this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2024
1103 points (96.3% liked)
xkcd
8986 readers
220 users here now
A community for a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'm all for efficient public transports in downtown, I use them daily myself, but people on suburbs won't really see a benefit to this.
On the other hand, just switching to electric is a nice start, otherwise we won't be able to live much longer.
Especially people in suburbs would benefit from public transport and suburbs built for walk ability and cycling.
That's the problem, only switching the transportation method isn't enough, there's a whole infrastructure behind that needs to be built.
In most city centers you can kinda refurbish pre-existing systems, but in suburbs you need to build from scratch, and the distances are way bigger which imposes another challenge.
Don't get me wrong, im all for it, but we need to acknowledge these problems first.
Are you sure that the rules here allow reasonable comments like this?
Suburbs are intentionally designed to not be walkable.
To get to the neighbor behind my house, without cutting anybody's yard, I have to walk about a mile. We aren't far. His daughters play with my sons through our shared fence.
And that's a modest example. Plenty of cul de sacs that are "close" to the main street, as a crow flies but a lot further if you're an East Asian Chinchilla Monkey running as fast as you can.
Love it or hate it, they aren't intentionally designed not to be walkable, they're intentionally designed to discourage traffic from driving through them.
The reason communities like yours and the one behind your house aren't connected is to reduce the amount of cars driving down your block. To make it safer for your kids to play outside.
Which is ironic because it has the opposite effect by forcing every resident to get around via car
Correct. It can be done though. Getting stores and stuff into suburbs would help already, assuming we're talking us style ones.
Yeah, unfortunately the Levitt-town style of suburbs (which are all that's allowed to be built nowadays) are largely incompatible with public transport. We need to fix zoning laws to allow pre-war style suburbs to be built again to make public transport feasible. And all of this will take awhile to fix