7 ms·

Surely the top way to avoid traffic congestion would be communities where it's possible to live near where you work, shop, go out, etc. and not doing everything

• baggy_trough 2mo ago
  If you don't have a community like that, then the best way is congestion pricing.
  • antiframe 2mo ago
    The best way is to change our communities, even if that takes time and money.
    • denkmoon 2mo ago
      Like everything else community construction responds to incentives. So we need to structurally incentivise short distance commute communities. Congestion pricing seems like a reasonable first step.
    • collabs 2mo ago
      It is difficult for me to admit I'm an idiot but when I was younger and living in an apartment, I loved the idea of a single family home. And now that I'm living in a single family home, I feel like I was wrong all along. Not that I want to go back to the apartment I was in before. Dear lord no but the idea of a mixed use building not too tall only like first floor with high ceilings for business or shops with two or at the most three floors above for residential units feels like the ideal sweet spot. Ideally with a lot of these close together to have everything I need within a walking distance but also a subway station within a walking distance if I need to go farther.
      • SilverElfin 2mo ago
        Do you have kids? I feel like apartment living as a family is worse than a spacious single family home and yard and all that. I suspect that preference holds true for most people.
        • asdff 2mo ago
          Most kids are only into playing in the yard for a couple years really. Before long they are preteens living in their room, probably seething at the fact they need a ride from a parent to hang out with any of their friends. Apartments can also have stuff you could never afford that a kid would like, such as a massive pool (try pricing out a new build pool these days).
          • fragmede 2mo ago
            Community shared parks can serve the purpose that a SFH yard serves for kids, but you have to interact with other people and we can't have that.
          • breezybottom 2mo ago
            Lmao what? Everything about this comment is nuts.
        • throw0101a 2mo ago
          > I feel like apartment living as a family is worse than a spacious single family home and yard and all that. I suspect that preference holds true for most people. And families do it in NYC, and Hong Kong, and Germany, and Spain (AFAICT, 65%), and…
          • inigyou 2mo ago
            They manage, but it's not a good experience. The apartments are usually too small for families and the ones that are big enough are too expensive. This is solvable, but has not been solved. Think about having to share a bedroom with your child, and when they're old enough to need their own one, putting up a partition wall and having each be less than half the size of a normal bedroom, very cramped. And you don't get a living room. (If you did have a living room, now it's your bedroom while the child gets the actual bedroom)
      • segfaltnh 2mo ago
        I wasted a decade trying to live in single family homes. Now at 40 my wife and I are living in a small city in a condo and couldn't be happier. Neither of us enjoyed the workload of managing a SFH. Dont force yourself to stay if you aren't happy, you'll wish you moved sooner (I do).
      • matwood 2mo ago
        People also change and want different things at different parts of their life. Young and single - living in an apartment is amazing. Once someone is coupled up, has kids, and some animals, a SFH also looks much more appealing. Once the kids are gone, then an apartment/condo starts to look pretty attractive again.
        • breezybottom 2mo ago
          Never in my life has living in an apartment seemed appealing. But I suppose that depends on the apartments you can afford.
          • ctkhn 2mo ago
            Depending on where you are, there are nice middle class apartments that can be family friendly. I have friends not in tech in my same neighborhood with a three bedroom place for 1500. Granted this is the midwest and not SF but their place is near the train to get downtown for work and surrounded with a lot of parks for baseball, soccer etc for kids
      • bluGill 2mo ago
        A not top tall building doesn't have enough people to be mixed use. Cities often cheat their with several side streets of residential (it might be zoned mix use but it isn't) only for every street of mixed use. People on the non mixed use streets travel to the mixed use one.
    • baggy_trough 2mo ago
      What if you don't want to live in a dense community?
      • slyall 2mo ago
        Well just live somewhere that is so lacking in density there is no congestion. Or a small town that is surrounded by farms. Just avoid suburban housing as far as the eye can see with a limited number of roads everyone gets funneled on to.
        • SilverElfin 2mo ago
          I’ve done that and those areas change over time. A town becomes more like a small city. A small city becomes more dense. Etc. Then all the urbanists move the goal posts and ask why you didn’t live somewhere else.
          • asdff 2mo ago
            Just move to the rust belt. If you are going to move to a growing job market don’t be surprised when the job market grows and triggers demand for development.
            • breezybottom 2mo ago
              You don't have to be surprised to disagree with it. What's the limiting principle here? Every city should grow to the size of Tokyo?
          • cman1444 2mo ago
            Very case dependent of course. There are loads of small towns that have stagnant or shrinking populations all across the US.
          • denkmoon 2mo ago
            God forbid society grows around you. How dare all those productive aspiring people build things near you. Did they not know you had exclusive right of refusal on nearby development?
    • adrianN 2mo ago
      There is little hope for that as long as driving is heavily subsidized.
      • xnx 2mo ago
        How is driving subsidized?
        • adrianN 2mo ago
          One example is the requirement to have parking spaces.
        • asdff 2mo ago
          Massive ongoing investment into roads. EV incentives that would pay for 3-4 ebikes outright. Big 3 bailout. Cash for clunkers. Impact fees from developers towards roads. As others said parking requirements. There is so much beyond that too.
          • ErroneousBosh 2mo ago
            > Massive ongoing investment into roads Okay, let's stop spending money on roads then. How are you at riding your bike through mud? Pretty good? Got nice chunky tyres?
            • adrianN 2mo ago
              Road wear increases with the fourth power of axle weight iirc. Bike paths are orders of magnitude cheaper and need a lot less space.
              • ErroneousBosh 2mo ago
                > Road wear increases with the fourth power of axle weight iirc That's not actually true, and the paper that describes the "fourth power" thing even says that right up front. If you massively oversimplify the model so that you've got all vehicles fitted with infinitely hard bicycle tyres on a perfectly smooth surface, it kind of works out, but not quite.
  • clickety_clack 2mo ago
    This sounds simple, but many people are already living further away because they can’t afford to live downtown near where they work. Add kids into the equation, and many people who could live there without them are also forced out. Congestion pricing is a regressive tax.
    • 7jjjjjjj 2mo ago
      The most regressive tax imaginable is a flat fee for every person with no consideration of income. That is exactly the effect of requiring everyone to own a car.
      • asdff 2mo ago
        It isn’t a flat fee per se, if only because wealthier people are too prideful. Rich man buys a 100k mercedes. Poor man buys that mercedes 15 or 20 years later for 3k. It still does what it did when it cost 100k.
        • inigyou 2mo ago
          It's a 3k tax, the other 97k wasn't part of the tax. Used car prices are more like 10k now anyway. Used Mercedes, probably 40k.
          • asdff 2mo ago
            I can tell you don’t check used car prices
• Aurornis 2mo ago
  This is possible if you’re not picky about where you live, where you work, your career options, how crowded your local vicinity is, or how much you pay for your residence. The more your preferences or financial constraints come into play, the more you have to give up. Most people settle in for driving because it allows them to pick from more job options than those that happen to be located near their house and more housing options than what happens to be near your job. This didn’t matter as much 200 years ago when most people’s job options were limited to farming or something in service of farming. It got much harder when the range of people’s jobs exploded and finding a company hiring in your specialty meant traveling some distance from home. It gets even harder when there are two earners in a household trying to find two jobs.
  • lucumo 2mo ago
    > This is possible if you’re not picky about where you live, where you work, your career options, Yup. And even if you arent't picky. The amount of surface area you can cover scales quadratically with the distance you can commute (either by traveling longer, or by going faster). So as a first approximation, the amount of competition for your labour also goes up quadratically. Job-hopping is one of the best ways to get better jobs. And it is a LOT easier if you can commute further.
  • dsl 2mo ago
    Here is your easy solution: Per employee tax = $0.20 * commute_miles * 2 * (commute_miles / 10)^2 * mandated_office_days_per_year * (1 + 2 * share_of_workforce_over_10_miles)^2 Tech companies can have more distributed offices and assign employees based on geography instead of teams, go back to WFH, pay employees enough to live close to their mega campuses, or pay out the ass into adding more lanes.
  • asdff 2mo ago
    The explosion was also due to the car not only spreading low density housing out that would have been a tough sell previously, but also job sprawl to suburban and exurban greenfield. There used to be natural agglomeration to central well connected nodes before the car. Many cities enacted height limits in the early 1900s with the specific aim to spread out development that was dense enough to make serving basic infrastructure, such as water, power, transit, and cleaning the mounting horseshit off the roads, increasingly expensive and difficult. Early real estate barons would buy marginal land and develop a streetcar line that ran into the job center, and sell plots off that line now that it finally had some utility in the form of a connection to jobs. Even if you worked in something specialized back then, chances are it was close to where most other people were working. Offices were downtown. Government buildings were downtown. Hospitals were downtown. Manufacturing was downtown. Ports and railheads were downtown. All of that snowballing enjoyed by cities exploded with the car.
• a2dam 2mo ago
  And the easiest way to do this is to lift restrictions on being able to build housing near workplaces (i.e. anywhere housing might reasonably and gainfully be built). Most traffic is caused by building restrictions.
• protocolture 2mo ago
  >Surely the top way to avoid traffic congestion would be communities where it's possible to live near where you work, shop, go out, etc. and not doing everything else exactly the same but taking a slightly different highway in your car I dont even know what this would look like in practice. It feels like an inner city thing, lifestyle priced accordingly. What Socialists/Communists/Liberals/Conservatives/Local and State Governments/Weird Internet Tech Bros all seem to forget is that people have different priorities, and you cant build 1 house that suits every priority. I am house hunting at the moment, and houses optimised for walking to shops are at the low end, when what I need is a big yard for my kid to run around in and a shed for my blacksmithing tools (and ideally neighbors far enough away that they dont mind metal being banged on in the morning) while also being within reasonable driving distance of a few of the sites I work at.
  • ctkhn 2mo ago
    It looks like a lot of neighborhoods in American cities that are adjacent or outside the downtown business district or even suburbs on the commuter rail lines. A main commercial street surrounded by 1900-1950s houses and apartments, probably with new built mixed use buildings too. Most smaller cities and even big towns have neighborhoods like this based on my last 10 years of road trips across the US so it's not just NY SF etc where this is possible. This is for the the largest cities like NY DC Chicago etc or even smaller ones like Sacramento or Louisville. Not sure we can work out housing policy to be blacksmith friendly and it seems like a pain even out in the suburbs
• refurb 2mo ago
  That seems like an impossible task in today’s world of layoffs and needing to jump jobs to get pay raises. You could live where you work and suddenly your next job is a 30 min drive away. How could you ensure that enough companies existing within a 10 mile radius to provided varied employment to all the residents?
• ratmeadow 2mo ago
  B-b-bb-b-bbb-but then how will I have my 3 storey house with a 100 acre backyard, 2 pools, and 14 cars??? Don't you know it's LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE to live without these basics?? What are you, a communist or something??????