Sign up for daily news updates from CleanTechnica on email. Or follow us on Google News! It’s funny — this article idea came to mind just before I saw Steve Hanley’s latest piece. That article was focused on a survey of US auto dealerships showing that they are not particularly ... [continued]
Serious question: How do you envision this transition for sprawling suburbs? Specifically places like Texas where everything is so spread out? The answer on an individual level is to just move. At the city or state level, I can’t even imagine a “perfect scenario” way to fix those areas.
Simple: we cut the Commie crap, abolish heavy-handed “big government” zoning* restrictions that infringe on landowners’ God-given property rights, and let the Free Market sort it out! red-tailed hawk bald eagle screech
The current prevailing modes of development only exist because government policy forces them to exist by prohibiting everything else almost everywhere. It was very much a utopian [sub]urban planning experiment, promulgated by Federal policy from the top down. Take this FHA bulletin from 1938, for instance: they were literally labeling traditional development “bad” and the beginnings of all the suburban development patterns (that we’ve realized are terrible ideas in retrospect) “good”. (Keep in mind the strength of these recommendations: developers didn’t have to follow this guide, but if they didn’t their project was gonna get redlined, which means their customers wouldn’t be able to get financing to buy their product.)
NIMBYs and car-brains love to think that car-dependent American development patterns are the “natural” result of the “free market,” but that couldn’t be further from the truth.
We’d also need to fix the public transportation infrastructure in two very important ways, neither of which are the naive suggestions of slapping on bike lanes or transit to the existing shitty dendritic street network we have in all that suburban sprawl now:
Redesign stroads into either proper roads (see 8:55 in the linked video), proper streets (9:26), or proper roads flanked by proper streets (12:44).
As for those “naive suggestions:”
Don’t get me wrong: we definitely should do transit; it’s just that it doesn’t work very well until after you’ve got decent density and last-mile walkable connectivity. It should happen at least concurrently with street redesigns and zoning reform, if not subsequently to them.
As for cycling infrastructure, I’m a huge fan of that, too – in the short-to-medium-term. It’s just that, as you ascend to the higher levels of urbanist thinking, you come to a realization: bike lanes are actually car infrastructure. Seen from a car-supremacist perspective, bike lanes seem like they’re for cyclists because building them on roads dominated by cars increases cyclists’ safety and encourages more cycling. But seen from a sufficiently-urbanist perspective, you come to realize that streets are for people and cars are interlopers, so getting cyclists “out of the way” of drivers with separated infrastructure only enables speeding and makes the street worse! We are very, very far away from getting over that hump though, so for now we should be building separated bike infrastructure pretty much everywhere as fast as we can.
First of all, because the person I replied to asked for an answer that applied to “specifically places like Texas” and it amused me to lean into it. Second, but more importantly, because it’s a popular misconception that Houston lacks zoning (it just lacks the word, not the concept, and goes about it in a more ad-hoc fashion) and I was trying to head off replies like yours. I mean, if my thesis is that getting rid of restrictive zoning will go a long way towards fixing the problem and the inevitable rebuttal is “but Houston doesn’t have zoning and still has the problem,” then I obviously have to address Houston, right? So I tried to do it preemptively… and then you wrote your comment anyway. womp, womp
EZPZ, just ban cars from the city. Install public parking outside the city and put in buses and trains and small vehicle lanes (bikes, scooters, microcars, etc., electric or human-powered only) with 25MPH speed limits. Look up “park and ride” to see how this works, we already have it. It works in Texas the same as anywhere else. The infrastructure will naturally adapt to the change.
Also get rid of all the SFH zoning in town and let the market decide what type of housing people want (or more accurately, can afford).
This is a solved problem. The only hurdle is human culture. People who don’t give a shit about public safety or their environment, and just want personal comfort above all else. That and vested interests in the automotive industry like Melon.
The problem that was inquired about was “how you see this transition taking place”, and “ways to fix urban areas”, not “how to convince people this is a good idea”.
Serious question: How do you envision this transition for sprawling suburbs? Specifically places like Texas where everything is so spread out? The answer on an individual level is to just move. At the city or state level, I can’t even imagine a “perfect scenario” way to fix those areas.
Simple: we cut the Commie crap, abolish heavy-handed “big government” zoning* restrictions that infringe on landowners’ God-given property rights, and let the Free Market sort it out!
red-tailed hawkbald eagle screechNo, seriously – only the over-the-top 'murica tone was a joke. Left to their own devices, people naturally tend to build reasonable things.
The current prevailing modes of development only exist because government policy forces them to exist by prohibiting everything else almost everywhere. It was very much a utopian [sub]urban planning experiment, promulgated by Federal policy from the top down. Take this FHA bulletin from 1938, for instance: they were literally labeling traditional development “bad” and the beginnings of all the suburban development patterns (that we’ve realized are terrible ideas in retrospect) “good”. (Keep in mind the strength of these recommendations: developers didn’t have to follow this guide, but if they didn’t their project was gonna get redlined, which means their customers wouldn’t be able to get financing to buy their product.)
NIMBYs and car-brains love to think that car-dependent American development patterns are the “natural” result of the “free market,” but that couldn’t be further from the truth.
We’d also need to fix the public transportation infrastructure in two very important ways, neither of which are the naive suggestions of slapping on bike lanes or transit to the existing shitty dendritic street network we have in all that suburban sprawl now:
As for those “naive suggestions:”
Don’t get me wrong: we definitely should do transit; it’s just that it doesn’t work very well until after you’ve got decent density and last-mile walkable connectivity. It should happen at least concurrently with street redesigns and zoning reform, if not subsequently to them.
As for cycling infrastructure, I’m a huge fan of that, too – in the short-to-medium-term. It’s just that, as you ascend to the higher levels of urbanist thinking, you come to a realization: bike lanes are actually car infrastructure. Seen from a car-supremacist perspective, bike lanes seem like they’re for cyclists because building them on roads dominated by cars increases cyclists’ safety and encourages more cycling. But seen from a sufficiently-urbanist perspective, you come to realize that streets are for people and cars are interlopers, so getting cyclists “out of the way” of drivers with separated infrastructure only enables speeding and makes the street worse! We are very, very far away from getting over that hump though, so for now we should be building separated bike infrastructure pretty much everywhere as fast as we can.
(* And yes, that includes Houston.)
Thank you for such a thorough response!
deleted by creator
People “getting a little carried away” creates some of the best comments on the internet!
Off the internet, too.
Not sure why you’re using Houston as an example here. There’s little zoning in Houston and it’s a sprawling mess. You couldn’t pay me to live there.
First of all, because the person I replied to asked for an answer that applied to “specifically places like Texas” and it amused me to lean into it. Second, but more importantly, because it’s a popular misconception that Houston lacks zoning (it just lacks the word, not the concept, and goes about it in a more ad-hoc fashion) and I was trying to head off replies like yours. I mean, if my thesis is that getting rid of restrictive zoning will go a long way towards fixing the problem and the inevitable rebuttal is “but Houston doesn’t have zoning and still has the problem,” then I obviously have to address Houston, right? So I tried to do it preemptively… and then you wrote your comment anyway. womp, womp
EZPZ, just ban cars from the city. Install public parking outside the city and put in buses and trains and small vehicle lanes (bikes, scooters, microcars, etc., electric or human-powered only) with 25MPH speed limits. Look up “park and ride” to see how this works, we already have it. It works in Texas the same as anywhere else. The infrastructure will naturally adapt to the change.
Also get rid of all the SFH zoning in town and let the market decide what type of housing people want (or more accurately, can afford).
This is a solved problem. The only hurdle is human culture. People who don’t give a shit about public safety or their environment, and just want personal comfort above all else. That and vested interests in the automotive industry like Melon.
So not a solved problem?
The problem that was inquired about was “how you see this transition taking place”, and “ways to fix urban areas”, not “how to convince people this is a good idea”.