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The one size fits all approach to urban planning. Smacks of his Soviet roots. Just picked a random post about 7-8 pages back. Reply to Arjay saying how difficult it is to carry a load of groceries home without a car. His reply? The urban environment would have a small grocer every few blocks where you could walk every days for the purchases for that days meal requirements. No need for a car nor huge living spaces dedicated to storage.
Feels like some dystopian futurama. Panem. Centralized, lack of freedom. Basically a personal preference for a lifestyle that takes no account of American traditions and roots... importation of a highly structured European model (that I don't think even exists in most of Europe) forcing all to adapt a lifestyle that suits his tastes.
It exists in places. Go there then. When in Rome, however... you know how the saying goes.
The one size fits all approach to urban planning. Smacks of his Soviet roots. Just picked a random post about 7-8 pages back. Reply to Arjay saying how difficult it is to carry a load of groceries home without a car. His reply? The urban environment would have a small grocer every few blocks where you could walk every days for the purchases for that days meal requirements. No need for a car nor huge living spaces dedicated to storage.
Feels like some dystopian futurama. Panem. Centralized, lack of freedom. Basically a personal preference for a lifestyle that takes no account of American traditions and roots... importation of a highly structured European model (that I don't think even exists in most of Europe) forcing all to adapt a lifestyle that suits his tastes.
It exists in places. Go there then. When in Rome, however... you know how the saying goes.
He didn't say everyone should live the same way. He said that there aren't enough options for those who want a car-free lifestyle. He was simply stating his preferences but he wasn't saying that everyone had to have the same preferences. How many times do he and I have to repeat this?
The one size fits all approach to urban planning. Smacks of his Soviet roots. Just picked a random post about 7-8 pages back. Reply to Arjay saying how difficult it is to carry a load of groceries home without a car. His reply? The urban environment would have a small grocer every few blocks where you could walk every days for the purchases for that days meal requirements. No need for a car nor huge living spaces dedicated to storage.
Feels like some dystopian futurama. Panem. Centralized, lack of freedom. Basically a personal preference for a lifestyle that takes no account of American traditions and roots... importation of a highly structured European model (that I don't think even exists in most of Europe) forcing all to adapt a lifestyle that suits his tastes.
It exists in places. Go there then. When in Rome, however... you know how the saying goes.
Ha! If only.
1. A one-size-fits-all approach to urban planning is what we have now, since, in most of America, zoning laws and building rules make it virtually illegal to build anything other than Los Angeles, while skewed perverse incentives and tens of billions of tax dollars are funneled toward road building, road widening, and greenfield subdivisions.
Between zoning boards, state legislatures and even HOAs (aka the local People's Commissariat), we've got a veritable dictatorship here that would make any Soviet bureaucrat proud. :-)
2. Just what exactly is it about being required to get in one's car to so much as re-up on a gallon of milk that confers "freedom", while walkable streets represent autocracy?
3. "When in Rome" ... is basically, "love it or leave it", remastered. That doesn't seem like a very "democratic" point of view on your part. I was told Freedom and Democracy presume the right to agitate for positive change from within the system.
1. A one-size-fits-all approach to urban planning is what we have now, since, in most of America, zoning laws and building rules make it virtually illegal to build anything other than Los Angeles, while skewed perverse incentives and tens of billions of tax dollars are funneled toward road building, road widening, and greenfield subdivisions.
Between zoning boards, state legislatures and even HOAs (aka the local People's Commissariat), we've got a veritable dictatorship here that would make any Soviet bureaucrat proud. :-)
2. Just what exactly is it about being required to get in one's car to so much as re-up on a gallon of milk that confers "freedom", while walkable streets represent autocracy?
3. "When in Rome" ... is basically, "love it or leave it", remastered. That doesn't seem like a very "democratic" point of view on your part. I was told Freedom and Democracy presume the right to agitate for positive change from within the system.
1. No it isn't. There are walkable neighborhoods being rediscovered and much new growth is on a new urbanism scale. Even in the Suburbs. Look at Marietta and Woodstock for two good examples.
1A. Don't live in an HOA. I've lived in the burbs my adult life and have never lived in an HOA community.
2. It's your choice. Live near a market if you don't want to drive for the gallon of milk. But I envision a soviet style horizon of 20 story blocks of apartments to sustain a market every couple of blocks. I prefer SFH thank you. I like driving a car as well. The freedom is you can live where you want with an automobile and you are restricted without one.
3. The market is what will dictate this. But much of what has been purported is to bulldoze much of what I love about Atlanta for a vision of a minority. When it becomes the majority, I am sure things will change. But the car is a great invention and our economy is built around it and for better, not worse in my opinion. Of course there will come a tipping point (if it does) where traffic is so difficult and gas is too pricey and roads are crap because all the money went to build rail line, then I will move to some rural corner somewhere and "leave it" myself.
1. I didn't say there aren't exceptions, although Marietta and Woodstock do strike me as oddly chosen examples.
Even so, land-use and zoning restrictions are where most of the pain points lie.
Keep in mind you and I may have two very different ideas of "walkable neighbourhood". Walkable to me, and I think to most urban planners, a set of criteria that incorporates far more than the mere, formal presence of sidewalks or pedestrian accessories.
2. Thanks to the ghastly tragedy of single-use zoning, opportunities to live in close proximity to the market are very limited. The whole point of single-use zoning is to force one to get in the car and drive from the residential zone to the commercial zone to run even the smallest errand, lest the suburbanite be disturbed somehow.
But, if that's how you want to live, fine by me. Sadly, the same zoning rules are often imported from suburbia and applied to urban infill projects. If you tear something in town, what you build in its place is often ruled by suburban constraints with regard to parking ratios and lot sizes. And the whole venture is fantastically disincentivised by appropriations of transportation and tax dollars, financing preferences for SFH (which to a large measure flow down from the FHA and from GSEs like Fannie Mae), etc.
3. I don't know where you got the idea that a vast horizon of socialist bloc-style apartment blocks are required to support a market every few blocks. That's ridiculous. You can find small groceries every few blocks in any European capital, including in the most famous places, where buildings generally top out at 3-5 storeys for "historical character" reasons.
Just because your mental reflex is to envision depressing, drab Eastern Bloc aesthetics doesn't mean that has any conceivable logical connection to the substance of urbanism. It's a completely arbitrary spectre and a straw man.
4. Noone proposes to take away your car or your freedom to enjoy driving it.
However, that doesn't mean that an automobile-scale and automobile-centric public realm is economically or ecologically sustainable, or, from the vantage points of community, psychological and physical health, desirable.
5. It is entirely true that in environments built for cars, cars represent freedom to live and move about, and that the absence of a car will be experienced as privation.
This does not mean cars confer a special degree of freedom ipso facto.
6. I highly, I highly doubt there is any danger of "all the money" going to build "the rail line".
On the other hand, the gross misallocation of resources/malinvestment of trillions over decades of sprawling suburban development is a serious discussing and a grave issue.
What you may not appreciate is that tens of billions of your tax dollars are being spent either way. It's just a question of what. The conventional wisdom here seems to be that it's best funneled to road builders and subdivision developers.
7. The market isn't going to solve anything. Contrary to your misapprehension, the market in this area is not in the least bit free. The near-total ubiquity of US- style highway cruft was made possible by a massively market-distorting set of incentives and, quite often, autocratic and inscrutable top-down mandates (for a stark example, the life's work of Robert Moses).
1. No it isn't. There are walkable neighborhoods being rediscovered and much new growth is on a new urbanism scale. Even in the Suburbs. Look at Marietta and Woodstock for two good examples.
1A. Don't live in an HOA. I've lived in the burbs my adult life and have never lived in an HOA community.
2. It's your choice. Live near a market if you don't want to drive for the gallon of milk. But I envision a soviet style horizon of 20 story blocks of apartments to sustain a market every couple of blocks. I prefer SFH thank you. I like driving a car as well. The freedom is you can live where you want with an automobile and you are restricted without one.
3. The market is what will dictate this. But much of what has been purported is to bulldoze much of what I love about Atlanta for a vision of a minority. When it becomes the majority, I am sure things will change. But the car is a great invention and our economy is built around it and for better, not worse in my opinion. Of course there will come a tipping point (if it does) where traffic is so difficult and gas is too pricey and roads are crap because all the money went to build rail line, then I will move to some rural corner somewhere and "leave it" myself.
1. He didn't say that walkable neighborhoods don't exist or that there isn't any growth on a new urbanism scale. He said that due to zoning laws and building rules, it's difficult to build walkable neighborhoods in most places. And as for Marietta and Woodstock? Those are urban islands in a sea of sprawl. Urban islands are different from large contiguous urban cores.
2. Not all apartments are soviet style. Would you consider most of Paris to be Soviet style?
3. The cost of driving is artificially low. The market is distorted. You aren't paying the true cost of it which includes the environmental costs CO2 emissions and climate change. We're not saying that most people want to live in a walkable neighborhood. We're saying that there aren't enough options for those that do.
I think the points that abalashov and I have made have been very clear. There aren't enough options for people who want to live car-free because of decades of legislation which have made it practically illegal to build walkable neighborhoods in most places and also, drivers don't pay the full cost of driving, so it's artificially cheap. If they actually did, then every highway would be tolled. I don't know what there is left to discuss.
Last edited by sstsunami55; 06-14-2016 at 12:02 AM..
Between zoning boards, state legislatures and even HOAs (aka the local People's Commissariat), we've got a veritable dictatorship here that would make any Soviet bureaucrat proud. :-)
I guess I must be Stalin. I'm on our HOA's board of directors. We do our best to make sure our infrastructure is up-to-date (much better than COA's Council does, by the way), to make sure that our children are safe and have healthy activities (tennis teams, swim team, play ground, safe biking, social events), help promote neighbor interactions (concerts, social events, holiday festivals), and help insure our neighborhood homes retain their value (certain non-heavy handed architectural controls - such as no cars up on cinder blocks). So, your constant innuendos and snide remarks about the burbs are just irresponsible. Stick with making the city great and stop with your silly, trite under the breath criticisms. You seem like a very intelligent person whose points would be much more effective if you didn't stoop to those levels.
I guess I must be Stalin. I'm on our HOA's board of directors. We do our best to make sure our infrastructure is up-to-date (much better than COA's Council does, by the way), to make sure that our children are safe and have healthy activities (tennis teams, swim team, play ground, safe biking, social events), help promote neighbor interactions (concerts, social events, holiday festivals), and help insure our neighborhood homes retain their value (certain non-heavy handed architectural controls - such as no cars up on cinder blocks). So, your constant innuendos and snide remarks about the burbs are just irresponsible. Stick with making the city great and stop with your silly, trite under the breath criticisms. You seem like a very intelligent person whose points would be much more effective if you didn't stoop to those levels.
I'm pleased to hear that you cultivate a benign Dictatorship of the Proletariat. :-)
What else is there to discuss? I think people like me and abalashov have made our points pretty clear. We're not trying to take away anyone's rights. At this point, people are just nitpicking.
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