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.
While I disagree with his "just move, silly" attitude, he's not completely off base. North American cities are so fucking shattered by car dependence that it would take a full communist revolution to even begin to set it right. It would cost several hundreds of billions just to overhaul (or in some cases begin work on) transit projects, and any project attempted in the current day is at the mercy of NIMBY fucks and the whims of local governments. It's just not feasible for 95% of North America.
Any widespread transportation overhaul in America would quite literally involve dragging stubborn rich idiots out of their suburban mansions and arresting them for disruption. It would involve massive rezoning and redistricting to repair urban sprawl. Also the gutting of every large real estate corporation.
Now that would be awesome, yeah, but we shouldn't delude ourselves. It's gonna be a lot of work.
Some places would have to be abandoned completely, like all the suburbs surrounding Phoenix shouldn't exist. Las Vegas would have to get razed to the ground.
I am optimistic though that something could work. There used to be widespread trolly networks in the US that operated above grade. They used to be so extensive one could travel from NYC to Minneapolis or something just on metro trolly tracks.
I don't think that would be necessary. Running utility lines to low-density areas is really expensive. Take out the subsidies or privatize exurban utilities altogether, and there would end up being a strong disincentive to live there. And due to the nature of sprawl, most of these suburban and exurban houses bottleneck around one collector road, and that collector road probably goes over a few culverts. They functionally depend on grocery stores and gas stations that are usually several miles away. All it would take is to [redacted] a few points at once, and an entire bedroom community would become unliveable. They'd end up getting in their SUVs and tearing up each other's lawns to try to get out. At that point they could either relocate closer to resources, or cling to the necrosis and go down with it. These asphalt and vinyl and particle-board and monocrop grass landscapes are so close to collapsing; all they need is a little nudge.
I would go so far as to say there shouldn't be a city with no access to a proper water source
Define proper? NYC gets its water from upstate, SF from the Sierras, LA from everywhere, the Romans notably built aqueducts. How about we just don’t grow lawns and alfalfa in deserts and see how that goes?