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Not if you live in the Bay Area and have to ride BART. Environment inside the train cars is a particular mix of pee, vomit, BO, and other unidentified smells.
To the OP's question, the pandemic has rescued home price increases in the city. San Francisco homes are flat over the last year while outer suburbs have been soaring. Think NY has had a similar trend.
San Francisco is also paying the price now for over-regulating business and silly taxes. Many companies that aren't going to Texas and Florida are looking at suburban office space.
I'd also add that many edge cities have rail. Tyson's Corner has had heavy rail since 2014, and a lot of the suburban offices here in the Bay Area, around Boston, and around NY are near at least a commuter rail station.
Car culture is dangerous for kids, too. Those "20 is plenty" signs are around for a reason.
On the other hand, based on recent Netherlands data (who are the most cycling developed country), bicycle culture is also dangerous for kids.
Their finding is that 64% of emergency visits related to road incidents are from cyclists. And you can't blame cars, most of those accidents only involved the cyclist. While there is an image of cars hitting cyclists, bicycle-on-bicycle accidents are almost as common as those involving bicycles and cars.
On the other hand, based on recent Netherlands data (who are the most cycling developed country), bicycle culture is also dangerous for kids.
Their finding is that 64% of emergency visits related to road incidents are from cyclists. And you can't blame cars, most of those accidents only involved the cyclist. While there is an image of cars hitting cyclists, bicycle-on-bicycle accidents are almost as common as those involving bicycles and cars.
I don't have the time to read that right now but I would be curious to know about the severity of injuries and how many road incidents in comparison (obviously more people bike over there than here)
I don't have the time to read that right now but I would be curious to know about the severity of injuries and how many road incidents in comparison (obviously more people bike over there than here)
It doesn't go into more detail than serious and minor injuries. Cycling fatalities are about the same as car fatalities (though it doesn't report how many cycling fatalities were involved with cars). Looking at the number of injuries and deaths suffered by the elderly, Netherlands might want to think about licensing or testing to ensure they can cycle safely.
Cycling accounts for about 28% of all trips and 8% by passenger-km.
Suburban office buildings are at an obvious disadvantage in places served by rail transit focused on a central city
But even in places where everyone must drive they are not optimal. As one office manager says, "if we locate in the West suburb, employees from the East suburbs complain about the long drive, and vice versa.
But I will note that while there is some overlap between the set "suburban shopping malls" and "edge cities" in that all of the latter contain one or more of the former, edge cities weren't dying pre-COVID and aren't now either.
An edge city is not just a shopping destination but a suburban downtown, combining office, retail, some industrial and residential functions just as a traditional city downtown does. Think Tysons, Va., or King of Prussia, Pa., or The Woodlands outside Houston, or Bellevue, Wash. (That last is unusual among edge cities in that it isn't dominated by island buildings sitting in lakes or seas of parking but is rather built like a traditional city downtown on a grid of streets. When I first saw it, only the absence of the Space Needle made it clear I wasn't in downtown Seattle.)
Most of the shopping malls I know of in edge cities have managed to survive the demise of the traditional department stores in fine fashion. King of Prussia has lost four of its original six anchor department stores and gained two others (Nordstrom and Neiman Marcus). One of the former anchor stores became more mall space for smaller stores; two have been torn down, one to make way for a huge bridge connecting what had been two separate malls and lined with ultra-luxe boutiques; the other now has a Primark and a Dick's Sporting Goods stiiting on it, and the fourth is going to be replaced by apartments and offices.
That last is significant. Malls all over the country are being "de-malled" and turned into mixed-use live/work/play "town centers." Car-free living may be a minority preference in this country and is likely to remain one, but the size of the minority — and their cousins who want to reduce the amount of driving they do — is growing, not shrinking.
BTW, throughout all these changes, KofP has remained the top-grossing mall in the Greater Philadelphia region as well as the largest shopping mall on the East Coast. Subtract the indoor amusement park from the Mall of America and it's the largest in the country in terms of total selling space.
Also BTW: Contrary to the arguments being made by the defenders of the status quo here, higher density and walkability do not mean everyone lives in high-rise apartment buildings. You can have decent density and freestanding SFRs too; the houses just sit on smaller lots and/or have accessory apartments in them, that's all. Older cities also have neighborhoods where SFRs are mixed in with small, two- to four-story apartment buildings; I have not noticed any real damage to either the residents or to property values caused by such mixing. In fact, such neighborhoods make it possible for people to remain in them as their life stages change. Others have also noticed these things, as a few cities have moved to eliminate exclusive single-family-residential zoning.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MidValleyDad
A couple years ago some parents were taken to court in a DC suburb because they let the children ( 6 & 10 I think) go to the community park without direct supervision. Child services took the position that if the children were not in eyesight of a responsible adult when outside their home the parents were endangering a minor. They were cited several times and then arrested. I don't remember the final outcome but I believe it was appealed at least once.
I had several coworkers who would not let their kids go anywhere but an approved list of friends. Even then they would either deliver the kids to the door of the friend or at least stand on their front step and watch as the child went several houses down the block and the door opened and the other parent waved up the street at them acknowledging they knew the kid was there. They didn't think it was funny when I asked one day 'You mean you don't get a signed hand receipt acknowledging they have assumed responsibility?'
This strikes me as overly protective. When I was growing up, parents didn't hover over their kids and escort them to absolutely everything; we could go in and out of neighbor kids' houses as we pleased until dinnertime.
They also have:
i) problems with definitions of terms like "suburb";
ii) an inability to understand why others are not interested in their lifestyle or re-visiting dormitory living;
iii) an inability to sell others on a mythical housing environment so they attack reality;
iv) an inability to sell others on an actually undesirable housing environment (for others) so they try to attack everywhere else as somehow being inferior or failing;
v) a fascination with choo-choo trains;
vi) hatred for folks that own and utilize cars for utilitarian purposes rather than mere recreational purposes;
vii) hatred for parking lots and private open space;
viii) a need to generate a vocabulary of fluffy, ambiguous words ("urban fabric") or perjorative words ("car dependent") to support a communitarian/socialistic agenda (e.g., anti-car, pro transit-dependence, pro small living quarters ("you don't need a yard..."))
Fundamentally, most also likely aren't in the income bracket or property valuation bracket to suffer the taxes they want everyone else to spend to support the mythical lifestyle they seek.
This IS well stated and well summarized. However, to elaborate upon v), it is not just a fascination; it is a fetish. They get hard, or wet, depending upon sex/gender (or at least the one to which they were naturally born) thinking about choo-choos.
This IS well stated and well summarized. However, to elaborate upon v), it is not just a fascination; it is a fetish. They get hard, or wet, depending upon sex/gender (or at least the one to which they were naturally born) thinking about choo-choos.
I wish both sides would sit back and rationally do the math about what it would cost to fully implement what they each want to do (and I mean dealing with all the issues and adding in maintenance/future replacement costs and not kicking the can down the road to the next generation). I think the answer is a lot more complicated when you look at it from that standpoint.
I wish both sides would sit back and rationally do the math about what it would cost to fully implement what they each want to do (and I mean dealing with all the issues and adding in maintenance/future replacement costs and not kicking the can down the road to the next generation). I think the answer is a lot more complicated when you look at it from that standpoint.
Chuck Marohn has spent the better part of 20 years now pointing out how the autocentric suburban development pattern doesn't generate the tax revenue needed to pay for its own infrastructure. He has been trying mightily to get his fellow highway engineers to see that instead of designing urban streets and environments to ensure the free and quick flow of cars through them, we should be designing them to ensure that people can move about them freely and easily, even — especially — those without cars.
And with the exception of Bellevue, which is already urban in form, and the Country Club Plaza area in KC, which was designed to accommodate both cars and people from the start, most of our edge cities are busy retrofitting walkable urbanity onto themselves, at least in places.
Mass transit costs more to run because people are required to move other people around, while the cost of doing that by car is offloaded onto the drivers themselves. But in terms of cost-efficiency per person moved, a bus will beat a car every time, and a train will beat a bus (but many more people need to ride the train for its numbers to work out because they need their own physical plant while the buses can use the roads).
Chuck Marohn has spent the better part of 20 years now pointing out how the autocentric suburban development pattern doesn't generate the tax revenue needed to pay for its own infrastructure. He has been trying mightily to get his fellow highway engineers to see that instead of designing urban streets and environments to ensure the free and quick flow of cars through them, we should be designing them to ensure that people can move about them freely and easily, even — especially — those without cars.
Yep - I personally have nothing against the suburbs and can totally see the appeal of living there! (I personally live in a inner ring suburb myself in the city I live in). I think that people need to put personal opinions aside and figure out what the math is to sustain either an urban lifestyle or a suburban lifestyle or rural lifestyle and have appropriate taxes to adequately fund each area both short-term and long-term. If after that, the suburbs are still appealing and lower cost, that's awesome! I just don't think government should be in the business of subsidizing one style of living versus another.
I personally work as a transportation engineer so I can only speak to transportation but I agree with Chuck that while taxes/cost of living is cheaper in the suburbs, a great deal of transportation money from the state/federal government goes to projects in suburban areas as opposed to urban areas. So at least in transportation, suburban areas are getting much more service for what their taxes are paying for in comparison to urban areas.
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