This isn’t a great argument. There is so much open undeveloped space in the US that could be used to house people. This interchange isn’t taking space away from anyone. There are lots of good reasons to reduce cars, but this isn’t one of them.
That’s not really true here though. This is in the middle of an urban area, not in some big open empty space that’s unoccupied, like Montana, or North Dakota. This is in the middle of Houston, Texas, a very populous city.
Calling anywhere in Greater Houston “the middle of an urban area” is just incorrect. It’s the 4th most populated city in the US and the 150th most densely populated. There are a lot of people in Houston but also just a fucking Tom of Houston around. But, as is the norm in this magazine, you are all free to ignore facts and data so you can raise a furor in your tiny anti-car cult.
Houston is so big because the city has absorbed all the communities around it. It’s incredibly sprawled so the density is much lower than cities of comparable population. This creates all sorts of other issues, like the problem of paving over hundreds of square miles of wetland.
Why do you think it’s so sparsely populated? What’s keeping people so far from each other? Is it just Houstonians are their own species and can’t stand to be in areas over a certain population density?
Because humans enjoy having lots of space to live in. Personally I would never go back to living in an apartment since I can afford a house and land. I’ve lived in small apartments, big apartments, a single-wide trailer, large houses, small houses, and medium houses. Medium house with acreage of land is the best living situation of all for me.
I concur bro. These bullshitters are high on their own farts and apparently can’t see the truth that they are never going to change the vast landscape of America into their imaginary Soviet-style shithole idea of a “utopia” where people don’t drive and live in tiny boxes in human hives.
Soviet Union was bad for multiple reasons but in major cities the housing was not really any worse than anywhere else in the world. I guess you just enjoy spending 3 hours a day in your car.
I don’t commute to work often, but when I do it’s only about a 20 minute drive in light traffic. I certainly wouldn’t spend 3 hours a day in a car to commute to work when there are plenty of jobs within that 20 minute commute from my house.
The point was that in total you probably spend more time in your car than any sane average European would, because you lack options. And because you lack options it’s a hellscape for anyone who can’t drive a car. The point wasn’t your commute, because your commute probably doesn’t represent the median. Also good for you. My commute is also irrelevant, but it’s five minutes walk to a train, ten minutes by train and five minutes walk from the train to the office, all that in an environment where I don’t fear for my life, the noise level permits me to whisper to other people without them having difficulties hearing me.
And? If they need space they expand elsewhere. If this interchange was at the edge of town, middle of town, north or south. The town is still the same size. America is large, lots of “empty” space.
And that’s how you get sprawling cities that are completely untraversable on foot, bike or bus. Urban planning is important, even when space is abundant
Which expands the total travel distance on average, exacerbating all car use in the area. Things need to be closer, not further. That will only encourage car dependent infrastructure.
Not just car use, also infrastructure cost for literally anything from water over sewage to electricity, internet connections, gas pipes,…
Expanding the distance is much, much worse than simply affecting travel times and making us more car dependent. It is literally something we can not afford.
Cities should avoid becoming nightmare, sprawling hellscapes. Dense cities with multi-use buildings, public transit, and walkable infrastructure are where its at.
Dense and ugly are not synonyms, same with lacking character. If you go to sprawling suburbia, you’ll find that there’s exactly no character, you can drive for 30 minutes and think you went in a circle.
Do you genuinely believe people want sprawling hellscapes where they have to sit in traffic forever to get to the nearest Walmart, destroying the environment and further atmozing individuals and alienating themselves, or do you think it makes more sense to address population needs, environmental needs, and efficiency via smarter urban planning that isn’t so car-centric?
Car-centric infrastructure takes up for more space and far more time is spent on commuting than well-planned urban infrastructure with public transit, and costs the environment far more, and is far more economically expensive. It’s disastrous and should be stopped entirely.
Ugly and character are both subjective, your opinion isn’t the correct one. Nor is someone’s else’s, but one side is vocal while the other trudges along allowing the other to do and get what they need and want.
Some people do, yeah. Do you seriously think people don’t want that? People literally drive trucks as a career lmfao, yeah lots of people love it, in fact, they are the majority and you are the vocal minority. Get a grip on reality lmfao.
People absolutely loath getting stuck in traffic, and the existence of truckers does not mean that the majority of people love traffic and wasted space, fighting over parking, wasting tons of money, and destroying the environment.
You implied that dense requires ugliness and lacking character, which is the exact opposite of reality. Car-centric infrastructure is incredibly ugly and lacks any and all character, it’s just roads and parking garages, traffic, and pollution.
No some people don’t mind being stuck in traffic. If it makes your drive 4x longer because of bad design that’s different. At the worst in my large city it’s 50% longer to get across the city unless there’s an accident. That 20 minutes to a whopping 30 minutes to travel the almost 40km from north to south.
Its ugly and lacks character because its dense, I’m sorry you can’t understand other peoples opinions and only yours apparently is valid.
You may want to look at the economic downsides to sprawl. If you really want sprawl, then you’re gonna have to pay for it, cause we’re sick of paying for your roads, and the people who live in the cities pay for everyone else’s roads, and we want walkable/bikeable cities with cars being excluded to a few parking structures on the edge of the city.
You’re so american it’s sad. American cities are some of the ugliest in the entire world, whereas dense cities like what you’d find in most of Europe or Japan are absolutely beautiful and brimming with character.
…and even though it’s next to industrial zone, this is what downtown Houston actually looks like on a map. Numerous square miles of space just for “letting traffic through”. The bill on the upkeep of this kind of wasteful infrastructure must be much more than what it costs to provide housing for all the homeless people in the county!
Do you think the people here care about sound arguments? Nobody except for a select few hyper-fit nutjobs are ever going to walk even so much as an 1/8th of that images span for anything. The area is far too large to want to walk, so we use it for transit instead. Forget that it transports millions of people, products, goods, etc. They want it to house hundreds of people instead.
People who will then not be able to get those products and goods, because…they fuckin’ ripped the road out!
Sound arguements are fine, but the interchange is literally in the middle of the 4th(?) largest city in the US, not the middle of nowhere. Houston is also known for a huge amount of sprawl which is literally caused by the amount of space the 10+ lane roads take up.
Is America running out of space or something? Yeah it’s a concern when there is limited space, but America is mainly “empty” the sprawl doesn’t affect them.
What’s inefficient about vertical farming? There’s plenty of green area even in the Picture that’s posted, could easily put a bike and pedestrian network through there. If it was needed.
There’s always solutions, but it’s also just easier to bitch and moan instead.
No, it’s just like solar. You need existing infrastructure to make it worthwhile, e.g. the top, sides, or inside of an apartment building . Otherwise there would be vertical farms everywhere. America is entrepreneur/Venture capital heavy. If it penciled out properly, people would be doing it.
The images span is about a mile… I know American fitness standards are low but I think most can walk an eighth of a mile.
Also it’s not housing hundreds of people, as shown in the meme it could house 10s of thousands of it’s not huge lot single family housing, but that’s only if you care about “sound arguments”
To be honest it’s kind of weird here in North America. People frequently act like a 15 minute walk is crazy, and a 30 minute walk is impossible. These people could walk that far, it’s not a fitness issue, just people pretty much always just default to driving everywhere in certain places.
@Chobbes@Not_mikey Walking 600m (as the crow flies) from my hotel in Sugarland Houston to the shopping district near it was sketchy as. Y’all are crazy hostile to people choosing to walk anywhere.
This is an issue sometimes. It’s not great when suddenly there’s no sidewalk and you’re walking alongside a busy road. That said, I don’t think this is the main contributor. I think people are just in the habit of driving everywhere to the point where they won’t walk 15 minutes from their house to a convenience store and will opt to drive instead, and this is in neighbourhoods with good sidewalks and no particularly busy roads. People just don’t think about walking as a means to get anywhere and they’ll frequently drive just a couple of blocks if they’re going to visit somebody nearby too, in my experience anyway.
Let me take this apart: “Nobody except for a select few hyper-fit nutjobs are ever going to walk even so much as an 1/8th of that images span for anything.” What’s the span in the image? Maybe a mile? Two? Come on! IF the surroundings aren’t noisy and are pleasant a normal average human of the planet earth is capable and willing to walk about 2-5 miles a day. In civilized countries you also have multiple options, it’s not just “suffer and walk” or “sit in a car and bang your head on the steering wheel”. Just the option to walk to most places where you need to go actually gets rid of some of the traffic that causes congestion. And the highway intersection hellscape depicted only serves the people who have no other option than to drive everywhere. It’s a prison.
“The area is far too large to want to walk, so we use it for transit instead.” No, it’s not.
“Forget that it transports millions of people, products, goods, etc.” You know there are better ways to do this than building an eversprawling city with highways cutting right through it. Highways are among some of the most inefficient ways of transporting goods and people. They cause noise and pollution. Everyone wants to live as far away from one as is convenient. Not that these human errors aren’t to be found everywhere in the world, it’s just that it’s only in the North America where this is more prominent than elsewhere.
“They want it to house hundreds of people instead.” You just looked at a picture where you have an area in Italy, similar in size to a highway knot in Texas that houses 30k people and you fail to understand what you just saw. 🤦♂️
“People who will then not be able to get those products and goods, because…they fuckin’ ripped the road out!” I can’t even… 🤦♂️
This isn’t a great argument. There is so much open undeveloped space in the US that could be used to house people. This interchange isn’t taking space away from anyone. There are lots of good reasons to reduce cars, but this isn’t one of them.
That’s not really true here though. This is in the middle of an urban area, not in some big open empty space that’s unoccupied, like Montana, or North Dakota. This is in the middle of Houston, Texas, a very populous city.
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Calling anywhere in Greater Houston “the middle of an urban area” is just incorrect. It’s the 4th most populated city in the US and the 150th most densely populated. There are a lot of people in Houston but also just a fucking Tom of Houston around. But, as is the norm in this magazine, you are all free to ignore facts and data so you can raise a furor in your tiny anti-car cult.
…
lmao
Houston is so big because the city has absorbed all the communities around it. It’s incredibly sprawled so the density is much lower than cities of comparable population. This creates all sorts of other issues, like the problem of paving over hundreds of square miles of wetland.
Why do you think it’s so sparsely populated? What’s keeping people so far from each other? Is it just Houstonians are their own species and can’t stand to be in areas over a certain population density?
Because humans enjoy having lots of space to live in. Personally I would never go back to living in an apartment since I can afford a house and land. I’ve lived in small apartments, big apartments, a single-wide trailer, large houses, small houses, and medium houses. Medium house with acreage of land is the best living situation of all for me.
Did you really decide that posting that was a good idea? Did you seriously think about it at all before writing it?
Yeah, this place is dumb as hell and you idiots need to know that.
I concur bro. These bullshitters are high on their own farts and apparently can’t see the truth that they are never going to change the vast landscape of America into their imaginary Soviet-style shithole idea of a “utopia” where people don’t drive and live in tiny boxes in human hives.
Soviet Union was bad for multiple reasons but in major cities the housing was not really any worse than anywhere else in the world. I guess you just enjoy spending 3 hours a day in your car.
I don’t commute to work often, but when I do it’s only about a 20 minute drive in light traffic. I certainly wouldn’t spend 3 hours a day in a car to commute to work when there are plenty of jobs within that 20 minute commute from my house.
The point was that in total you probably spend more time in your car than any sane average European would, because you lack options. And because you lack options it’s a hellscape for anyone who can’t drive a car. The point wasn’t your commute, because your commute probably doesn’t represent the median. Also good for you. My commute is also irrelevant, but it’s five minutes walk to a train, ten minutes by train and five minutes walk from the train to the office, all that in an environment where I don’t fear for my life, the noise level permits me to whisper to other people without them having difficulties hearing me.
Cool story. Come back when your brain has developed past the age of 2, we’ll gladly discuss then.
And? If they need space they expand elsewhere. If this interchange was at the edge of town, middle of town, north or south. The town is still the same size. America is large, lots of “empty” space.
And that’s how you get sprawling cities that are completely untraversable on foot, bike or bus. Urban planning is important, even when space is abundant
Which expands the total travel distance on average, exacerbating all car use in the area. Things need to be closer, not further. That will only encourage car dependent infrastructure.
Not just car use, also infrastructure cost for literally anything from water over sewage to electricity, internet connections, gas pipes,…
Expanding the distance is much, much worse than simply affecting travel times and making us more car dependent. It is literally something we can not afford.
that’s not how urban development works, like, at all, lol.
Cities should avoid becoming nightmare, sprawling hellscapes. Dense cities with multi-use buildings, public transit, and walkable infrastructure are where its at.
Dense, ugly cities, with no character, where people trip over each other isn’t the solution.
Those can be a part of the larger city, why can’t everyone have what they want instead of just a small portion of people who only think of themselves?
Its great to know this community is open to discussion instead of just perpetuating the same tropes and downvoting people!
Dense and ugly are not synonyms, same with lacking character. If you go to sprawling suburbia, you’ll find that there’s exactly no character, you can drive for 30 minutes and think you went in a circle.
Do you genuinely believe people want sprawling hellscapes where they have to sit in traffic forever to get to the nearest Walmart, destroying the environment and further atmozing individuals and alienating themselves, or do you think it makes more sense to address population needs, environmental needs, and efficiency via smarter urban planning that isn’t so car-centric?
Car-centric infrastructure takes up for more space and far more time is spent on commuting than well-planned urban infrastructure with public transit, and costs the environment far more, and is far more economically expensive. It’s disastrous and should be stopped entirely.
Ugly and character are both subjective, your opinion isn’t the correct one. Nor is someone’s else’s, but one side is vocal while the other trudges along allowing the other to do and get what they need and want.
Some people do, yeah. Do you seriously think people don’t want that? People literally drive trucks as a career lmfao, yeah lots of people love it, in fact, they are the majority and you are the vocal minority. Get a grip on reality lmfao.
No.
People absolutely loath getting stuck in traffic, and the existence of truckers does not mean that the majority of people love traffic and wasted space, fighting over parking, wasting tons of money, and destroying the environment.
You implied that dense requires ugliness and lacking character, which is the exact opposite of reality. Car-centric infrastructure is incredibly ugly and lacks any and all character, it’s just roads and parking garages, traffic, and pollution.
No some people don’t mind being stuck in traffic. If it makes your drive 4x longer because of bad design that’s different. At the worst in my large city it’s 50% longer to get across the city unless there’s an accident. That 20 minutes to a whopping 30 minutes to travel the almost 40km from north to south.
Its ugly and lacks character because its dense, I’m sorry you can’t understand other peoples opinions and only yours apparently is valid.
https://youtu.be/7Nw6qyyrTeI?si=4Dhz8B-6AYK677PO
You may want to look at the economic downsides to sprawl. If you really want sprawl, then you’re gonna have to pay for it, cause we’re sick of paying for your roads, and the people who live in the cities pay for everyone else’s roads, and we want walkable/bikeable cities with cars being excluded to a few parking structures on the edge of the city.
You’re so american it’s sad. American cities are some of the ugliest in the entire world, whereas dense cities like what you’d find in most of Europe or Japan are absolutely beautiful and brimming with character.
This is not really outside the city though
…and even though it’s next to industrial zone, this is what downtown Houston actually looks like on a map. Numerous square miles of space just for “letting traffic through”. The bill on the upkeep of this kind of wasteful infrastructure must be much more than what it costs to provide housing for all the homeless people in the county!
I think OP’s argument is that the interchange is a symptom of low density urban sprawl and all the associated maladies that come with it.
@Anarch157a @BradleyUffner Yeah, it’d suck trying to walk to a friends house on the other side of the interchange.
Do you think the people here care about sound arguments? Nobody except for a select few hyper-fit nutjobs are ever going to walk even so much as an 1/8th of that images span for anything. The area is far too large to want to walk, so we use it for transit instead. Forget that it transports millions of people, products, goods, etc. They want it to house hundreds of people instead.
People who will then not be able to get those products and goods, because…they fuckin’ ripped the road out!
Is it just me, or are the Lemmy fuck cars communities a lot more infested with trolls like this guy☝️ than the one on Reddit was?
@grue @thantik Federated service instances need active and aggresive moderation to keep trolls under control.
Monolithic services spend a lot of time and money on doing that.
Apart from the time when they don’t.
People That Disagree with you != Troll.
People that use arguments easily debunked by a 5 year-old or repeat garbage == trolls
Sound arguements are fine, but the interchange is literally in the middle of the 4th(?) largest city in the US, not the middle of nowhere. Houston is also known for a huge amount of sprawl which is literally caused by the amount of space the 10+ lane roads take up.
Is America running out of space or something? Yeah it’s a concern when there is limited space, but America is mainly “empty” the sprawl doesn’t affect them.
“Hm yes if we inefficiently use all this space then we can destroy all this perfectly good agricultural land and make space for more cars!”
What’s inefficient about vertical farming? There’s plenty of green area even in the Picture that’s posted, could easily put a bike and pedestrian network through there. If it was needed.
There’s always solutions, but it’s also just easier to bitch and moan instead.
Cost. It’s a lot more expensive to build vertical. Additionally you need lighting that would wouldn’t need otherwise.
The capacity more than makes up for it. You could also grow in cold climates where you can’t normally as well.
The benefits are there.
No, it’s just like solar. You need existing infrastructure to make it worthwhile, e.g. the top, sides, or inside of an apartment building . Otherwise there would be vertical farms everywhere. America is entrepreneur/Venture capital heavy. If it penciled out properly, people would be doing it.
The images span is about a mile… I know American fitness standards are low but I think most can walk an eighth of a mile.
Also it’s not housing hundreds of people, as shown in the meme it could house 10s of thousands of it’s not huge lot single family housing, but that’s only if you care about “sound arguments”
To be honest it’s kind of weird here in North America. People frequently act like a 15 minute walk is crazy, and a 30 minute walk is impossible. These people could walk that far, it’s not a fitness issue, just people pretty much always just default to driving everywhere in certain places.
@Chobbes @Not_mikey Walking 600m (as the crow flies) from my hotel in Sugarland Houston to the shopping district near it was sketchy as. Y’all are crazy hostile to people choosing to walk anywhere.
Ooooh yeah, big time! I just want to live somewhere that at least acknowledges how fucked up the car situation is 😭
Probably part of the problem is where they make you walk, or that nobody actually plans for safe nor comfortable walking anywhere.
This is an issue sometimes. It’s not great when suddenly there’s no sidewalk and you’re walking alongside a busy road. That said, I don’t think this is the main contributor. I think people are just in the habit of driving everywhere to the point where they won’t walk 15 minutes from their house to a convenience store and will opt to drive instead, and this is in neighbourhoods with good sidewalks and no particularly busy roads. People just don’t think about walking as a means to get anywhere and they’ll frequently drive just a couple of blocks if they’re going to visit somebody nearby too, in my experience anyway.
You know what can transport millions of people? Trains. Oh and bikes and buses exist. Cars are not the only form of transport, or the best.
@eya @thantik I’m waiting on that transnational conveyor belt.
Yep, actually in a city setting there are scenarios where walking has got better throughput rates than car traffic…
Possibly. This isn’t reddit… yet…
Let me take this apart: “Nobody except for a select few hyper-fit nutjobs are ever going to walk even so much as an 1/8th of that images span for anything.” What’s the span in the image? Maybe a mile? Two? Come on! IF the surroundings aren’t noisy and are pleasant a normal average human of the planet earth is capable and willing to walk about 2-5 miles a day. In civilized countries you also have multiple options, it’s not just “suffer and walk” or “sit in a car and bang your head on the steering wheel”. Just the option to walk to most places where you need to go actually gets rid of some of the traffic that causes congestion. And the highway intersection hellscape depicted only serves the people who have no other option than to drive everywhere. It’s a prison. “The area is far too large to want to walk, so we use it for transit instead.” No, it’s not.
“Forget that it transports millions of people, products, goods, etc.” You know there are better ways to do this than building an eversprawling city with highways cutting right through it. Highways are among some of the most inefficient ways of transporting goods and people. They cause noise and pollution. Everyone wants to live as far away from one as is convenient. Not that these human errors aren’t to be found everywhere in the world, it’s just that it’s only in the North America where this is more prominent than elsewhere. “They want it to house hundreds of people instead.” You just looked at a picture where you have an area in Italy, similar in size to a highway knot in Texas that houses 30k people and you fail to understand what you just saw. 🤦♂️ “People who will then not be able to get those products and goods, because…they fuckin’ ripped the road out!” I can’t even… 🤦♂️