I mean in those areas where it just identical houses along a road in huge blocks.
How would you realisyicly solve it?
Network of buses/trams and trains. Trains to get in and out of the neighborhood and connect to the city and other neighborhoods, and buses within communities to get around and to/from the train stations. Like a bus stop on every or every other block, then one or two train stations on every neighborhood.
Yeah, this sounds decently realistic
I wouldn’t use public transport. People have generally chosen to use cars, and doing so makes sense for the development type.
If you definitely wanted to take the public transit route, busses are probably the most well-suited thing that could be deployed tomorrow.
The best near-future public-transit thing is probably a fleet of self-driving cars; that’s well adapted to low-density housing, permits for transit to doorstep, and permits for a higher usage ratio than individually-owned vehicles.
Just a couple small buses with cheap fares. That way you can be anywhere in town quick and cheap. One of the places you could go is a train station? Or stop for bigger busses?
Dedicated bus lanes can have multiple times the capacity in terms of moving people compared lanes that allow cars. Say you got a six lane road in the suburbs, convert the center lanes in each direction to dedicated bus lanes, then have a small median/curb separating the bus and car lanes on both sides. This will make buses faster than cars because of the lower congestion and incentive people to use them, making car congestion go down as well, because people who would otherwise drive are now on the bus.
City Nerd has a great channel focusing on stuff like this on YouTube and Nebula
With the side benefit of providing a fast lane that emergency services can make great use of
Those neighborhoods only exist because of cars. Fix transit in the cities and stop subsidizing automobiles and those suburban tracts will empty out.
Bus stops on the main road(s), placed so everyone has a stop within a 15-20 minute walk.
Sort of agree with others suggesting getting rid of the neighborhoods in the first place, but sharing walls is hell. When the only way to speak confidentially in your own home is to whisper, it’s impossible to wfh or have a telehealth appointment (or, worse, a teletherapy appointment).
15-20 min is too far, if it is going to have any impact, the distance to the closest bus stop can’t be any further from houses than 10 min.
Don’t build your houses out of cardboard then
I’m confused. When I lived in apartments, I never built them myself. Can you explain how one builds one’s apartment?
The sound is bad enough but with properly constructed walls, it’s not a problem.
I have other problems with shared walls. Your neighbors have cockroaches? Now you do too! Bedbugs? Yep those can come on in too. If you live in an apartment, then you bet the landlord will cheap out and not do as effective treatments. You think being clean and not keeping things in cardboard will stop them? Maybe temporarily but they’re just waiting to come back out from the walls where they weren’t treated. Joy!
The other thing is that if your neighbor smokes cigarettes inside, then you get some bonus secondhand smoke. If you have bad reactions even with allergy medications and HEPA filters, well I guess it’s time for you to move or suffer. (You didn’t want to use your PTO on anything not sick days right?)
Did your neighbors have a plumbing problem that they neglected? Congratulations on your new mold in your shared walls. (You wanted to call code enforcement on your landlord about this? Good luck, they won’t enforce it.)
I’m sure there are real solutions to my above problems but my reality is that the only solution is to move when it’s too much to bear. (Haven’t lived in one place for more than 2 years because of it…)
Even worse. I lived in an apartment that suffered water and smoke damage because my upstairs neighbor fell asleep with a cigarette in his hand. It could have been worse than just a fire really. We could have all lost everything or someone could have died.
That sounds more like a old/cheap construction problem than a shared walls problem. I live in an apartment with solid concrete walls built in the 80s and I never hear my neighbours unless they are full-on screaming, which I’ve only heard happen once.
They all own their cars and they want to use them.
My suggestion is car pooling.
Encourage (with money) every ride that has 2 or more people in 1 car.
Put an extra street toll on every ride where there is only 1 person in a car. Yes, even the pizza guy - be strict or let it all be.
!micromobility@lemmy.world - just need to have infrastructure and enforcement that makes it safe to do stuff like ride a bike or scooter.
I am not sure micro mobility is the sustainable answer to this problem, though I will admit that I tend to focus on macro mobility, like busses and trains.
Micro mobility is fine is you are interested in it, but it has a too narrow appeal to be any realistic solution.
It also has one of the same problem as a car, the need to drive it.
Meaning you allways have to budget your own fatigue just as you would a car.
I disagree: Micromobility is the answer to a lot of problems but it’s definitely not the answer to all problems.
Your fatigue doesn’t necessarily have to be a factor either, you can ride an ebike, scooter, emoto, motorcycle, tuktuk, tiny car, evelo, monowheel, etc. There are a huge number of different types of transportation that require little to no effort to use and are not mentally and emotionally taxing like commuting in a car is (they are, I dare say, fun instead).
I’m not saying we ignore public transport, of course that’s important but micromobility can and should be part of the solution too. For many people (myself included), it already is.
Oh yeah, that makes sense,
As a Strong Towns article pointed out, solving the problem with cars is not the number of people that drive, but the number of people that drive × the average miles that each person drives.
We can reduce the number of miles that the average person drives without taking away anybody’s car, and make transit more cost-effective by reducing the distance it has to go, by simply putting destinations closer together. Zap the exclusive residential zoning laws. Intermix cafés, shops, restaurants, doctors offices, community centers, and such, with the existing neighborhoods. These things are all quiet, and low-impact, barely noticeable among houses, if they don’t need giant parking lots.
Zoning laws are so bizarre. I remember encountering them for the first time many years ago trying to play SimCity and being confounded by what felt by wholly arbitrary game rules. They genuinely accomplish nothing at all, so why have them?
It’s not that they accomplish nothing at all, but what they accomplished was evil. From my studies and reading1, I think that zoning law started out with good intentions to keep noxious industry (tanneries, blacksmith shops, livestock, etc.) away from dwelling places. Like so many things in the United States, though, it quickly got co-opted for racism.2 The Supreme Court issued a decision barring housing discrimination, so the Federal, state, and local governments turned to zoning laws to keep Black people out of white neighborhoods by, e.g. mandating minimum lot sizes, and construction methods, that priced suburban houses out of reach for Black families. Nowadays, we have this pervasive myth that such restrictions were to foster a rural aesthetic, for environmental preservation, or the result of auto industry lobbying, and those probably contributed, but the root of it was segregation. This becomes clear when you learn about what happened when some Black families succeeded financially anyway, and tried to move into white neighborhoods, like the Cicero, IL race riot of 1951.
- Zoned in the USA by Sonia Hirt is a dry, but good read for a super-nerd, as it compares Euclidean zoning in the U.S. to land-use laws in Europe.
- The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein blew my mind with evidence of just how deliberate and explicit it was.
Cars. Cars are great and electric ones don’t make road smog.
Each person being able to go wherever they want whenever they want is a good thing.
Whimsy is a sign of a society operating correctly.
Electric cars are still cars, and come with all of the negative externalities of ICE cars, but for the tailpipe emissions: Danger, noise, particulate pollution, social isolation, and infrastructure costs.
The last one is a big problem. Everybody wants to drive anywhere they want whenever they want, but they don’t want to pay for it. Lots of people believe cockamamie stories about how politicians pocket all of their tax money instead of fixing the roads. But no, roads are stupid expensive, and paying for them is driving most cities into insolvency.
The thing is, car drivers should support public transport as much as possible, public transport is the best way to reduce traffic, reducing traffic jams, and giving more freedom to both drivers and public transport users.
Smaller (6 passenger) buses running autonomously. We’re not there yet with the autonomy, but there’s no reason to stick with one size of bus. Sure, keep big ones on major routes, but use smaller ones for small routes. Heck, make those routes on-demand.
That’s just a taxi.
A taxi has a very expensive component - the driver. And a taxi doesn’t pick up strangers on the way to your destination.
That’s called a ‘jitney.’
They can follow a regular route, or make detours for door to door service.
Much better with an actual driver to provide safety and assist the low mobility passengers
Yeah, ride hailing bus services should be more popular
I’d say more like 15 passenger and security could be a bigger issue, but I completely agree with this.
Same general concept to replace large trains in metro systems. You just go to the nearest station and a single train car pulls up to pick you up and then takes you to any station in the system, with stops only when other passengers are getting off.
More of a tram or trolley? Simple automated things you might find at larger airports or some theme parks?
Monorail.
Monorail!
You could have a bus route along the major street, bus stops every kilometre and a bus coming every 20 minutes.
also rezone to allow mixed use and tall buildings directly along the route. bring some density to the suburbs
You don’t need to make cars worse to have people use public transit. I visited Japan last year for a couple weeks and their train and bus infrastructure was so good I would have just taken the buss instead of a car if I had a car there. Google maps times were like a 3 minute difference between public transit and car times every single time I checked it. In cali it’s at least double the time if not triple depending on where I’m at. Both of these were in the middle of Metropolitan areas. They just need to make public transic as good, cheap and clean as it is in japan. Not an easy task granted.
Yeah, I kind of added that sarcastically. My view of the US is that it needs some capitalist nuance to it or people won’t like it. It’s not enough if it’s better, or just cheaper for society.
In reality, I understand that people in rural areas need their car. And it’s a hassle to do the shopping for a family of 5 without a car. Unless you can have that delivered…
I’m not sure if Japan is a good example for exactly this. As far as I know a parking spot in Tokyo is more expensive than an apartment in other places of the world. And the city mandates that you have some parking spot or you can’t have a car in the first place.
But public transit in Japan is awesome. They’re on time, get you everywhere, are affordable and run every few minutes… The scenic train routes have cute mascots. Everything works. There are colored lines on the floor (in the big city) and you can get by without being able to read… I’d like to have that where I live.
It kinda depends on what you mean by “solved”. You could have a bus route stop at every person house. This would be expensive, frequency would be abysmal, and the routes would take forever and no one would use it.
This issue is that public transit thrives in areas with more density. Get rid of the density public transit ceases to exist.
A more realistic solution for most people would be to try and set up a bike network throughout the neighborhood. Biking, especially e-biking, is mode of transit that can be implemented almost anywhere in a city and have some big benefits to the citizens.
I wonder if this might be a situation where autonomous vehicles could really solve a problem. Like if there were like 2 or 3 minivan size vehicles that you could summon to ferry you from your house to the nearest real bus stop. The vehicle would only have to go like 20 miles an hour to make it safe for pedestrians and be compellingly worthwhile to make people take the bus instead of drive
In smaller mexican cities instead of huge busses they have smaller 10 person vehicles that run every 15ish minutes. Terrible for the environment cause it’s more cars but better for public transit cause they’re consistent and come more often.
Could just have a human driver. I think the impromptu routing would be the thing that works best for suburbs.
3 human drivers 24/7 would be too expensive. And suburb subdivisions are perfect for autonomous systems, it’s a very unchanging route with rarely any other people or cars on the road and the speed limit is already capped at a very low number
who knows if when they will exist. if they exist they will probably work.
In a few specific areas. None within 1000 miles of my city., the tech is promissing, but only time will tell how far it gets.
If you live where it exists then you should be asking questions. It seems like a dream answer.
Get rid of cars and their awful infrastructure and density can comfortably go up.
People moved to the suburbs to get away from the city. I say we bring the city to the suburbs.
