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| 7/29 |
| 2006/4/3-4 [Transportation/Car, Transportation/Car/RoadHogs] UID:42623 Activity:moderate |
4/4 I've seen this before, but this is the best breakdown I've seen on the
compressed air car. (video from the Science Channel)
http://csua.org/u/fep
\_ damn, I was hoping to see a shot of what happens with a catastrophic
rupture of the air cylinder. Gasoline may take a while to burn, but
imagine what that compressed-air bottle would do with a good hole
in it. Not mentioned in the video, of course.
\_ It's 4/3 you doophus.
\_ I got a better idea. Design a European-like city that doesn't
have this FUCKING uncontrolled suburban McMansionized sprawl
which require a lot of driving in the first place.
\_ It's 4/3 you doophus.
\_ I got a better idea. Design a walkable and bikeable European-like
city that doesn't have this FUCKING uncontrolled suburban
McMansionized sprawl which require a lot of driving in the
first place. Oh well it'll never happen in America.
\_ And it's going out of style in Europe. Haven't you heard? All
the French want to move to the suburbs.
\_ You mean there's stuff outside the Peripherique? Inconceivable!
\_ You mean there's stuff outside the Peripherique?
Inconceivable!
\_ Where do you think the cheap prostitutes hang out?
\_ You mean all the poor, dangerous Arab suburbs around Paris?
No, I had not heard that.
\_ Design? So maybe we should have Soviet style cities built from
the ground up by lowest bidders and force people to leave their
current homes and jobs to move to Utopiaville?
\_ Market forces, o rabid one: build Utopiaville and see if they
come. If they do, great; if not, turn it into a theme park.
\_ I'm not rabid. I just think it's stupid. Economies
develop. They don't pop up artificially. If it was such
a great idea and easy to implement it would've happened.
I think we tried the commune thing already. It was called
the 60s and the hippies all turned into baby boomer wall
street 80s go-go executive scumbags living in the suburbs
in McMansions with matching Hummers and 60" plasmas.
People like comfort and stuff and space and mobility.
\_ I like comfort, space and mobility. But for me, part
of comfort is being able to walk over to my friends
houses, or not worrying about sobering up at a bar
because I can walk home. Part of mobility is being
able to hop on my bike in a snowstorm at 2 in the
morning and go to work in 5 minutes without having to
screw around with a window scraper and warming up a
car. And as for space, I'd rather share a hundred acre
park with the other residents of a neighborhood than
have my own 1/8 acre plot to sit in by myself that I
have to mow and trim. Also, the claim that suburbs just
"spring up" is absurd. Take a good look at miles and
miles of identical houses built by the same builders
on the same plans, and miles and miles of box stores
also built by the same companies and tell me that's
spontaneous. It's still planned, it's just planned
by a small group of corporate planners instead of a
small group of civil planners.
\_ The problem with your city utopia is that people
can't fuck their wives loudly and have babies.
And even if they start having kids in the city,
where would you hide when the baby starts crying?
Where would you keep your tools to fix your car?
Where would you keep your inlaws? There's no
backyard, garage, and an empty street where kids
can play safely. Your city utopia works well
when you're young, but as you get older you need
room and privacy to fuck and to have lots of kids.
\_ Sorry to tell you this but you're a minority.
95% of the people aren't like you, and do not
want to live in a compact city or dorm like
environment. To illustrate the point, why do
juniors, seniors, and grad students want to
move out of the dorm so badly? Because they're
fed up with living so close to other idiots
who party all night and listen to hip-hop music
3AM in the morning and smoke weeds. It's so much
easier to deal with 2-3 hours of traffic than to
deal with people. If space allows it, most people
in America will trade traffic for big space,
freedom of expression, and individuality.
-dim #1 fan
\_ Free expression, huh? I guess that's why all the
artists, musicians, writers and scientists, and
most big-time entrepreneurs live in cities.
\_ "all the ...". No. I know a bunch of writers
and scientists. None of them live in a large
city. Ok, well, 1 writer does but she's
living in her mom's house at age 38.
\_ Let me guess, you're a liberal socialist and you
oppose the wonderful forces of free market?
\_ Nope I'm a liberal capitalist who hasn't been
duped by the new socialism of the suburbs.
Choosing between an identical McHouse with a
blue birdhouse mailbox and one with a brown
birdhouse mailbox or choosing between Target
and Walmart is not my idea of a free market.
Cities are the best place for a free market
to exist. I don't see the NYSE planning to
move to some dipshit suburb of LA any time soon.
Can you name one stock exchange that's not in a
city?
\_ there's a huge difference between building
new homes near a pre-existing job center and
firing up Utopiaville from scratch including
jobs (what jobs?!) people can walk to and
hoping it just magically works.
\_ A history of the suburbs. http://www.slate.com/id/2129636
"[S]prawl is not the anomalous result of American zoning laws, or
"[S]prawl is not the anomalous result of American zoning laws,
mortgage interest tax deduction, or cheap gas, or subsidized
highway construction, or cultural antipathy toward cities. Nor
is it an aberration... Sprawl is and always has been inherent
to urbanization."
\_ All of the examples there since the 19th century were
predicated on availability of public transportation. |
| 7/29 |
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| csua.org/u/fep -> science.discovery.com/fansites/discoveriesthisweek/videogallery/videogallery.html?myClip=dtw_aircar The leading global real-world media and entertainment company. |
| www.slate.com/id/2129636 Suburban Despair Is urban sprawl really an American menace? It's responsible for everything that we don't like about modern American life: strip malls, McMansions, big-box stores, the loss of favorite countryside, the decline of downtowns, traffic congestion, SUVs, high gas consumption, dependence on foreign oil, the Iraq war. Like expanding waistlines, it's touted around the world as yet another symptom of our profligacy and wastefulness as a nation. Or, as Robert Bruegmann puts it in his new book, "cities that sprawl and, by implication, the citizens living in them, are self indulgent and undisciplined." In Sprawl, cheekily subtitled "A Compact History," Bruegmann, a professor of art history at the University of Illinois at Chicago, examines the assumptions that underpin most people's strongly held convictions about sprawl. To begin with, he finds that urban sprawl is not a recent phenomenon: It has been a feature of city life since the earliest times. The urban rich have always sought the pleasures of living in low-density residential neighborhoods on the outskirts of cities. As long ago as the Ming dynasty in the 14^th century, the Chinese gentry sang the praises of the exurban life, and the rustic villa suburbana was a common feature of ancient Rome. Pliny's maritime villa was 17 miles from the city, and many fashionable Roman villa districts such as Tusculum--where Cicero had a summer house--were much closer. Bruegmann also observes that medieval suburbs--those urbanized areas outside cities' protective walls--had a variety of uses. Manufacturing processes that were too dirty to be located inside the city (such as brick kilns, tanneries, slaughterhouses) were in the suburbs; so were the homes of those who could not afford to reside within the city proper. Those compact little cities bounded by bucolic landscapes, portrayed in innumerable idealized paintings, were surrounded by extensive suburbs. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, "sprawl" first appeared in print in this context in 1955, in an article in the London Times that contained a disapproving reference to "great sprawl" at the city's periphery. But, as Bruegmann shows, by then London had been spreading into the surrounding countryside for hundreds of years. During the 17^th and 18^th centuries, while the poor moved increasingly eastward, affluent Londoners built suburban estates in the westerly direction of Westminster and Whitehall, commuting to town by carriage. one generation's suburb is the next generation's urban neighborhood. As Bruegmann notes, "Clearly, from the beginning of modern urban history, and contrary to much accepted wisdom, suburban development was very diverse and catered to all kinds of people and activities." When inexpensive public transportation opened up South London for development in the 19^th century, London sprawl took a different form: streets and streets of small brick-terrace houses. For middle-class families, this dispersal was a godsend, since it allowed them to exchange a cramped flat for a house with a garden. The outward movement continued in the boom years between the First and Second World Wars, causing the built-up area of London to double, although the population increased by only about 10 percent--which sounds a lot like Atlanta today. It was not only by sprawling at the edges that cities reduced their densities. Preindustrial cities began life by exhibiting what planners call a steep "density gradient," that is, the population density was extremely high in the center and dropped off rapidly at the edges. Over time, with growing prosperity--and the availability of increasingly far-reaching mass transportation (omnibuses, streetcars, trains, subways, cars)--this gradient flattened out. Density at the center reduced while density in the (expanding) suburbs increased. The single most important variable in this common pattern was, as Bruegmann observes, not geography or culture, but the point at which the city reached economic maturity. In the case of London, the city's population density peaked in the early 19^th century; While the common perception is that sprawl is America's contribution to urban culture, Bruegmann shows that it appeared in Europe first. Little boxes on a hillside Yet haven't high rates of automobile ownership, easy availability of land, and a lack of central planning made sprawl much worse in the United States? Most American tourists spend their time visiting historic city centers, so they may be unaware that suburbs now constitute the bulk of European metropolitan areas, just as they do in America. We marvel at the efficiency of European mass transit, but since 1950, transit ridership has remained flat, while the use of private automobiles has skyrocketed. "As cities across Europe have become more affluent in the last decades of the twentieth century," Bruegmann writes, "they have witnessed a continuing decline in population densities in the historic core, a quickening of the pace of suburban and exurban development, a sharp rise in automobile ownership and use, and the proliferation of subdivisions of single-family houses and suburban shopping centers." Despite some of the most stringent anti-sprawl regulations in the world and high gas prices, the population of the City of Paris has declined by almost a third since 1921, while its suburbs have grown. Over the last 15 years, the city of Milan has lost about 600,000 people to its metropolitan fringes, while Barcelona, considered by many a model compact city, has developed extensive suburbs and has experienced the largest population loss of any European city in the last 25 years. Greater London, too, continues to sprawl, resulting in a population density of 12,000 persons per square mile, about half that of New York City. The point is not that London, any more than Barcelona or Paris, is a city in decline (although the demographics of European city centers have changed and are now home to wealthier and older inhabitants, just like some American cities). Central urban densities are dropping because household sizes are smaller and affluent people occupy more space. Like Americans, Europeans have opted for decentralization. To a great extent, this dispersal is driven by a desire for home-ownership. "Polls consistently confirm that most Europeans, like most Americans, and indeed most people worldwide, would prefer to live in single-family houses on their own piece of land rather than in apartment buildings," Bruegmann writes. So strong is this preference that certain European countries such as Ireland and the United Kingdom now have higher single-family house occupancy rates than the United States, while others, such as Holland, Belgium, and Norway, are comparable. It appears that all cities--at least all cities in the industrialized Western world--have experienced a dispersal of population from the center to a lower-density periphery. "Most American anti-sprawl reformers today believe that sprawl is a recent and peculiarly American phenomenon caused by specific technological innovations like the automobile and by government policies like single-use zoning or the mortgage-interest deduction on the federal income tax," Bruegmann writes. "It is important for them to believe this because if sprawl turned out to be a long-standing feature of urban development worldwide, it would suggest that stopping it involves something much more fundamental than correcting some poor American land-use policy." What this iconoclastic little book demonstrates is that sprawl is not the anomalous result of American zoning laws, or mortgage interest tax deduction, or cheap gas, or subsidized highway construction, or cultural antipathy toward cities. Bruegmann shows that asking whether sprawl is "good" or "bad" is the wrong question. It is driven less by the regulations of legislators, the actions of developers, and the theories of city planners, than by the decisions of millions of individuals--Adam Smith's "invisible hand." There are scores of books offering "solutions" to sprawl. To find solutions--or, rather, better ways to manage sprawl, which is not the same thing--it helps to ... |