this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2023
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I'm against poorly designed cities. Once you have a well designed city, what would you need transit for?
About all we've been able to come up with is that one guy who wants to have lunch with his far away friend. Is that a good reason to build transit? If so, where do you draw the line? People are going to have friends all over the world. Do we need a train straight to Japan so I can connect with my friends who live there? I'd enjoy having lunch with them, sure.
Live amongst wannabe farmers and you're going to need wannabe tractors, for sure. That's outside of the discussion taking place here, though. We're talking about working towards building cities for people who actually want to live in cities.
You are making no sense. What wannabe farmers are you talking about? We are talking about cities, not villages. Do you expect 40000 UQAM students to all live in the Quartier Latin? Do you expect 70000 UdeM students to all live in Cote de Neiges? What about their professors, the admin staff? Do you expect that the spouse of a professor would not need to have a job in a different part of town? What if you have a couple where one works at the Botanical Garden and the other at the National Library that are in different parts of the city?
Do you imagine that in an ideal city there are no big centralized institutions with thousands of people working there? Universities, hospitals, public services, cultural amenities (theaters, stadiums, museums, ...), shopping districts, etc? Dense, livable cities cannot exist without public transit.
Are you talking about "cities" and imagining suburban sprawl?? Because you're not making any sense.
Why? They say you will meet 10,000 people in your lifetime. What is to be gained by having the 30,000+ other people there?
What if they got jobs locally? You can't have a local economy without local workers.
There exists communities in this world with over 150,000 inhabitants in a square kilometre. What is the 150,001st person providing you that the 150,000 other people can't?
By dense, are you imagining having a few acres of land to call your own? That's fine, but that's the rural life, not the city life. If you want to live rurally, why not live rurally?
A UNIVERSITY
Honestly, you have no idea what you are talking about. You're either a troll, a kid, or an idiot.
A university is not defined by a set number of people. Sure, you need some minimum number of people to see a meeting of the minds, but surely there is diminishing returns after a couple of hundred people? What kind of meeting of the minds are you making with the tens of thousands of people that you cannot possibly meet?
The ad homiem is telling.
I live in an urban part of my city, and I still have plenty of reasons to leave my 15-minute walkable area. A friend far to the north, a friend on the other side of the river, family on the outskirts. Restaurants I love all over. My office downtown. Theatres near the university. Festivals and expos spread out across all the parks and venues and other walkable areas. I can use my bike to access pretty well all of those things in the warmer months but transit (and sometimes, unfortunately, a car) keeps it accessible year round.
If you don't see any reason to use transportation in a city, you either don't appreciate the breadth of experiences that come with city life, or you live in a really boring city.
That may be, but you're living the rural lifestyle. That is what rural people do – they get into a vehicle and have it move them to where friends are, where restaurants are, where work is, where theatres and festivals are, etc.
Which is fine. There is nothing wrong with rural living. But what set urban areas apart is being able to do all those things only steps away – not needing a vehicle to get you to and fro. The value proposition of urban life is lost if you are back to needing a vehicle to do anything.
I see the need for transportation in our poorly designed cities. The question is: Given the discussion about inventing our dream world, why use transit as a bandaid when we can do a better job in city design instead? If you had a well designed city, not the wannabe-rural cities of Canada, what would you need transit for?
Even the best designed city will have different things in different parts of it. I've been all over the planet - from the backwoods hickville I grew up in to beautiful metropolises in Europe to Asian megacities and no matter where I went there was always a reason to travel around. A particularly beautiful park. A temple floating on a lake. The best damn hamburger you'll ever eat. That doesn't change just because I live in a place, and it doesn't mean it's poorly designed. Different people in different parts of the city make those parts of the city different.
I noticed you completely glossed over friends and family living in different places. That's not just some side point. People travel to see other people. I can't force *everyone *I love to live within a 15 minute walk of me - even if I could, they have their own friends and family, and they have theirs, and they all need to work, probably not in the same buildings. If I'm friends with a Construction worker, a tech bro, an RN, a Highschool teacher, a personal trainer and a genetics researcher, are we all going to be able to live in a 6 block radius? Possibly. But it'd be a lot easier for all of use if we could live a little farther apart (maybe near where we each work) and just take a train to hang out somewhere central.
Life sprawls. It doesn't mean rural, it doesn't even mean suburbs (even though that's how people seem to want it today). But it does mean transportation is a requirement.
I've addressed that many times already. What new and edgy details have you brought to the table that warrants a new response?
Once every few years, sure. You are an exceptional individual if you are jetting off to China each week to lunch with your friend. That is not the norm at all. People normally only keep regular ties to those who are convenient.
Well, if you don't all live nearby, who is going to support the local economy? An economy needs all of those functions.
Why's that? Given a properly designed city, what would you need it for?
I get you want to vacation once in a while, and while it is a stretch to think that is a requirement, without regular traffic there won't be the ridership to support transit even granting it as a luxury. You're back to needing car .
I've read your response to me, not all the comments you've made to whoever else you're talking to. If you think you've explained away people living in different parts of a city not being a problem to someone else, copy and paste it. I won't go looking for it.
In the rest of your statement you seem to have conflated when I said that "I've been to other cities" with "I always go to other cities to do various things" and that's just not what I said. Nothing except my first paragraph explaining how other (much better designed) cities than my own that I've been to have a distribution of experiences throughout them was about travelling between cities. Only within.
This city, the one I live in, has many things in many places. Some of those things are restaurants or parks or events, some of those things are people. I must travel within my city to experience them, and they physically cannot all be within a 15 minute walk, even if my city were much better designed. Not everyone I am friends with will be able to live within a 6 block district. Not every restaurant I would like to eat at will be in my district. Not every sports team or theatrical performance will take place in my district.
I'm not talking about things that take place in other cities. I'm talking about my city, where the opera theatre and the hockey arena are a 15 minute train ride apart. Where the research university and downtown business district are a 10 minute train ride apart. Where there are 7 sizeable hospitals that it would be hard to arrange a couple million people into walking distance around (and only some of which have the capability to offer certain specialized types of care). Where the best bars and restaurants are mostly concentrated onto a handful of streets already, but some streets are not walking distance from the others.
You can call this a problem of design, but the city can only support one hockey arena, so "The hockey arena is far away from the University" isn't something you can solve without moving billions of dollars of infrastructure (and likely creating entirely new problems) or designing good transportation - unless your solution is professors and students can't go watch live sports. Similarly "The hospital I live near doesn't have a Gamma Knife program to excise my brain tumor," can't just be hand waved away. That's a multi-million dollar machine requiring highly specialized staff and it doesn't need to be at every facility to manage the patient load.