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Old 02-18-2014, 10:31 PM
 
Location: Oakland, CA
28,226 posts, read 36,852,900 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by nikitakolata View Post
I can't speak for anyone else but I would love that. The two things I hate most about my job are the dress code and the commute and working from home eliminates both.
I just finished a 3 year stint working at a virtual company where I only worked from home. I am not in the mood to do that again anytime soon. It isn't all roses.

Once or twice a week, sure. But permanently? It is very isolating.
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Old 02-18-2014, 10:36 PM
 
Location: Oakland, CA
28,226 posts, read 36,852,900 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by nei View Post
This is about as low density as Parisan suburbs (probably a few lower ones) get:

https://maps.google.com/maps?q=Orsay...12,348.76,,0,0

maybe some California ones are that dense, but that's rather dense for most American suburban standards.
We have lots of lower density areas like this in Oakland. Most of the Oakland single family areas are just like that actually. Besides the part that is like ranch country. LA looks pretty similar as well in many neighborhoods.

Quote:
And here its "railroad suburb" commerical center:

https://maps.google.com/maps?q=Orsay...2,44.86,,0,6.3

Again, more crowded than most similar American ones.
This is what it looks like on my main street area, it gets a little less dense in the neighboring blocks. Around 3 blocks out, and starts to look like pic #1. Until my block which is about 60-70% like the main street example above, 30-40% like the low density area above.
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Old 02-18-2014, 10:39 PM
 
Location: Vallejo
21,829 posts, read 25,094,690 times
Reputation: 19060
Quote:
Originally Posted by nei View Post
This is about as low density as Parisan suburbs (probably a few lower ones) get:

https://maps.google.com/maps?q=Orsay...12,348.76,,0,0

maybe some California ones are that dense, but that's rather dense for most American suburban standards. And here its "railroad suburb" commerical center:

https://maps.google.com/maps?q=Orsay...2,44.86,,0,6.3

Again, more crowded than most similar American ones.
Metro Paris is just over twice as dense as NYC metro, 50% denser than LA metro. Of course, put that in perspective, it's 1/10th the density of a real dense metro is. As far as I'm concerned, champions of the standard American line of thinking of more is better can go live in Dhaka. The place is a cesspool. A certain degree of sprawl is definitely a good thing. Maybe some people like NY's greater sprawl but greater centralization, others like LA or Paris's more uniform sprawl, and still others actually want to live as crowded as they do in the actually dense parts of the world.
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Old 02-19-2014, 04:44 AM
 
Location: Crooklyn, New York
32,084 posts, read 34,676,186 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by drive carephilly View Post
The idea that Europe didn't have farmland to sprawl out into is simply not true. Not only did they have the farmland to sprawl out onto - they used it. A quick drive through the suburbs of Paris makes that clear enough.
Why are you characterizing my position as being so extreme: sprawl or no sprawl? That's not what I said. I said that Europe has a much denser version of sprawl. Where would you, for example, find a post-WWII suburban development in the States as dense as Clichy or La Courneuve? To my knowledge, they don't exist (unless we're talking about 21st Century TOD development). What they call "suburbs" would be walkable paradises worthy of boasting about on the CvC forum.

At any rate, this article spells out the very point I have been making all along.

Quote:
Part of the problem is that the U.S. has had the good fortune of developing as an expansive, rich country, with plenty of extra space and cheap energy.
Quote:
In many European countries, space has always been something of a premium, forcing Europeans early on to live with greater awareness of humans’ negative effects on the planet. In small countries like the Netherlands, it’s hard to put garbage in distant landfills because you tend to run into another city. In the U.S., open space is abundant and often regarded as something to be developed. In Europe you cohabit with it.
What Makes Europe Greener than the U.S.? by Elisabeth Rosenthal: Yale Environment 360

Why this would not be mentioned in the Atlantic Cities article as one of the factors that contributed to different patterns of development between Europe and the U.S. is beyond me. To me, it seems that there's a real psychological factor at play when you're talking about a society that on the one hand has abundant land and resources and a society that doesn't (or not nearly to the same extent anyway).
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Old 02-19-2014, 06:27 AM
 
2,939 posts, read 4,122,207 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by nei View Post
This is about as low density as Parisan suburbs (probably a few lower ones) get:
meh, there's this in Paris, par example - http://goo.gl/maps/6rm41

Lyon - http://goo.gl/maps/ieU0S

Toulouse - http://goo.gl/maps/YMyT8

The argument isn't really that these suburbs are on 1/4 acre lots and american suburbs are 1/3 of an acre but rather that these places are car dependent. LA is a pretty solid example of how density doesn't preclude auto dependency.
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Old 02-19-2014, 06:41 AM
 
2,939 posts, read 4,122,207 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Malloric View Post
Metro Paris is just over twice as dense as NYC metro
Metro Paris is 12,223,100 people in 6,631 sq. mi. or roughly 1,843 ppm

Metro NYC is 19,831,858 people in 6,720 sq. mi. or roughly 2,951 ppm

Paris is significantly less dense than NYC.
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Old 02-19-2014, 07:25 AM
nei nei won $500 in our forum's Most Engaging Poster Contest - Thirteenth Edition (Jan-Feb 2015). 

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Location: Western Massachusetts
45,983 posts, read 53,443,154 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by drive carephilly View Post
Metro Paris is 12,223,100 people in 6,631 sq. mi. or roughly 1,843 ppm

Metro NYC is 19,831,858 people in 6,720 sq. mi. or roughly 2,951 ppm

Paris is significantly less dense than NYC.
Use urban areas, which doesn't add lots of undeveloped land.

Paris urban area is 10.4 million people in 1098 square miles, roughly 10,000 ppm. The NYC urban area is 18.3 million people in 3450 square miles, 5,318 ppm.
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Old 02-19-2014, 07:28 AM
 
2,939 posts, read 4,122,207 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by BajanYankee View Post
Why are you characterizing my position as being so extreme: sprawl or no sprawl? That's not what I said. I said that Europe has a much denser version of sprawl.
I'm not characterizing your position as anything. I'm quoting you. If you want to say that Europe developed its suburbs more densely that's true, to a point, but it doesn't mean that those places are much less car dependent compared to similar big cities in the US or that job growth in the 'burbs and suburb-to-suburb commuting aren't big, traffic inducing problems in Paris or London.

Europe took much better care of its cities than we did while we had what amounted to 40 years of successive, anti-urban administrations. Europe invested their time and money in shoring up their central cities by building solid, well balanced transport systems. We invested our time and money in tearing down central cities to ram interstates through them and would federally fund highway projects at 90% while funding transit projects at 40%


Quote:
Where would you, for example, find a post-WWII suburban development in the States as dense as Clichy or La Courneuve? To my knowledge, they don't exist (unless we're talking about 21st Century TOD development). What they call "suburbs" would be walkable paradises worthy of boasting about on the CvC forum.
A lot of Hudson County? Parts of Arlington County? Parts of Northeast Philly? Evanston? Brentwood?
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Old 02-19-2014, 07:41 AM
 
Location: Crooklyn, New York
32,084 posts, read 34,676,186 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by drive carephilly View Post
The argument isn't really that these suburbs are on 1/4 acre lots and american suburbs are 1/3 of an acre but rather that these places are car dependent. LA is a pretty solid example of how density doesn't preclude auto dependency.
But that wasn't the argument made in the article. That also wasn't an argument made by anyone in this thread. It didn't become an argument in the thread until just now (yours). And my response to that is "And?" Nobody's argued that every single square inch of ÃŽle-de-France is a walkable transit paradise. The point is that European metros are less car dependent than American metros. And for the most part, we've been discussing why that's the case.

Los Angeles is not even comparable to Paris. Its suburbs (whether we're talking about suburban areas in the city or outside of it) are far denser than LA's. The United States has some of the least dense urban areas in the world.

Bucharest (6,800 km/2)
Athens (6,000 km/2)
London (5,900 km/2)
Madrid (4,600 km/2)
Prague (4,400 km/2)
Barcelona (4,300 km/2)
Paris (3,800 km/2)
Stockholm (3,800 km/2)
Birmingham (3,800 km/2)
Moscow (3,600 km/s2)
Rome (3,400 km/2)
Berlin (2,900 km/2)
Milan (2,800 km/2)
Lisbon (2,800 km/2)
Hamburg (2,500 km/2)
Los Angeles (2,400 km/2)
San Francisco (2,200 km/2)
New York (1,800 km/2)
San Diego (1,600 km/2)
Washington, DC (1,400 km/2)
Denver (1,400 km/2)
Chicago (1,300 km/2)
Phoenix (1,200 km/2)
Philadelphia (1,110 km/2)
Boston (800 km/2)
Atlanta (700 km/2)

List of urban areas by population - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Old 02-19-2014, 07:50 AM
 
10,974 posts, read 10,868,101 times
Reputation: 3435
Bajan- Why are you so obsessed with density numbers? No one is denying that sprawled out cities in the US are less dense than Europe. But that is a symptom of sprawl and car-dependency. Not the cause.
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