Thank you for the glimpse into your zoning codes - I rarely get a chance to hear ones from other countries explained, and they are always a fascinating counterpoint.
As you can see, if there is zoning, it’s often decided together with the developer – and has building heights, shape of roof, amount of floors and windows, etc already included.
Generally, the largest difference is that we just zone 90% of what we zone as mixed use, and let the market decide what it’ll be.
Your point about taking your car and heading to Tahoe and Yosemite, strictly speaking, is correct. However, speaking only for myself, I do not find it particularly urgent to make long-distance trips - presumably for leisure - within ten minutes of making the decision.
The bigger question is - why is it strictly necessarily to have to use it for ten minutes - just to get milk?
And while most places in the US simply do not have it, the solution to public transportation scheduling is that they run so frequently no one bothers to check the schedule. This is, admittedly, a chicken-or-the-egg problem in most US cities, although some are starting to get it.
>they run so frequently no one bothers to check the schedule
Great if you live on a route popular enough that they do that. You are screwed otherwise. Even if you do live on a popular route, it also doesn't solve the problem if you want to go somewhere unpopular.
>I do not find it particularly urgent to make long-distance trips - presumably for leisure - within ten minutes of making the decision.
Good for you, but not that relevant for people that do. Waking up Saturday morning and deciding to drive out to a destination like this, spend the night, and then drive back the next day is not considered unreasonable.
>The bigger question is - why is it strictly necessarily to have to use it for ten minutes - just to get milk?
Because I need milk for a recipe I just found online and I don't want to wait 15 minutes for the next train, ride for 10 minutes, shop for 5 minutes, wait 15 minutes for the return train, and then ride for 10 minutes. And those times even generously assume I live right on a stop and there is a store right on a stop.
>Great if you live on a route popular enough that they do that.
I was alluding to the fact that it a circular problem - frequent routes (within reason) become popular routes.
>it also doesn't solve the problem if you want to go somewhere unpopular.
The vast majority of trips are to popular locations, by definition. Everyone can still use cars for unpopular destinations.
>Waking up Saturday morning and deciding to drive out to a destination like this
One can wake up in the morning and decide to take a weekend trip without a car. The difference? It will take probably about an hour to get underway.
Meanwhile, a person in an urban area can have all of these car advantages for infrequent uses such as weekend trips or going somewhere unpopular with far less expense by having a Zipcar account.
Because I need milk for a recipe I just found online and I don't want to wait 15 minutes for the next train
Your perspective is very narrow. I asked why you should have to drive to get milk, your response is because you don't want to take a train to get milk.
There is a far simpler option than either of those.
Are you kidding? It depends where you are in the suburbs I'm sure. However, in general because of the ease of transit with a car you have access to far more.
For example, in NYC I wouldn't have access to a soccer field, a place to go horse back ridding, a place to go off roading, fishing, a Macy's, an Steak house, McDonalds, a Red Lobster, etc. all within 10-15 minutes. All at the same time, having a 4 bedroom, 2 bathroom house with a yard at $1500/month.
> suburbs have less things spread out over much more area
Again, it is spread out over a larger area, but the accessibility of those regions is much greater (i.e. far less traffic, 45+ mph speed limit, and cheaper fuel costs). If you want stuff within walking distance, or public transit it will not be as accessible and thus you'll have access to less.
Living in the Bay Area (even with a car) it'll take me 25 minutes to get to the Costco 4 miles from my apartment which costs me 5x what it would in the suburbs of say Chicago, Austin, or countless other locations.
I'm not kidding. I am saying there are tradeoffs between suburban living and urban living. You give up a yard in the city. It is more expensive for far less space. However…
- I have Fishing, a Steakhouse, McDonalds, several seafood places better than Red Lobster within a 10-15 minute walk in NYC. Up until a few years ago, had horseback riding as well.
- If you expand this to a 10-15 minute subway ride, the selection gets insane.
So, no, you do not get access to more things in the suburbs, not by a lot. But as you said - you are closer to outdoorsy activities, have a yard, pay less.
If you're comparing the accessibility and cost of chain stores in and out of cities I'm going to assert that you're missing a lot of what cities have to offer (museums, interesting restaurants, live music, parks with lots of people in them, etc...). Also some people truly enjoy not needing to get into a car to accomplish even the most basic task
Cost of living and accessibility to nature and open space are the big compromises though
There's interesting restaurants in the (Chicago) suburbs too. They might not be as gimmicky (no "say the secret password to get in" types), but you can find just about every cuisine and the food is usually just as good.
Museums are great, but they're something I only get the urge to see a couple of times per year.
Live music (and you should have said shows/theatre also) is definitely lacking, but if I want to see that, I can drive an hour to go downtown or take the train to see them. Even when I was super gung-ho about going to those, I didn't go to more than a show per month. And several of those were in the suburbs (Ravinia, Oddball Comedy Festival, Chicago Improv, etc).
And parks? Except for the beach at Lake Michigan, the suburbs has the city beat in parks by a huge margin. Tons of forest preserves and parks out here, plenty to explore.
There's a lot more smaller but still enjoyable things in the suburbs too, community theatre, smaller concerts, sports events that don't cost a minimum of $80 per ticket, and town festivals which I prefer to big city events because you can actually walk without being constantly smushed by everyone else (literally true in Taste of Chicago).
But yeah, those don't want to use cars need not apply. And granted, there will be people who want to see a show 2 or 3 times per week and visit a museum at lunch every other day, who would of course prefer living in a big city. But it's not for everyone.
I'll agree the suburbs have less (if any) museums, live music, and parks with people in them.
What I would argue, that if someone from the suburbs wants to visit/participate in city events it's relatively easy (although getting home drunk or something would be difficult).
That's more-or-less the clear trade. You can't walk home drunk or visit these places without figuring out transportation, which often is less enjoyable.
I would like to say, I used to visit Greek Town, neighborhood festivities, or the Art Institute in Chicago pretty regularly and it took about an hour to and from the city on the weekends (I lived about 30 miles away). Living in the city, it took roughly the same time if you lived 2-3 miles away, but didn't use a car (the benefit being less responsibility)... So honestly, I see little difference in the cultural aspects.
I think this is how most American's see this as well. The cities are for the young who want to party, the suburbs are for the more established families wanting to raise children/relax.
If the only difference was the travel time, a 10x improvement in travel times would give you access to 100x more things, because we live on a two-dimensional surface. The reduction in density cuts down on that, but it's not 100x less dense.
It's an interesting bit of curiosity how capital design kind of spread from France to the U.S. and then from the U.S. to Canberra. While other purpose built cities, like Brasilia had designs sourced locally.
It's contagious. Someone, develop a vaccine for this before it spreads... except that at this point the whole globe's caught it, and we seem to be developing an immune response at last.
I thought this would be about text-to-speech applications, while this seems more like an encoder-decoder problem (make the network learn a pattern and then let it reproduce it). I'm wondering how long it is until we see working TTS based on LSTM RNNs.
A bearer-backed market basket currency (rather, the ability for anyone to create a digital bearer token currency as a service; billions of currencies, and realtime exchanges to determine prices and exchange currencies at transaction time) is my #1 idea for a project. Unfortunately not really a path to profitability, so I'll do something more mundane first.
I'm glad I ducked out of e-gold (we were building a digital bearer currency backed by e-gold, in partnership with them) before the e-gold prosecutions started. Kind of sobering talking to the lawyers 10 years later and seeing what pain I missed.
Yes, and there's more - Portland cement is made of constituent parts, each presumably extracted from different stones (using energy intensive processes) and then precisely recombined in certain ratios. Roman concrete, lime mortar, and Natural cement are made largely from just moderately heating limestone.
