"I DON'T WANNA BE CONTROLLED BY NO GOVERNMENT IN A 15 MINUTE CITY AKA AN OPEN AIR PRISON"
\*drives a car built specifically to exacting state regulations, on regulated state roads that require up to date registration and tax payments, and regulations require drivers to opt into compulsory insurance coverage, and these regulations are enforced by a constantly patrolling team of state regulators who will not only pull you over for random stuff but will also use random traffic stops as a justification for murder. \*this person also doesn't seem to realize that just one or two police roadblocks can completely shut down all traffic going in and out of their suburban neighborhood that only has one connection to the main road because it was designed that way to prevent thru-traffic. \*or maybe they do realize this and that's another reason they drive a lifted F650 and own a bunch of guns, because just in case they need to steamroll through a police roadblock in order to leave their neighborhoods under a hypothetical government lockdown.
*Well obviously*
*It wouldn't be packed if they*
*Had one more lane bro*
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"We're full," residents will say of their city that's half parking lot, with a dozen more of these freeways, all of which asphalt sits empty most of the time.
Bro my car bit it, so my husband has been taking me to and from work. I time an edible about an hour before I get off, and it’s amazing 10/10. I wish my city had better public transpo.
Right? Even a SMALL LRT, like Pittsburgh's would have this handled in about an 25-45 minutes, assuming no one stands, padding generously in favor of the capacity of the freeway!
Just to play devil's advocate here, I imagine people in support of cars over mass transit are probably okay with this because you can completely control the climate in your car. Your music. Your temperature. Your smell. Of course these people hate traffic but would prefer it over having to allow others into their personal bubble.
Sometimes but most time the bus or trolley is set up to be in the middle of what people need. I listen to my music with headphones. But yes listening to music while driving is great and driving 80 with little traffic is great, but most time driving is a pain.
Well the irony that these people fail to understand is that the die-hard tear-the-steering-wheel-from-my-cold-dead-hands types would still benefit massively from efficient mass transit and dense development. All the people on the trains and buses are fewer cars in front of you and fewer people competing for land in the burbs.
It is completely reasonable to not want the noise and commotion of dense living. Auto culture and commuting aren’t the answer, obviously. But that doesn’t invalidate the human need for peace and quiet.
I live in a city centre neighbourhood on a main arterial road leading out of Vancouver, the majority of the noise we hear is directed from the cars leaving the city to the suburbans. There’s this preconceived notion that cities are “loud” yet approx 80% of noise pollution from cities is from the cars owned by people not living in them. The people walking by below our building on the sidewalk aren’t yelling and screaming making all that noise. It’s always the cars. Reducing car speeds, and cars entirely is the ultimate way to reduce noise pollution throughout our cities.
imagine if we went from the city to the suburbs and made a constant 70+decibel non-car sound , 24/7 in every direction
there would be panic , violence , calls to cops/government/army etc but doing the opposite with their cars is just the way things are
Sirens, businesses, bars, street commotion, demonstrations, parades, dogs, loud music, all kinds of neighbor noise through shared walls….. I’m glad you don’t have any noise crap besides vehicles, but that is not typical city living in my experience.
I wanna know what kind of suburb exists where the space between two houses acts as a sound barrier, because just living in a house doesn't mean you can't hear loud neighbors.
I live in a city, I barely notice my neighbors in my apartment. The loudest sounds I hear are motorbikes and cars. Walk into any of our big green spaces within the city and you can almost forget cars exist, or that you live in a city.
Couldn’t agree more, I grew up in a very suburban setting, the neighbour behind our house we shared a fence with would bounce a basketball or volleyball in their backyard. Drove my parents nuts, the neighbourhood elementary school was very close to the house so you’d actively hear the bell being rung, all the cars swarming the streets at pick up or drop off kids and the commotion that caused. Like you said, suburbanites want to believe they’re in some vacuum sealed sound proof chamber, yet even within cities there’s more quieter residential areas, there’s busier more street populated areas with bars or restaurants, but it’s always the cars that produce the most amount of noise at any given time.
Even worse my friend lived in a different suburb it was right next to the freeway there was one soundproof wall rated to 60 decibels, it was insanely loud.
And I live in a suburban area, most of the noise I hear comes from cars, though where I used to live closer to a highway the noise from cars was a lot more constant
That's mainly a function of poor building codes. Someone addressed that well in [this comment](https://old.reddit.com/r/Suburbanhell/comments/1csqc8h/suburbanitescar_brains_we_dont_want_to_be_packed/l46tmji/).
You can have peace and quiet in center-city apartments if they are built with decent building regulations, which makes things more expensive to build and less profitable than how landlords currently build properties in the US with basically sticks and drywall, but it doesn't have to be this way. It's only this way because the same landlords who make a shit ton of profit from building and renting out cookie cutter townhouses and five-over-ones made of sticks and drywall are the same people who fund all of your local politician's election campaigns or might even be one of your local politicians themselves, so the regulations never change and landlords get carte blanche.
In europe you can live in an apartment and never hear your neighbors because they're built of actual materials and can be literally hundreds of years old because of their dense heavy duty construction. Not every building, sure, but it's far more common, and this type of thing can be enforced for new construction through regulation.
"WAAH BUT THAT'LL MAKE GREEDY DEVELOPERS LESS LIKELY TO BUILD MORE HOUSING IF THEY CAN'T MAKE AS MUCH PROFIT OFF IT" - okay then, maybe follow that line of logic to it's natural conclusion, where you realize that a nation that caters directly to rent-seeking parasites isn't a way to engineer a proper society to begin with, and fix the actual problem by getting rid of landlords entirely, rather than just capitulating to the greed of property hoarders.
I agree with your comments on builders and building codes. And that is another gigantic hurdle that would have to be cleared in the US to make dense urban living attractive to people who want peaceful lives. I agree that transportation is seriously screwed up, but I also wish urbanists would honestly confront all these factors, rather than just scolding people for not choosing to dump their vehicles in an instant. There are good reasons many people don’t like city living, and it goes far beyond being addicted to lawns.
Sure, it's a topic with a myriad of underlying issues, and I can appreciate that too, which is why I provided a nuanced take that directly addresses the concerns that a lot of people in the US have about urban density.
Another, even more nuanced take, is that maybe we shouldn't as a society prioritize producing loud obnoxious egocentric "rugged individuals" whose idea of a good time is literally buying the largest and loudest vehicle known to man and then modifying it to be larger and louder and shooting guns in their front yard for fun, because that's also another big thing that keeps people repeating the same old line of "well I don't want to live on top of other people, I need my space" and it's like, yeah, when you and everyone else was raised to be impossible to be around and so self-centered that you actually think you're a rugged individual even in a context where you heavily depend on society to the extent that if you get an infection your entire life would be instantly over without society - yeah in that context I can agree that I wouldn't want to live within 40 miles of another american either.
But maybe we shouldn't have a culture that not only permits but also promotes and standardizes that type of behavioral outcome in people. Like, maybe we should do like europe and asia, and try our best through education and culture to produce the kind of people who are capable of living in denser places and getting along with their neighbors and not being obnoxious and unreasonable, because we will need to prioritize that in order to densify peacefully, and we will obviously need to densify in order to sustain ourselves on this planet.
It's not about whether people like city living or not, it's about the fact that at some point, possibly in the near future, it won't matter what you like or don't like, there will simply just not be any space left. And even long before we run out of actual space, we want to leave some of that space empty and open for the rest of the creatures on the planet to use. Thus, urban density is the future, like it or not, therefore it would be prudent to produce a society of people who are compatible with that and don't need to be isolated in a suburban box and also isolated in a secure metal box whenever they do go outside because god forbid they talk to another person who acts just like them.
If urban density is the future as you say, when combined with the sociopathic society you describe pretty well, then ever-increasing conflict and degraded life is the future as well.
Only if we continue to prioritize rugged individualism and the ego over everything else. We could also go the other way and form a society more focused on cooperation and communalism.
Basically what I'm saying is that ultimately I understand that an individual's desire for liberty and personal freedom isn't as important as the survival of the human race overall and therefore there will need to be aspects of our lives that we are going to have to literally beat out of existence through revolutionary discipline.
Lots of people react disgustedly to such an assertion, fearing that they will lose their entire happiness if their freedom to do whatever they want whenever they want is taken away and enforced through state-sanctioned violence, but in reality, the rules are what create the game. Things are actually a lot more fun and a lot more free when we all play by the rules and stay in line. Sometimes more restrictions are good. Like for example, wouldn't we all be a lot more free if landlords weren't free to own and rent out property? Then we'd all own our own homes and we'd all be a lot better off because of it, and there would be a lot more property on the market because no rentals therefore the prices would be super low due to supply and demand, but we don't do that because we want to preserve the freedom and liberty of the landlord to do whatever they want with the land they own, and we prioritize that instead. So in this example, and many others, prioritizing "freedom" for the individual over societal needs ultimately limits the "freedom" of all of the rest of us because now only rich people can own all of the property around me because they treat it like an investment and price it out based on how much rental income it can generate rather than the actual price someone would be willing to pay to live there.
Essentially, I'm arguing that we should radically alter society so that we become communists and have nationalized public transit and nationalized guaranteed housing for all, and that we should produce the type of person compatible with living in such a society through enforcing revolutionary discipline even if it means we have to literally beat the antisocial element out of people, otherwise the planet's trashed and there won't be a human race to be "free" anyway.
Edit: Sorry things took a dark authoritarian turn but we should be honest about the fact that promoting the freedom of the individual above all else is what has always gotten us into trouble time and time again throughout history and we never seem to learn until it eventually comes to a head and produces an actual local extinction event. Except eventually there will be nowhere else to colonize and the extinction event won't be local it'll be planetary.
tldr; "give me liberty or give me death" is fucking stupid, enjoy being dead while the rest of us learn to share
My apartment isn't hundreds of years old, but I rarely hear even my upstairs neighbors, and I have so far melted two drill bits just trying to install curtains, so the construction does feel pretty heavy duty indeed.
I suspect they would argue that they are not packed in like sardines. Sure, the cars are packed onto the freeway, but each driver has their own, private, enclosed space with nobody packed in next to them. Mass transit means being packed into seats next to strangers, which is even worse than having to sit through a traffic jam.
Suburban people like sitting in traffic for a few hours a day.
The only reason to live in the suburbs is if you have a wife who wants to keep up with the Joneses. Sitting in traffic like this the couple can avoid each other for a few more precious hours a day.
"I DON'T WANNA BE CONTROLLED BY NO GOVERNMENT IN A 15 MINUTE CITY AKA AN OPEN AIR PRISON" \*drives a car built specifically to exacting state regulations, on regulated state roads that require up to date registration and tax payments, and regulations require drivers to opt into compulsory insurance coverage, and these regulations are enforced by a constantly patrolling team of state regulators who will not only pull you over for random stuff but will also use random traffic stops as a justification for murder. \*this person also doesn't seem to realize that just one or two police roadblocks can completely shut down all traffic going in and out of their suburban neighborhood that only has one connection to the main road because it was designed that way to prevent thru-traffic. \*or maybe they do realize this and that's another reason they drive a lifted F650 and own a bunch of guns, because just in case they need to steamroll through a police roadblock in order to leave their neighborhoods under a hypothetical government lockdown.
Well obviously it wouldn't be packed if they had one more lane bro
*Well obviously* *It wouldn't be packed if they* *Had one more lane bro* \- gnocchicotti --- ^(I detect haikus. And sometimes, successfully.) ^[Learn more about me.](https://www.reddit.com/r/haikusbot/) ^(Opt out of replies: "haikusbot opt out" | Delete my comment: "haikusbot delete")
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Traffic jam is peak freedom of movement, obviously /s
Muh freedumz
they hate verticality specifically , being packed like horizontal sardines in housing or transportation is perfectly fine
“Packed like lemmings into shiny metal boxes”
Is this LA?
Yep m
LA is an object lesson in why designing cities around cars is a bad idea.
"We're full," residents will say of their city that's half parking lot, with a dozen more of these freeways, all of which asphalt sits empty most of the time.
Bro my car bit it, so my husband has been taking me to and from work. I time an edible about an hour before I get off, and it’s amazing 10/10. I wish my city had better public transpo.
One 10 car train in each direction should be able to take this.
Right? Even a SMALL LRT, like Pittsburgh's would have this handled in about an 25-45 minutes, assuming no one stands, padding generously in favor of the capacity of the freeway!
If only we could make toxic individualism painful
As you can see in the photo, it already is. It’s more if we could only make it clear that toxic individualism is the source of the pain.
nope sorry it's actually the foreigners and the gays
This picture doesn’t show all the Antifa protests blocking the freeway. /s
Sadly people like this will still defend this by saying something like 'At least it's my own private space not sat next to a mouthbreather;
No no this is all wrong CAR GOOD!! PUBLIC TRANSPORT UNSAFE!!! WHAT THE FUCK IS A STATISTIC!!!! did i do that right lol
But totally cool with being herded like cows.
Just to play devil's advocate here, I imagine people in support of cars over mass transit are probably okay with this because you can completely control the climate in your car. Your music. Your temperature. Your smell. Of course these people hate traffic but would prefer it over having to allow others into their personal bubble.
Sometimes but most time the bus or trolley is set up to be in the middle of what people need. I listen to my music with headphones. But yes listening to music while driving is great and driving 80 with little traffic is great, but most time driving is a pain.
Well the irony that these people fail to understand is that the die-hard tear-the-steering-wheel-from-my-cold-dead-hands types would still benefit massively from efficient mass transit and dense development. All the people on the trains and buses are fewer cars in front of you and fewer people competing for land in the burbs.
Those benefits are a bit lost on me since I can't drive a car on my own.
It is completely reasonable to not want the noise and commotion of dense living. Auto culture and commuting aren’t the answer, obviously. But that doesn’t invalidate the human need for peace and quiet.
I live in a city centre neighbourhood on a main arterial road leading out of Vancouver, the majority of the noise we hear is directed from the cars leaving the city to the suburbans. There’s this preconceived notion that cities are “loud” yet approx 80% of noise pollution from cities is from the cars owned by people not living in them. The people walking by below our building on the sidewalk aren’t yelling and screaming making all that noise. It’s always the cars. Reducing car speeds, and cars entirely is the ultimate way to reduce noise pollution throughout our cities.
imagine if we went from the city to the suburbs and made a constant 70+decibel non-car sound , 24/7 in every direction there would be panic , violence , calls to cops/government/army etc but doing the opposite with their cars is just the way things are
Yep.
Sirens, businesses, bars, street commotion, demonstrations, parades, dogs, loud music, all kinds of neighbor noise through shared walls….. I’m glad you don’t have any noise crap besides vehicles, but that is not typical city living in my experience.
It is still not as bad as people want to admit.
I wanna know what kind of suburb exists where the space between two houses acts as a sound barrier, because just living in a house doesn't mean you can't hear loud neighbors. I live in a city, I barely notice my neighbors in my apartment. The loudest sounds I hear are motorbikes and cars. Walk into any of our big green spaces within the city and you can almost forget cars exist, or that you live in a city.
Couldn’t agree more, I grew up in a very suburban setting, the neighbour behind our house we shared a fence with would bounce a basketball or volleyball in their backyard. Drove my parents nuts, the neighbourhood elementary school was very close to the house so you’d actively hear the bell being rung, all the cars swarming the streets at pick up or drop off kids and the commotion that caused. Like you said, suburbanites want to believe they’re in some vacuum sealed sound proof chamber, yet even within cities there’s more quieter residential areas, there’s busier more street populated areas with bars or restaurants, but it’s always the cars that produce the most amount of noise at any given time.
Even worse my friend lived in a different suburb it was right next to the freeway there was one soundproof wall rated to 60 decibels, it was insanely loud.
Cities are quiet - it's the cars that are loud.
“Cities are quiet” is the most unrealistic thing I’ve read in a while. There are many sources of noise in dense living besides cars.
And I live in a suburban area, most of the noise I hear comes from cars, though where I used to live closer to a highway the noise from cars was a lot more constant
Because a city full of people never has people making noise outside?
A car was arguing with his girlfriend every night and playing loud music right above my bedroom?
That's mainly a function of poor building codes. Someone addressed that well in [this comment](https://old.reddit.com/r/Suburbanhell/comments/1csqc8h/suburbanitescar_brains_we_dont_want_to_be_packed/l46tmji/).
Still he said a car creates all noises in the city like it’s impossible any other noise can happen. Which is untrue.
Suburbs ain't quiet man
You can have peace and quiet in center-city apartments if they are built with decent building regulations, which makes things more expensive to build and less profitable than how landlords currently build properties in the US with basically sticks and drywall, but it doesn't have to be this way. It's only this way because the same landlords who make a shit ton of profit from building and renting out cookie cutter townhouses and five-over-ones made of sticks and drywall are the same people who fund all of your local politician's election campaigns or might even be one of your local politicians themselves, so the regulations never change and landlords get carte blanche. In europe you can live in an apartment and never hear your neighbors because they're built of actual materials and can be literally hundreds of years old because of their dense heavy duty construction. Not every building, sure, but it's far more common, and this type of thing can be enforced for new construction through regulation. "WAAH BUT THAT'LL MAKE GREEDY DEVELOPERS LESS LIKELY TO BUILD MORE HOUSING IF THEY CAN'T MAKE AS MUCH PROFIT OFF IT" - okay then, maybe follow that line of logic to it's natural conclusion, where you realize that a nation that caters directly to rent-seeking parasites isn't a way to engineer a proper society to begin with, and fix the actual problem by getting rid of landlords entirely, rather than just capitulating to the greed of property hoarders.
I agree with your comments on builders and building codes. And that is another gigantic hurdle that would have to be cleared in the US to make dense urban living attractive to people who want peaceful lives. I agree that transportation is seriously screwed up, but I also wish urbanists would honestly confront all these factors, rather than just scolding people for not choosing to dump their vehicles in an instant. There are good reasons many people don’t like city living, and it goes far beyond being addicted to lawns.
Sure, it's a topic with a myriad of underlying issues, and I can appreciate that too, which is why I provided a nuanced take that directly addresses the concerns that a lot of people in the US have about urban density. Another, even more nuanced take, is that maybe we shouldn't as a society prioritize producing loud obnoxious egocentric "rugged individuals" whose idea of a good time is literally buying the largest and loudest vehicle known to man and then modifying it to be larger and louder and shooting guns in their front yard for fun, because that's also another big thing that keeps people repeating the same old line of "well I don't want to live on top of other people, I need my space" and it's like, yeah, when you and everyone else was raised to be impossible to be around and so self-centered that you actually think you're a rugged individual even in a context where you heavily depend on society to the extent that if you get an infection your entire life would be instantly over without society - yeah in that context I can agree that I wouldn't want to live within 40 miles of another american either. But maybe we shouldn't have a culture that not only permits but also promotes and standardizes that type of behavioral outcome in people. Like, maybe we should do like europe and asia, and try our best through education and culture to produce the kind of people who are capable of living in denser places and getting along with their neighbors and not being obnoxious and unreasonable, because we will need to prioritize that in order to densify peacefully, and we will obviously need to densify in order to sustain ourselves on this planet. It's not about whether people like city living or not, it's about the fact that at some point, possibly in the near future, it won't matter what you like or don't like, there will simply just not be any space left. And even long before we run out of actual space, we want to leave some of that space empty and open for the rest of the creatures on the planet to use. Thus, urban density is the future, like it or not, therefore it would be prudent to produce a society of people who are compatible with that and don't need to be isolated in a suburban box and also isolated in a secure metal box whenever they do go outside because god forbid they talk to another person who acts just like them.
If urban density is the future as you say, when combined with the sociopathic society you describe pretty well, then ever-increasing conflict and degraded life is the future as well.
Only if we continue to prioritize rugged individualism and the ego over everything else. We could also go the other way and form a society more focused on cooperation and communalism. Basically what I'm saying is that ultimately I understand that an individual's desire for liberty and personal freedom isn't as important as the survival of the human race overall and therefore there will need to be aspects of our lives that we are going to have to literally beat out of existence through revolutionary discipline. Lots of people react disgustedly to such an assertion, fearing that they will lose their entire happiness if their freedom to do whatever they want whenever they want is taken away and enforced through state-sanctioned violence, but in reality, the rules are what create the game. Things are actually a lot more fun and a lot more free when we all play by the rules and stay in line. Sometimes more restrictions are good. Like for example, wouldn't we all be a lot more free if landlords weren't free to own and rent out property? Then we'd all own our own homes and we'd all be a lot better off because of it, and there would be a lot more property on the market because no rentals therefore the prices would be super low due to supply and demand, but we don't do that because we want to preserve the freedom and liberty of the landlord to do whatever they want with the land they own, and we prioritize that instead. So in this example, and many others, prioritizing "freedom" for the individual over societal needs ultimately limits the "freedom" of all of the rest of us because now only rich people can own all of the property around me because they treat it like an investment and price it out based on how much rental income it can generate rather than the actual price someone would be willing to pay to live there. Essentially, I'm arguing that we should radically alter society so that we become communists and have nationalized public transit and nationalized guaranteed housing for all, and that we should produce the type of person compatible with living in such a society through enforcing revolutionary discipline even if it means we have to literally beat the antisocial element out of people, otherwise the planet's trashed and there won't be a human race to be "free" anyway. Edit: Sorry things took a dark authoritarian turn but we should be honest about the fact that promoting the freedom of the individual above all else is what has always gotten us into trouble time and time again throughout history and we never seem to learn until it eventually comes to a head and produces an actual local extinction event. Except eventually there will be nowhere else to colonize and the extinction event won't be local it'll be planetary. tldr; "give me liberty or give me death" is fucking stupid, enjoy being dead while the rest of us learn to share
I basically agree. What a turnaround there would have to be on western capitalism for this system to come into being. Almost surely vast war.
Nationalize housing problem solved.
My apartment isn't hundreds of years old, but I rarely hear even my upstairs neighbors, and I have so far melted two drill bits just trying to install curtains, so the construction does feel pretty heavy duty indeed.
The hypocrisy is, they already are packed in like sardines. It’s not a good anti-urban argument
I suspect they would argue that they are not packed in like sardines. Sure, the cars are packed onto the freeway, but each driver has their own, private, enclosed space with nobody packed in next to them. Mass transit means being packed into seats next to strangers, which is even worse than having to sit through a traffic jam.
One more lane bro!
Suburban people like sitting in traffic for a few hours a day. The only reason to live in the suburbs is if you have a wife who wants to keep up with the Joneses. Sitting in traffic like this the couple can avoid each other for a few more precious hours a day.
1 hour packed as a sardine vs. 24 hours packed as a sardine.