Shit, I grew up in the suburbs and it was pretty much the same as the urbanite. Except “corner store” was “egg ranch” and you had to walk out of town to get there.
I live in suburbia in the US and I can walk to 3 different grocery stores from my house. If I go to the warehouse store, I will drive. Between telework, walking, and avoiding unnecessary trips to various places, I try to drive less than 1 mile per day.
Density kinda sucks to live in, but we can all make more effort to waste less energy.
If you drive less than 1 mile per day it sounds like you shouldn’t have to drive at all. It’s walking distance - is your destination not reachable on foot?
Its an average. Some days I don’t drive at all. Some days I have to bring a family member several miles to an appointment, or get something bulky from a store that I can’t feasibly move without a vehicle.
I’m in the same boat, I have two grocery stores, three gas stations, a bank, several fast food/take out restaurants, a Home Depot, a pharmacy, and several walking trails, all within about a 10-15 minute walk from my house. Also live in suburbia, and would like to get a bike this summer to start cutting out driving.
Can’t eliminate most of my driving though, I work about 30 minutes from home for a general contractor, and public transport would require me to leave my dog alone for over 12 hours a day, which just isn’t an option.
In China it’s easy to afford rent in most of the cities on a full time minimum wage job, and the cities are extremely walkable. My wife lives in a 18 story building, and immediately outside of her development are at least 6 supermarkets, 20 restaurants and countless bus stations and subway stations. Sounds like it’s more of a problem with the economic system than the city itself.
It is the single greatest place I have ever been in my life. The air pollution in the cities I went to, which included Beijing, was no worse than it is in my Colorado city. They’ve done a lot to combat it, and though there’s still bad days, we also have bad days. Hell, we were known for the “brown cloud” for decades, and still regularly have inversions that cause the cloud these days, thankfully much less often though. There’s also a lot more electric vehicles there than there are here, so less ground level pollution from exhaust. I felt so sick my first couple days back in the states and everything smelled so bad. I didn’t even realize how bad it was until my nose wasn’t accustomed to it anymore.
What boggles my mind here, in my province, is that a lot of new dense condos/apartments are built without any walkable services. It is mind boggling that it still happens.
Nothing worse than having to take your car to do small errands.
We have to fight the armies of NIMBYs and developers to even get a suite of overpriced luxury condos or apartments built, and we’re still building gigantic McMansion suburbs like they’re going out of style, so I feel that in my bones. My nearest grocery store is more than 2 miles away, and there’s no way to get there without having to go down a 45mph road with no sidewalks. But we have pretty monoculture lawns! -_- thank god my family is willing to turn most of our lawn into pollinator gardens and food gardens… now if only we could convince our neighbors to do the same.
I think I only ever lived in the real “center” of a city once when I was crashing at a friends place while looking for an apartment.
All of my other places have been further out in neighborhoods outside of the center but there were still shops everywhere. Single use zoning and the tendency to obsess over shitty copypaste single family homes is the real culprit in the US.
Europe’s city centers are friggin expensive, if you know what I’m talking about you know. The suburbs are usually fine, also some of the best paces ever are between the suburbs and the center. Locals in the old town will make you pay for the oxygen they have in
TBH its a 15 minute walk to the main Lidl, or a 4 minute one the other way to the nearest corner shop down here. Cant do a full shop on foot (I could steal the trolley for a bit, LOL) but eggs is doable here.
Bicycle is a great investment. I go to my lidl by bike as much as possible and do proper shopping with single Pannier bag. It’s farther than yours, but it’s also easier to carry more stuff on a bike.
Shops closing on Sundays in Germany is no workers rights issue. No one is asking workers to work 7 days a week.
Germany as plenty of students, for example, who’d love to have a job on the weekend because they have the freedom to choose a bit better when they work and when not.
The reason Sunday to this day is still a day when almost all shops have to close is mostly religious. There are restaurants and some other shops that are allowed to stay open and most of them choose either a different rest day or make sure that they have someone on any of those days. One workday on a Sunday is plenty to fill out a typical untaxed low payment job that are very useful to students and others looking to just get a bit of an income.
Actual workers rights aren’t telling people that they can never work on Sundays, they’re guaranteeing people that they will never need to work too much.
Why? Cause shops are open on sunday? Having no workers rights makes that a lot easier
Yes. Shops being closed on Sundays is a major PITA. I have 2 days off a week. So I have to buy groceries in overcrowded shops in the evening or in overcrowded shops on Saturdays. Or I drive across the border and buy in Luxemburg, on Sundays. So the VAT I am creating stays in another country. Which is just plain stupid.
Also: workers’ rights and shops being open on Sundays aren’t mutually exclusive.
The churches don’t have enough political influence to keep Sunday a rest day. That we still have a mostly closed down Sunday (minus vital and emergency services and recreation) is union influence. IG Metall and Ver.di would skin the SPD alive if they were to propose abolishing it.
Consider the alternative: All your friends have different days off, so organising a grill party becomes a once in a summer opportunity when all your days off happen to align.
On the contrary there’s a lot of shift work in industry, especially IG Metall’s “core” clientele, metalworkers. A blast furnace don’t care whether it’s Sunday you need workers to work it, 24/7 – with extra extra pay for night shifts and Sundays. But IG Metall also covers the engineering side and with that IT workers, plenty of white-collar jobs included it’s a really big tent.
Small towns can eventually turn into suburbs… In my area, most suburbs were founded in the 1600’s, later became incorporated into a town, and later into a city. It’s proximity to a major nearby city makes it a suburb.
Sure, there are inconveniences with living in the suburbs, but there are some positives. A dollar typically goes further than in the city, meaning more space for gardening, hobbies, kids, etc. You get to have neighbors without literally living on top of eachother. Usually more quiet then urban settings,etc.
I mean if you get urban and rural, what’s there not to get about the suburbs? It’s the best and worst of both. More open lands and less congestion but also rush hour sucks and people suck at driving. It’s far to go get something, but car rides with buddies is its own fun.
It’s not the best of both though, it just the worst of both.
The best of both are small towns along railways, with a dense core with some amenities surrounded by decreasing density until it quickly becomes pure countryside, and thanks to the station it’s easy to get to and from the big city.
And if you only want rural surroundings you can have train halts basically in the middle of nowhere, there’s a couple like that in my region and it’s absolutely delightful.
So do you put a population limit on small towns? How do you think major Metropolitan areas got started? They didn’t just appear one day, they grew over time from small port and station towns…
huh? why would suburbs magically be exempt from that idea?
Yes, places grow, this is why it’s important to apply good urban planning and use as much high density housing as possible, otherwise you get the miserable car-dependent sprawl we see in america and much of the rest of the world.
By centering around transit stops you get rid of the need for all the parking and roads that takes a ton of space (which lets urban areas be smaller while containing the same amount of living space), and by having many small towns with high density centers spread out like this you maximize how many people can live close to the countryside.
My point is that what you described is basically a city with suburbs on a reduced scale. If a town is nice and successful, you’re gonna have people that want to move there, so your options are to build outward, upward, or not at all. It sounds like you’d prefer towns build upward rather than outward, which is obviously valid, but it’s a matter of preference. People who don’t mind living in an apartment will move into the city center, people who value space over commute will move to the suburbs.
Where I think things get turned around (in the states anyway), is the lack of community-run programs and local business owners. Community gardens, neighborhood solar cells, locally owned farms, grocers, and corner stores are all things I’d like to see way more of in suburban areas.
Not the best. The best of rural is nature wildness and independence. The ability to wander off into your backyard and shoot something and not get an eyebrow raised. The ability to pick a direction, and start walking, and not turn around until your water gets low, then go home, and not meet another person unless you choose to. The option to just dig a big ass hole or marvel at the intricacy of the ecology. Maybe have a few dozen semi feral cats, so nobody xan quite say you are ir arent the creepy cat lady. The best of rural is room to experiment and play, to be entirely food independent, etc. And oh my god it can get so quiet! Its nice. Peaceful, if a little rough. And if something goes horribly globally wrong? Might not even be your problem.
Suburbs have… A little privacy indoors, I guess? Room for a small garden, if your house is old, maybe some fruit trees? A garage to play with if you don’t drive, which is a major sacrifice?
The best of urban us art culture and people at your fingertips, connectedness and depth. Walking two blocks into an entirely different world, hopping on the train/bus to a dozen art museums and twice as many different cuisines and so many options. Knowing that there are friends for you nearby, if you just find them. Enemies too, probably. Its collaboration and history and the intense humanness of the designed world around you, and oh my god the architecture. At its best, which I admit is rare, its the very very almost imperceptibly low grade version of the thrill of collaboration all the time. And if something goes horribly globally wrong, at least you know youre not alone. Its pretty cool. I’m a fan.
Suburbs have none of this. They pretend at the restaurants, but they’re all chain shit, homogenized to pointlessness.
Suburbs are garbage. Youre as dependent on long ass supply chains as an urban core, but you’re all tiny little ratter dogs pretending to be wolves on the tundra, so you don’t acknowledge or embrace it. You get all the isolation with none of the solitude. It takes almost as long to get anywhere, but you can’t just chill on your farm or go forage in the woods, so you need to go.
Suburbs ate garbage poison and ecologically unsustainable. One can argue modern cities are unsustainable too, but there’s room for doubt on that one; there are economies of scale to take advantage of.
Living within 30 minutes of my job in the city costs $3,000/month in rent for a 800sf apartment. Living within walking distance would cost $4,000 if I could even find anything to rent.
Living an hour away costs $750/month in rent for a 1200sf trailer. My car note is $450/month and I spend about $300/month on gasoline on average. All in my rent, vehicle, and gas is half the cost of just the rent in the city.
Yeah - there’s an extra hour lost every day to the drive, but the savings comes out to around $75/hr for that commute. And I have the freedom to travel anywhere I want with my vehicle on top of that.
So yeah, I live suburban and fuck anyone who criticizes me for making that sensible economic decision.
Nobody’s saying ‘fuck you’ for being forced into suburbs. Were saying ‘fuck you’ to the people who built suburbs instead of high density housing and made housing near your job unaffordable.
And the people who genuinely had the choice (I might argue you didn’t) and chose to pay extra for suburb.
I mean to be fair people might be more open to it if high density housing didn’t suck ass. The exact same shitty template copy pasted a thousand times. It’s honestly not even that it’s the same that’s the problem it’s that the template sucks ass.
There is a middle ground between high-density housing and showing you into a tiny poorly put together space but nobody seems willing to build that. Give me a suburb house, a full two floors, with a standard layout. And turn that into high density housing and I’m willing to bet a lot more people would be fine with it.
It’s not like that’s even all that difficult to imagine, we build fucking skyscrapers 100 plus stories tall there’s zero reason we couldn’t just take a two-story suburb townhome and just stack 50 of them on top of each other. Then the only thing lost is a dedicated garage and your own private backyard which some people will still heavily want but it’s a much easier pill to swallow versus the “shitty cramped poorly designed apartment layout”
Also it should be mandatory that high density housing has a minimum of one dedicated parking spot per unit, the first two floors of any high-density buildings should be dedicated to a parking garage. That is the other thing that makes people say fuck you to high density housing is it’s always a shit ton of units crammed into not enough parking and it’s a huge pita to deal with. Do we need better design the cities that are less reliant on cars for transport? Yes, but you should still expect at least one car per unit regardless it’s just the reality of America
I agree we do dog shit architecture, especially residential.
We do not need more parking spaces though. We need trains. I’m sorry, but its too late to be putting more fucking cars on the road; even ‘clean’ electric ones.
Even if you got rid of all the bureaucracy bullshit and started building trains everywhere tomorrow that would not remove the need for people to have cars. And the idea that you should be able to build a building that does not have enough spaces for everyone that lives there to have one is unreasonable.
Even if I could literally walk outside and immediately outside of my door get onto a train there are still going to be times I would need a vehicle. Even if I only use it once a year I would still like to be able to own my own. I would like to live somewhere that I only need to use my vehicle a couple times a year but I still need to have somewhere to put it
You really don’t ever need a car, with good public transit. You can use the delivery van or rent something twice a year, I’m sure.
Depending on geography, even delivery vans may be unnecessary; cargo bikes work pretty well on flat terrain.
I haven’t ever had a car. Not in a hypothetical world where we built public transit, but here, in the present/past real world. Most of the times this has been a problem were caused by other people using cars, and I don’t consider becoming part of the problem to be a solution there. It can be done.
I would be really annoyed having to rent something every time I wanted a new bed, tv, dresser, that sort of thing. It’s nice having my own vehicle that can do it.
Like I said we should absolutely have good robust public transportation everywhere so that I only need to use it on those very specific occasions which will drastically cut down on the problems with so many cars but I should still be able to have one. Trying to outright remove cars from people will never lead to anything useful because they will fight you tooth and nail.
Make it so that I don’t need it but can still have it if I want it and suddenly they will be on the road significantly less often, I’m glad that you have been able to get by without one and are happy but not everyone is going to be the same. I mean hell I regularly make trips between the states almost every other week for seeing friends and I would really hate to do that on public transportation because it would take what’s already a 6-hour round trip and probably turn it into a 10 hour round trip.
Dude its not worth the space (and maintenance, insurance, etc) of an entire car for two deliveries a year, thats fuvking insane, get over yourself. And people can include rental/delivery in cost of the item or wherever. Or we can gave full communism and they just do it.
Plus, and I say this living in California; cargo bikes really do work fine most places. Even here (not all, but most) youre just being afraid of change, And it’s cringe.
I’m sorry, but the earths carrying capacity does not have room for your pathological american bullshit.
And what if it’s pouring down rain? Or snowing? And I just don’t feel like becoming completely soaked just to go to the grocery store. There are lots of reasons someone might want a car over a bike. I actually have a bike and I do use it, fun fact I’m also a bus driver so I’m pretty fond of public transportation because it directly feeds my livelihood. However I have this neat little thing where I don’t really sweat much even if I’m basically on the verge of heat stroke. So if it’s anything more than like 60° F outside and sunny and I’m doing some type of cardio such as biking i will start to overheat.
So the majority of my bike riding is in the fall and winter months, but I do very much enjoy during those months when I can take the bike to work thankfully I don’t have to go very far and I get to ride the local transit for free as a bus driver.
The carrying capacity of Earth is already handling the majority of Americans owning multiple cars, I’m literally only asking for enough parking for one car for each individual in the design of a building. Which is literally just a couple floors of a parking garage and you’re over here asking like I want the end of the world. If you ever want to see Improvement in public transportation you need to stop being so extremist because it pushes people away from the idea entirely
Dude, youve never seen a good transit system have you? You shouldn’t be walking more than a couple blocks
Or get shit delivered
Or, hey, what if we stop driving cars so we can stop global warming getting worse? And more people don’t have this fucking problem?
the carrying capacity of earth is already handling
No its fucking not and if we keep going like this literally everyone dies. I dunno about you, but I can think of much more pleasant ways to go out than climate apocalypse.
you’ll never get better transit if you jeep being so radical
What I’m hearing here is "I fucking hate public transit and enjoy fucking my car! witness me!
Have you ever taken a train? Amtrak is a fucking joy.
Like genuinely a pleasant experience, and I don’t just mean the joy of not getting dry fucked by sandpaper and barbed wire. Its really comfy, the scenery is often quite nice, there’s decent WiFi and a bar, you can wander the train and fuck off to the bar if you get bored reading or whatever-not a great bar; beer and wine only no coctails, but we could fix that too.
And if we actually cared about rail, especially passenger rail, the speed caps on that are so much fucking higher than you could possibly get with individual cars. Trips would be more frequent, too.
Yes I’m familiar with riding trains, both in and out of the us. It is enjoyable but it is much slower than just hopping in my car and going straight to where I’m going. For the sake of those trips where I’m hopping around between states and coming back in a single day I would not want to have to do it by train. When I’m going out of state and staying out of state for a couple days train is perfectly fine and as long as the Amtrak lines up with my schedule I generally will
Do you want those states to have living things in them in fifty years? Do you want exterior temperatures under 105f/40c most days?
Because you can’t have both that and cars. This isnt me being your mom, this is me telling you youre the reason I don’t bother with savings, because I have an inkling what the world is gonna be in twenty years if we don’t fix shit now, and I’m not eager to see that shit.
Have you actually looked at any of the studies the majority of our greenhouse gases are coming from? Transportation is only a small piece of it. If your goal is to stop climate change then there are significantly more important things you could be targeting. Fuels used for generating electricity, as byproducts in the manufacturing of goods, and the clear cutting of forests all contribute significantly more to Greenhouse production than Transportation does.
That’s not to say we shouldn’t reduce Transportation emissions still, which you seem to think I’m not advocating for but I clearly am because I am saying I want better public transportation and I want to be able to use my car less often I just don’t want it taken away from me entirely. But using it as an argument for the removal of cars is weak because it’s not even one of the largest contributors
Like I’m for reducing agriculture emissions(going vegan), I’m for increasing rail to the point flying feels absurd (and getting rid of it, mostly), and I’m for not burning fossil fuels for any reason. But the future where we just switched to electric cars abd everything else is the same? We (or our grandparents) walked past that door, carter admin or Chevy volt at the latest. Its underwater now.
The ecological cost of cars (break and tire dust in our lungs and water-thats where most of your microplastics come from) producing and moving tons of material for every 1-5 hundred pound human, black pavement that won’t let water through, and just the sheer wasted space, we can’t afford it anymore. Its not worth it.
But its not all bad! Trains are cool as fuck, and crazy efficient per joule-a filthy diesel train belching clouds of smoke is cleaner and greener than an electric car running on clean nuclear/wind power, so imagine what we could do with overhead wire/third rail?
And yeah you might have to walk a block or two to the train station, once robust transit gets put in, but you’d get your steps in, and honestly in Los Angeles most people walk at least that far to their cars anyway.
Because they’re subsidized to Fuck and city costs are inflated. Suburbs are ecological nightmares, and cannot continue to exist if you want a green earth in 80 years.
City costs are inflated by exploitative landlords.
Suburb costs are subsidized by basically all the infrastructure for them; none of it pays for itself. Not the roads not the wiring not the water and sewer. Yes I know everywhere has roads, but suburbs demand a high standard of them and don’t produce anything with them.
Youre not being space efficient like a city, or (whatever degree of) self sufficient like the country, so everything is just car trips, any time you leave the house. Like in OP.
I did the same math and my results came out the opposite way - in a much cheaper country however. I had a rent free situation over an hour away, but ended up renting an apartment near work. My time alone was worth it, being able to pay the month’s rent using one week’s commute time for freelancing after work. And the monthly fuel cost itself would’ve been 2/3 of my month’s rent.
Everyone’s circumstances are different. I made what I believe was the most sensible economic decision - paying to get out of commuting. For you, the opposite was sensible, commuting to reduce rent. Can’t really judge you for doing what’s best for your wallet in these tough times we’re living.
I like suburbs because it’s relatively calm, I can build a workshop in my garage, and there’s still pretty good amenities. And it’s significantly cheaper than the city.
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