As someone who lives in an area with plenty of high-density residential buildings, I can attest that this is a perfect recipe for creating congested cities with such intense light and noise pollution.
Light pollution is relatively easily solved, there's just not much will to do so. Noise pollution is best solved by reducing car-dependency which is a non-starter in most North American cities; I can't speak for Europe but I understand Paris to have undertaken a serious revolution in purging cars within the past decade.
> I understand Paris to have undertaken a serious revolution in purging cars within the past decade.
The issue is that they have mainly increased the friction of using cars in the city (reducing lanes, restricting parking, converting avenues to one-way) all the while the public transit enhancements are running late, and whatever lines were already there saw a drop in service quality.
So increasing density would require a major improvement in public transit. Note, however, that the city of Paris proper already has one of the highest densities in the world.
But what that doesn't mention: the bike sharing schemes are hit-and-miss. I usually commute each way a good hour before rush-hour traffic, so I have a good probability of finding a usable bike. But during rush hour? Fat chance.
Oh, you're going to point out that there's a scheme helping you purchase your own bike? Indeed. What are you going to do with it, though? At home, you may be able to find a spot to park in your flat (it's not my case). You wanna leave it outside? Sure, go ahead, if you don't care about finding it in one piece in the morning. Ditto for the other end of your commute.
There's also the fact that bike sharing schemes only work in Paris proper and adjacent towns. If you want to commute in from further away [0], you better be ready to ride in traffic and have your own bike, assuming you don't live that far. If you're lucky enough to live in one of the places served by the new metro, it's still not ready (but should be real soon now - fingers crossed).
So sure, having more dedicated bike lanes (and some of the new ones are actually physically separate from car lanes) is great. Although sometimes the layout is... puzzling? Bike lanes switching from the left to the right side of the roads, narrow two-way lanes (Bd Sébastopol), etc.
But I wouldn't exactly call it a "revolution" in practice. My commute goes from the east to the northwest of the city, around 7 km. Of these, only around 1 km is a bike lane separate from the traffic. And it's ridiculously narrow. Bonus points for it being painted with a slippery paint for some reason (look up Boulevard Magenta). The rest is half on bike lanes shared with a bus, the other half on regular roads with no bike lane at all.
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[0] Don't forget that Paris proper is home to ~2M people, while the Paris Region has ~12M.
The original post was complaining about increasing density and how investment in public transport hasn't kept up. The previous poster said what about bikes, and you are now saying that bikes are not a solution to people coming from the greater Paris region. But that was not what we are talking about, we were talking about higher density (=more people) in Paris proper. Bikes are certainly a solution to transport in the high density city.
Only part of my answer was about people coming in from afar. The other, about there being nowhere to store bikes, as well as questionable quality of the biking infrastructure is about the city itself.
Edit: I'm actually saying this as someone who enjoys and actually does bike. When living in the city proper, I think there are very few routes for which the bike isn't the quickest method of transportation. For my commute, which is pretty much a best-case scenario (modern metro with few to no issues, goes in a fairly straight line, don't have to change lines, stations close to both home and the office) the bike is much faster: 20 instead of 30 minutes.
Bike storage was never a problem for me living in London, even when I lived on a tiny canal boat. I can’t imagine Parisian’s bicycles are that different nor their homes much smaller than a boat or my 75m2 flat. Yes, I also have a cargo bike for transporting kids. The only thing stopping anyone from cycling is their anxiety and sense of car-owing identity
I was talking to a friend living in London, and it would indeed seem that flats tend to be bigger over there. We do have many 100+ m2 flats, don't get me wrong, it's just that most locals can't afford those and live in shoeboxes instead.
There's also the fact that the layout doesn't always lend itself to storing a bike, most flats being rather old. Even though I would technically have the surface area to store a bike, it'd have to be in an awkward place to avoid blocking the passages.
Some newer apartment buildings do have areas for storing bikes more or less securely. But I doubt that's the case for most people.
Instead, what I'm hopeful for, is that the local bike-sharing scheme will improve. And indeed, I've read a few weeks ago that they were rolling out some improved model, which they expect to be more robust.
One reason I don't get a bike here in Seattle is because bike theft is just way too common, and I have no way to secure it in my house (not enclosed garage, no space inside to keep it). It is funny, because they have better infrastructure now, but the theft problem (and lack of police/government care for the problem) means less people are actually riding bikes here.
People also generally don't arrive sweaty when biking (at least not more than those taking public transportation in the summer).
To avoid being sweaty: go slower to not over-exert yourself, wear less clothing (you might be a bit cold when starting your commute, but that's not a big deal), and if it's still not enough (not fit enough, hills, etc...), an electric-assisted bike might be the solution.
they don't; it's just not practical. You have to be relatively fit and energetic to do it every day, have no chores like kids pickup, have extra time on your hands, the weather has to be perfect - no rain or god forbid snow. This only works for a particular segment of working people out there.
It depends on the climate. If you live in California or west coast outside of rainy seasons, there really isn't much of a problem unless you have a huge hill to climb on the way to work. Actually, that was my problem in Lausanne (3D town, I road up the hill every morning, and would be a bit sweaty, but I had my own office so I didn't care).
Riding worked for a particular phase of my life, now it doesn't, since I have a kid to take care of and the bike theft problem has gotten out of control in my locale.
I live in Paris, I have 2 small kids, and I don't have much time on my hands (founder). I go to work (5km) by bike every day, whether it rains, snows, or worse ;)
Over a third of Dutch people cycle as their most frequent mode of transport. Over a quarter of all trips are on a bike. 49% of primary school students and 75% of secondary school students cycle to school.
Cycling has been a national priority for the Dutch, like the automobile has a been a priority for much of the rest of the developed world.
With e-bikes, fitness and terrain are less relevant than ever. Unsafe(car dominated) bike routes are the number one obstacle to increased cycling.
I’m not biking to work in -17C. I have walked to the bus (including through 50cm of snow in a raging blizzard) and driven in such temperature many times.
A quick search reveals that the average winter temperature in the Netherlands is above freezing, while average summer temperatures hover around 20C. Sounds positively delightful for biking. That’s not the case for much of North America.
Where I come from, generally in the Great Lakes region, the average temperatures range from -1C to 30C during the year. Not great for year-round commuting by bike. Some people do it, sure, but it is truly a commitment.
It helps that the Netherlands is mostly flat and has pretty good weather for it (I guess rain is kind of an issue). They also have awesome infrastructure and don't just expect cars to do the right thing (they actually design and redesign roads to make biking safe).
according to your own numbers, 64% of the Dutch don't use bicycle as their most frequent mode of transport. Meaning that bicycling doesn't work for the majority of population even when it is made a national priority. I'm all for it, but the numbers you've listed prove that it's simply not practical for most people in the best of times.
I'm not so sure that's an issue for the general population.
My main gripe is actually availability of bikes in the bike-sharing scheme, since I can't bring up my own in the office, and since I work in a shady area, there's no way I'd leave it outside for the day. I also like the flexibility of not having to use my bike both ways. Think catching a movie or whatever after work and possibly getting a drink with friends. Although this is related to not wanting to leave the bike unattended for any period of time.
But nowadays, with electric bikes, unless you live on top of Montmartre hill (and even then), I think it's no longer an issue. I have a colleague who takes her two children to school on bike before riding into the office (she works in a different office, where they have an interior yard with bike racks). Her bike's got electric assistance and she doesn't seem to arrive out of breath or anything. She also doesn't seem exceptionally sporty.
Everything only works for a particular segment of people, but you exaggerate how small this particular segment is.
You don’t need to be fit, just not entirely out of shape — or ride an ebike. You can easily do chores, get groceries, etc. on a bike. I take my kid to school in a cargo bike regularly. It’s faster than driving (at rush hour at least) because there’s no stoplights on the bike path. And rain gear is a thing.
It’s not for everyone but haters always claim it’s for no one. No, it’s just not for you, stop being a hater.
I have biked to work over 30 years in various places. Some with uphill in the morning. The point is just that you bike comfortably. When I was younger that probably meant something like 18 km/h in sligthly hilly places. Nowadays it's less. You can actually debug your code while biking (mentally, no screen involved). I have solved many problems after 15 minutes on the bike better than in 3 hours in front of the screen. Yes, I avoid heavy traffic, even if it means a detour.
If you want to bike fast you can do it when not on the way to the office.
(I once biked in Dallas at 95F. There not getting sweaty might be a challenge...)
The same is happening in the UK. They've made car travel harder without making public transport any better (outside of London), which has just lowered the average person's productivity rather than making any headway into tackling the core issue of people getting from A to B quicker, cheaper, with less pollution.
They put in some heavy traffic restrictions in my local city of Oxford by closing off residential roads, forcing all traffic down "arterial" roads instead and putting parking restrictions all over the place. A year later, there are no fewer cars on the road or increased public transport usage; some local studies by the university confirmed that. People just spend more time stuck in traffic travelling longer distances.
It's like having a person with an injured leg and a missing one. Instead of giving the person a prosthesis to remove the load, they've just lopped the other off altogether, leaving them to crawl from place to place instead of hobble.
> [car travel harder without making public transport better]
Erm aren't you forgetting something?
London just quadrupled its bicycle network. That seems like a massive improvement to me. When I lived there, biking was...let's be kind and say "less than ideal". Last time I visited I was amazed by the improvement, with protected two-way bike lanes right on the Thames and much more.
I feel like the best way to make getting from A to B quicker is for A and B to be closer together. Which makes walking or biking more practical and you don’t have to spend as much money on public transit.
Only when the distances are greater than short-walk distance. Cars take up (huge amounts of) space at their destination by parking. You can only push two destinations so close together before their parking lots merge.
Only to a point, because car trips have more “friction” especially in a city.
For example, you might need to spend some time getting to/from the car or wending your way through a parking structure. You may need to drive a more circuitous route due to one-way streets—-and certainly can’t cut through a park or building. You don’t need fuel/charging or maintenance every trip but it amortizes out to a small delay. And there’s traffic!
Anecdotally, a 15 minute walk (~1 mile) is probably about the break-even point. My spouse and I both went that far yesterday, one in a car and one walking, and yet we both got home at almost exactly the same time.
If you increase density, you should be avoiding the need to improve public transit, as more people will be closer to their destination than it's worth driving to.
For the same population increase, less density means people have to travel farther to get to their destination. More people travelling farther necessitates more public transit
Suppose that you have a grid-like road network across an area of 100 square miles, where intersecting roads go north-south and east-west and roads are half a mile apart. If you want to get from one corner of the square to the adjacent one, you have to travel 10 miles. If there are a million people doing this, you have ten million vehicle miles.
Now suppose you compress this many people into an area of 25 square miles, where the roads are still half a mile apart. Now the distance along one of the edges is 5 miles and the same million people only have to travel 5 million miles. But now instead of having 400 miles of roads (10/0.5 * 10 on each axis), you have 100 miles of roads (5/0.5 * 5 * 2), so each road has twice as many cars, or each bus has to carry twice as many passengers or whatever.
This is why mass transit works in cities and not in the suburbs. In a city you have enough passengers to fill the bus or subway car, in the suburbs you don't. But if you increase the density without putting in any mass transit, you just get more traffic.
On the other hand, the people who say we can't increase density until we build mass transit are full of crap. You can add a bus route in a day, you just buy a bus and hire a driver. In urban areas subways are generally more efficient, and those take time to build, but you can run a bus until the subway is built. It's no excuse to hold up housing construction.
You can't assume that the number of cars is a constant though. As point A and point B become farther apart, car usage goes up. When they become closer together, car usage scales down.
But as point A and point B become closer together, it takes less time to get there by car and then people do it more often. Unless traffic congestion eats the time savings, implying that there is high traffic congestion.
Cities are populated by people, not cars. As point A and point B become closer, people are less likely to drive.
If your mailbox is attached to your house, you can lean out your front door to get your mail. If your mailbox is at the end of your 20 foot driveway, you take a few steps to get your mail. If you live on a farm, and your mailbox is down a several hundred yard driveway, you might hop in your side-by-side UTV. If your mail goes to a Post Office Box in town, you might hop in your truck and pick it up while running errands.
If things that had been a 10 minute drive become a 5 minute drive, now they're worth it when before they weren't. You go to the shop instead of waiting 2 days for Amazon. You go to the shop you like more instead of the one you like less even though the lesser one is closer, because now the difference isn't as big.
There's a finite number of trips people can practically do - just because they live next door to work doesn't mean they'll commute more than twice each day (close enough people will return for home for lunch perhaps).
As traffic and travel times lessen, people do travel further and more, but only to a point.
But who was contending otherwise? You don't need it to be infinite, to be a problem all it has to do is not allow the reduction in driving because now distances are shorter and sometimes people can walk to not exceed the increase in density because now four times as many people are in the same area. Which it might not have done even without this, depending on how much more often shorter distances cause people to walk.
That is unfortunate but realistically there's never going to be a political overhaul of that scale where all moves are perfectly synced. As long as they're actually working on the transit enhancements it seems completely acceptable to me (in the abstract; I'm not a Parisian)
yeah, make sure you move out of the city and go run hiding in the countryside somewhere
if you stay in the city, the globalists WILL come for you, they WILL put you in 15 minute cities where everything you need is easily available within walking, bicycling or high quality transit distance (oh no!)
Lol. I'm not worried. I just it's funny think it's funny how people live to line up on the side of the unelected global governance system and think that voting matters and believe everything they were taught in school/on TV etc.
"I'm choosing to give up my car, and you will choose that too!"
yeah, the default mode of human transportation is to drive a single occupancy private automobile, for every trip, everywhere, including in dense urban environments, and anyone who thinks otherwise is brainwashed by the globalists
if you prefer walking, riding a bike or transit you're so brainwashed! wake up and listen to the truth the automobile and fossil fuel industries are trying to get out there!
But I didn't say any of that. Walk or ride - do whatever you like. But in the new world, one option will have been removed - driving. I'm not cheering the loss of that. I'm for free choice. You seem to be arguing in favour of removing other peoples' choices. And you think that's right! Who made you (or the Paris mayor) king/queen of the world?
I'm also saying, artificially creating issues by removing roads, making them one way etc, in order to create terrible traffic, in order to then justify removing cars completely, is a form of manipulative abuse, being inflicted on people by government. I'm not going to cheer abusive behaviour.
I fundamentally disagree with every single word and every thought that led you there
> Walk or ride - do whatever you like. But in the new world, one option will have been removed - driving. I'm not cheering the loss of that. I'm for free choice. You seem to be arguing in favour of removing other peoples' choices. And you think that's right! Who made you (or the Paris mayor) king/queen of the world?
Akshully it's all other modes of transportation that have been exterminated by the private single occupancy automobile. Cities levelled and the entire planet polluted to make way for it, and walking, cycling and transit made not just unsafe and unpleasant but literally impossible and illegal, and everyone forced to pay insane amounts to subsidize roads that don't make any profit. Thankfully, in Paris and a handful of other cities, leaders are recognizing this and working on making walking, riding a bike and transit legal, safe and enjoyable again. So if you and other ardent motorists want to continue to exercise your free choice to drive, you will no longer be able to do so at the expense of everyone else, you will have to pay your fair share for roads and parking and accept that all space no longer belongs to you by default.
> I'm also saying, artificially creating issues by removing roads, making them one way etc, in order to create terrible traffic, in order to then justify removing cars completely, is a form of manipulative abuse, being inflicted on people by government. I'm not going to cheer abusive behaviour.
Roads create traffic and viable alternatives to driving reduces it. Any child, idiot or PhD urban planner and traffic engineer can tell you this.
> Roads create traffic and viable alternatives to driving reduces it. Any child, idiot or PhD urban planner and traffic engineer can tell you this.
So, in the past, the governance structure used taxes to install roads and encourage car use.. (ie they were children, idiots and bereft of PhD urban planners).
But now, it's using taxes to remove roads and discourage car use.
How sage they are, not idiotic at all. Go go government! Double helpings please!
Yes, some actions have bad outcomes and some good.
Are you saying everything the government does objectively makes life worse? Then you should be furious about driving anyway, because the government effectively forced you into it.
Yes. I think government was acting immorally back then, far exceeding whatever people required and acting in support of powerful interests (petrol companies, industry). Now it is far, far worse, with government seeking a level of micro management and control over people that is abhorrent to me - control of travel, energy, water, money, location, etc.
And amazingly, most people want it! Because they have been mis-educated by this immoral institution. They want to force others into this or that action, not because those others have done something wrong, but because they are convinced of an idea and think it is ok to use force to get their preference. It's a sort of tyranny in the name of 'morality', only the moral element of 'do no harm' is ignored.
The recalcitrant will be helped whether they want it or not!
Kindly explain how "not having 90% of public surface area in a dense city dedicated to 1 mode of transport, the automobile" is tyranny. If anything the elimination of everything else as a mode of transport (by not having safe paths for people walking or cycling, as well as subpar public transport) is the true tyranny here.
It's true what they say: for those accustomed to privilege anything else is an assault.
The mayor enjoys high levels of public approval for her pedestrianisation and cyclability projects (and so do dozens of other aediles undertaking similar projects in the past few years throughout Europe), so I'm not sure what's your point here.
I also can't really figure out the logic of a conspiracy theory that equates "car (purchase + license + insurance + fuel) = freedom" and "bikes (300$ + strong legs) = slavery", but hey
The purging has really picked up pace in the last couple of years, and I think a major highlight will be the upcoming cleansing of Place de la Concorde.
Hear hear! Anytime someone argues something like "I could never give up my car and live in a city! They're so noisy!" I feel like a version of that Goose meme. "NOISY FROM WHAT?"
More of this, it's fun - when you don't live there: trams running on insanely poorly designed, or maintained tracks, trams running on extremely squeally wheels (see design, maintenance), sirens (running on overtime and at full strength, see screaming people), preachers (see screaming people :-), protests (The birds aren't real!), drummers, motorcycles ("Harleys"), dirt bikes (kids). In San Francisco, cars are the well behaved and quiet group in there.
Sirens: valid. But those suckers are usually attached to vehicles
People yelling: not often in my experience. And the usual offender when someone is yelling, it's some doofus in a car yelling at some other doofus in a car.
Loud music: not often in my experience. And the usual offender when there is loud music, it's some doofus playing loud music in their car.
Construction: valid
But the single most frequent / annoying loud sound: car horns. Constantly.
I'm not going to argue the point that cars aren't loud they are!
However, in Manhattan the city is still very loud with 0 cars. Meaning in the middle of the night in midtown, not a single car, the city itself hums with a constant noise that is not healthy.
Witnessed this during covid when I didn't see a car for hours on a typically busy midtown avenue, but the city is still very very loud compared to a suburban setting.
So, we get rid of all cars, then what? You still live in a noisy city. No thanks.
Credentials: 5 years in midtown, 15 years downtown Manhattan.
With all respect, “didn’t see a car for hours on a typically busy midtown avenue”, even during peak covid, is bananas if for no other reason than the ambulances were going almost constantly (ymmv based on where you live).
But I distinctly remember watching the odd car here and there and wondering where they were going.
And things were quieter! There was the background noise of machinery and buses and cars but it was a lot quieter than even holiday Sundays.
Credentials: 14 years in semi-rural Texas, 25 years in Manhattan
Living in Texas and Manhattan you should aware that we very good at adapting to our surroundings. The relative noise is not comparable between rural Texas and Manhattan.
I agree the city was quieter during covid, and would be quieter without cars. It's ridiculous to debate otherwise.
But a major is vastly noisier without cars than any normal suburb with the rare car passing by a residential street.
It varies by area; I remember staying in Brooklyn with a friend and being a few floors up the traffic noise was minimal (constant), few horns, but it seemed an emergency vehicle went by every few minutes.
Most of what I remember of European cities, too, when anywhere near the denser parts.
Part of "city noise" is dependent where you're living, and how new it is. Close, cramped, older building with people arguing above and below and beside you? Not fun. Newer building with excellent soundproofing? Nowhere near as bad.
> Sirens: valid. But those suckers are usually attached to vehicles
But they're attached to emergency vehicles. The fire department is not going to wait for the bus when responding to a fire, so you can't actually get rid of this by installing mass transit, and then its prevalence is proportional to density.
> People yelling: not often in my experience. And the usual offender when someone is yelling, it's some doofus in a car yelling at some other doofus in a car.
> Loud music: not often in my experience. And the usual offender when there is loud music, it's some doofus playing loud music in their car.
If people are usually in cars then the people making noise will usually be in cars. But it's not as if they're going to stop having business disputes or lovers' quarrels or whatever it is this time just because they're on foot.
And whether loud music is a problem depends primarily on who your neighbors are. In a city you'll have a lot of them and you don't get to choose who they are.
> car horns
Ironically this doesn't happen in the suburbs because there are more roads and parking per car, and thereby fewer traffic disputes and no need to summon someone from a building immediately instead of parking and going inside. So you're now equally making the case for cities to have wider roads and more parking.
France already has some of the most densely populated cities in the world, Paris is #32. French cities feel less congested than the likes of US cities because it has better cycling infrastructure and public transport options. High population density is not a cure for the bias car infrastructure imposes on a city. So your recipe will need to take more in to account than just density.
There was a semi-arbitrary building height adopted during the Haussmannian reorganization in Paris. My feeling is people noticed it led to perfectly liveable blocks. (Most places go a bit higher than this by now but Paris is strongly attached to the "roofs of Paris" and actively protects them. So Paris is a mix of Haussmannian building heights and higher.)
In the 50es through 70es, there was a strong need for extra housing which led to the projects outside Paris ("citées"), to many factories torn down to make space, but also to much higher residential buildings here and there. Still worked fine (well, not many of the citées worked fine).
And people really, but REALLY love being able to walk to their preferred local baker and pastry shop (out of a choice of several of course), and to the local grocery store. The density has to be high enough to support these.
Turns out, high density also allows a great subway system. Nobody complains that it exists.
one is that Chinese "city" boundaries also generally include a lot of rural land, mountains, etc. Chongqing is the size of Austria.
The other is that while the buildings are certainly tall, China also does a lot of "tower-in-the-park" style development where the plazas and landscaping in between tall buildings decrease overall density.
PRC cities are not particularly dense. Population densities in cities within a country tend to follow zipfs law, which would predict BJ and SH to be 3-4x larger than it currently is. Many economists and urban planners was suggesting PRC should densify tier1 about 10 years ago. But hukou anbd industrial policy seems to be designed to limit megacity sizes to redirect popuation towards growing 3rd, 4th+ tier cities into their own economic hubs. IMO trying to avoid SKR/JP where everyone rushes to a few economically viable regions.
Most of Manila is an endless sprawl low-rise housing and single-story slums, with a few areas of high-rise buildings (Makati, BGC, etc). In the average large Chinese city, more or less all the housing is high-rise.
As someone who lives in an area with plenty of high-density residential buildings, I can attest that I love it and I wish there were more American cities that were an option for my lifestyle.
What do you mean? In my experience outside of the few major cities (New York, LA, etc.) there are only high rises in the very downtown of large cities.
I guess I tend to think of "high-rise" as a synonym for skyscraper. Something in the neighborhood of 10+ stories. I'm fairly certain that Columbus at least doesn't have many residential buildings that high outside of its downtown.
However, if we are counting 3 or so story apartments then there are definitely high-rises all over the place like you say.
Edit: think about crowded grocery stores and restaurants. Think community spaces like parks and libraries being packed all the time. Think about never being able to stop and get a coffee without waiting in a long line. Congestion
> Think community spaces like parks and libraries being packed all the time.
They aren't, with dense housing there is so much room for parks that they are everywhere. I live in such a place, you go out and you mostly hear birds chirping, not people, it is a cheap suburb with high rise apartments next to public transit and everything you need in walkable distance including hospital and government services and hardware stores.
Dense housing means there is more room for everything else, not less, so everything is less crowded. Birds singing outside of my windows is the main noise pollution where I live.
That's only true if we hold the population constant, and get everyone to scrunch together onto smaller lots built taller.
The main aim of density is to turn cities of a million into cities of ten million, not to just stick with a million and have birds chirping in parks everywhere you go.
Sorry, which density advocacy groups have this nice idea as their literal goal?
Density is the population of a metropolitan area divided by its total area. Not population divided by the footprint area of residential lots. Density advocacy is all about accommodating population influx; it is really burgeoning population advocacy.
Every group I know of that actually advocates for density does have this as their goal. It is a bit odd that the external reputation is that they do not, to the point that parallel orgs sometimes appear advocating for pretty much the same things but "with more emphasis on livability" or similar.
Really? Is this documented somewhere? What is the typical proposal for how they plan to keep the population constant, after creating all that space? I've not heard of this. It's always about how many more millions of people could live here if we rearranged things.
I've never heard of a density advocacy group being opposed to population growth. Density advocacy is practically synonymous with at least acceptance (if not advocacy) of urban population growth. Population growth is in fact like a sacred cow. You must never blame any urban problems on population growth; the cause is always not enough vertical build.
Is there any example of a density anywhere going on record that the metropolis in this local neck of the woods should somehow say no to more people, rather than building more?
> What is the typical proposal for how they plan to keep the population constant, after creating all that space?
Have other metropolitan areas do the same so there is no net migration.
> Is there any example of a density anywhere going on record that the metropolis in this local neck of the woods should somehow say no to more people, rather than building more?
There is a difference between refusing new people and having population growth as a goal. People exist, they have to live somewhere, increasing density increases the housing stock and gives them somewhere to live.
If one city is hostile to giving them somewhere to live and another isn't, people might move from the hostile place to the amiable place. But the solution to this is obviously to make the other city less hostile, not to make sure that all cities are maximally hostile.
paris proper is already one of the densest areas in the world (and definitely in europe). when i lived there i wouldn't have noticed any problems with crowded grocery stores or community spaces compared to the comparatively low-density city i currently live in.
there definitely were a lot more people in the streets, other cities feel deserted in comparison.
Delivery also lets you have more smaller stores carrying the 80% you need regularly, and the 20% that is less common can come via delivery in a day or two.
This seems like a fundamentally suburban perspective, and I don't mean that to be an insult, it's just what all of my small home town family members and friends think, and it overwhelmingly and ironically relates to the real traffic congestion they actually experience coupled with the hypothetical imagined congestion they pre-emptively avoid exposure to by driving instead of getting on the train.
Not that there's _no_ foot traffic congestion or lines, but it's the same thing that happens in a case where there's only one Starbucks in a sprawling suburb or business district at lunch time.
A high density area is likewise it's own complex economy and system that seeks balance, when there's too many people in one area, you just go somewhere else or enjoy or compete with it. That's partly why Tokyo is simultaneously the most populated city on earth and one of the most quiet, clean, and least congested places I've visited.
In my sparsely populated city that sprawls, it's extremely noisy, dusty, time consuming to get around, the infrastructure is failing, and I rarely bump into anyone I know, because people are only visible at the beginning and end of their journey. Meanwhile here in Vancouver I often run into people I know multiple times per day because we're in the same spaces, or I can go somewhere else and not see anyone just like any other place.
"Partly why". It's just an example, I'm sure other cities are more hectic. I didn't get the impression that Japanese suburbs were particularly different than North American ones in terms of volume levels or how uninteresting they are.
It seems to me that it's mainly cars and a scarcity of places to be that make cities horrible and congested. More pollution, more noise, less space.
> Edit: think about crowded grocery stores and restaurants. Think community spaces like parks and libraries being packed all the time. Think about never being able to stop and get a coffee without waiting in a long line.
Have you lived (rather than just visited; extremely tourist-oriented areas can be broken in the way you describe, because all of the tourists stay there) in a large dense city? I'm sure there are exceptions (chiefly places with broken zoning/planning) but _in general_, if there's enough traffic for the cafe that people have to wait in long lines, _someone will open a cafe_. To the point where "there are a silly number of cafes" is a complaint people sometimes make about such cities.
Same goes for the rest of it, of course, but "dense cities have insufficient cafe provision" is a particularly bizarre take.
In Dublin (not a massively dense city; it's about a quarter the density of Paris, or a little less than San Francisco), we had an almost complete collapse of construction following the financial crisis, only really resuming around 2014. One interesting consequence of this was _fake cafes_. When you build an apartment block, you probably want to do _something_ with the ground floor, and in urban apartment blocks it'll rarely be used for housing; instead it'll be used for retail units. So if you build the apartment block, and then the next day the construction industry collapses and there's an unfinished site next door for five years, what do you do with the retail units? You don't want them to look derelict, so you put in fake cafes! (Via images on the windows).
Growth has since resumed, the unfinished sites are gone, and the fake cafes have become manifest, adding to the bafflingly large number of cafes in the city.
> think about crowded grocery stores and restaurants. Think community spaces like parks and libraries being packed all the time. Think about never being able to stop and get a coffee without waiting in a long line. Congestion
That depends on supply and demand, not simply demand. More people attract, open and staff more shops, etc. It's easier to find a restaurant in a major city than a quiet rural town.
I would imagine that the answer would be to open more shops. Obviously, to avoid a NYC-like situation, you would have to bust the CRE cartels that keep retail square-footage absurdly expensive. Parks and libraries are harder... though building taller does tend to allow for more open land space.
> think about crowded grocery stores and restaurants. Think community spaces like parks and libraries being packed all the time. Think about never being able to stop and get a coffee without waiting in a long line.
It also changes behaviour. People are under stress all the time. It's not a nice or natural way to live. But it is easier to govern people.
I really think people underestimate how much of this is down to _taste_. Personally I've lived in pretty sparse suburbs of Dublin (by European standards, anyway; think semi-detached houses, as far as the eye can see), in the city centre, and in dense inner suburbs (walking distance to the centre, generally terraced houses and apartment buildings). I wouldn't consider going back to an outer suburb, never mind a rural area. But I know some people who live in the middle of nowhere and love it! Couldn't do it, myself.
...This is the state of people living under car-dependency, not dense urbanism supported by public transit and walkable areas. Car noises stress people out, make them irritable, impact their health. Driving in traffic makes people angry/furious/insane (literally - it is not sane to pull a gun on someone driving past you but it happens). Prioritizing parking and roads is a colossal misuse of land which causes crowded public spaces; imagine if every parking lot was an additional market or park.
But, they are closing roads making them one way etc, that creates the traffic problem. It's bad governance - creating pain to allow government to administer the preordained 'solution' - no cars!
Moving to car less city is the goal, but, as others note, the infrastructure is not there. So you're just pushing cars out... with no real answers being provided.
How is that good government?
And the roads you call mismanagement are already there! Removing them, deteriorating their use is what's new...
It causes congestion if the city refuses to invest in public transportation - which is more a problem in US cities - though some European cities could be behind on keeping up with changes to different degrees
Yes, it always a balance of factors in the system, but what you're talking about is a higher threshold of capacity already. They've built up to higher rise density in Tokyo and are already managing much higher people movement in core higher density areas than the edges of Paris.
You'd be mistaken. Public transit is extremely crowded in the centre during rush hour.
For example, two regional lines (RER B and D) need to share a tunnel in the middle of the city. They've been investigating digging another one for a long time, but, AFAIK. they haven't found an economical way of doing so. The solution is to try to move people to other lines, but those are already very crowded and I'm not aware of any project to build a new line inside of the city limits.
Ultimately you have more people coming and going from each building, which means more people on the streets, and more demand for all utilities and public services. Building up doesn't build out those other things. That's why you have things like Air Rights in NYC to limit building.
I don't know... I lived in Barcelona for two years recently and had pretty bad luck. In addition to one-off incidents, some consistent noise issues we had:
- The Pakistani restaurant below our apartment would regularly host receptions/weddings until 2-3am. The sendoff typically involved groups of 20-30 people banging large drums loudly and singing as the happy couple walked out and were driven away.
- We had a neighborhood drunk who frequently (multiple times a week) would wander down the street singing Flamenco-style ballads about his unfortunate love life. My assumption was that the ex he was singing to lived on the street? Anyway, he had quite a voice and was great at projecting.
- The building behind us was shorter than ours and our rear balcony faced their rooftop. In the summer one of the apartments there would semi-regularly hold parties until 1am.
Cars were an occasional issue too, but people were a much bigger problem in that particular neighborhood. That said, I've also lived in dense neighborhoods with none of those problems, so maybe better norms/regulations are the answer... but existing noise ordinances in the US are rarely enforced.
Beyond the noise issues though I did enjoy the convenience/amenities that a dense neighborhood provides!
Theoretically all those interactions breach the social contract and could be acted upon by making complaints. However, someone loudly driving a multi-ton car down your road is always "okay".
Also... I live in a low-density urban neighborhood currently and it's the loudest place I've ever lived. Mostly it's road noise, but also one of my neighbors parties 12+ hours every weekend playing music very loudly. Some people are just loud, but cars make everybody loud.
> However, someone loudly driving a multi-ton car down your road is always "okay".
Cars with fart pipes installed are the same kind of violation. Modern cars with functioning mufflers or electric powertrains... aren't actually that loud.
> Modern cars with functioning mufflers or electric powertrains... aren't actually that loud.
Until their tires hit asphalt. Cars have to go very slowly for the engine to be louder than the tires, and that noise is a function of weight, and electric cars are heavier than equivalent ICE cars.
Most of the sound from a modern car with a functioning muffler is wind noise. You can barely hear the tires unless you're standing right next to it.
"Electric cars are heavier" is some silly nonsense where people went looking for something to complain about. You can make an electric car as light as you want, with the trade off that it implies making the battery smaller and reducing range. But the Model 3 has a ~300 mile range and weighs the same as the average car.
> Most of the sound from a modern car with a functioning muffler is wind noise
What? Like wind hitting the extremely aerodynamic surface of the car designed specifically not to catch the wind? I have never heard or read this in my life - it is widely known that tires-on-pavement is the biggest contributor of car noise. That roar you hear standing a quarter mile from a busy highway is not wind, it's the tires.
> "Electric cars are heavier" is some silly nonsense where people went looking for something to complain about. You can make an electric car as light as you want, with the trade off that it implies making the battery smaller and reducing range.
Again, this contradicts everything I've read and/or is just willfully ignorant. You can't make EVs superlight by stripping down the body, for example. The battery is the heavy part and while they may get more mass-efficient over time EVs are now and for the foreseeable future strictly heavier than same-size ICE cars.
EVs aren't the savior of the environment, public transit is. EVs are better than ICE cars in most ways, but for noise all cars are a problem and EVs are worse.
> What? Like wind hitting the extremely aerodynamic surface of the car designed specifically not to catch the wind?
Like the sound of a hundred cubic feet of metal displacing the air at 40 MPH and leaving vacuum in its wake, yeah. That they're designed to be aerodynamic is the reason they're not that loud.
> That roar you hear standing a quarter mile from a busy highway is not wind, it's the tires.
Now you're talking about highways. People don't typically drive at highway speeds on city streets.
> Again, this contradicts everything I've read and/or is just willfully ignorant.
People have agendas. They need some reason for electric cars to be bad.
The Model 3 weighs around 4000 pounds, as do the Ford Taurus, Chevy Camaro and BMW 3 series, all vehicles of approximately the same size.
Some cars are lighter than this. Some are heavier. In general the existing production electric cars tend to be on the heavier side because premium car buyers prefer longer range to less weight, and that's the trade off. But there is nothing inherently requiring that, and in fact electric cars with smaller/lighter batteries would be cheaper, so that's likely to be what happens as more affordable electric cars become available.
> You can't make EVs superlight by stripping down the body, for example.
If you have an electric car with a 1500 pound battery and a 300 mile range, there is a fairly obvious way to make one that has a 100 mile range and weighs 1000 pounds less, and it doesn't require changing the size of the cabin. You might even get more than 100 miles of range by doing this, because now the car weighs 1000 pounds less and requires less energy to accelerate.
> EVs aren't the savior of the environment, public transit is.
Public transit is inapplicable to any place without enough density to support it. More than two thirds of Americans live in suburban or rural areas. We could build millions of new high density housing units and the majority would still live in suburban and rural areas -- and that's unlikely to change, because housing is scarce and only a fraction of those units would be converted specifically because of how many more units you can put on a lot for high density housing. If you build 20 units to a lot you could double the number of urban housing units while only reducing the number of suburban/rural units by 2.5%.
All of the people who live there will continue to need cars.
> Now you're talking about highways. People don't typically drive at highway speeds on city streets.
That was an illustrative example. Tires typically overtakes engine noise at about 25mph. That's city street speeds. (In most car-dependent cities 40-50 is also typical city street speed.) Again, this is why tires are the majority of car noise. When you hear a car pass by on a non-highway road, you're mostly hearing tires.
If wind is a serious factor either you need to publish your secret findings or link me to some research I'm not finding.
> Tires typically overtakes engine noise at about 25mph.
This is like saying "a person typically travels at 30MPH". It doesn't mean anything. An off-road truck with knobby tires is going to have more tire noise than a sedan with snow tires which will have more than the same sedan with low rolling resistance tires. An 80s muscle car will have more engine noise than a modern 4-cylinder sedan which will have more than an electric vehicle. A gasoline vehicle under acceleration (as in stop-and-go city traffic) will have much more engine noise at a given speed. Tire noise is affected by the roadway material in addition to the vehicle. Tire noise in a 4000 pound electric car might overtake "engine noise" at a lower speed than it does for a 4000 pound V8, but that's because it's quieter, not louder.
> When you hear a car pass by on a non-highway road, you're mostly hearing tires.
Then why does it make a "whoosh" sound?
> If wind is a serious factor either you need to publish your secret findings or link me to some research I'm not finding.
I suspect the problem here is that the studies are so old. Here's the relevant sentence from the Wikipedia article called Road Noise:
> Noise of rolling tires driving on pavement is found to be the biggest contributor of highway noise and increases with higher vehicle speeds.
For this sentence it has three citations. One discusses the effects of road material on tire noise and not tire noise relative to other noise, another lumps tire noise and aerodynamic noise into the same category. The third, which is presumably where it got the premise, is from 1973, when cars commonly used bias-ply tires, which are much louder.
But let's not lose track of the thread here. The premise is that electric cars would be louder. A Model 3 is ~4000 pounds, the same as a Ford Taurus, so that's not going to be louder. Some cars are lighter -- a Honda Accord is in the same class and is ~3200 pounds, only 80% as much. But then it has a gasoline engine, which is louder than an electric motor. Does the 20% weight difference cause more noise than the gasoline engine vs. the electric motor? Somebody would need a dB meter to even answer it, and that's rather the point. Either way the difference is going to be small and people are just looking for something to complain about.
> This is like saying "a person typically travels at 30MPH". It doesn't mean anything.
No. It's very different. It's more like saying "a person is usually about 5'7"." It is obvious there are difference, but it's not something that varies minute by minute, and the range of differences is not stated. There's definitely not cars moving 40+ mph without making a lot of tire noise.
You're right those aren't good citations, I looked at it earlier myself and didn't like them, but I didn't go through the work of finding better ones. But seriously, can you find a single study saying wind is a dominant factor in road noise? Again, I've never heard anyone claim that.
> Then why does it make a "whoosh" sound?
Because, that's the sound it makes.
> But let's not lose track of the thread here.
This started because you claimed modern cars are not noisy except for those with modified exhaust pipes. I'm saying cars are fucking loud, all of them. Electric cars are also loud and do not solve for the problem of road noise at all. The fact that we're trying to figure out if wind or tires is the source of the noise that we both acknowledge is quite noticeable makes no difference except to support my actual point, that cars are loud.
> There's definitely not cars moving 40+ mph without making a lot of tire noise.
Based on what? A car with low resistance tires on concrete isn't going to make a lot of tire noise even at fairly high speeds.
> But seriously, can you find a single study saying wind is a dominant factor in road noise?
The one lumping tire noise and aerodynamic noise together is obviously contemplating that aerodynamic noise is a thing.
> Because, that's the sound it makes.
Tires make a rumbly sound, when you can hear them, as for example with the types of tires that make more tire noise.
> The fact that we're trying to figure out if wind or tires is the source of the noise that we both acknowledge is quite noticeable makes no difference except to support my actual point, that cars are loud.
There is a difference between something not being absolutely perfectly silent and something emitting a loud noise. Road noise for most modern cars at city speeds isn't loud. Exhaust noise for cars with negligently or intentionally defective mufflers is loud.
> Road noise for most modern cars at city speeds isn't loud.
If you can hear it and you're not next to the road, that's too loud. It's noise pollution. You can personally draw an arbitrary line anywhere you want to determine what counts as "loud", but the actual phenomenon is that cars make an amount of noise that is detrimental to our health, sanity, and wildlife.
As you note, no two dense neighborhoods are the same. Those experiences would be rare in Tokyo or Kuala Lumpur. I would say that cultural norms dominate density when it comes to explaining late-night partying.
recently moved half a mile further out from city center and can attest to all of this. Hookah bar in my case was blaring music at 1AM. People in various states of inebriation shouting to each other outside my bedroom window.
There's less car traffic too but that was such a background noise that I hardly noticed it. Though truthfully the first week or so at the new place I was conscious of it's absence.
Cars get into wrecks all the time :)
Seriously though we just normalise it.
If there is a car accident on your street everyone is awake.
How about cop cars and ambulances racing by sirens blaring at all hours.
People blast horns way louder than anyone will shout.
My early 1910s Manhattan building was fantastically quiet, with very thick walls. The only noise I ever heard was floor noise directly above me, never to the sides.
I'm guessing mid-1900s to early 2000s buildings are the problematic ones.
The higher the density, the more vehicles get in each others way.
If your reply is that the vehicles are not needed because everyone can just walk: it takes more energy and more carbon emissions to walk a mile than it takes to drive a vehicle a mile -- and that's before we get to transporting things other than people. (Growing food is very energy intensive; walking burns food.)
Oh and it turns out the carbon footprint for beef varies significantly by where the beef is raised. Average carbon footprint per 1kg of beef in the EU is 22.1 kg CO₂e [1], so if you're in the EU your beef-fueled 1 mile walk emits ~730g of CO₂e, a little under twice what you'd have emitted if you drove
If I'm reading this right it's not quite apples for apples, as it's comparing the cost to create and move the beef, but doesn't consider the cost to create the car, only the movement of the car.
A car driver could easily eat the same amount of food as a walker, the extra calories would be stored as fat. This also ignores upfront CO2 output from assembling and delivering the car and increased CO2 output from maintaining car infrastructure vs. pedestrian infrastructure. Not to mention numerous other externalities.
Here's what I found: the formula given in the article is "calories burned = BMR x METs/24 x hour"
But the METs for lying quietly is 1. The author certainly forgot to subtract 1 from METs in that equation, and could easily have also forgotten to do so when calculating the given numbers.
It just wouldn't make any sense to tell people "you burn X calories when walking/running/whatever for an hour" if they had to subtract their base metabolic rate from the number.
I wouldnt be completely surprised if it were true, though I lack the background and willpower to try to get an actual answer lol.
My thought process is that food also implies some level of driving (delivering pesticides/fertilizer, driving crops away), the fertilizers are fossil-fuel derived, and if you count the sun it takes to grow crops to eat (or worse, as feed for meat).
The whole chain is pretty inefficient, too. Crops are pretty good at converting sunlight to stored energy, but animals and us are bad at retrieving that stored energy. The losses compound if we're eating meat.
Walking isn't a particularly efficient method of movement either, to my understanding.
The energy gets a bit spurious though. One could argue that if we're going to count sunlight going into the crops, we should do the same for the sunlight that raised the dinos so they could become oil.
I also would wager that starts and stops would impact this heavily. The human weighs a lot less so they can accelerate/decelerate much cheaper. The car would have a better edge on a long, straight mile with no stops.
A human walking is absurdly efficient, as anyone who's ever tried to outrun a bad diet can tell you. Running or walking a mile burns ~100 extra calories relative to sitting on your couch. Unless you're putting active effort into not doing so, most diets fluctuate by far more than that.
Even if we count the cost of the co2 emissions: it probably takes more petroleum products to grow the food for the walking delivery workers than it takes to fuel the delivery truck.
I don't remember where I heard it, only that it was an expert on agriculture saying it.
The easiest way to see that it is plausible is to note that only 400 years ago, something like 90% of all human labor went into growing food, which is the way agricultural societies had always been everywhere. The way society was able reduce that to the 5% or so it is today was to use fossil fuels. The first big reduction came with the mechanization of textile production, freeing the food-growers from the need to make their own yarn and weave it into fabric to make clothes with. The tractor was of course also responsible for a drastic reduction in human labor as input to food-growing. Also, the replacement of horses with trucks for transportation of food from the farm to the nearest rail head or port or river (and transportation of inputs like fertilizer to the farm) meant that the food-growers could concentrate on growing food for people now that horses were much less needed.
It's not just the extra calories needed to walk as opposed to rest or to watch television: it's the fact that a single person in a delivery truck can do the work of a dozen people who have to do the deliveries on foot, and keeping one person alive and productive costs only one twelfth as much as keeping a dozen alive and productive -- even if no one walks anywhere or does any exercise. Sometimes for example in order to remain alive and productive, one of the dozen will need to visit a doctor. The doctor requires food to stay alive and productive. Doctors don't live forever and so need to be replaced, and that is an expensive process in part because medical students need food and lots of other energy-requiring things to stay alive and able to learn (and to grow from babies to people mature enough to go to medical school).
My guess is that that analysis continues to hold even if the dozen delivery workers can take public transportation as well as walk although maybe we have to replace "dozen" with "six".
I'm not saying that restricting vehicles in Paris is a bad move: I'm just saying that the effects on, e.g., carbon emission is not obviously good and that the planners who chose (e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann%27s_renovation_of_Pa...) to devote a large fraction of the area of cities to make it easy for vehicle traffic to flow were not just stupid benighted fools or evil people bent on making life worse for everyone.
When people suggest that we reduce the number of cars driven, they are generally not talking about reducing commercial delivery vehicles [1]. Obviously our civilization depends on moving essential stuff around, and we need to do continue doing that, albeit with a electrified fleet of trucks/vans. The problem is with private cars, electric or internal combustion.
OK, but some people here are asserting that the more urban density, the better, and neglecting to consider that if the density gets high enough, the commercial delivery vehicles are stuck in traffic most of the time or the residents of the city refrain from buying things that would enhance their lives if it weren't so expensive or tedious to move things around the city.
Which is why if you've ever lived far outside the city, you're tired of people from the city coming out to visit you to buy all the stuff they can't get in the city.
Oh, no, it's the other way round, mostly. It's easier to deliver a quantity and variety of goods to a dense area than the sticks. Which is why "go shopping" is a suggestion for people going to NYC, not Tucson.
In deciding between a city where personal vehicles are banned or discouraged and a city where they are allowed, noting the virtues of cities over rural areas is relevant how?
It's false. People will not go into suspend mode when not walking; they still burn calories. A very large person would burn about 130 calories walking a mile. i.e. one large latte. And most people who are this large are not at risk of a caloric deficit by burning an extra 130 calories.
I agree that OP's assertion sounds dubious (especially considering the entire supply chain) but calories are a measure of energy, not CO2. You need to know the rate of CO2 emitted per kcal.
I'm not claiming that the CO2 exhaled by people is relevant. I'm claiming that growing food requires significant energy inputs unless you want to go back to the world where most human labor went into growing food.
The problem that this is the wrong measure to use emissions per mile, when it's really about emissions per trip.
A car flying down the freeway uses less emissions per mile, but if one is traveling 50 miles versus just walking to down the block the former is using a lot more emissions even if it is more efficient per mile.
This is simply abject nonsense. I know the research you obliquely referenced and it assumes you specifically fuel that movement by eating beef burgers. And even that's on shaky ground.
You can use your eyes to instantly observe that car drivers are not reducing their caloric intake to compensate for the fact that they "save" that energy by not walking.
Thankfully Paris was also super super super smart & has rapidly developed dedicated bike infrastructure that is incredibly popular & nice to use. It rapidly reduces the need for cars for many many people.
They also are restricting the use of cars in their city center, which will help force de-car'ing for casual use & make people take efficient less demanding forms of transit.
This should help keep congestion & din from being aggravating!
This is a huge problem with housing in general that is mostly ignored.
Let people build 4 units where today it's zone for 1, and if you disagree, you're an out of touch racist/classist/luddite who is just not a visionary and can't embrace the future.
Surely nothing bad is going to happen when you take a subdivision with 30 homes and take just 10 of those and turn them into quadplexes.
30 homes might approximate something like 60 cars and 60 children.
Now instead of 30 homes, you have 20 + 10*4 = 60 homes.
You're now asking infrastructure that hasn't been touched since the 60s to accommodate nearly twice as many people. And I get that not every new unit will also have 2 children, but some will and it no doubt leads to a net increase.
Where as before the road leading out your development had to accommodate 50 cars in the morning commute, now it has to handle more than 100. And this is just a minor inconvenience.
The real issues arise when you've doubled the amount of school children, but the number of teachers hires or classrooms built hasn't increased, and let's not even talk about teacher salaries.
Then there are utilities and other public services (first responders, etc.)
This was just one small subdivision with 30 homes, now imagine this happening across multiple parts of town at once and you can see the problem.
All that is to say, I've never been against building more housing (omg build up! it's so easy!), what I'm against is building more housing without proportional investments everywhere else.
It's a hard problem to solve, I admit it, but that's my whole point. It's hard, you can't just build more housing and call it a day.
> 30 homes might approximate something like 60 cars and 60 children.
> Now instead of 30 homes, you have 20 + 10*4 = 60 homes.
Not building the houses doesn't make the people go away. What ends up happening is they have to commute in from somewhere else, and
> the road leading out your development had to accommodate 50 cars in the morning commute, now it has to handle more than 100
happens in a different road.
(sure, in the long run people learn not to have children in the West because living space is scarce, and your "doubled the amount of school children" problem goes away)
It is not a hard problem to solve and was/is being solved all around the world. If a developer is building not 60 homes but 6000 homes then they can be tasked to build a school, a few kindergartens, a fire station, cafes, grocery shop, a few bus stops and plenty of individual and communal parking spaces.
Going from single family homes to quadplexes does not solve the problem, build taller!
Maybe the reason people accuse you of being "racist/classist/luddite" is because you're fearmongering, and they suspect these talking points are just a cover for looking out for your financial interest (keep increasing property prices), or keeping your community free from "others" or something.
Why is this fearmongering? Because your figures are wildly, wildly out of touch with reality. If you legalize quadplexes by right, you're not going to magically see a doubling of housing, there just aren't that many people! That is completely made up bullshit. Fast growing place have growth rates in the low single digits, like 2%/a, not 50%. Growth projections for fast growing regions like the Toronto area have 50% growth projections on the scale of decades. But "If we legalize quadplexes, our 100 home with turn into 102 home next years and there'll be one extra car" just doesn't have the same zing and it's hard to keep the housing crisis going with realistic complaints.
I can just as easily accuse you of moral righteousness, it's not a cover for anything, it's what's happening and with neither you nor I citing sources, it's just your word against mine.
Even then, come up with whatever cutesy numbers you want regarding housing, there are concrete numbers to point to for the side effects. Depressed teacher salaries is a well known issue. Overcrowding in schools is a real issue. Congestion and lack of public transportation is a real issue.
You can argue causality all you want, but if you leave out suddenly overpopulating areas as part of your equation, it's already flawed.
Lastly, you didn't read what I said.
I said it's fine to build more housing provides it comes with equal investments in infrastructure. You conveniently glossed over this fact because your solution of building taller still doesn't address it. So no, build taller isn't the only solution.
Again, reread what I said. I'm not against building more housing. Do you understand that? Again, I am not against building more housing.
All for building out public transportation, all for doing that is required to build more housing.
So either you take a slow and moderate approach to building more housing, which is fine, and will allow other infrastructure more time to catch up, or you make these investments up front with your larger scale development, as long as it's addressed it's all I'm saying.
> congested cities with such intense light and noise pollution
I'm not sure how you mean that. Obviously you know that many people love cities with lots of tall buildings, NYC being the obvious US example. Clearly you don't like them, but are you saying the busy-ness is inherently bad? If you don't like it, can you leave? Usually, that's an expensive place to live.
> As someone who lives in an area with plenty of high-density residential buildings
And yet you live there, which means, presumably, that it's your best option relative to the alternatives. People should be allowed to choose living arrangements that meet their most critical needs, even if they also find reasons to complain about aspects of those arrangements that are self-evidently less important to them.
As someone who lives in an area with plenty of high-density residential buildings, I can attest that this is a perfect recipe for creating congested cities with such intense light and noise pollution.