Even Small Towns are Great Here (5 Years in the Netherlands)

Did I say we should run subways to every corner? Here’s a nice video about how small suburbs and even farms don’t need to involve deep car dependence: ▶ this video Meanwhile, Arlington, Texas has over 200,000 people with no bus system. And before you say “oh it’s Europe it’s old” I will point out that the Netherlands had a huge car dependency problem in the mid-century and deliberately moved away from it during/after the oil crisis. You can see multiple single family home developments that would be right at home in a US suburb in this video. The author even reaches a rural farm without a car. What about if American transit authorities just did basic stuff like work together and perform actual regional planning rather than working in silos and having conflicts with each other? For example, there’s zero reason why NJ transit should be a different agency than NYC’s transit authority. They should be the same agency that works toward a comprehensive regional transit system focused on the metropolitan area rather than arbitrary state borders. Instead, they’re forced to do things like sell $100 World Cup train tickets because they haven’t been empowered to reap the rewards of the economic development they enable.

We actually don’t have to work with what exists. We actively chose and continue to choose what exists. Every day new land is developed that perpetuates these choices. Every day we decide to keep things the same or implement change. Here’s a nice video about how rural towns can be configured to not be car dependent: ▶ this video You’ll notice that this isn’t some ancient European pre-automobile city stuff, you’ll see many single family home tract houses in the suburbs and small towns of the Netherlands that would be at home in any American suburb. The Netherlands did struggle with post-war car-oriented development that it has successfully pushed back against. If you live in Arlington, Texas, you live in a city of over 200,000 people that doesn’t even have bus service.

Small towns and suburbs don't have to be huge road/car hellscapes. I think most Americans don't realize how good it could be. Towns with good walking paths, public transit, and, yes, safe bike paths are: 1. Cheaper for governments to maintain infrastructure - heavy road use leads to more requirements of maintenance. Road sizes in the US are also huge. Needlessly giant firetrucks keep building standards this way. 2. Cheaper for getting around - no gas/insurance/car required. 3. Cheaper for housing - car storage takes up a ton of space. 4. Much, much quieter - cars are the noisiest thing in any town. 5. Much more social and therefore more community oriented. This fosters a more trusting society - something we are in dire need of. 6. Easier to get around as things like grocery stores are built in walking distance to dwellings. 7. Just much more beautiful. It's not just big cities that can benefit from these things. Small towns in the Netherlands are much better than Amsterdam in this way, for example. A very small town can have a town square that you'll see your neighbours in as you buy groceries. The model we've made for ourselves is extremely expensive and literally dystopic hell. We don't need anything other than better organization to get to utopia here. We just lack imagination. Europe could learn a lot from America in economics. But here is where America needs to learn from Europe. Not just Bikes talks a lot about the subtle differences that make life so much more enjoyable. ▶ this video

Hot weather transit: link Cold weather transit: link Transit is small towns and suburbs: ▶ this video I would remind all of us that our built environment is not an inevitability, it is a continuous choice, especially in a rapidly expanding state like Texas. In 1960, 8 million fewer people lived in the Netherlands, and cars definitely existed and were mainstream back then. This idea that the Netherlands is special and this magical thing they've done can't be done anywhere else is a weak one in my mind. It's never too late to change course. It's not a black and white choice where we must suddenly give up our vehicles and never drive, it's more like a gradual increase in the number of trips that are feasible and enjoyable without a car. I know people who lived in Cleveland who started using the bus to get to work when the HealthLine BRT line was completed. They still drive basically everywhere else, but that one bus line changed their daily habits dramatically.

Then why does public transit work in other countries with suburbs? Obligatory repost of this video about small towns and cities in the Netherlands being easily accessible by public transit and cycling: ▶ this video I will also point out that a large proportion of suburbs in the US are comparatively brand new developments. While we might not be able to retrofit existing developments, fast-growing suburban locations like those in Texas can change course right now and decide to build in a way that’s transit-oriented.

I completely understand your reaction, and it's a very typical one when I talk about this subject. I hope you're willing to engage in a productive conversation and maybe you'll come away with at least a little new perspective. I am not at all advocating for stifling urban density. I never suggested that nor ever talked about building subways or skyscrapers. The organization I linked to is called "Strong Towns" not "Strong Cities" and that is on purpose. > Also a feature: if you can't afford this, perhaps that isn't the community for you? Let's reframe this: If I'm a business owner, I can pay an American breadwinner $100,000 and they'll spend $10,000 on transportation per year for their family. Or, I can hire someone who lives in a place where they don't have to spend that much and I can pay them $95,000 a year. Maybe that other family only owns one car per family instead of two, I'm not even saying that they never drive. They just don't have to use a car to reach 100% of the destinations they want to reach in their life (grocery store, school, work, playground, etc). This is what I'm really getting at here: Americans collectively blowing all this money on longer roads and sewer lines and a bunch of half-empty parking lots that don't generate tax income and economic activity makes America less competitive on the global stage. It’s a silent drag on the economy. This is before we even dive into the rabbit hole of the statement you just made: that you implicitly believe that this self-reliant car-dependent transportation system makes it more difficult to be poor. What happens if my car breaks down before my first day at work at an entry level hourly job? I'm going to be fired, and then I will have no job to pay for fixing my car. You don't even have to be pro-urbanism or prefer to walk to places to understand that argument. > This is a fairly typical agenda: "I want to spend your money turning your city into something you don't want it to be so some theoretical utopia can be actualized." 1. What do you want your city to be? Can you describe it? What environments in your city/town do you enjoy spending time in? Which ones do you find uncomfortable to be in? What's it like to stand in those places, outside of your vehicle? 2. Is the utopia theoretical? Try visiting the downtown of any small railroad town in the US and observe the scale of it. How many millions of Americans per year travel internationally to experience walkable environments? Small towns that are comfortable to traverse without driving do exist: ▶ this video > No matter how much crying I do not recall crying > nothing is going to make me ride the bus > I ride the subway everywhere in NYC Now you're sending mixed signals, I guess. My hypothesis is that you don't actually know what it's like to ride the bus, and the idea scares you. I hear you. You've probably never been on one that is frequent or pleasant, probably just your typical infrequent broken-down slow bus that is underfunded in America, the kind of bus where you have to be extremely desperate to resort to using it. So you get on the bus and that's the demographic, and it makes you uncomfortable. Have you ever been to Disney World? Did you ride the bus there? Why didn't you just drive up to the gate? Have you ever ridden a bus from the airport parking to the airport? Why did you do that? Why not just drive up to the airport? > no matter how many lanes you kill by dedicating them to buses Even if you prefer to drive, you should actually want what I want, because it alleviates traffic. If your goal is to get more people to drive, you will have more traffic. > I'll just take my tax dollars (which far exceed that of typical bus ridership) elsewhere. The place you are taking your tax dollar is into sewer line reconstruction. it really isn't even all that much about transportation itself, it's about property tax efficiency.

I never said non-city people all need to move to cities. In fact, small towns predate automobiles by thousands of years, and are not examples of urban sprawl. Furthermore, there are examples of suburbs and small towns that are well-served by transit, don't waste land wildly, and don't force you to own a car. [1] I'm just saying that American zoning and regional planning should be adjusted to use land better and be more focused on humans than vehicles. I'm not saying that everyone needs to live in a studio apartment, nor that the government should use eminent domain to re-develop vast swaths of land and displace people. But simple things like zoning law changes can impact the direction of the future. You've done a lot of talking about freedom, facscism, and dictatorship of being forced to live in close quarters. I would submit that the opposite has its own aspects of this "dictatorship." For example, you are forced to buy an automobile from a corporation (and most of them sold today track your every move and sell data to insurance companies [2]). You are forced to risk personal injury to drive that vehicle on the road rather than a safer alternative like walking, biking or transit. You are forced to change your job or lifestyle or home if you ever lose the ability to drive yourself by age or disability. You say that the non-city people will never move to the city, but that has literally already been happening in the past 20 years or so. Finally, I will point out that cities are already making themselves more attractive in exactly the way you describe. Crime has been plummeting in the last 30 years, city streets are being reconfigured to favor livability, blight is being redeveloped, and more housing is being built. For example, downtown Cleveland, Ohio has more people living downtown now than at any point in history, since before urban flight and regional population decline ever occurred. I would also submit the idea that it's something of a misconception that cities don't have any family-friendly housing. Sure, NYC isn't a great example, but many other cities have plenty of suitable dwellings at affordable prices. Just because they aren't square footage maxxing doesn't mean they are inadequate. I also think that many suburbanites visualize themselves as living in "small towns" when they really live in somewhat large cities in their own right that really could be entirely traversed by walking, cycling or taking financially sustainable transit like a modest bus system if they weren't made up of haphazardly parceled off farmland with winding streets rather than an easily traversed grid that has some level of long-term planning rather than a haphazard piecemeal development plan based on which farmers are selling. [1] ▶ this video [2] link