US houses and apartments seem notoriously poorly insulated when it comes to sound. As you say, its a small extra cost, and it can allow for more people in an area (even having connected townhouses or apartments) without having to deal with neighbor noises. If you can fit 3x the number of houses into a lot and they have good sound insulation, you're producing a lot more revenue from the house sales as well as generating potentially much tax revenue for that area of land (depending on how property taxing is done there)
I think the trick to that is to get rid of sprawl. You have a lot of people thinly spread out but still emitting light pollution. Move people in closer to city/town/village centers, out of meandering suburbs, you move the light pollution to centralized locations, and are able to leave more surrounding land for rural uses with little to no light pollution.
> The benefit of faster speeds isn't driver convenience, it's that you get cars off the road quicker for a given travel distance.
Yes but that isn't actually what happens because the use of a street or road isn't by one car from A to B but by the continuous use over time across a section of the street.
Say you had a single 1 mile arterial in a city, and it's the only way of getting from one half of the city to the other half. There are few points when a cars are "off" of it (except maybe late at night) - the rest of the time it is a near constant high speed flow.
You're not wrong to say that it gets any given car off the road quicker, but that is if you're focusing on the one driver's trip, as opposed to focusing on the use of and experience of being at that section of road. If it was an old town which had its main street become a high speed arterial, you now have an experience for any pedestrians who might want to use the (probably few remaining) stores along that road be not unlike walking along side a freeway - unfun and dangerous.
By focusing on any one driver's trip experience, and not the street experience, you're essentially damning the street experience for the potential sake of some extra time saved (if its across a city, perhaps on the order of 10 or so minutes).
Of course when you have nothing on the street worth being around (like most of El Camino Real), you want to get passed it ASAP. (SF problems are a whole other hairball of outside commuters plus residents who insist on using cars.)
I think you have this internal representation of what "going to the store" means which is based on the North American suburban lifestyle of doing everything by car. This is not the model most of the world uses, especially not in old European cities.
I think that depends on what your trip from home to the store is. Is it a pleasant 10 minute trip on down a country road or in an exciting, bustling city, or is it a 10 minute trip along a despotic road with nothing going on and which screams "cars only! no humans allowed!"? I prefer getting smaller grocery loads more frequently when the store is nearby, but when the trip is an ordeal, you go fewer big trips to avoid that as much as possible. A pleasant 15-20 minute walk to a store is much nicer than a 10 minute drive through an oppressive roadscape.
I gotta agree with thescriptkiddie, C:S is an imperfect model of how traffic behaves.
> Self-driving cars (or just ubiquitous turn-by-turn navigation) could change this equation by intelligently routing cars around bottlenecks and avoiding the neighborhood entirely, but as long as drivers have imperfect information about traffic conditions and tend to take the shortest route to their destination, this will remain a problem.
Self-driving cars or drivers with good mapping are still limited where they can go when they have a street hierarchy to deal with, forcing all cars onto the same few arterials.
> Oftentimes, the solution to a traffic problem is simply to bulldoze a few intersections. By doing this, you give cars a buffer. It increases the median trip length but it also increases vehicle speed and road throughput by more.
This is all well and fine in a game, but increasing street speeds kills the street life (figuratively, and sometimes literally). Slower but more constant speeds are better for everyone involved. For walkers, bikers, and even drivers. Ask yourself this: would drivers flip their shit more often when going slow but steady down 15-20 mph hour streets with stop signs (or roundabouts), or when they're stuck at long traffic lights regardless of how many lanes they have?
See another of my posts about road vs street definitions. Note that a lot of suburban wide streets are built that way to meet fire codes written to accommodate overly-large trucks. A suburban town doesn't need giant trucks where smaller, cheaper, more maneuverable trucks can do the work. Combined with ubiquitous hydrants - which have disappeared from many US suburban subdivisions - they are more than enough fire safety for anything under 4 stories. Regulations to accommodate these huge trucks have helped ruin the human scale of streets in many places. Also note that existing old cities have become a lot more safe by using superior materials, installing sprinkler system, etc etc.
See my bit elsewhere in this thread about Japan - small slow streets need less or even no use segregation. Part of the equation is that small streets discourage fast driving, but also when walking/biking on those small streets becomes the 'new normal', drivers will tend to be extra cautious, expecting slow bikes or walkers anywhere
For sure. As I understand it a lot of the build-out in Tokyo into what were more rural areas was done by the railroad lines - build a km or two, add a station and more developed land, repeat.
Cars are also super space-wasters. They do nothing but sit for 80-90% of the time (which is one reason why car sharing is making more sense to people). In a lot of cities, especially newer ones built out since WW2, you will find a large percentage of space dedicated to parking lots. Not even necessarily parking structures (which cost a lot more per car) but just free to park flat lots, with nothing going on there.
More or less. Some aspects of Western urban planning are rather big on things like Complete Streets, where you have segregated bike lanes added between sidewalks and street. These are fine for wider streets as seen in many American cities, but smaller streets which force cars to slower speeds don't necessarily bikes and even pedestrians segregated.
This seems to be the default building style in much of Japan. You will still find larger streets which are arterial in nature, but they're usually still very bikeable and walkable, and still porous to smaller streets like the one linked above.
Those are pretty recent designs, but I like them for the most part. I agree, as long as you are not hampering human movement, keep car traffic slow and safe for said human movement, networking with bike paths is fine in my book. In an existing dendritic US-style street system, retrofitting with bike paths between streets is a really cheap and easy way to encourage biking (the hardest part is probably dealing with existing property rights)
It's important to make a semantic distinction between 'streets' and 'roads'. A typical one is:
Streets are things which are where humand can play, people bike and walk, go to stores, around the places we live and work, etc. They are 'Places' where people can live about their day to day lives. Very human-friendly.
'Roads' which are higher-speed connectors between Places. Highways are a very high-speed type of roads.
In a typologically healthy region, there is a clear distinction between streets in roads, but in the US there is a blurring, and we often see what are sometimes dubbed 'stroads' - a mutant street-road hybrid, the sort of thing we typically see in the US with wide, fast, multi-lane streets, lined with strip malls and the like. They're hostile to human and make walking between locations at best boring and tedious, and at worst dangerous.
- mixed use zoning: reduce requirement for long trips by mixing many compatible types of commercial with residential, and remove single housing type developments. Also, allow many smaller apartment complexes mixed with single family houses, instead of segregating housing types.
- street design: No more hierarchical/dendritic street layouts. That is, no more dead-end streets, which lead to collectors, which lead to arterials - you're bottlenecking a huge population through a very small, fast, and unsafe road system. Instead, make the streets highly connected, and narrower to encourage slower but steadier car traffic, and blocks shorter. Porous streets networks can route around bottlenecks and can have many more concurrent cars than even crazy-huge Texas-style freeways.
- no big street setback requirements: encourage density by removing crazy suburban-style setbacks.
Edit: I wanted to make a plug for form-based zoning, which is zoning where the form (building type) is zoned, not its use. This doesn't necessarily refer to its style (Neoclassical, Modernist, etc) but how it interacts with the surrounding buildings on the street. E.g. buildings above a certain size might not be allowed in an area, and not be allowed to take more than N number of yards of street frontage. Setbacks of a certain size might be prohibited, or allowed. This allows of a reasonable number of mixed uses like restaurants, shops, and other day to day commercial uses to coexist with residential. This does not mean that heavy/noxious industry can be built up there. This was the error the Euclid v. Ambler decision made 100 years ago: they threw the baby out with the bathwater by restricting zoning by type; there is not a small amount of racism that came with Euclidean/exclusive zoning, e.g. removing a formerly viable way for immigrants to start a business with a house above (a la Bob's Burgers) and thereby increasing the barrier for success.
