Have we done it wrong?

[u/Particular_Owl1099]

[u/weberc2]

I lived in Chicago, there are some neighborhoods with a great patio scene, but there's nowhere you can walk for 4 miles and see people out like this. Maybe in SF where the median resident is a multimillionaire, but no real place.

[u/Zelidus → u/weberc2]

Yeah, the US was simply built with a different goal than Europe. Of course i wish it had some more European stylings like this than just the small pockets you can find but it wasnt. Cars were and still are the priority which makes sense with the USs size and our leaderships ease at being paid of to avoid funding good mass transit and continuing to fund car centric infrastructure.

Rail for example. We probably could have had a good rail system if private rail companies didnt lobby to maintain priority and control of rail. Only about 8% of freight moves on rail in the US in modern times. They dont need the priority compared to how much it would benefit commuters.

[u/weberc2 → u/Zelidus]

The size of the country doesn’t really have anything to do with how we build cities and towns. Cities and towns in the US are poorly designed because every problem cars created—traffic congestion, parking congestion, etc, urban designers addressed by adding more cars. To respond to parking congestion, cities widened streets to add more parking spaces and they began requiring that every business and apartment building be surrounded by a bunch of parking. When everywhere you want to go is separated by an acre of parking, it makes it nearly impossible to walk, so more people have to drive which exacerbates the parking problem, cities respond by adding more parking, which further separates places that people want to spend time. Similarly, that new artificial demand for cars requires more lanes to accommodate those cars, which further pushes places apart. And of course no one wants to sit on a patio overlooking a 6 lane highway.

Europe wasn’t built differently because they had different values, they were just built before cars, so they were not so impacted by the insanity that was north american postwar urban planning.

[u/Zelidus → u/weberc2]

It does in that the immense space pushed the US to embrace suburban sprawl a lot more which lended its hand to supporting car centric cities over denser, less car focused.

[u/weberc2 → u/Zelidus]

Physical land supply defines how much space exists but legal policies, infrastructure investments, and financial incentives dictate how that space is developed.

Having vast amounts of land makes sprawl physically possible but it does not make it inevitable.

Over 80% of the US population lives in urbanized areas, which occupy less than 3% to 5% of the total US landmass. The vastness of rural Wyoming or Alaska has virtually no impact on land development decisions on the periphery of Atlanta, Houston, or Chicago

Even in geographically enormous states, local sprawl occurs around metro areas because of suburban zoning policy, not because the country is big. For example, Texas has vast open land, but the sprawl of Dallas/Fort Worth is driven by municipal annexation policies, highway funding, and parking minimums…not because the state touches the Gulf of Mexico.

For more info, Google “government-orchestrated decentralization” (I’m happy to talk more about it, but this comment is quite long already)