cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/16511967
Someone got woken up on Sunday morning 🤣
this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2024
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We really do not value quiet enough.
And the people here who's idea of a utopia is all of us living in Mega City One are the worst of them.
I used to play WoW with a guy in London, and literally every time he opened his mic to speak, it was a cacophony of sirens and cars and helicopters. I don't know how people in cities can even here themselves think. Like, great, you can order from 20 different Chinese takeaways but at what cost?
Most people suggesting we should densify are targeting suburbs, not rural areas. Suburbs are incredibly expensive and environmentally wasteful per square inch. They have all the utility of a city but spread out with more asphalt, cement, power, sewer, water, gas, cheap inefficient homes that leach heat/ac at an alarming rate, etc.
In rural areas the infrastructure isn't always as expensive because some residents have their own septic and well, live on a dirt road, heat with a wood furnace, etc. A few of those things are also more renewable. Additionally, rural areas are still required for our way of living (farming, logging, mining, fishing), while suburbs have negative societal value (they take more than they put back into the system).
I suspect the suburb issue is one of car centric US suburbs where you can't even get out of it without a car, rather than somewhere like the UK, where I effectively live in what is now a suburb of a larger city (if I drove there, it's about ten miles, through an entirely built up area), but that "suburb" is also a town that's been here since medieval times with it's own shops and workplaces and facilities.
Seems to me the issue is less about low density suburbs, and more about the fact that there's nothing there apart from rows and rows of identikit housing.
Absolutely, North America has a special level of stupidity. To clarify yes, the suburbs in the US mostly don't even have a real town center, many are just residential, malls, and big box stores. The average property size and spread is also often much less dense than nearly any suburb in the UK. So the infrastructure and environmental cost is much much higher.
I'm in DC and NYC a lot, and the places I stay are almost always pretty quiet areas (cause I'm not staying in the hotbed touristy/party-y areas)
Even in cities, most people have average boring 9 to 5 jobs and need to sleep at night. When you get away from those particular areas (of course Times Square isnt indicative of the "norm," right?) its all pretty mundane actually.
Other folks will probably reply with "Cities aren't loud, cars are loud" but sirens and helicopters will still be there even if there aren't cars.
Plus if the city is quiet suddenly I'm all anxious because I don't want to bother anyone with my noise. Social anxiety and cities do not mix.
How many of those sirens are responding to a car related accident?I would assume a signifcant amount. They may also be able to use their sirens less if streets were less congetsed. I'm also much more forgiving hearing a siren responding to an emergency than hearing a modfiied honda fart all the way to McDonalds.
Not doing anything about car noise pollution just because sirens and helicopters still exist is a poor solution.
I’m just saying that even if there weren’t any cars it would still be too loud for me to feel comfortable.
Then again if it’s too quiet I still wouldn’t feel comfortable.
tl;dr I don’t like cities. Or suburbs. Or people, really.