That looks like hell. Where do you go when you want to get away from people?
You know houses exist right? Tho maybe not a lot of americans sleep in cars…
If there’s 30k people in that small of an area most of them aren’t going to be able to afford houses.
The parks or your own home. I don’t normally go into the middle of a highway interchange for solitude.
Parks with all the other people? Locked in a room in a 300 sq ft apartment with your family/roommates outside?
The interchange allows you to live far enough away from the overcrowded city that you can own a bigger piece of land where you’re not packed in with your neighbors like sardines so you can actually go outside and sit and be alone without hearing 15 other families doing shit. It also allows you to have enough space to have a workshop space for hobbies or a garden or whatever else you want to do.
You understand that Italy has areas that are not as densely populated as the city center. In fact some places are down right rural. And the US has some very densely populated square milage.
This is such a wild, wild take on the US’s cat centric build.
@lightnsfw @KnowledgeableNip what exactly is your “hobby” that you need to be so far away from other people to do it?
Building/refurbishing furniture, working on cars, basically anything that is loud and requires power tools and space to lay out, assemble, or store materials, also gardening.
All of those things can be done in a densely populated city. I do it and live near the city center in São Paulo, the world’s 4th most populous megapolis. In short, your arguments are bullshit.
Can I ask how? I really don’t see how a person on a average income could afford enough space to do that living in a city.
this is all stuff that in Italy goes on inside the city. There are fab-labs, maker-spaces, communal gardens and other communal organizations that enable you to do this without living in bumblefuck nowhere or renting a giant ass house.
Have you ever worked in a shared space? I have, and shit was constantly being lost, broken, or stolen. More people just means more chances some asshole will ruin things for everyone.
omg you’re so American. These places have clear rules, systems to guarantee accountability, with software tracking every person using a room or a tool at any given time. They are managed by people that work there full-time and guarantee everything is in order.
There are garages underneath the apartment lot where you can do reasonably noisy work from 7:00 to 23:00, no need to go to a maker space or anything like that
Go live in a cave, the rest of us can remain in civilization.
Most country, urbanist or not, do have wilderness, where you can live and die without people know.
This is my hangup as well.
I agree with the premise of this sub. The way car first places such as the US does things is a problem. The cars themselves and the underlying infrastructure, such as that exchange.
But I also don’t want to live in cramped multidweller unit housing. I’ve done so most of my life and I hated it.
I don’t know what or even if there’s a good solution that accomodates both, but I hope so.
You can have walkable areas that aren’t all multi unit. This video goes over some existing places that fit.
And if you’re someone that wants to live somewhere actually remote, having dense urban areas instead of suburban sprawl will leave more space for rural areas and nature.
I am no expert, but if we are allowed to design everything from ground up, I believe personal electric vehicle (e-bike etc, abbreviated as PEV) for suburb, transit/bike/walk in city, and high speed rail between cities are probably the way to go.
City should be mostly car free, people can transit to suburb via transit, and to other city via rail. People move within city using walk/bike/tram. Vehicle besides delivery and commercial vehicle should be discouraged from entering the city, by removing in-city parking and setup no-go zones for private vehicles.
Even in the U.S. most people in suburb live rather close to a town center (less than 15 mins with PEV or bike). Thus efficient transit from town center to city can be a good idea. People will be discouraged from driving to city due to the lack of road and parking.
For long form travel, people should move via high speed rail. Then take local travel options once arrived. High speed rail provide a faster and more comfortable travel alternative to driving.
Finally, I believe for people living in rural areas (an hour to any town center on PEV), cars and electric cars are their only option. If they want to enter city or suburb, they can drive to the nearest town center and take transit.
Interestingly, with this type of town, it’s easier and quicker to go out of the town than in American car centric towns.
Public transports are more efficient. You don’t need cars. You have parcs and actual green space. The energy consumption is also reduced.
It’s no magic that they built these type of towns in the past. They couldn’t afford our type of energy consumption and land use. And, it was more practical for the daily life.
This isn’t a great argument. There is so much open undeveloped space in the US that could be used to house people. This interchange isn’t taking space away from anyone. There are lots of good reasons to reduce cars, but this isn’t one of them.
Do you think the people here care about sound arguments? Nobody except for a select few hyper-fit nutjobs are ever going to walk even so much as an 1/8th of that images span for anything. The area is far too large to want to walk, so we use it for transit instead. Forget that it transports millions of people, products, goods, etc. They want it to house hundreds of people instead.
People who will then not be able to get those products and goods, because…they fuckin’ ripped the road out!
Sound arguements are fine, but the interchange is literally in the middle of the 4th(?) largest city in the US, not the middle of nowhere. Houston is also known for a huge amount of sprawl which is literally caused by the amount of space the 10+ lane roads take up.
Is America running out of space or something? Yeah it’s a concern when there is limited space, but America is mainly “empty” the sprawl doesn’t affect them.
“Hm yes if we inefficiently use all this space then we can destroy all this perfectly good agricultural land and make space for more cars!”
What’s inefficient about vertical farming? There’s plenty of green area even in the Picture that’s posted, could easily put a bike and pedestrian network through there. If it was needed.
There’s always solutions, but it’s also just easier to bitch and moan instead.
What’s inefficient about vertical farming?
Cost. It’s a lot more expensive to build vertical. Additionally you need lighting that would wouldn’t need otherwise.
The capacity more than makes up for it. You could also grow in cold climates where you can’t normally as well.
The benefits are there.
Is it just me, or are the Lemmy fuck cars communities a lot more infested with trolls like this guy☝️ than the one on Reddit was?
People That Disagree with you != Troll.
People that use arguments easily debunked by a 5 year-old or repeat garbage == trolls
That’s not really true here though. This is in the middle of an urban area, not in some big open empty space that’s unoccupied, like Montana, or North Dakota. This is in the middle of Houston, Texas, a very populous city.
Calling anywhere in Greater Houston “the middle of an urban area” is just incorrect. It’s the 4th most populated city in the US and the 150th most densely populated. There are a lot of people in Houston but also just a fucking Tom of Houston around. But, as is the norm in this magazine, you are all free to ignore facts and data so you can raise a furor in your tiny anti-car cult.
Why do you think it’s so sparsely populated? What’s keeping people so far from each other? Is it just Houstonians are their own species and can’t stand to be in areas over a certain population density?
Because humans enjoy having lots of space to live in. Personally I would never go back to living in an apartment since I can afford a house and land. I’ve lived in small apartments, big apartments, a single-wide trailer, large houses, small houses, and medium houses. Medium house with acreage of land is the best living situation of all for me.
Did you really decide that posting that was a good idea? Did you seriously think about it at all before writing it?
Yeah, this place is dumb as hell and you idiots need to know that.
I concur bro. These bullshitters are high on their own farts and apparently can’t see the truth that they are never going to change the vast landscape of America into their imaginary Soviet-style shithole idea of a “utopia” where people don’t drive and live in tiny boxes in human hives.
Soviet Union was bad for multiple reasons but in major cities the housing was not really any worse than anywhere else in the world. I guess you just enjoy spending 3 hours a day in your car.
I don’t commute to work often, but when I do it’s only about a 20 minute drive in light traffic. I certainly wouldn’t spend 3 hours a day in a car to commute to work when there are plenty of jobs within that 20 minute commute from my house.
And? If they need space they expand elsewhere. If this interchange was at the edge of town, middle of town, north or south. The town is still the same size. America is large, lots of “empty” space.
This is not really outside the city though
…and even though it’s next to industrial zone, this is what downtown Houston actually looks like on a map. Numerous square miles of space just for “letting traffic through”. The bill on the upkeep of this kind of wasteful infrastructure must be much more than what it costs to provide housing for all the homeless people in the county!
I think OP’s argument is that the interchange is a symptom of low density urban sprawl and all the associated maladies that come with it.
@Anarch157a @BradleyUffner Yeah, it’d suck trying to walk to a friends house on the other side of the interchange.
Well damn start building apartments in the empty parts. Its not that difficult to understand.
With 6inch thick windows or intolerable noise pollution, sounds great. I wonder which one penny pinching developers are going to build.
Duh, moron, the future is you just live in the car.
You cant legally park it anywhere near anything useful for survival, and gas is expensive and so is car insurance.
But thats fine because cars and car companies have more rights than people! Or something…
What I am saying is anyone who walks to the grocery store /deserves/ to get run over.
Natural Selection mannnnn!
inhales
Alright, feelin good, got beer in the glove compartment, time to film my magnum opus:
DeathRace 2024.
YEEEEEHAAAWWW!!!
immediately peels out, doesnt see other driver blowing a red light until too late, swerves to avoid and crashes into the weed dispensary, paralyzing himself from the legs down and killing 4 others
In many cities, people are literally living in cars that don’t run, in public parking spaces, because it’s the only enclosed place they can afford to live in.
Yep, and that is almost always illegal, and such people almost always end up having the car towed, having to pay for the car being towed, losing all their possessions and then becoming homeless.
Its just a matter of time until enough people report it and the police get around to it.
Capitalist wet dream right here
cue America Fuck Yeah! song
@eya This is such a weird way to compare countries anyway, Italy has giant interchanges too: https://www.google.com/maps/@41.929109,12.7359436,1733m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu
Because it’s not meant to compare countries, it’s meant to compare sizes. That interchange could be replaced with any interchange of similar size.
bUt wE hAve EnoUGh sPaCE!
You forgot the homeless people, forced to live under that interchange because you know, america, freedom etc…
I could be wrong but iirc, Italy also has a lot of homelessness
According to wikipedia, 8.4/10k for italy vs 17.5/10k for the US. So while the US is the richest country in the world they have twice as many homeless people per capita :/
I see thanks for clarification
If they are lucky enough that nobody installed some hostile architecture there to keep them out.
Even better: Leaving that land undeveloped and natural, instead of cramming humans or cars on it
What a dumb take.
Nah
Siena is (in my memory at least) a small, quaint, Tuscan village.
Still too many people far too close to me
It’s a medieval walled city of historical significance; the centre is a world heritage site. It’s the location of the oldest bank in the world, one of the oldest universities and the central piazza is the venue for the Palio (a bareback horse race contested by the different quarters of the city.)
I went there by chance during a Palio. The whole city was alive in a way that I can’t even begin to describe. Would definitely go back.
People need to live somewhere, and if they live somewhere like Siena it leaves more space for nature.
Yeah, and the nicer urbanists can make cities the more empty land there will be. And I can live in a pile of rocks with animals for my friends while you all enjoy the nice cities.
