A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/07/20/opinion-broadway-upzoning-parking-chicago/
"If the city becomes more dense, where will people put their car?!!" he asks.
A threat actor using bad faith arguments.
The L train: am I a fucking joke to you!?
I would like to see initiatives to make the area downtown car free and not allowing additional parking to be made in the area between the rivers, congress, and the lake. I would love this area to be car free in my lifetime.
Or they could invest in mass transit and park and rides?
If I lived in a city like that, I doubt I’d bother with a car.
I work in municipal development, and here's the cold facts:
There's little support for the extreme cost of transitioning to 24/7 universal public transit because we have infrastructure for cars.
Without universal public transit, most people still need to own a car.
While park and rides can work for places with good public transit, their real advantage is allowing businesses to share parking lots so that you don't have to have multiple parking spaces avaiallble for the same car on a day trip (work, shopping, whatever), the owners of the cars need a convenient, secure place to store their car, and the best place to do that is where they live.
And the biggest reason - who is gonna develop the system? The thing about roads is they're cheap and easy. Yeah - on aggregate they're super expensive, but they usually aren't built by the government. When a developer wants to build, they build clout the part of the infrastructure needed to support their development, which usually means connecting to and expanding existing systems.
Over time, zoning changes can mandate additional requirements for future designs, but the expansion takes decades at best. You know all those sidewalks that are 60 feet long and connect to nothing? Those aren't the result of someone just being dumb - that's cities telling developers they have to build out a sidewalk network when they develop a site. But it also requires everything to redevelop, so you've got a bunch orlf orphaned sidewalks.
Then we decide mixed-use paths for bikes and pedestrians are better, so now you've gor 3ft sidewalks connecting to 12ft paths. And because of accessibility requirements, it has to be concrete, which requires more impervious cover and therefore more stormwater infrastructure, but the old sewer system is located where the upgraded stormwater needs to go....
The world isn't Sim City where things can be master-planned and executed. Cities exist across centuries, and its needs and planning theories change over that time. It's messy. And the reality is we've discovered that roads and cars are very adaptable and relatively cheap to extend.
I work in municipal development, and here’s the cold facts
Spoken like a true city planner, LOL. I love how even when you folks are trying to give the "cold facts" you still end up being gentle and diplomatic about it. 🥰
Here's my bottom-line conclusion to the above comment, from someone who doesn't work in municipal development and thus hasn't been required to develop that 'public official' speaking habit:
In order to get the government to pay to build transit, it has to be made painful to drive first. That means you have to build the density first even when you don't have transit to support it yet.
I know a lot of you folks even in this community don't want to hear it, but as an activist who's been on the other side of conversations with municipal development people for decades, that really is how it works.
And the biggest reason - who is gonna develop the system? The thing about roads is they’re cheap and easy. Yeah - on aggregate they’re super expensive, but they usually aren’t built by the government. When a developer wants to build, they build clout the part of the infrastructure needed to support their development, which usually means connecting to and expanding existing systems.
I think it's worth noting that, while infrastructure is often initially built by developers, subsequent maintenance usually falls back on the government. That means, from a municipal development perspective, that it's super-important to go back and retrofit density to build up the tax base, before the extreme maintenance costs of building entire streets just to serve single-family houses on large lots bankrupts the city. For a long time, cities have been getting by funding maintenance of existing infrastructure using those developer impact fees in what amounts to a gigantic Ponzi scheme, but that quits working once the frontier of green-field development moves beyond the jurisdictional limits. After that, densifying becomes a financial imperative, whether the NIMBYs like it or not.
The way public infrastructure expansion works isn't a ponzi scheme.
We typically require a maintenance contract from the developer for the first few years and a special tax for the owners of the developed land that lasts between 10 and 30 years, depending on the specifics of the agreement. That tax is put into escrow, and by the time the infrastructure needs to be maintained, there's enough money in the fund to maintain that portion of the infrastructure off of interest.
The mistake many cities make is putting that revenue into the general fund. But if you put it into dedicated funds, it can't be diverted to other city expenses and used by the next Council to cut property taxes while leaving future maintenance unfunded.
That sounds less like "the way public infrastructure expansion works isn’t a ponzi scheme," and more "my city is the exception to the rule that does it right."
Makes sense, actually. Think about it, you can live in a car but you can't park in your house. /jk
Yet we park in a driveway and drive through a parkway. 🤦♂️
I understand we need to move away from the personal automobile as it is currently conceived, and they are building houses without parking and adding transit infrastructure and such, but if only the very wealthy can afford to buy the housing being built, these are not the same demographics of people who use transit infrastructure and therefore require parking, gobbling up all the available street parking in the area and causing businesses to suffer as they can't be accessed by a wider majority of people from the suburbs. It's a cart before the horse kind of thing but I don't see it stopping anytime soon unfortunately.
if only the very wealthy can afford to buy the housing
Build it without parking. The price will drop. Now we have more affordable housing :-D
What?? Pretty soon you're gonna be suggesting that there are better ways to transport people around than cars and that we could build better public transportation infrastructure with the tax payers money so that the same tax payers can afford mobility for a lot less while saving time in getting around and polluting a lot less the atmosphere that allows them to breath!
What's this? Do you want to make sense? We wouldn't want to start making sense now, would we?
...
Jokes aside now, when it comes to housing, the problem is not a lack of housing in itself necessarily. The crucial part of the problem resides in property hoarding by the wealthy and upper middle-class as long term investments in the form of assets to flip, all while they still obtain revenue in renting them to the highest bidder. Airbnb and similar initiatives destroyed affordable rent all around the world. This to say, that a lot of people in the unprivileged categories didn't also mind screwing their peers to get ahead. This is what the capitalist system does. It re-enforces sociopathic behaviour in people through them valuing the monetary tokens more than the lives of those around them and the very world in which they have to inhabit. This is what Elizabeth Magie tried to explain the world when she created "The Landlord's Game". It has been explained and demonstrated as a predicted model for a very long time. And we all lose in the end. Always.
Saying that the government needs to interfere and create measures to prevent the furthering of this crisis is incomplete without acknowledgement of the required rewiring of the general public to stave off the centuries old social conditioning of appealing to the worst in human condition.
The default setting of a common citizen is not to contribute to a life shared by all that live around them and in turn benefit from the same efforts from others. It is instead to try and survive them all and and not needing the slightest from them. Which is never true, never possible but nevertheless the reason why we are always in this mess. And the reason why we all lose, and even those who lose the least, they still have to inhabit a world that would be better if this wasn't true.
Individuality also explains the housing crisis in the sense that more and more people have the desire to live alone. And therefore more houses are required. Which in a world like the one we have, that desire is perfectly understandable but in itself also a reinforcement of the loop that causes it.
It's a mess.
Jokes aside now, when it comes to housing, the problem is not a lack of housing in itself necessarily.
The problem is lack of housing specifically in the places where the high demand for it exists.
The notion of prices being high because everything is getting bought up by investors is an easy, comfortable scapegoat, but that's all it is -- a scapegoat. Fundamentally, landlords and flippers don't make money unless they have an occupant to lease or sell the housing unit to. Sure, you could say that the speculative bubble holding vacant properties and waiting for them to appreciate is making the housing crisis worse, but that only comes into effect after prices start to spiral and thus cannot be the underlying cause that made housing an attractive investment for speculators in the first place.
The real underlying cause is simple: supply is not being allowed to meet demand because of zoning codes that restrict density.
Saying that the government needs to interfere and create measures to prevent the furthering of this crisis is incomplete without acknowledgement of the required rewiring of the general public
You might be right in the way that you mean, but I want to talk about how you're also right in a different way: people are too often wired to see rezoning for density as "interference" by the government because changing the law is a government action, but in reality it is undoing the previous interference the government did when they restricted the zoning to begin with.
Individuality also explains the housing crisis in the sense that more and more people have the desire to live alone. And therefore more houses are required. Which in a world like the one we have, that desire is perfectly understandable but in itself also a reinforcement of the loop that causes it.
The way I see it, the problem isn't that people need to be rewired to be less individualist, the problem is that the government needs to stop indulging their desires by subsidizing them at public expense. I have no problem with somebody "wanting" to live in a single-family house instead of an apartment/condo, but I have a very big problem with the government subsidizing that want by forcing developers to build single-family houses when the market demands dense housing, displacing all the other people who could've lived there and causing the massive negative externalities of car-dependency in the process.
I can't speak for every place on earth, but where I live in the south of Portugal, that is very much the problem. And affordable long term rent has been destroyed in all of Europe by Airbnb and similar initiatives. And no, this is not a scapegoat theory. All you have to do is access housing registrations and match against citizenship registered to addresses in the same area and then you start to see the problem. There's a lot more houses than people that have their permanent address registered to the same area. So then the problem can't be housing in itself. When one starts to look closer we start to notice a lot of titles to the same people and the same last names as we all would expect. The house to person ratio is quite disproportionate in its distribution. I can tell you that this has been exposed time and time again over time, but since 2008 that it has indeed gotten worse and more so exponentially every year since then.
The problem in just simply building more housing is that the same thing will happen to those new homes. They'll just be absorbed into this same phenomenon of asset flipping and market speculation in which even rent, not just owning property reaches prices beyond what locals can afford with long term rent even becoming entirely unavailable due to Airbnb and other initiatives alike.
That's why the governments have to intervene. Especially at a local level. But if a rewiring of the general population doesn't occur, it will just be lobbied back to the same as before. As it has happened. Because what is simply enforced is not learned. And this is what you are referring to when you speak to the public aversion to government intervention. If not understood and learned, what is then witnessed is the same rope pull of do and undo between governmental administrations, that wears off and alienates the public.
But yes, sometimes the problem in itself can be an increase of population density that exploded beyond the local availability of houses. And then new housing development is required or people will have to choose (more like forced without an option) to relocate.
That is why I said "the problem is not a lack of housing in itself necessarily". In which I meant it as not always the source of the problem. I didn't say the lack of housing in itself is NEVER the problem.
There are many contributors to this issue.
Environmental changes and war are also intertwined as they both lead to resource depletion, and become part of the same feedback loop that plays a part in the whole of the Metacrisis. In which both will cause mass migrations. And mass migrations will always cause a disparity between demand and availability in housing, which leads to more inflation and more conflicts over resources, which in turn leads to more mass migrations and on and on and on... This is "systems thinking" and the general public has not caught up to the descent we're in yet. Or is in denial and refusing to engage in the face of its enormity.
Most problems that are detected by most people are real and feeding into one another. What I said is true and what you said is true and anyone who doubts that is possible is not engaging with the complexity of the world as it is.
Well, I have no experience with Portugal, so I will concede that, regarding Portugal, you may very well be correct, and the speculative investment housing bubble has some underlying cause other than North American-style Euclidean low-density zoning.
I believe that my argument does apply in North America (as well as other English-speaking countries that have copied American city planning ideas, such as Australia, New Zealand, and to a slightly lesser extent, the UK), though.
You know what really helps looking at other “upcoming” dense cities. Then build from their faults, like there is no difference when you do something and it turns out to be wrong.. like there are are more uses cases to have a rainbow line or upgrade tracks/switches. The more people you can move the more profit for your city and business. It’s all about how quickly can you get money to move from hand to another. Make it accessible for all, as an example certain parts of north and south sides have elevated boarding, super helpful and safe for cyclists and transit users. But having it only one side really says you’re desperate to save pennies over human safety/lives.
@Davriellelouna People who choose to live in the suburbs should be limited to working in the suburbs. No writing for a big city paper, making policy decisions for the city as an employee or consultant, policing the city, acting in downtown theaters, displaying your art in downtown galleries, even working in downtown banks. If you love suburbs and suburban lifestyles so much, marry them and don't stray from them.
People who choose to live in the suburbs should be limited to working in the suburbs.
When WFH got popular during covid people essentially did that. And lots of smaller shops in the city suffered because of it. I know of at least 3 places I used to frequent that shut down from the lack of foot traffic around office hours post covid.
A lot of small businesses got hit from COVID and WFH growing nailed their coffin.
Oh please! You think the sort of people are actually writing according to their possibly non-existent moral system? You think it would make any difference if the author was forced to rent in the city?