this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2023
142 points (99.3% liked)
Asklemmy
43849 readers
639 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I agree with the sentiment, but this feels like the least boomer opinion ngl
I think it's simultaneously an opinion held by very old people who remember when they could just walk to the store and younger urbanists that want us to return to that. The people in the middle grew up in a car oriented society that hadn't completely lost small businesses and been locked down by traffic. And they now have a house way out in the burbs with a disdain for the traffic of the city. Urbanism threatens their way of life now. That's my opinion.
Most of the US has dug a hole that can't easily be fixed with its car-centric developments, people living there pretty much need a car for everything.
Driving there may be a pleasure, but I personally wouldn't want to live in that situation at all. I'm glad and lucky to have the equivalent of a mall just a 10 minute bike ride away, 25 minute walk, 5 minute bus trip.
America is definitely pretty deeply invested in car-centeic living. But I don't think it's impossible to get out of it. There's rising pressure to lower housing costs, traffic, and improve infrastructure quality. My city (which is about as car centric as it gets) is growing fast and most of that is with infil development. It's going to be a slow transformation but I think it will happen. I don't think American cities will look like European or Asian cities because they won't evolve the same way. But they will look different to how they look now.
Yep I agree - It's definitely possible for the US to shift away from it, some cities have even been transforming some of their busy central roads into pedestrianised boulevards (such as times square in NY, and a couple others I can't remember off the top of my head) and from an outsiders perspective been successful.
The difficulty is mainly going to be places like Culver City where some just don't get that cars don't scale well in dense urban areas like cities - they've voted to remove a 2 year old bike lane just to get back an additional driving lane. That's just going to move most of the bike riders back into their cars, filling that brand new driving lane (and the other existing driving lanes) with traffic that previously didn't exist. Hopefully over time positive changes will return though!