NotJustBikes is getting dragged on Twitter for this post.
What do you think? Is he right? Wrong? Not wrong, but an asshole?
When I see how hard advocates and sympathetic planners have to work in 2023 to get a halfassed facility that would never make it off the drawing board in the Netherlands, it's hard for me to say he's wrong.
he's right. the suburbs are already built. what is supposed to happen? so much of the nations wealth is tied up in these multi-hundred thousand dollar, single family homes. you're not destroying that and moving people into higher density areas. My civil engineer friend said "well we'll zone 10,000 square miles for higher density and let the City grow into the suburbs and extend the public transport there" and felt this would be easy enough to redevelop all American homes into 5-over-1s within a few years.
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But we can destroy multihundred dollar single family homes. You need to have a critical mass of high density population, then you fold the suburbs into the city itself, increase land property taxes steeply, zone for unlimited density contingent on guaranteed infrastructure, greatly limit car use, streamline eminent domain, and eventually people will either be priced out of their homes or, if they're very rich they'll either be eminent domained or annoyed that they can't use their cars anymore.
It can be done. The single family homes are all shoddily made piece of shit that won't last. They're barely wealth as it is and will be a liability in 15 years time. The land is what's valuable, the houses are a crappy consumer good made to the lowest standard the building code will allow full of glued fiberboard and cheap drywall. American houses themselves aren't wealth, they're consumables.
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The cities the US has now were the result of bulldozing their urban centres to build highways, suburbs, and parking lots. Those were already built too. Why should one be fait accompli and the other be unthinkable?
seems like it would divert an unrealistic amount of construction material for a post-industrial, declining country entering a climate apocalypse to rebuild homes that people already have.