I’m somewhat confused by all the hatred for lawns – people saying that they are useless.
I don’t disagree that they are costly in terms of water and some kinds of maintenance. A better material culture would have fewer of them and there seem to be some perverse expectations (even regulations sometimes) that various landscaped areas should have lawns rather than other, more appropriate plants or landscape.
However, it’s totally obvious what lawns are for, to me. They’re for kids to play on or to play soccer or run around or sit for a picnic or whatever. And I don’t see why people don’t get *any* of that.
These people don’t have kids. Furthermore, children are so removed from their social circle and frame of mind that they don’t even think about what they would use the lawn for if they did have kids.
(Or they live in dense urban areas where playgrounds are no more than a few blocks away.)
I think it’s more the latter, but even a bit further. The broader model people are using here I think is “suburbia is cancer,” which I think is accurate even (especially?) if you have kids. It gets you suburban-brand Safety at the cost of making you into a suburbanite. Like yeah, there are reasons people make that tradeoff, but it’s hard to argue that it isn’t an example of widespread civilizational inadequacy. @sinesalvatorem @michaelblume back me up here.
OK, let’s actually talk about this. Why? What does “making you into a suburbanite” mean?
Unsurprisingly, I’ve had this exact conversation with a lot of people who are reflexively hostile to the suburbs. The answers I’ve gotten mostly seem to boil down to some combination of four things:
1) Prestige. We all know that only boring thick-necked American morons like the suburbs! You don’t want to be one of them, do you?
2) Aesthetics. To which, well, sure, you’re allowed to like or not-like whatever you want, but then this falls into the general category of “if you’re going to be vehemently angry about enforcing an aesthetic preference you should at least own up to it.”
3) The suburban lack of Social Culture in the form of clubs, neighborhood bars, Town Spirit, etc. There are obviously people for whom this is a legitimately a big deal. But I’d be surprised if it were a meaningful motivating factor amongst the hordes of introverted Internet nerds who mostly want to hang out with their friends and wish that they could just not have to deal with the rest of the world.
4) Environmental issues. Which are of course real and salient, and to the extent that’s what you mean, I’m not going to object. But people don’t generally talk about suburbia like “this is an awesome thing that we’re sadly going to have to give up to save the planet…”
…is that, in fact, it? Am I missing something? Where is all the “civilizational cancer” stuff coming from?
From my own personal standpoint, suburbia seems like a super good deal all around, except for the fact that you might want to have kids someday. You get lots of space at an almost-reasonable price! And privacy! And pretty trees! And you can still get to pretty much anything you want within like forty-five minutes, which is really not that much worse than living in most parts of a major city! It’s just a shame that, if you raise children in the suburbs, you’re signing up for them being totally dependent on your willingness to drive them to any single thing they might ever want to do…
Forty-five minutes? In a reasonably dense city with decent transit you have everything within less than half that.
Density is more than just Social Culture, and even for introverted nerds Social Culture that needs density is a benefit. Good luck trying to start an anime club in Bumfuck, Nowhere when the number of people inside a 45 minute drive is small, and then trying to get them together. Assuming they have cars, of course. Density significantly helps hanging out with friends, you know. And it means there can be better places for it.
Even if you don’t want to see anyone at all, the goods you have access to in a dense city are so much more diverse.
Also you know what the worst kind of having to deal with people is? Traffic. I don’t get how people can stand driving for like 2 hours every day. Driving is boring at best and traffic SUCKS. (Yes, I own a car.)
When I lived in Cincinnati, it was much more reliably 30-45 minutes to get anywhere else in the city, than when I lived in New York when I needed to book 1-2 hours to get to another borough.
But ignoring that empirical fact… @balioc and others aren’t arguing about whether you’d prefer suburbia or urbia, but “why do people hate the existence of suburbs so much?” “Can’t form an anime club” seems to be a weird rationale to despite other people for choosing to live there.
I don’t actually hate suburbs that much, I hate the rules that suburbanize what are supposed to be “cities”. We have one actual decent city in the US (Manhattan) and I think we could stand to have a few more, so that everyone who wants to live in a Real City doesn’t have to live in Manhattan.
I liked living in a relatively small town (Tuscaloosa) a whole lot better than living in the suburbs of D.C.
Mainly because the traffic didn’t turn to complete shit every morning and evening—because hey, the capacity of the roads was actually proportionate to the population. (That’s the problem: there’s not enough roads! The beltway should be like three times wider.)
It was just a lot quicker to drive everywhere in general.
On the other hand, it was not the location of a huge number of think tanks, etc. to work at.
Generally speaking, if you build that many roads, the parking situation eats you alive.
Given that the average Manhattan apartment is about twice the size of a parking space and support….
That’s why I think self-driving cars are going to really transform cities, if the government will get out of the way.
Still doesn’t really solve the parking problem. It opens up new options, but new options means: “Car parks itself a neighborhood over”, not “Let’s get rid of these forever”.
I think it does solve it?
For one, people can rent them on-demand instead of having a car that’s not in use the vast majority of the time.
For excess capacity (or for those who still want to pay the premium for their own, private car @the or , they can valet-park themselves in huge warehouses on cheap land outside the city center.
It vastly reduces the number of cars that need to be parked, and solves the bigger problem of needing them to be parked right next to where the user lives/works, in spots that are individually accessible. Most of the space in parking garages is empty, to allow the cars to get in and out. If they can drive themselves, you could park 20 in a row, end-to-end.
The basic problem is that it’s still not in use the vast majority of the time.
A lot of people seem to think self-driving cars will be like regular cars, except you can multitask while commuting.
I (and apparently also @voxette-vk – I knew I liked her for a reason) think self-driving cars will end up being Ubers for 1/3 the price.
So, like, most of the price of an Uber is the driver’s time. With self-driving cars, a robot’s time is significantly less expensive than a human’s – basically free. You’d be paying the marginal cost per mile (which you’d have to pay if you owned the car, too) and the company’s profit margin, in exchange for not having to buy the car itself.
Basically, if you use self-driving Ubers or whatever Waymo’s equivalent is (apparently self-driving Lyfts), you effectively get a car for free. Who would want to own a car if they could get one for free?
Well, one reason might be so you could have a car in your garage whenever you need it. You’d have to pay for a parking space (which in cities can get pretty expensive, and in suburbs trades off against having a larger house), but you’d get instant access to a car, instead of having to wait for a self-driving Uber.
How long would it take to get a self-driving Uber, anyway? Currently it’s around five minutes, but if their price dropped drastically, they’d probably be popular and common enough to be around a minute. Is that worth paying for a car and a parking space and insurance?
And, sure, the self-driving taxi company (Uber or whatever) is going to need a profit margin, but they aren’t going to demand so high a profit margin to prevent themselves from replacing most personally-owned cars.
That’s not actually the problem.
The problem is that on any given day, 90% of people are boring.
They wake up, go to work, go home, maybe stop at the grocery store. This is why rush hour exists in the first place. There’s two enormous, tremendous spikes in demand for 2-3 hours in the morning and evening, and then pretty much nobody uses anything for the other 18 hours of the day and they can be handled with a tenth of your capacity.
So a world in which Uber has no parking problems is:
- A world in which demand at 9:23 PM on a Tuesday goes way up and demand at 5:30 goes way, way, way down.
- A world in which rush hour traffic has been replaced by hour-long waits/10x surge pricing for your taxi home.
Self-driving cars will improve this scenario immensely (Pool, warehouses a neighborhood over, giving 3-4 rides every morning). They won’t solve it entirely. Most of your cars aren’t being used 80% of the day, where do they sit when they aren’t being used?
/And then of course, there’s the special hell that is LA and their housing/jobs mismatches. That’ll be the real test.
I feel like 90% is a severe overestimate. Do you really think rush hour means that 90% of all cars in existence in a city are on the road at the same time? I feel like “below 50%” is probably more accurate.
Assuming rush hour lasts 2 hours and the average commute is half an hour, this gives a minimum of 75% reduction in cars even if every single car in the city is used during rush hour (which I still think is a serious overestimate). I guess if you consider that rush hour is mostly one way, you might cut it down to 60%. I think fewer than half of cars in a city are used during rush hour, so I’d guess 85% reduction.
And grouping up (like UberPool) is a lot easier to coordinate in a self-driving taxi system. Assuming half of people UberPool, we’re now at 90% reduction.
So parking space demand would decrease 90%. But also consider that during non-peak hours, self-driving cars can drive a decent distance to park. So the densest parts of cities won’t need parking in like a 30-mile radius.
This gets even easier if most of the trip can be taken on a train of some kind.
Hmm. What if the interior of a car became more like a semi trailer, where you would get in, be automatically connected to a train by your taxi, then transferred between trains by more taxis, none of which ever travels outside of a mile or so radius?
(still doesn’t solve the problem of privacy though)
I’m a bit concerned, as “the poor don’t have to own cars” means “the poor won’t own cars” (as their wages will shrink to reflect this) which has been at least somewhat of a buffer against homelessness in this country.
And the marketeer types aren’t going to want to do anything about that, because they rarely ever do, as either they think suffering is justified or they cover themselves with platitudes about private charity that is frankly just not going to materialize.
WW’s concern about privacy is valid. The car company will have round-the-clock cameras in cars so that they can fine people for leaving messes or damaging them.
Additionally, there are concerns not even on the radar, such as that currently the spare vehicular capacity is enough to evacuate an entire city, but won’t be under this plan. But then I can’t convince people to up the level of emergency readiness generally, and if I had my way the level of North American civil defense might accidentally convince foreigners that we were preparing to survive nuclear war, so…
