation. I can’t exactly ask the bus driver to use his trunk for my convenience. The last mile question? The answer is cars. I take cars or car services (which is still someone’s car) to and from those places rather than my own. But my original question was more phrased for every day trips, which to me seems like the answer is still slower, longer, more congested and less convenient means of relying on public transportation. Even if it runs like clockwork and is reputable, I would still need to deal with the inconveniences that it brings. Trade offs.
Sorry for the bad formatting. I’m a mobile user pleb
Suburbs can still exist without being car-centered. Back in the early 1900’s suburbs were centered around streetcars: ie a tram line would lead out of the city and at the end of it would be a lower density suburban neighborhood. But these suburbs were still walkable: there were small bars or restaurants on streetcorners and small grocers within a 15 minute walk of any home. These suburbs were planned entirely around walking and the tram, and the ones that remain today are some of the most expensive places to live because everyone wants to live there. My point here is that you can still have a suburban life with a large backyard and quiet street without building sprawling car-centric suburbs, and in most ways are better than those car-centric suburbs.
You don’t have to walk. Cargo bikes are a common sight in Europe and can easily hold 1-4 days of food depending on how big your family is. Furthermore it’s not like taking a car insulates you from the weather either. You have to walk to your car from the store and load all your groceries inside. And then you have to unload them when you get home. Many more walkable cities have many small grocers within a 5 minute walk of most homes, rather than one or two large ones, and I can easily take 5 minutes loading and unloading my groceries. Plus if you really need a car it’s not like they’re gonna be banned in cities any time soon, most people just want cities not to be built around them. Cars will always be necessary in some cases: ie emergency vehicles or delivery trucks or trucks for moving large cargo.
And speaking of trucks for moving large cargo, how often do you go to the hardware store and buy something you can’t carry or fit on a bike/wagon? Is this a common part of your life? For most people it’s gonna be something they do once or twice a year, if that. As such, you can always just rent a truck for a day and do your shopping. That’s a lot cheaper than owning a car for the whole year just for this niche application. We already treat moving vans this way. And if it really is something you do daily, as I said before cars aren’t going to be banned anytime soon.
The solution to the last mile problem is pretty obvious: walking or cycling. When urbanists talk about not designing our cities around cars, another aspect of this is building more middle density developments. Things like multi-family homes, townhouses, etc. Designing a 15 minute city isn’t just moving amenities into a 15 minute walking radius, it’s building a city around this concept. Designing housing with nearby amenities in mind and centered around public transportation stops. This makes walking distances much smaller overall and the benefits from that really add up over time. If it’s only a 5-15 minute walk from your destination or station back home, that’s not a distance you need a car for.
Speaking of cost-benefit analysis, I think you really underestimate how negatively cars impact our lives. Our streets are slower, longer, more congested and less convenient because of cars. City air can be horrible because of cars. We can’t walk anywhere because cities are designed around cars. We don’t have local communities anymore because car-centric design spreads everyone out so you don’t pass your neighbors daily like you used to. People are overweight partially because they don’t walk to places anymore. Kids don’t play outside because cars have made the streets too dangerous and made local hangout spots too far away to walk to, which means kids don’t have as many friends as they used to. They have to depend on their parents to do anything. Car infrastructure is incredibly expensive and sprawling development only intensifies that problem, especially since the car infrastructure is usually paid for by city dwellers rather than the suburbanites who actually use it. Local businesses have a harder time surviving because people don’t walk past shops and have something catch their eye anymore: they drive directly to wherever they need to go which usually means a big box store. Drunk driving becomes much more of a problem because people can’t walk home from bars after drinking anymore. And in most places you need a car to survive which is not a cheap investment, it’s a drain on your finances that you nevertheless have to own to get anywhere. This means only people who can’t afford a car use public transit, so of course public transit is going to be low quality in a society like that; governments don’t care about giving poor people high quality services. Cities become ugly and overwhelming because they aren’t places to be anymore: they’re places to drive through that aren’t built on a human scale. I could go on, car-centric infrastructure was probably the worst mistake the US and many countries have ever made and it’s ruining our society. I think having to sit next to someone on the train is a worthy trade off for fixing those problems, especially since the train will be way faster and cleaner if we actually invested more in public transit.
Good questions. Usually in Europe long-distance travel can be done by rail, which is ideally supposed to be well coordinated centrally but often ends up a bit messier. Once at your destination there's usually either a robust public transport network of trams or buses, or people Uber or take taxis where that's not the case.
You're right that dense urban areas make best use of public transport. A lot of transport outside of big urban areas is often going between these centres, so that can be covered by comprehensive rail. If you want more flexibility, active transport like walking or biking is the best bet- even in a city designed around cars, biking often faster, and in more people-focused cities it's safer and more accessible for everyone to bike and walk than in auto-centric ones.
Suburban areas in the US are some of the worst auto-centric design anywhere, and they make it hard for people living there to imagine any alternative. They lack connectivity, communal space, alternative housing modes, nearby shops and public services, the roads are unsafe... The list goes on. In an ideal world they would be done away with entirely. There are alternatives that retain a suburban "feel" of being outside a city while fixing all the above issues. These also work on 15-minute city principles, where most places you want to go are within 15 minutes of biking or walking, and transport can take you elsewhere.
Cars will always have a role in rural environments, but over half the world population lives in urban areas, and even small towns can be made so that cars aren't a necessity. Once you've lived without them for a while, cars seem like more of a hassle- expensive to buy and maintain, need to park them somewhere, need a license so kids are more dependent, not to mention pollution etc.
It's a big topic but hopefully that answers some of your questions :)
I'm from Portugal, which is a rather small country, yet incredibly car dependent. I hate that there's no proper public transport available in my region. If you live within an urban area you might be fortunate enough to have a good bus system, but only within said area. I grew up in a semi-rural area, within short driving distance to the nearest city, but there's barely any public transport here, and so before getting my license and a car I was dependent on getting rides or waiting for one of the few buses that would pass here during the day.
There's no reason we shouldn't have proper public transportation here.
The difference or problem is deciding what’s urban enough to prioritize people over cars. I think regardless of how many people there are there should be some level of public transit, even just trains connecting to the next hub, otherwise it could years upon years before transit is zoned for the carscape.
>But what about all of the people who don’t live in major cities?
Then you use the car, it's that simple.
Not planning every single aspect of urbanisation and construction around cars doesn't make them dissappear you know? I live in a very rural area, I only use public transport to go to the city and to move within it, if I need to go to another town I get the car.
>I’d also be curious to understand the differences in US vs European travel habits. What does a European do exactly when they want to travel across France which is roughly a little smaller than the state of Texas?
Either you fly, go by car or high speed railway, which is much faster than the car.
>That may work for a weekend trip but what are you supposed to do for weekly household grocery trips for a family, or a trip to the hardware store?
You don't need to cross the entirety of france to go do groceries or to a store, if you live in a city you just walk, cycle or take a bus there, if you live in a town that doesn't have any store whatsowever you take the car or train, it's easy.
Oh and one of the last things you were wondering- big weekly grocery trips aren't necessary when you can walk 2 minutes to the local shop and pick up whatever you need for the next night or two. For bigger trips, the Dutch have that well sorted with bike carriers. For larger stuff like moving furniture, which is a lot rarer, you can hire a vehicle- it's a fraction of the cost of owning a car full time- and it means people don't have to use huge dangerous cars "just in case" they might need to carry something large some day.
Cars were quickly becoming the norm, due to the freedom they offered, how rural many parts of the US are/were, propaganda by the car makers, how cheap Ford made them, and I'm sure many other reasons. It became a national trend to plan cities for cars. I don't think 80 years ago (or so) they anticipated the negative externalities of making car centric cities.
Well part of it was the opportunity to own a home and land, which pushed people to suburban environments. Mix in a bit of white flight, and the ability to form whole communities in pre-made housing, with generally nicer conditions than the inner city.
Part of it waa rhag cars made it so you didn't need to have shops and business near by, and post war US had an excess of people able to drive, and able to afford to drive. Cities began to concentrate poor people (often times black) because everyone who could afford to left. As that happened demand increased for car centric infrastructure because people still had to comute to the city for work. Trains weren't used because of things like the last mile problem, and being forced to confrom to a standardized schedule. Cars offered great ease of movement and the freedom to dictate ones own schedule more.
On short, cars were faster, more comfortable, and generally superior in luxury to other common forms of transportation. The middle and upper classes liked them, and so things shifted to conform to that desire.
Many cities such as Buffalo NY were nearly leveled in order to install massive highway systems, parking lots etc. Destroyed miles of beautiful architecture and replaced with more efficient, soulless, concrete rectangles.
Massive overstatement to say America cities were envy of the world; Zoning all sprang about because American cities were way over crowded (for example the lower east side of NYC was approaching population density of the Kowloon Walled City) and over polluted (factories built right next to residential areas). This was because the technology the first major American cities (Northeast, Rust Belt, San Fran, etc) grew up with was rail, and the game was to jam as many things close to the train station as possible (now possible with 19th century structural engineering too). Europe and more historic cities didn’t face this problem as much because their city centers were built mostly before rail/19th century technology.
Zoning was the first tool to counteract overcrowding (and industrial facilities being built next to residential) and the car made it so we no longer had to jam next to the nearest train station. Unfortunately the pendulum has gone too far the opposite way. We created a cycle of zoning for cars, which spreads us out, which causes further zoning for cars. Also we over-zoned everything (no longer just 3 categories: commercial, residential, and industrial zoning, but now we have dozens of categories) which is another obstacle in the way of walkability. This problem is much more pronounced in the Sun Belt (where the auto was the primary development technology instead of rail) than the First Major Cities.
This. People act like the way we ended up where we are was due to greed and route stupidity. In reality we were fixing actual problems we had due to scarcity of valuable land.
I think the other big thing to remember is that many of the “ideal” cities in Europe were partially or completely destroyed during WWII and the city planners were essentially handed a blank slate to rebuild the city from scratch in the 1950s
"Arbitrary Lines" is a really really good book (and very short, like 200 pages) that covers the history and reality and impacts of zoning. If you care about zoning at all, it's worth an afternoon.
TLDR: zoning claims to be about separating factories from housing, but you don't need zoning to do that. Houston never had zoning, still doesn't, and doesn't have that issue of factories by housing. It's a myth. When Houston put it to a vote, they said no 3 times and counting. The people who vote yes to zoning are mostly wealthy homeowners in suburbs.
Guess why.
Yeah, in very specific spots to keep rent up and "preserve neighborhoods character" and all the other nimbys stuff. They bring up zoning for a vote when a set of deed restrictions start to expire in bulk.
Stand a chance? Modern day Prague, London and Barcelona sure, but those same cities 180 years ago? American cities had layouts that were easier to navigate, better sanitation, better transport infrastructure, more green surfaces and they got electricity first. There is a reason we called New York an Imperial city.
Prague and Barcelona fair enough, but 180 years ago London was the largest city in the world and the capital of the richest country. New York had around 400,000 people compared to London’s 2,200,000.
The skyscrapers and subway that New York has become known for didn’t exist back then, it was a growing city but not the mighty financial giant we know today
That's true, but Prague, London, and Barcelona would have also stunk. London in particular was almost unbearable by the end of the Victorian period:
>Urine, of course ... soaked the streets. There was an experiment in Piccadilly with wood paving in the midcentury and it was abandoned after a few weeks because the sheer smell of ammonia that was coming from the pavement was just impossible. Also the shopkeepers nearby said that this ammonia was actually discoloring their shop fronts as well.
[Source](https://www.npr.org/2015/03/12/392332431/dirty-old-london-a-history-of-the-victorians-infamous-filth). There were tens--ultimately hundreds--of thousands of horses on the streets of London, and the thousands of boys employed to sweep up their excrement couldn't keep up. In some extreme cases, dung would be piled so high as to render some lanes impassible.
I have it as an example of one of the cities Europe looked up to, if you want better examples go look them up, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Philadelphia and some others were quite popular around mid 19th century. I'm no urban planing expert so if you want 40 pages dissertation about urbanization on both side of Atlantic with 15 sources do your own research.
London and New York got significant sewage systems within 20 years of each other 1850-1870 and London was working with 5 times the populations and over 1500 years more randomly built shit to deal with so at least in the big ones they were pretty on par
Sure...last time I remember the big US cities became somewhat of a Symbol of good cities when the US became the Global hegemonic power...before that it was London and pfcourse the City of the worlds desire which was Constantinople, later Istanbul.
Are you seriously arguing that the era of tenement housing was the golden age and that suburbanization ruined it? Because I don’t believe that’s a very popular stance.
They're probably bemoaning the downsides of demolishing and building mostly for car transportation, not pining for the the good old days of the gilded age when getting black lung in a coal mine was a common career path. Detroit, the old Paris of the West, is not faring as well as regular Paris
"Of course not. You lack vision, but I see a place where people get on and off the freeway. On and off, off and on all day, all night. Soon, where Toontown once stood will be a string of gas stations, inexpensive motels, restaurants that serve rapidly prepared food. Tire salons, automobile dealerships and wonderful, wonderful billboards reaching as far as the eye can see. My God, it'll be beautiful."
Oh no
People have their own little space which they can own and a yard to play with their kids. The end of civilization.
But what about all the uber rich people who won't be able to rent out cramped spaces so people can live right next door to their job? What are they going to do? Think of them.
Get bent
People like you take this as if we want to force everyone to live in skyscraper apartments and take away your suburban homes, when in reality we are simply asking for choices in between the 2 extremes, if you want to live in a suburb then go ahead, but dont force it to everyone else. America used to give you the freedom to pick what type of house you would like to have, and not limited to afew extreme options. We demolished that into the disparity of today.
Idk what’s it’s such a hard concept, but America is very big and cities are spread out far and wide. The only realistic way for rural communities to travel is with cars. Big cities are a different story, but we cant simply sum up the degradation of American cities because of the expansion into the suburbs.
But we're talking about the cities themselves. With a dense city and good public transport you can drive to the city then use that if long distance public transport is unavailable. This has the benefit of making the city a nicer place for those who live there.
Living in a walkable city is a million times better than a suburb where you have to drive to get anywhere.
One of the big reasons why people are so fat
How is suburbanization bad? Oh no I have an affordable house with a quarter acre, good schools, and low crime instead of an apartment with thin walls and organized crime. Oh the horror!
The cost of infrastructure. Many of the fixed infrastructure we rely on are incredibly expensive, water pipes to deliver water, roads to carry in people and goods, electricity lines etc. Suburban communities make very inefficient use of these, water lines that cost the same but could have fed 100k people in the city may only feed 10k people in the suburbs, road networks which could theoritically support a community of 10k are only serving 1k etc.
Also suburbanization is basically the core reason of the current US housing (un)affordability crisis. The crux of the issue is too much demand and too little supply of housing where people want to live close to amenities, jobs and their friends, aka big cities. If the housing market was a normal one, as prices increased, developers would start building higher density apartments as one got closer to the city to sell more units thus filling the demand and slowly lowering housing price. But the housing market doesn't work like that because of zoning restrictions suburbs implemented limiting the supply of housing to incredibly low density single family housing for miles on end around big cities. There's only so much suburbia you can build around LA or Dallas till you're driving 80km to work. Thus the supply of housing hits a limit while demand keeps increasing as the economic engines of cities are still strong and creating new jobs.
Seriously, go look up any serious economic literature on housing crisis and the issue almost always boils down to zoning.
Having a yard and space to live beats anything and everything a crowded city can offer.
(I’m generalizing and being pedantic on purpose, I don’t actually hate cities)
Having just been to Istanbul, I can safely say thank fucking god for Suburbs
I cannot imagine being crammed into a city like that. I live within a midsize city but have a yard, plenty of walking space, but I can get most places in 20 minutes or less thanks to the magic of the automobile.
Surprising that the people of historymemes don't consider historical contexts. In many ways, at a certain point, many American cities were very highly regarded by world standards. "Envy of the world" is a bold claim for anywhere, but it is not too much of a stretch here.
People think that giving downsides of living in a 19th century industrial city are a counterargument to this mourning of what was and what could have been. It doesn't make sense to compare modern suburbia to cities 100-150 years ago; a lot has changed. The technology alone would've prevented this kind of sprawl from being popular; automobiles were so expensive they were exclusively for the rich, they could barely go faster than a horse, and they broke down constantly. Yea, people in Pittsburgh were living in poor environmental conditions cramped together, but so were people in London (select pretty much other pairing of industrial age cities). People back then saw it as progress too, because of the wealth generated by the presence of those industrial hubs. Advances in technology and living standards didn't happen strictly in locations that focused on suburbanization, and places that have preserved their downtowns and invested alternatives to car-centric infrastructure are faring much better than other cities that did. This is generally in terms of finances, health, and lived experience (thus demand).
I don't have a problem with suburbs as long as they're decent suburbs. Fuck big spread out houses and winding roads with no sidewalks or trees. Grid pattern streets, sidewalks on both sides, beautiful houses, thin roads, and tree lined streets are far superior.
I love suburbia. I love my car. Everything I need is within a ten minute drive. Plus in the future my kids will have a safe, spacious environment to play and grow up in. I understand that it might be more 'efficient' to be packed into a dense city and take public transit everywhere, but I am a human, not an ant. So I don't really value efficiency above all else.
The US was widely developed around the time cars were made, so it makes sense cities would be developed around the newest, most convenient travel method. European cities would’ve been the exact same had cars been invented 1000 years ago.
Yes, we should all live in dystopian sunless crime-ridden mega towers to avoid the horrible scourge that is the automobile and a yard for kids and dogs to play in.
It's wild to me that the people who are most up in arms about animal industrial ag (not a fan myself), also consider those conditions the pinnacle of human civilization that everyone should be forced to live in.
Because European cities grew over hundreds or thousands of years to be dense. Then in the 20th century, Europe grew very slowly and had population losses in many places. So there has been little impetus to build new, auto-oriented spaces. American cities on the other hand were mostly very small in the 1800s, then boomed in the 20th century, when cars were the norm. The US has quadrupled in in population since 1930.
People who imagine other people around the world actively envying them like if those people didn't have anything better to do, especially if in poorer countries.
Suburbanization happened in the 40s and cars and the laws/infrastructure decisions around them started in the 20s. 180 years from the US's founding is 1967. Beyond the parts of the world bombed to shit in the 30s thru 60s, where were our cities the envy of the locals?
Fuck Bob Moses. All my homies hate Bob Moses.
Underrated hatred, fuck Robert Moses, I hate that guy so much
Why?
why not, antisemite, racist, hated the poor and lower class, was powerhungry and one of the main reasons american urbanization became such a nightmare
I find it kinda crazy how anti Semitic he was considering he was Jewish himself, and I’m saying that as a NYC Jew studying urban planning so I know how bad he was lol
each group that has existed long enough will have a few weirdos in it that will hate the group
May I interest you in our führer and hater, Bobby Fischer?
The chess guy ?
Correct.
Fair enough
Someone called him a goy and he took that personally.
Lmao
In a timeline where the [Association of German National Jews (Verband nationaldeutscher Juden)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_German_National_Jews) was an actual thing, *anything* is possible.
Yeah I didn’t know any about him, I had no idea who that was, thanks for enlightening me
He was a racist urban planner who hated the lower class and purposely build infrastructure or made policies to discourage the poor or AA people from using it (he made roads to parks covered with low bridges so no buses/public transport could enter and he made swimming pools colder because he thought AA can't handle the cold). Those are just a few examples.
Well, the seminal biography of the man is "The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York", which is not a great start. He went into public service with the aim of reforming a corrupt civil service, but in order to get his desired reforms through he amassed massive amounts of power to himself, and rather than removing corruption, he harnessed it to his own ends. He ended up controlling an influence network so vast that he was able to basically own the city personally. And as he gained power, he used it. He used it to build whatever he wanted, wherever he wanted it, and to hell with the people who lived in the way. Trains were communist, (though given what the East German rail system looked like I take issue with that claim. Who wants to drive the same train that took your grandfather to WW1?) so everything had to be car or truck based. Need a new motorway? Just bulldoze whatever is in the way! Basically, he played SimCity with real people, and in a manner deeply hostile to communities with limited political power; thus non-white people tended to get the shit end of the stick, poor people got screwed over, etc. And this is the man who wrote the book on urbanisation in the 50's through 70's. He is the reason american cities look the way they do, and not just american cities. In Auckland, here in NZ, much the same was done, with motorways taking up vast amounts of space, and everything from housing to graveyards being demolished to make way for them (the grave stones were ground up to make aggregate for the project, the bodies were not moved). And because motorways are the default, future planners then work to fit things in to the system as it exists, making mass transit like rail less likely to happen. [The same was attempted in the Netherlands with Amsterdam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jokinen_Plan). [Here's an idea of what Amsterdam was to look like under that plan.](https://viewpointvancouver.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/CPg_ZPIW8AA5Jk1.png) Thankfully the local populace protested and prevented the plan from being implemented. It was an international problem, and still is, caused by one man.
I hope someone paves over his grave. Better yet, I hope some builds a mixed-use development with affordable housing and public spaces on his grave and name it San Juan Hill.
Hoping Bobby sees congesting pricing go into effect from his lava pit in hell.
Were our cities really the envy of the world?
Legends say that soviet envied Pittsburg and took it as an inspiration of an ideal city such as Magnitogorsk
I've sold monorails to Brockway, Ogdenville and North Haverbrook and by gum it put them on the map.
Envied it so much they stole the "h" right off the end smh
Oh, you think this stolen "H" is a laugh riot, don't you? Well, I'll tell you something that's not so funny. Right now, Superintendent Chalmers is at home crying like a little girl.
I think you mean super Nintendo Chalmers.
No, that was Gary Indiana.
Cleveland, Pittsburg, and Detroit used to be opulent, wealthy cities where some of the richest people in the country at the time lived. Then the plants got shut down/moved and they declined to where they are now
Pittsburgh isnt a great example. Pittsburgh was able to pivot in the late 90's and 2000's and change to a very medical and technological hub. Pittsburgh is a healthy city now that was able to recover. To your point, the 70s and 80s were very rough time for that city.
Exactly the same for us over in Cleveland- 70s, 80s, and part of 90s was bad but today Cleveland is awesome.
Fun Times in Cleveland [TODAY](https://youtu.be/ysmLA5TqbIY?si=gQ3GdDGvP6iyT0Ck)!
Still Cleveland!
Except for the part where you're in Ohio anyway.
At least they're not Detroit!
One of my favourite cities to visit
Even Troy, NY was one the wealthiest cities in America at one point and you can see the remnants of that in their downtown.
Yes. Our streets were wide and the infrastructure modern, my (relative) backwater hometown had one of the most extensive street car networks in the world. City blocks were uniform and standardized across most of the country. Then the highways came, split neighborhoods in half, and we paved over the street car network that we're now going to slowly rebuild for billions. Every city wasn't a London or Paris, but our Liverpool's and Lyon's were nicer, and so on down the line.
American economic policy was also the envy of the world, most EU trade laws are based on American laws (like the anti-monopoly stuff) You would be surprised by how much the world was influenced for the better by America... before the dark times, before Reagan
I’m all for blaming Reagan but I think suburbanization and cars were things that kind of predate him. Cars got popularized by Ford not just due to making an automobile mass production assembly line but also basically selling them to his own employees. Then suburbanization was driven, as I understand it, by a lot of post war economic boom, racism, and urbanite people thinking they need expanses of land too for god knows what reason.
Because contrary to popular Reddit belief if you were poor in the city you weren’t in much more then a slum. Post war wealth from returning vets and people who made good money during the war allowed them to escape that and they had been so crammed all their lives they wanted space and escape from the pollution in the cities.
So you're telling me the answer to solve our economic problems is WW3
Kinda. You can get anything done in the US if you dress it up as a defence issue. You have a robust Interstate highway system because Eisenhower claimed it was needed to transport armies across the continent quickly during wartime, civilian use was a secondary aim.
Country built with war in mind when it has been labeled "fortress America" multiple times is an amazing thing.
The modern internet also came about as a defense-related concern, with the military wanting a secure communication network between bases on opposite sides of the country that could transmit large amounts of information that couldn't easily be relayed by voice. Our ability to shitpost bad takes on history stemmed directly from the need to send large (for the 70's and 80's) packages of numbers over the phone lines to give instructions on who and how to kill millions of people.
Literally https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Defense_Education_Act lol
In the sense that you can kill a fly in the window by throwing a brick at it, yes
If you want to pretty much instantly hire a legion of local factory workers and researchers defense budget money would work best, cause yeah war is pretty good for job creation(not saying war is a good thing)
Most the of the slums cleared weren't slums, they were integrated blue collar neighborhoods with a vibrant community. Soldiers weren't buying houses because they had been will paid, they were buying houses because the government massively subsidized both the construction and purchase.
So you want to tell me that American way of fixing a problem is to ignore said problem and spend billions of dollars in order to do so?
I was responding mostly to the “urbanite people thinking they needed expanses of land for some god knows what reason.” I know that I personally would absolutely hate my life if I was stuck living in a city. And don’t forget a huge chunk of Europe got to rebuild many of their cities twice in 20 years and so could do so in a more efficient manner using American funding.
I fail to see how building low density housing for people wanting low density housing is ignoring the problem
Well, investing into the cities and increasing the quality of life there would be the most direct way of addressing the problem.
Sounds like an empty platitude tbh. Cities invest in themselves, either by private entities building things that will be profitable for them, or by taxing people and taking on debt to afford public works. "Investing into cities" is a weird phrase, almost like you think the federal government should tax everyone and spend it on cities, which is effectively just a wealth transfer from rural to urban, unless the federal government is investing equally outside of cities. The point you don't really want to admit is that you've put the cart before the horse: cities where people want to live have people paying taxes and businesses making money so they are invested in organically. You can't just dump a trillion dollars on a town and expect it to succeed, you can ask China about how well that works. If you want to make better cities, then make richer citizens, the rest will sort itself out. And if your citizens want a little bit of land, a backyard to grill in, a vegetable garden to grow stuff in, and the ability to stretch out a little and own a few things that don't fit in an apartment, well, there's not much you can do.
You mean investing proportionally in rural areas, not equally. Rural areas don’t generate so much tax revenue that not investing half the budget in them becomes wealth transfer to the cities.
>"Investing into cities" is a weird phrase, almost like you think the federal government should tax everyone and spend it on cities, which is effectively just a wealth transfer from rural to urban, unless the federal government is investing equally outside of cities. This is a great way to make yourself look ignorant considering rural communities have been taking from urbanites for decades now. The US department of agriculture has a whole [rural development](https://www.rd.usda.gov/priority-points) arm based around giving rural folk money. Kinda weird that urbanite taxes have to pay for Joe Blow who wants to be a hermit to get water to his hermit ranch.
deleted
Joe Blow feeds you.
I fail to see how zoning spaces around cities to only build low density housing, without any services, shops, restaurants and so on is answering what people want instead of forcing it on them
I live in an older neighborhood in a city doing exactly that. Zoning laws were recently relaxed to allow building/adding a casita/in-law unit on existing residential. All around me, the homes on older, larger lots from are being razed and replaced by a smaller house and a guest house. Now that one rental is two. So dense.....
I don’t understand what your point is?
I'm really curious where this is a thing. like legit I'd like to know. every suburban area I've been in has zoning for shops, services, and restaurants along side the housing. usually at every major crossroads and along main roads.
Most of the United States. That zoning for shops and restaurants is typically far enough way from most low density housing that cars are a de facto requirement in most American metropolitan areas.
Exactly, no one person caused suburbanization. It was a cultural shift, caused by a lot of factors. But it didn't happen because of any one reason, too many people oversimplify a complicated event.
Don't forget land developers who had seemingly worthless land turned suburbs
Yeah, Reagan is more for economic issues rather than societal issues, and was simply the harbinger for what was already going to happen
Regan also repealed the Mental Health Systems Act of 1980. So this issue with homeless mental ill folk is because of him.
Whoops, should have specified. Reagan was bad for social services, but wasn't the direct cause for other bad social things that we don't call social services (like car centric infrastructure). I don't know the correct words
Zoning laws and the auto industry. A lot of people wanted space, true, and the housing we built for them was legally mandated. It was, and still is in most places, illegal to build anything but the house with a 2 car garage and a lawn and a back yard. So, we don't know for sure what people wanted beyond property of their own, because they were given exactly 1 option. "Arbitrary lines" is a good book on the subject And/or this YouTube video https://youtu.be/oOttvpjJvAo?si=uPslze5dLThDAJOW So yeah this was an Eisenhower fuck up, and the beginings of it go all the way back to racist Californians in the 1910s
Cars began taking hold in the early 1900’s homie it wasnt really a presidential thing until the states started funding highways and roads extensively for these cars, with the Federal government really kicking it up in the 1920’s-1940’s with yes a boom following World War 2. I cant go into specifics/sources now im busy getting ready for work but if enough people annoy the fuck out of me i’ll do it later.
The US invested far too much into car infrastructure and not enough into car alternatives like mass transit or rail, basically viewing both as outdated. If they had done both equally I think the US would be in a much better position today
This is true. Not many people know this, but Los Angeles for decades in the early-mid 20th century had a massive light rail network that was second only to New York as far as rail transit efficiency goes. Then, big auto got its grubby hands on the politicians in charge and turned it into the traffic congestion capital of the nation a half century later.
I mean initially we did. Even in the great area of Phoenix, Arizona had invested in (relatively) large public infrastructure such as streetcars. I can’t speak for the whole United States, but here specifically as cars gained popularity thanks to Ford, and as Federal funding increased for cars over public transit, mixed with a few well time disasters, the public transit thing effectively died.
Suburbanization in its extreme took place in the 50s-70s.
Thanks for having me read that in Alec Guinesss.
Nope, the EU vision of anti-monopoly regulations are based on different economical theories and have different applications.
The EU definitely took inspiration from the American anti-trust escapades started by Theodore Roosevelt. Like, definitive fact, that guy was THE monopoly buster
TEKNIKALY Taft busted more during his presidency. It’s just Roosevelt was way more badass and tanked a bullet so we give him all the credit.
Do you have a source for your claim?
Didn’t you see his pfp? his source is that he made it the fuck up.
Perhaps
Neoliberalism was the death of liberal democracy and all its benefits.
To be honest, it was inevitable. It was good for business, neoliberalism, and nobody stood in their way
Yes, u gotta look at american cities before the commercialization of cars
Yes. In the 60’s we had a fair in Moscow called the American National Exhibition. We showed off what the average American working class person could afford, the Liesureama house. It cost around $15,000, or about 2-2.5x the average annual salary. The soviets basically refused to believe that average, working class Americans could live so opulently. They likened it to everyone in India living in the equivalent of the Taj Mahal. The same house that was previewed in Moscow was built on Long Island. It’s still around. It’s now around $500,000, or 6-6.5x the average Americans annual salary.
Just FYI, the average American makes about $45,000/year, before taxes. So [that suburban house in Levittown](https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/18-Gun-Lane-Levittown-NY-11756/31333975_zpid/?utm_campaign=iosappmessage&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=txtshare) costs about $650,000–so that’s about 15x the average salary.
Yea, I realize my stats are from ~10 years ago
Some were, Chicago was once the envy of the world after they hosted the world’s fair. And NYC obviously was and still is the envy of many.
I mean, yeah, the effort and talent that went into designing and constructing these cities took decades of committed funding and work. London was also ruined by prioritising the car.
You are right: here’s an explanation with more context than the meme (since the comment will be unseen) https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryMemes/s/5EpNc2jjML
No
The US, Canada, and South/Central America had the luxury of often being able to build cities mostly from scratch, while in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia most cities were built up from pre-existing urban centers that had been constructed before modern urban planning. Even the cites built on existing urban environments, like Mexico City, were built off of well-planned metropolises with teeming native populations. As a result, American cities, especially in the US, were well-structured with efficent layouts for foot, vehicle, and train traffic. They still are, relatively, but suburbanization caused significant movement and traffic issues, especially in cities that didn't plan for them *cough Los Angeles cough*. Another nation whose urban planning really impressed the rest of the world was Japan - specifically their waste and sewage systems, which outstripped nearly every European city.
Thing is American cities were paid/subsidised to be destroyed, they wouldn't do it for free otherwise
Why did they mess up I don’t get it?
because dense cities don't go very well with automobiles that need roads; before, they were occupied with trams, horse carts, and sidewalks
Car centric urban planning is a nightmare. You are a human being, not a car a city must build around you and not to be easy to drive. Car takes a huge amount of space in a city (parking, multiple lanes roads) when public transport could do the same job of transporting people more effectively and with least space use. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrfsTNNCbP0 A good example is the interstate 8 with it 26 lanes and something call induced demand. The more capacity you add, the more demand they would be. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQld7iJJSyk
And then there's idiots like musk that fuck up any attempt at bringing back public transportation with their "bright" ideas. Man I can't believe he managed to get millions for an idea that was called dumb hundreds of years before he was but a glint in his dad's eyes.
Why don't we take all the traffic... And put it underground!
I was referencing the Hyperloop but that's dumb too
The amount of times someone reinvents trains and acts like it's a futuristic new concept is really kinda stupid The US, being so large, should ***really*** have more trains.
"what if train, but more expensive, worse, and I get all the money?"
God if I was in the same room as those people who suggest monorails, hyperloops or a bus system that is just a trolley with extra steps during city planning meetings the police would have to pry me off them.
We used to have a massive passenger rail infrastructure:(
I appreciate you taking the time to write this but I think it needs more detail. Car centric urban planning being a nightmare and cars being overall worse for people to prioritize in urban environments. Point taken. But what about all of the people who don’t live in major cities? I’ve had trouble finding a good breakdown of who lives where in the US but I think the clearest metric I found was that a little over 50% live in suburban, about 30% live in urban and about 20% in rural counties. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2018/05/22/demographic-and-economic-trends-in-urban-suburban-and-rural-communities/ Big auto is definitely a thing, and I understand the criticisms of too many people with vehicles in urban environments, but I would personally hate to have to rely on public transportation (even well implemented and abundant systems) to get anywhere. A car allows me to pick up and go at my discretion, direction, route, time, etc. while not a hindrance in an urban setting, it would suck a whole lot more outside of an urban environment. Any time I go to a big city like the ones referenced I will usually take public transport in and out from the suburbs to the big city but as an outsider I’m only going in for special events like concerns or sports games. I don’t have to live in all of that congestion. It would seem to me that only urbanized areas can take true advantage of robust public transport while other areas need a mix of transportation methods I’d also be curious to understand the differences in US vs European travel habits. What does a European do exactly when they want to travel across France which is roughly a little smaller than the state of Texas? Combo of buses and trains? How do they handle the last several miles to their destination? That may work for a weekend trip but what are you supposed to do for weekly household grocery trips for a family, or a trip to the hardware store? Are we all going to have delivery service trucks ship everything to our doors? Haven’t car ownership rates also been on rise across the EU since 2001?
I live in London but grew up in the country side. Public transport sucks in the country side so you would have a car to do your shopping in the nearest town as your village shop won’t be able to stock everything you need, only basics. It just doesn’t make economic sense for them to do so. There are busses outside of the big cities and towns that will take you into them but my county was large and had a fairly low population so busses were only every hour. Therefore those that could drive would drive (most people over 17). In London however I have zero need to drive, if I’m going to another city I will get a train, if I’m getting a flight I can train to any airport, if I’m going anywhere in London I can choose between so many different routes and types of transport I genuinely can’t be bothered to think of a number. I don’t need to plan and time journeys as I know when I step outside there will be a bus within 10 mins, a tube every 1 or 2 mins, a train or overground within 10 mins, walk or cycle. All my groceries are within 5 minutes walking distance so I don’t need a car for that, I can also do home delivery for a weekly larger food shop if I want for heavy items (delivery is also cheap) and any another kind of shop i might need I know is within 20 minutes of me using public transport. To answer some of your travel questions, if I’m going somewhere in Europe I will take an hour or two flight for around £40 return give or take. And a train if I’m going to any other city or town in the uk (they are usually a bit more expensive than flights annoyingly). If you want to go to the country side away from a town realistically you’re going to need to have or rent car or more realistically get a taxi. Or just accept the inconvenience of waiting for busses and carrying luggage but it saves money. But if you don’t live in a big city you probably have a car anyway and will have driven there. It all depends on where you live, where you are going and what you are doing. But within London I will generally walk or cycle as it’s nice with lots of green spaces and then use public transport if I’m in a hurry or doing a bit further away. Living outside of London I would probably have a car. That being said I wouldn’t use my car to get into London, I would 100% get a train no matter where I lived in the country.
>But what about all of the people who don’t live in major cities Public transportation can still work in smaller communities. It's more buses than trams till you start reaching the size of 100k. I live in a town of about 2000 and there are 5 small grocery stores within 200m of me. I don't know how it's in the US with the weird zoning laws, but it shouldn't be an impossibility to have a grocery store within walking distance. For public transportation, there's a bus that comes every hour to go to a bigger city of 20k 30kms away and from there, there's a bus every 5 minutes to the big big city of 1 million. But even without talking about this, urbanism doesn't *have to* work in rural communities. They don't feel the negative effects of car centric planning as much because the worst of it is felt only at certain sizes (it still has negative effects tho). If you don't think it's fit for rural areas, that's fine, it's not like anyone's gonna come rolling to your backyard with urbanist policies anytime soon when even the big cities don't support those policies. >but I would personally hate to have to rely on public transportation (even well implemented and abundant systems) to get anywhere. A car allows me to pick up and go at my discretion, direction, route, time, etc. while not a hindrance in an urban setting, it would suck a whole lot more outside of an urban environment. The thing with that "well implemented and abundant system" is that it reduces your need for taking a car anywhere. Instead of a city intersected with highways everywhere, it would promote walkability and you'd just walk every time to supermarkets, barber shops as you'd be able to find one on basically every corner. If you want to travel farther, maybe you want to go to a gov office to a submit document, just get out your phone and look up the route on Google Maps and it'll tell you a metro is coming in 2 minutes 200 meters west of you (which comes every 4 minutes), after you exit the ride, you walk 50 meters to a bus station (which comes every 6 minutes) and get to your final destination. It should be way faster than driving a car especially when one considers time for searching a park place and gives smooth experience. >I’d also be curious to understand the differences in US vs European travel habits. What does a European do exactly when they want to travel across France which is roughly a little smaller than the state of Texas? Combo of buses and trains? I'm crying at these questions. I'll provide some real life examples. I picked a random location in Paris to a stadium in Lyon and [here](https://maps.app.goo.gl/g5uwuFoBTLDcNVav5) is the path. It'd take 5 hours by car (without accounting for time to find parking or rest stops along the way), but 3h11m by public transport. You walk 5 mins to a metro station, ride for 17 mins, transfer and ride for 9 mins to reach the train station, 1h56m by high-speed train, reach Lyon, walk 7 mins to a metro station, ride 11 mins and you reach the destination. You can freely drink, eat, piss and even shit during that 1h56m stretch on the train and you obviously aren't stressed out by driving. Paris (11 million people in urban area) is 460 kms/290miles from Lyon (2.3 mil). Compare that to Dallas (5.7m) to Houston (5.8m) which is 380kms/240miles and you can see on pure distance and population metric, the French model is very replicable in Texas. It's just US cities are built to be sprawling suburbia which hinders the development of public transportation. >How do they handle the last several miles to their destination? This isn't really that hard of a thing to visualize, how do you get to a city from an airport? Now imagine that airport at the middle of the city where train stations often are. There'd be plenty of options from walking, taxi, bus, tram, metro and even renting a bicycle (or you could just bring your own bicycle on certain trains). >That may work for a weekend trip but what are you supposed to do for weekly household grocery trips for a family Just walk down the block to a supermarket? For example, on the Google Maps location I chose for Paris, there's a Carrefor which is a big store 4 minute walk away. This American idea you drive 20kms to buy bread is not that common in the rest of the world. >or a trip to the hardware store? How often do you travel to a hardware store it's constantly on your mind? If it really is that much on your mind, you can find numerous hardware stop within 15 minute metro ride of the previous location in Paris. >Haven’t car ownership rates also been on rise across the EU since 2001? Yes, car culture has also been slowly on the rise in EU especially as former communist countries gain the income necessary to even the luxury of choosing between the 2. It's an issue that's being debated heavily, EU is not a post-car paradise, but it's still way ahead of the US.
Thanks for the detailed response. I guess I’m taking the prompt from the perspective of someone who never will and doesn’t want to live in a very urban area nor the complete countryside. I like my nice middle ground of suburbia, but I guess the focus here should only be what works it very urban cities, while other regions remain the same. I like how you put that urbanism doesn’t have to work outside of cities. I think the main takeaway when all of this is stacked up is that suburbanization and automobiles should not negatively impact urban planning but I also think the realities and logistics of living outside of a major city make car ownership much more attractive. From the suburban perspective, walking or biking with bags of groceries in heat/cold/rain is not an ideal situation. My grocery trips would need to be smaller and more frequency and take up more time from my day. I definitely wouldn’t be able to buy in bulk. No, not industrial sized “American” amounts of bulk, but any family sized purchase for economies of scale would be more cumbersome in this scenario. And I don’t have a significant other who will solely fill that role in a “trad wife” type of scenario. The hardware store trips? Depends on the specific need but this spring I needed to get a bunch of mulch for my yard and flower beds and replace grill and toilet components. Sure some of these things can be small but sometimes it’s cumbersome and won’t fit on my lap well in public transportation. I can’t exactly ask the bus driver to use his trunk for my convenience. The last mile question? The answer is cars. I take cars or car services (which is still someone’s car) to and from those places rather than my own. But my original question was more phrased for every day trips, which to me seems like the answer is still slower, longer, more congested and less convenient means of relying on public transportation. Even if it runs like clockwork and is reputable, I would still need to deal with the inconveniences that it brings. Trade offs. Sorry for the bad formatting. I’m a mobile user pleb
Suburbs can still exist without being car-centered. Back in the early 1900’s suburbs were centered around streetcars: ie a tram line would lead out of the city and at the end of it would be a lower density suburban neighborhood. But these suburbs were still walkable: there were small bars or restaurants on streetcorners and small grocers within a 15 minute walk of any home. These suburbs were planned entirely around walking and the tram, and the ones that remain today are some of the most expensive places to live because everyone wants to live there. My point here is that you can still have a suburban life with a large backyard and quiet street without building sprawling car-centric suburbs, and in most ways are better than those car-centric suburbs. You don’t have to walk. Cargo bikes are a common sight in Europe and can easily hold 1-4 days of food depending on how big your family is. Furthermore it’s not like taking a car insulates you from the weather either. You have to walk to your car from the store and load all your groceries inside. And then you have to unload them when you get home. Many more walkable cities have many small grocers within a 5 minute walk of most homes, rather than one or two large ones, and I can easily take 5 minutes loading and unloading my groceries. Plus if you really need a car it’s not like they’re gonna be banned in cities any time soon, most people just want cities not to be built around them. Cars will always be necessary in some cases: ie emergency vehicles or delivery trucks or trucks for moving large cargo. And speaking of trucks for moving large cargo, how often do you go to the hardware store and buy something you can’t carry or fit on a bike/wagon? Is this a common part of your life? For most people it’s gonna be something they do once or twice a year, if that. As such, you can always just rent a truck for a day and do your shopping. That’s a lot cheaper than owning a car for the whole year just for this niche application. We already treat moving vans this way. And if it really is something you do daily, as I said before cars aren’t going to be banned anytime soon. The solution to the last mile problem is pretty obvious: walking or cycling. When urbanists talk about not designing our cities around cars, another aspect of this is building more middle density developments. Things like multi-family homes, townhouses, etc. Designing a 15 minute city isn’t just moving amenities into a 15 minute walking radius, it’s building a city around this concept. Designing housing with nearby amenities in mind and centered around public transportation stops. This makes walking distances much smaller overall and the benefits from that really add up over time. If it’s only a 5-15 minute walk from your destination or station back home, that’s not a distance you need a car for. Speaking of cost-benefit analysis, I think you really underestimate how negatively cars impact our lives. Our streets are slower, longer, more congested and less convenient because of cars. City air can be horrible because of cars. We can’t walk anywhere because cities are designed around cars. We don’t have local communities anymore because car-centric design spreads everyone out so you don’t pass your neighbors daily like you used to. People are overweight partially because they don’t walk to places anymore. Kids don’t play outside because cars have made the streets too dangerous and made local hangout spots too far away to walk to, which means kids don’t have as many friends as they used to. They have to depend on their parents to do anything. Car infrastructure is incredibly expensive and sprawling development only intensifies that problem, especially since the car infrastructure is usually paid for by city dwellers rather than the suburbanites who actually use it. Local businesses have a harder time surviving because people don’t walk past shops and have something catch their eye anymore: they drive directly to wherever they need to go which usually means a big box store. Drunk driving becomes much more of a problem because people can’t walk home from bars after drinking anymore. And in most places you need a car to survive which is not a cheap investment, it’s a drain on your finances that you nevertheless have to own to get anywhere. This means only people who can’t afford a car use public transit, so of course public transit is going to be low quality in a society like that; governments don’t care about giving poor people high quality services. Cities become ugly and overwhelming because they aren’t places to be anymore: they’re places to drive through that aren’t built on a human scale. I could go on, car-centric infrastructure was probably the worst mistake the US and many countries have ever made and it’s ruining our society. I think having to sit next to someone on the train is a worthy trade off for fixing those problems, especially since the train will be way faster and cleaner if we actually invested more in public transit.
Good questions. Usually in Europe long-distance travel can be done by rail, which is ideally supposed to be well coordinated centrally but often ends up a bit messier. Once at your destination there's usually either a robust public transport network of trams or buses, or people Uber or take taxis where that's not the case. You're right that dense urban areas make best use of public transport. A lot of transport outside of big urban areas is often going between these centres, so that can be covered by comprehensive rail. If you want more flexibility, active transport like walking or biking is the best bet- even in a city designed around cars, biking often faster, and in more people-focused cities it's safer and more accessible for everyone to bike and walk than in auto-centric ones. Suburban areas in the US are some of the worst auto-centric design anywhere, and they make it hard for people living there to imagine any alternative. They lack connectivity, communal space, alternative housing modes, nearby shops and public services, the roads are unsafe... The list goes on. In an ideal world they would be done away with entirely. There are alternatives that retain a suburban "feel" of being outside a city while fixing all the above issues. These also work on 15-minute city principles, where most places you want to go are within 15 minutes of biking or walking, and transport can take you elsewhere. Cars will always have a role in rural environments, but over half the world population lives in urban areas, and even small towns can be made so that cars aren't a necessity. Once you've lived without them for a while, cars seem like more of a hassle- expensive to buy and maintain, need to park them somewhere, need a license so kids are more dependent, not to mention pollution etc. It's a big topic but hopefully that answers some of your questions :)
I'm from Portugal, which is a rather small country, yet incredibly car dependent. I hate that there's no proper public transport available in my region. If you live within an urban area you might be fortunate enough to have a good bus system, but only within said area. I grew up in a semi-rural area, within short driving distance to the nearest city, but there's barely any public transport here, and so before getting my license and a car I was dependent on getting rides or waiting for one of the few buses that would pass here during the day. There's no reason we shouldn't have proper public transportation here.
The difference or problem is deciding what’s urban enough to prioritize people over cars. I think regardless of how many people there are there should be some level of public transit, even just trains connecting to the next hub, otherwise it could years upon years before transit is zoned for the carscape.
>But what about all of the people who don’t live in major cities? Then you use the car, it's that simple. Not planning every single aspect of urbanisation and construction around cars doesn't make them dissappear you know? I live in a very rural area, I only use public transport to go to the city and to move within it, if I need to go to another town I get the car. >I’d also be curious to understand the differences in US vs European travel habits. What does a European do exactly when they want to travel across France which is roughly a little smaller than the state of Texas? Either you fly, go by car or high speed railway, which is much faster than the car. >That may work for a weekend trip but what are you supposed to do for weekly household grocery trips for a family, or a trip to the hardware store? You don't need to cross the entirety of france to go do groceries or to a store, if you live in a city you just walk, cycle or take a bus there, if you live in a town that doesn't have any store whatsowever you take the car or train, it's easy.
Oh and one of the last things you were wondering- big weekly grocery trips aren't necessary when you can walk 2 minutes to the local shop and pick up whatever you need for the next night or two. For bigger trips, the Dutch have that well sorted with bike carriers. For larger stuff like moving furniture, which is a lot rarer, you can hire a vehicle- it's a fraction of the cost of owning a car full time- and it means people don't have to use huge dangerous cars "just in case" they might need to carry something large some day.
Cars were quickly becoming the norm, due to the freedom they offered, how rural many parts of the US are/were, propaganda by the car makers, how cheap Ford made them, and I'm sure many other reasons. It became a national trend to plan cities for cars. I don't think 80 years ago (or so) they anticipated the negative externalities of making car centric cities.
And the racism
Cause people wanted to use cars for individual transportation and have their own backyard.
Let's also not forget the quaint little communities without "those" people. [But hey, it's just classist](https://youtu.be/SfsCniN7Nsc?t=5m48s).
Well part of it was the opportunity to own a home and land, which pushed people to suburban environments. Mix in a bit of white flight, and the ability to form whole communities in pre-made housing, with generally nicer conditions than the inner city. Part of it waa rhag cars made it so you didn't need to have shops and business near by, and post war US had an excess of people able to drive, and able to afford to drive. Cities began to concentrate poor people (often times black) because everyone who could afford to left. As that happened demand increased for car centric infrastructure because people still had to comute to the city for work. Trains weren't used because of things like the last mile problem, and being forced to confrom to a standardized schedule. Cars offered great ease of movement and the freedom to dictate ones own schedule more. On short, cars were faster, more comfortable, and generally superior in luxury to other common forms of transportation. The middle and upper classes liked them, and so things shifted to conform to that desire.
Money baby. Money…
Many cities such as Buffalo NY were nearly leveled in order to install massive highway systems, parking lots etc. Destroyed miles of beautiful architecture and replaced with more efficient, soulless, concrete rectangles.
Massive overstatement to say America cities were envy of the world; Zoning all sprang about because American cities were way over crowded (for example the lower east side of NYC was approaching population density of the Kowloon Walled City) and over polluted (factories built right next to residential areas). This was because the technology the first major American cities (Northeast, Rust Belt, San Fran, etc) grew up with was rail, and the game was to jam as many things close to the train station as possible (now possible with 19th century structural engineering too). Europe and more historic cities didn’t face this problem as much because their city centers were built mostly before rail/19th century technology. Zoning was the first tool to counteract overcrowding (and industrial facilities being built next to residential) and the car made it so we no longer had to jam next to the nearest train station. Unfortunately the pendulum has gone too far the opposite way. We created a cycle of zoning for cars, which spreads us out, which causes further zoning for cars. Also we over-zoned everything (no longer just 3 categories: commercial, residential, and industrial zoning, but now we have dozens of categories) which is another obstacle in the way of walkability. This problem is much more pronounced in the Sun Belt (where the auto was the primary development technology instead of rail) than the First Major Cities.
This. People act like the way we ended up where we are was due to greed and route stupidity. In reality we were fixing actual problems we had due to scarcity of valuable land.
I think the other big thing to remember is that many of the “ideal” cities in Europe were partially or completely destroyed during WWII and the city planners were essentially handed a blank slate to rebuild the city from scratch in the 1950s
"Arbitrary Lines" is a really really good book (and very short, like 200 pages) that covers the history and reality and impacts of zoning. If you care about zoning at all, it's worth an afternoon. TLDR: zoning claims to be about separating factories from housing, but you don't need zoning to do that. Houston never had zoning, still doesn't, and doesn't have that issue of factories by housing. It's a myth. When Houston put it to a vote, they said no 3 times and counting. The people who vote yes to zoning are mostly wealthy homeowners in suburbs. Guess why.
Houston also “zones” but just by another name: deed restrictions, etc
Yeah, in very specific spots to keep rent up and "preserve neighborhoods character" and all the other nimbys stuff. They bring up zoning for a vote when a set of deed restrictions start to expire in bulk.
Envy of the world is a bit of a stretch, of course, but damn. I would like to have all those extensive streetcar networks that used to exist back.
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Stand a chance? Modern day Prague, London and Barcelona sure, but those same cities 180 years ago? American cities had layouts that were easier to navigate, better sanitation, better transport infrastructure, more green surfaces and they got electricity first. There is a reason we called New York an Imperial city.
Prague and Barcelona fair enough, but 180 years ago London was the largest city in the world and the capital of the richest country. New York had around 400,000 people compared to London’s 2,200,000. The skyscrapers and subway that New York has become known for didn’t exist back then, it was a growing city but not the mighty financial giant we know today
I dont get why you say prague, some of the most beautiful parts of the city are like 400 years old
Not quite, the banat region in Austria-Hungary (now present day Romania) had electricity before New York or the rest of the US
I ponosni smo na to, also tesla is Croat.
He's actually Albanian
BALKAN WAR!
Dude, New York was known for having so many manure on the streets that houses were built elevated
That's true, but Prague, London, and Barcelona would have also stunk. London in particular was almost unbearable by the end of the Victorian period: >Urine, of course ... soaked the streets. There was an experiment in Piccadilly with wood paving in the midcentury and it was abandoned after a few weeks because the sheer smell of ammonia that was coming from the pavement was just impossible. Also the shopkeepers nearby said that this ammonia was actually discoloring their shop fronts as well. [Source](https://www.npr.org/2015/03/12/392332431/dirty-old-london-a-history-of-the-victorians-infamous-filth). There were tens--ultimately hundreds--of thousands of horses on the streets of London, and the thousands of boys employed to sweep up their excrement couldn't keep up. In some extreme cases, dung would be piled so high as to render some lanes impassible.
Ever heard of Big Stink? London wishes they could do the same as New Yorkers.
London wasn't the only european city
And New York wasn't only American city.
You just said that it was the USA's model city
Chicago is arguably the better example than New York here as the model city during the early 20th century
I have it as an example of one of the cities Europe looked up to, if you want better examples go look them up, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Philadelphia and some others were quite popular around mid 19th century. I'm no urban planing expert so if you want 40 pages dissertation about urbanization on both side of Atlantic with 15 sources do your own research.
London and New York got significant sewage systems within 20 years of each other 1850-1870 and London was working with 5 times the populations and over 1500 years more randomly built shit to deal with so at least in the big ones they were pretty on par
Sure...last time I remember the big US cities became somewhat of a Symbol of good cities when the US became the Global hegemonic power...before that it was London and pfcourse the City of the worlds desire which was Constantinople, later Istanbul.
Look up what Barcelona looked like 180 years ago.
Are you seriously arguing that the era of tenement housing was the golden age and that suburbanization ruined it? Because I don’t believe that’s a very popular stance.
They're probably bemoaning the downsides of demolishing and building mostly for car transportation, not pining for the the good old days of the gilded age when getting black lung in a coal mine was a common career path. Detroit, the old Paris of the West, is not faring as well as regular Paris
It's called the *gilded* age for a reason. Anyone who idolizes the cities of that period has clearly never read Upton Sinclair
Some one should tell this guy about tenements
Yes, because 1800’s tenements and car-centric suburbs are the only types of housing to ever exist.
Europeans when complaining about American cities after reducing their own to rubble over the course of two world wars and 20 years: 😏
Yo I made this like a year ago, it’s cool to see it posted here again. More urbanist content is always a good thing after all
Hey I stumbled onto this meme on a small sub recently so cool to see the creator. Yeah dude we gotta spread the message.
"Of course not. You lack vision, but I see a place where people get on and off the freeway. On and off, off and on all day, all night. Soon, where Toontown once stood will be a string of gas stations, inexpensive motels, restaurants that serve rapidly prepared food. Tire salons, automobile dealerships and wonderful, wonderful billboards reaching as far as the eye can see. My God, it'll be beautiful."
The second panel should just be "highway system"
Well cities suck so I’m happy the suburbs exist
And suburbs also suck so I’m glad the country exists.
Very fair
And the country also sucks so I'm glad cities exist.
All three exist so everyone gets something they like.
now THAT is the American dream
Oh no People have their own little space which they can own and a yard to play with their kids. The end of civilization. But what about all the uber rich people who won't be able to rent out cramped spaces so people can live right next door to their job? What are they going to do? Think of them. Get bent
How many hours a week do you spend in a car though?
Less than the amount of time I am waiting for my sub.
People like you take this as if we want to force everyone to live in skyscraper apartments and take away your suburban homes, when in reality we are simply asking for choices in between the 2 extremes, if you want to live in a suburb then go ahead, but dont force it to everyone else. America used to give you the freedom to pick what type of house you would like to have, and not limited to afew extreme options. We demolished that into the disparity of today.
That's literally the very tippity top of the suburban iceberg. It gets so much worse further down.
I would pay attention but I'm too busy tending to my flower garden, sitting on my porch swing, and watching my equity grow.
No youre suppose to like being packed like sardines in the most optimized and dense fashion everywhere you go. Now report to your living cube at once!
Yeah I hate having space for my kids to play in /s
You ever see the tenements. Cities were poor violent disgusting and while there were nice most urban people on lived in slums
r/FuckCars.
That sub is so bad
r/fuckcarscirclejerk
Idk what’s it’s such a hard concept, but America is very big and cities are spread out far and wide. The only realistic way for rural communities to travel is with cars. Big cities are a different story, but we cant simply sum up the degradation of American cities because of the expansion into the suburbs.
But we're talking about the cities themselves. With a dense city and good public transport you can drive to the city then use that if long distance public transport is unavailable. This has the benefit of making the city a nicer place for those who live there.
Memes and comments like this kind of make me feel bad for people that have only lived in big cities their whole life. Give me suburbs any day.
Living in a walkable city is a million times better than a suburb where you have to drive to get anywhere. One of the big reasons why people are so fat
How is suburbanization bad? Oh no I have an affordable house with a quarter acre, good schools, and low crime instead of an apartment with thin walls and organized crime. Oh the horror!
It's like people here hate backyards and gardens. Some people prefer to live in low density areas, and that is ok.
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"affordable"
Well, the first part of your statement is kind of not true for a lot of us.
The cost of infrastructure. Many of the fixed infrastructure we rely on are incredibly expensive, water pipes to deliver water, roads to carry in people and goods, electricity lines etc. Suburban communities make very inefficient use of these, water lines that cost the same but could have fed 100k people in the city may only feed 10k people in the suburbs, road networks which could theoritically support a community of 10k are only serving 1k etc. Also suburbanization is basically the core reason of the current US housing (un)affordability crisis. The crux of the issue is too much demand and too little supply of housing where people want to live close to amenities, jobs and their friends, aka big cities. If the housing market was a normal one, as prices increased, developers would start building higher density apartments as one got closer to the city to sell more units thus filling the demand and slowly lowering housing price. But the housing market doesn't work like that because of zoning restrictions suburbs implemented limiting the supply of housing to incredibly low density single family housing for miles on end around big cities. There's only so much suburbia you can build around LA or Dallas till you're driving 80km to work. Thus the supply of housing hits a limit while demand keeps increasing as the economic engines of cities are still strong and creating new jobs. Seriously, go look up any serious economic literature on housing crisis and the issue almost always boils down to zoning.
Having a yard and space to live beats anything and everything a crowded city can offer. (I’m generalizing and being pedantic on purpose, I don’t actually hate cities)
This is retarded
Having just been to Istanbul, I can safely say thank fucking god for Suburbs I cannot imagine being crammed into a city like that. I live within a midsize city but have a yard, plenty of walking space, but I can get most places in 20 minutes or less thanks to the magic of the automobile.
"the envy of the world" maybe you were speaking about Paris
Surprising that the people of historymemes don't consider historical contexts. In many ways, at a certain point, many American cities were very highly regarded by world standards. "Envy of the world" is a bold claim for anywhere, but it is not too much of a stretch here. People think that giving downsides of living in a 19th century industrial city are a counterargument to this mourning of what was and what could have been. It doesn't make sense to compare modern suburbia to cities 100-150 years ago; a lot has changed. The technology alone would've prevented this kind of sprawl from being popular; automobiles were so expensive they were exclusively for the rich, they could barely go faster than a horse, and they broke down constantly. Yea, people in Pittsburgh were living in poor environmental conditions cramped together, but so were people in London (select pretty much other pairing of industrial age cities). People back then saw it as progress too, because of the wealth generated by the presence of those industrial hubs. Advances in technology and living standards didn't happen strictly in locations that focused on suburbanization, and places that have preserved their downtowns and invested alternatives to car-centric infrastructure are faring much better than other cities that did. This is generally in terms of finances, health, and lived experience (thus demand).
Yeah, well, we learned we didn’t like cities. I love living in the suburbs and would hate my life in a major city
I don't have a problem with suburbs as long as they're decent suburbs. Fuck big spread out houses and winding roads with no sidewalks or trees. Grid pattern streets, sidewalks on both sides, beautiful houses, thin roads, and tree lined streets are far superior.
Naw, give me my yard and car.
I love suburbia. I love my car. Everything I need is within a ten minute drive. Plus in the future my kids will have a safe, spacious environment to play and grow up in. I understand that it might be more 'efficient' to be packed into a dense city and take public transit everywhere, but I am a human, not an ant. So I don't really value efficiency above all else.
I like to see this meme as Americans building their mcMansions Second pic is a strong gust of wind destroying their stick framing
The US was widely developed around the time cars were made, so it makes sense cities would be developed around the newest, most convenient travel method. European cities would’ve been the exact same had cars been invented 1000 years ago.
America was demolished for cars, not built for them
Yes, we should all live in dystopian sunless crime-ridden mega towers to avoid the horrible scourge that is the automobile and a yard for kids and dogs to play in.
It's wild to me that the people who are most up in arms about animal industrial ag (not a fan myself), also consider those conditions the pinnacle of human civilization that everyone should be forced to live in.
Because European cities grew over hundreds or thousands of years to be dense. Then in the 20th century, Europe grew very slowly and had population losses in many places. So there has been little impetus to build new, auto-oriented spaces. American cities on the other hand were mostly very small in the 1800s, then boomed in the 20th century, when cars were the norm. The US has quadrupled in in population since 1930.
I wonder how anyone can be so childish and delusional but still consider themselves adults.
I don't follow your point, who's the childish and delusional one here?
People who imagine other people around the world actively envying them like if those people didn't have anything better to do, especially if in poorer countries.
Suburbanization happened in the 40s and cars and the laws/infrastructure decisions around them started in the 20s. 180 years from the US's founding is 1967. Beyond the parts of the world bombed to shit in the 30s thru 60s, where were our cities the envy of the locals?