I just watched this video from Not Just Bikes on YouTube, I have few questions : urbanplanning
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0
Disclaimer: I'm from Slovakia, Eastern Europe, so bear in mind, I'm confusion
He keeps on talking about how cities and suburbs have to meet certain types of regulations. For example the parking lot size, the road width, etc. Then he says there can be only one family houses. There can't be any businesses inside these residential suburbs and also no schools.
My questions are:
What do you actually do? Are you always stuck inside? What did you do when you were a child and couldn't drive?
Why do you have these sorts of strange regulations? Are your officials so incompetent? Is this due to lobbying from car or oil companies? I don't get it.
Why is there no public transport? It seems like the only thing is the yellow school bus, idk.
He says there can be only one family houses. Why? Why can't you have idk a commie block in the middle of such a suburb? Or row houses or whatever.
Why are there no businesses inside these? I mean, he says it's illegal, just why? If I lived in such a place, I'd just buy a house next to mine and turn it into a tavern or a convenience store or whatever. Is that simply not possible and illegal?
These places have front and backyards. But they're mostly empty. Some backyards have a pool maybe, but it's mostly just green grass. Why don't you grow plants in your yards? Like potatoes, cucumbers, tomatoes or whatever. Why do you own this land, if you never use it?
Whenever I watched an American movie and saw those suburbs, I always thought these streets were located somewhere in a small village or something. Turns out these are located within cities up to 30 km away from Downtown...
The funny thing about zoning is that if you had no zones at all and just let the "free market" decide where everything goes you would probably get massively more healthy layouts for towns and cities, moreso than what currently exists anyway. The zoning in america literally makes it hostile to human living.
They used to not have zoning but you'd get slums and shitty housing mixed into industrial smog belching factories or smelly and dangerous tanneries and shit. The advent of single family residential and the car has turned America into a hellscape though, there's just better zoning and planning than what we're doing. I get your point, though, its still shit even if we won things like separation between industrial and residential or fire escapes or ventilation etc.
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Hot take but slums are objectively better than homeless people and factories should be near the people that work in them. Regulating their emissions is better than over regulating their locations and would solve that problem by a different means.
I'm sure homeless also existed when those slums were around but having them is better than eliminating them through policy-based gentrification which is something we fight non-stop here in the UK.