this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2023
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The Netherlands did it in about 30 years, and nowadays we have more knowledge on how to build efficient cities, it can be done.
The US is a different beast from European countries, sure, but it doesn't mean it's impossible or that changing would literally take centuries. And even if it did require hundreds of years, isn't that more a reason to start as soon as possible?
Electric cars aren't here to save the planet, they're are here to save the auto industry. The solution is ditching euclidian zoning and increasing bike lanes and public transport.
I think you should use 'cartesian zoning' unless you have a flat earth agenda.
That aside is both a nitpick (the curvature of Earth is small enough on the local scale of a city that the differences are negligible) and it is wrong, as cartesian coordinates are planar and aren't useful for accounting for spherical curvature. "Euclidean" and "cartesian" are basically synonyms for this purpose.
Euclidian geometry is used for things on a globe.
non-euclidian spaces are those that are not spherical. Such as a flat earth.
Caretesian means to exist in an X-Y plane. Such as a grid in a city. Seems closer to your seeming intent.
This is incorrect. Euclidean geometry deals with planar geometry such as that which cartesian coordinates are used to describe. I mean, here's a quote from Wikipedia:
Spherical surfaces are even used as kind of the classical example of non-Euclidean geometry. For example, you can form a triangle along great circles on the surface of a sphere and have all three angles be right angles (90-90-90); something not possible in Euclidean/planer geometry. See the linked text.
No one is going to bike 15 miles for a dozen eggs, and no one is going to build a supermarket closer than that, and I'm nowhere near an extreme case. It will take more than a century to restructure the US away from individual vehicles, if it's done at an insanely fast pace.
Public transport relies on the value of having a public around the stops, or the ability to concentrate the public in crossroad areas. It's already too late for that in the US, and will take multiple generations of land transfer to fix it. The entire country was literally built on expansionism and isolationism. Fixing our cities is the easy part, and that alone will take more than all government expenditure ever, over half a century at the least. And that's assuming we don't go bankrupt simply supporting the retiring population we have right now, let alone additional expenditures.
Supermarkets would be replaced with multiple markets in walking distance after removing the zoning that excludes retail from being within walking distance of residential areas.
No one is building shit within walking distance of nowhere. There's less than 200 people within 20 miles of me, and I've moved to a more crowded area. No market is going to fix that. The nearest zoning law is probably a hundred miles away. And supermarkets didn't defeat small stores because of zoning, it's because economies of scale are more efficient.
In rural areas where population is the issue and not zoning, that is true.
In any city with 10 thousand residents or more it tends to be the zoning that keeps stores from opening up in the suburbs and other new development. There they tend to go big becsuse they are far enough away that they might as well be big enough to draw from as far away as possible.
Most people live in the latter areas and that is what is being discussed.
They're talking about replacing cars with public transportation which is fucking ridiculous for the majority of the country due to low population density and large distances. There's no amount of zoning changes that are going to fix that. Also, creating walkable cities is a great goal, with zero chance of happening in the US. It would be asking home owners and businesses to throw away existing investments, or forcing them to. Guess how well either of those options is going to go over. Especially in an aging populace with nothing but investment income.