Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
The difference between transit riders in LA as opposed to NYC, Chicago and many other major US cities is that transit riders in LA are at the bottom of the rankings as it relates to income, and being in a city where bus riders outnumber rail system riders 3 to 1 means that they're being sacrificed thanks to this rail building spree.
Can't low income riders make use of the rail system, too? Or is bus service getting cut as well?
A good illustration of the ridiculousness of not weighting density can be seen if we take a metro area, and relocate the people from high density to low density. This will actually create a "denser" metro. Basically regions are punished for concentrated population.
Take the NYC area. Let's pretend we vacate Manhattan, and force all its residents to live in exurban sprawl. Guess what, according to the metric used in this thread, we just increased the metro area's density. We made the denominator (land area) smaller, while maintaining the numerator (population). So relocating 100% of Manhattan to exurban McMansions actually has the perverse result of making NYC more "dense".
A good illustration of the ridiculousness of not weighting density can be seen if we take a metro area, and relocate the people from high density to low density. This will actually create a "denser" metro. Basically regions are punished for concentrated population.
Take the NYC area. Let's pretend we vacate Manhattan, and force all its residents to live in exurban sprawl. Guess what, according to the metric used in this thread, we just increased the metro area's density. We made the denominator (land area) smaller, while maintaining the numerator (population). So relocating 100% of Manhattan to exurban McMansions actually has the perverse result of making NYC more "dense".
According to Demographia the New York Urban Area is 4495 sq miles. Even if we remove NYC's land mass from the equation and transfer all 8.3 million residents to the suburbs, you're still looking at a 4190 sq mile footprint, with a standard density of 4900ppsm. Yes, the region's density increases a bit, but not enough to overtake LA's UA density (15.06 million, 6200ppsm). Sorry, you'd need to add the population of Jakarta to make a dent on that enormous footprint.
Huh? Why would you remove NYC to compare the density? And not look at weighted density, NOLA was arguing unweighted density is a useless number.
Because weighted density is useless in a thread about sprawl. Unweighted density is slightly more useful, but the key number to look at is landmass. Why would you ignore that?
Would you argue that Tokyo is more compact than the Bay Area simply because it's more dense?
As I mentioned here - //www.city-data.com/forum/38533013-post40.html - the suburbs of NYC aren't radically different in density from the suburbs of LA. It's just that the "urban area" of NYC includes a lot of what most people would call the exurbs. It's simply easier to cast a neater net around where development is in LA - mostly because of the historical abundance of water in the NY area and a lack of the large wetlands areas that exist all over the NYC metro.
Because weighted density is useless in a thread about sprawl. Unweighted density is slightly more useful, but the key number to look at is landmass. Why would you ignore that?
It is useless? It's unclear what exactly people mean here by sprawl, with some posters having very different ideas in mind. Maybe not compact, I'd argue the Bay Area is more sprawling than Tokyo.
Most of those marshes in the gif aren't either, the urban area boundaries are deliberately to exclude low density area unless surrounded by higher density areas.
. . . and no one in their right mind would call them urbanized. In the first one the area is zoned that way as a municipal extension of the Pinelands Act which mandates large lot sizes and clustering of units on <50% of the land area and limits the amount of impervious surface to protect groundwater . . . even though this part of that municipality isn't technically in the Pinelands (and if it was even the number of trees you could clear would also be restricted).
In the second one it's part of a broader area of parks, preserved forest and farmland. Partly the legacy of Whitman's 1 million acres. Going back to this map - http://nj.usgs.gov/nawqa/linj/workpl...ures/pop2a.gif when you look at the light gray areas that's largely what you get - scattered housing around parks, farms, forests, wetlands or other protected areas, a whole bunch of that gets included in the urbanized area but not many people live there. It's not that Metuchen/Edison is more sprawling than Irvine - it's that the "urban area" of greater NYC still includes farms and other undeveloped areas.
Most of those marshes in the gif aren't either, the urban area boundaries are deliberately to exclude low density area unless surrounded by higher density areas.
Not sure which marshes you're talking about but all 8,400 acres of wetlands in the Meadowlands, 13,000 acres in NYC, 13,500 in Nassau, etc are well within the urban area boundary - that's ~55 square miles before we get to Suffolk, Middlesex, Monmouth or Ocean which would easily double those numbers. The only wetlands that are excluded from the urban area are those inside Jamaica Bay.
I used to live in Corona del Mar, which is adjacent to Irvine. Anyone who thinks that Irvine is less sprawly than NJ is seriously on drugs.
Orange County is basically 100% sprawl, and there is nothing in OC remotely comparable to the urban centers in NJ. Not one square inch of Irvine is remotely urban or walker friendly. In fact there is not one attractive, sizable downtown anywhere in OC, and we're talking a county of 3 million people.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
