Costs of Sprawl: The Speed Burden (2014)

http://www.originalgreen.org/blog/costs-of-sprawl---the-speed.html

by Doctor_Fegg • 10 years ago

109 160 10 years ago

wmeredith• 10 years ago

The opening statement of this piece about "how much we've given up" to accommodate cars in the US leaves me pretty cold. This isn't Italy and we aren't bound by how far we can travel by foot. The US still has huge swaths of undeveloped land. Drive from Kansas City to Denver sometime, it's a mind-numbing exercise in endurance. Energy usage concerns (which are very real) not withstanding the actual physical footprint of all this infrastructure is a drop in the ocean. The US is huge.

lmm• 10 years ago

There are empty parts of Italy too - it's not like the whole country's the same density as Florence. The point (and it's an inherently subjective one) is how much nicer it is to live in Florence than in Atlanta.

Lazare• 10 years ago

Yeah. It's a fascinating comparison, but it's being presented as a clearly problematic tradeoff, but it's not clear why.

The unspoken conceit of the argument is that all land is equally valuable. Which...maybe so! But if you believe that, I'd love to chat with you about doing a land deal...

Edit: Plus if you look at the comments at the link, there's some pretty serious criticism of the basic accuracy too...

pif3• 10 years ago

I'm Italian, I LOVE Florence and I upvoted you. Indeed, nothing was given up to build that interchange. If you want to build a new Florence in the US, you won't be room-bound. OTOH, one of the factor of Florence's charm is its history, and one cannot build several centuries of history out of a blueprint.

return02• 10 years ago

Visitors in the US can't help to notice just how much emphasis was put on cars when designing cities (e.g. LA). I wonder if that design has paid off, given that today's technology can be used to significantly lower city traffic.

ZanyProgrammer• 10 years ago

A lot of that emphasis only dates from the mud 20th century, with the unholy trinity of urban renewal, the interstate highway system, and tearing out commuter rail/interurban/streetcar lines.

bitslayer4• 10 years ago

The US is huge, and we could build anything we want. The problem is that we don't see what we have given up by not living closer together. The dream of car culture is that we as individuals can live in a huge area, with vast potential for interaction. But the truth of what we have built is that we are cut off from one another. The "square" that I pass through every morning is a massive intersection of two suburban highways. Behind our tinted windows, we wait in long lines for out turn signal. We drive to the gym and fight for that close up parking space so we won't have to walk. Why? Because the exterior environment we have built is horrific. This is not the life I want to live. I reject the idea that we can't live in nicer places. Americans learn the wrong lesson from visiting Europe. They think that a place has to be hundreds of years old to be livable. But we can build anything we want. Politics need to get out in front and not drag us back. Moneyed interests need to take a chance. Because when given a choice, people will choose a walkable, livable world.

ryanmarsh• 10 years ago

the exterior environment we have built is horrific

So true. Growing up in one of the most sprawled cities in America I had no sense for how ugly and disgusting our city was to pedestrians and why that might matter. Then I lived in Washington DC where walking almost anywhere was a pleasant experience. Now I hate the sprawl and what we've given up.

VLM• 10 years ago

Because when given a choice, people will choose a walkable, livable world.

Try an inductive proof. Assume that is true, see if characteristics under those circumstances match real world observations.

So, wards of the state on welfare were ordered by the state to move to the unwanted burbs which they hated and wished they could live packed together in giant ultra dense urban projects. There are no slums or poor/bad neighborhoods in cities because cities being more desirable than burbs means slums and slum dwellers are all pushed into the burbs. Starving college students and recent grads live in the burbs because they're poor and McMansions are less desirable, then if or as they get higher incomes and have kids, they move into downtown because thats nicer. All economic development in the city is via private investment because everybody wants to live there, whereas all burb development is taxpayer funded. The suburbs are full of burned out abandoned buildings and empty lots whereas continuous construction and redevelopment fills the cities. Crime rates are extremely low in cities because the less well adjusted members of society are all pushed economically into the burbs, which are overflowing with violent crime, resulting in more poverty in an anti-virtuous cycle. The cities, being more desirable, have the best public schools and the burbs, being less desirable, have 50% dropout rates and massive discipline problems.

It would make an interesting alternative history, but seems to have no relationship with reality. Therefore I think that's probably proven false.

pionar• 10 years ago

The problem is that we don't see what we have given up by not living closer together.

Oh, I see it. I see "giving up" crowded, noisy urban areas while walking in a crowd that will make most people feel claustrophobic. I see "giving up" fast, hurried lifestyles with dirty air and people.

I like having room to breathe. I like being able to look around for a half-mile and see a few houses. I like those long drives to get places. I like not having to wait in line with 20 other people to get a bagel. I like being able to open my window in the morning and not hearing someone else's shitty conversations.

Get off the high horse. Some of us like it out here.

xienze3• 10 years ago

The dream of car culture is that we as individuals can live in a huge area, with vast potential for interaction. But the truth of what we have built is that we are cut off from one another.

No, the dream of car culture is that regular people can afford to live in their own detached house on a nice-sized plot of land. Which is what we have.

You can build dense cities in the US all you want, but there will always be a sizable portion of the population that says "I can pay $X to live in a small apartment in the city or a big house with a yard in the suburbs. Hmm..." It's an obvious choice for many people.

tehwalrus• 10 years ago

It's not that you've give up the (unscarce) land, it's that you've given up the ability to walk through town on foot.

Shivetya• 10 years ago

still very many countries have incredible amounts of land going unused, usually owned by the state. with technology we no longer need to live on top of each other and should be free to choose to or to not too.

cities are not inexpensive places to live and in some areas they aren't the safest either. still it should always be choice. we as a world are far from running out of space or arable lands

matwood• 10 years ago

Drive from Kansas City to Denver sometime, it's a mind-numbing exercise in endurance.

I just had terrible flashbacks from doing that drive multiple times when I moved from the east coast to Denver (and then back!).

wobbleblob• 10 years ago

Driving is nice there, but I think you've taken it too far. Why are there no sidewalks in the suburbs? People actively campaign their local government to stop them from building sidewalks along their street.

Sometimes we visit relatives in Atlanta. The mall is literally across the street from where they live. The only legal way to get there is by car. You couldn't even walk to the next crosswalk. It's a mile or two down, and then back up to the mall, but as there is no sidewalk, the police will stop you and ask you why you are walking. Crazy.

soundwave106• 10 years ago

I agree that America has in the past de-emphasized safe pedestrian paths way too much in favor of car culture (the South in particular is pretty bad... Atlanta's not great, but I don't think their walking-unfriendliness compares to Houston or Dallas). I think the culture is changing somewhat though. I think there's a much greater desire for pedestrian friendliness than there used to be.

Of course, any demand for improvements will always be the usual mix of NIMBY, people who think almost any government spending is useless, people who don't like change of any sort, people who fear sidewalks will bring in "undesirables", or people who don't seem to understand what an easement is.

It really depends on the neighborhood culture, though. Personally around here (Tampa Florida) I think I've seen more concerns along the lines of "why can't my child safely walk to school". The statistics probably help shed light on the problem too... Florida cities in general has very high pedestrian fatality rates (due to the issue of being a traditional retirement area + poor pedestrian considerations in road design).

mikeash2• 10 years ago

Exactly this, there is no reason you can't have something that's good for both cars and people with some effort, but so much of the US is just a giant middle finger to pedestrians.

I live in a fairly walkable area of the suburbs. I routinely walk to the grocery store, hardware store, restaurants, etc. And yet, the infrastructure kind of sucks. The most direct paths are missing sidewalks in a couple of places. The main road only has a sidewalk on one side for most of it. Many of the intersections have crosswalks on only one, two, or three sides. There are a couple of businesses I almost never visit simply because getting there requires crossing three crosswalks of the same intersection, then doing it again on the way back. And it's a dangerous intersection to cross which requires great care, because people routinely blow through red lights to turn right on red. Naturally, there is zero police enforcement of this.

It even goes beyond a lack of infrastructure and sometimes involves intentional barriers. I used to take a shortcut through the neighborhood next door, which gave me some variety and bypassed one of the bits of missing sidewalk. Then they put up a fence and I can't go that way anymore.

So many places in this country are within a reasonable walking distance of things, but make it unnecessarily difficult to take advantage of that fact. Get rid of pointless fences, put sidewalks and crosswalks everywhere, and you'd improve things significantly.

mseebach3• 10 years ago

It could also fit inside a decent-sized airport. Several large factories are bigger than this. Heck, so are single farms.

The idea that there's a trade-off between centres of high culture and highway interchanges is entirely absurd.

willvarfar4• 10 years ago

Can you have "high culture" and cars?

Empirically, all the towns and cities I like to visit are the non-high-rise pedestrian ones. They don't have to be old, but it helps.

My visits to the US have given me a very jaded view of what constitutes culture in the US. Small towns with small roads can be nice in the evenings, and that's about it.

pif3• 10 years ago

all the towns and cities I like to visit ...

Warning: "like to visit" != "like to live in"

mseebach3• 10 years ago

Can you have "high culture" and cars?

Yes.

The centres of high culture from centuries ago were also centres of traffic and trade, they were not pleasant "liveable" cities, indeed, they typically had huge slums. The origin of the word ghetto is a neighbourhood in Venice. Today, it's UNESCO World Heritage at all, and probably on the list of places you like to visit (and, incidentally, smaller than a Walmart) -- but 500 years ago, it was a prison for jews.

Whatever future generations will recognise as high culture of our present day is very hard to predict, and I'm not at all certain that they will consider the absence of car infrastructure a key feature. Silicon Valley, being ground zero of the information revolution, certainly has a decent claim, and it's nothing if not cars all over.

jerf• 10 years ago

I took a moment to find the interchange. It appears to be the 285/75 interchange [1]. Eyeballing it based on the scale in Google maps, if you zoom out until you see Atlanta itself... and it takes quite a few zoom levels... it looks to be 12-15 miles from the Downtown Atlanta you'd be concerned about, or, in terms more relevant to the current discussion, approximately 20 Florences laid end to end.

The numbers are quite approximate, but the orders of magnitude are definitely correct.

Several of the Florences that would be laid end-to-end to get to Atlanta as the crow flies appear to be going in places that have virtually nothing there and could actually go there. I can't tell from Google maps if perhaps that's all swampland or something, but a lot of it isn't utilized, regardless of the reason.

If you want to make the point that cities should be more walkable or whatever, this is a terrible hook to do so with, because the existence of large interchanges has nothing to do with the cities not being more walkable. These large interchanges, in general, do not exist in downtown areas, and if you still complain about them it starts to sound more like you have no idea how large the world is. It comes off less like trenchant criticism and more like Puritan-style "those damned car owners are having fun and they should be stopped!".

[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@33.8901712,-84.462566,3749m/dat...

HelloMcFly• 10 years ago

My visits to the US have given me a very jaded view of what constitutes culture in the US.

I am saddened by your comment here. The US has such a wealth of diversity in its cities, towns, and country-sides to offer that I can't possibly understand how one could dismiss everything in the country so categorically. Yes, even Atlanta, a city that I find is terrible to visit, but great to live.

hugh4• 10 years ago

Heck, so are single farms.

There's single farms bigger than a lot of countries.

epimetheus2• 10 years ago

There's single buildings larger than a lot of countries.

The Boeing plant in Everett, WA is over 399 km^2 in floor space. That puts it larger than something like 45 Sovereign states/countries[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d...

peteretep• 10 years ago

    > Heck, so are single farms.

That's not a farm...

    > Anna Creek Station is the world's largest working cattle
    > station. It is located in the Australian state of South
    > Australia. Its area is roughly 6,000,000 acres (24,000
    > km2; 9,400 sq mi) which is slightly larger than Israel

That's a farm!

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWl8EbNN8NM)

aroch• 10 years ago

I wager that Kidman Beef Co probably wins this particular distinction. Their grazing lands are in the ~30-35K square mile range -- or the size of Ireland!

hammock• 10 years ago

I wonder what a comparison of the throughput of an interchange vs. an airport looks like? The East LA interchange (busiest in the world) serves 550K vehicles per day[1] while Hartsfield (busiest airport in the world) serves 278K passengers per day[2]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Los_Angeles_Interchange [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_world%27s_busiest_...

SteveMouzon6• 10 years ago

That was never the point. Instead, the point was that when we require high-speed expressways in our cities, the land requirements blow up insanely and the land is then useful for pretty much nothing else.

Contrast that to Florence which required much lower speeds and therefore could use the land for many useful purposes. Obviously, Atlanta has nodes of high culture elsewhere, but they certainly can't put any of them here.

As for the proportion of how much land use blows up at speed, consider this: at 5 mph, making a right turn requires just a 15' turning radius, which occupies 225 square feet. The largest curves in the Atlanta interchange (the ones for which you don't have to slow down) have a radius of close to 900', which occupies about 810,000 square feet. So to go 14 times as fast (70 instead of 5 mph) you have to occupy 3,600 times as much land.

return02• 10 years ago

Thats the reason why most american cities lack a city center culture.

pacala• 10 years ago

Historical Florence is a great place to visit for a few days. Not so sure it's that great to live in long term, especially with kids.

merraksh3• 10 years ago

About 100k people seem to live there, I assume many of them with kids. I lived for different periods of a few years in two cities of similar structure and size of ancient Florence and Atlanta, and found the quality of life to be much higher in the Florence-like city.

willvarfar4• 10 years ago

Does the mafia have any impact on daily life? In Naples, with the waste situation, I understand they make it hell.

quantumhobbit4• 10 years ago

This. Maybe I'm just an uncouth American but the idea of living with so many other people in such a small places makes me claustrophobic.

Doctor_Fegg• 10 years ago

I don't know Florence, but compact settlements aren't necessarily claustrophobic or cramped. They can and do have green space and open areas. The difference is that this space is public, not private.

I live in the densest part of a little English town. We have hardly any garden; our house is three storeys high, narrow and terraced. But it isn't claustrophobic. We can go to the town park/playing field, or the water meadow in the valley, or the walk through the grounds of the big house, or half a dozen other places. Yet the town is still compact and walkable, because this open space is shared between everyone, not walled off.

tirant• 10 years ago

Don't you feel claustrophobic when spending most of your time inside of a car when commuting?

I love Mediterranean cities like Florence or Barcelona. They are great places to live and to raise your kids/family.

Piskvorrr7• 10 years ago

Well...the most claustrophobic place I've visited was also the one most profoundly American: lower Manhattan ;) But yeah, I see your point - and like with Manhattan, not all who live there also reside in that spot. (I commute from the center, to a slightly less crowded - yet still urban - locality)

SteveMouzon6• 10 years ago

Actually, just the opposite is true. When you build in a really compact way, the countryside is never far away... and that makes the real estate more valuable because a lot of people love the idea of living in the city but having access to the country. In Bath, England, for example, you can stand in the center of town and look down the street and see sheep grazing on hillsides a short distance away. In Atlanta and other sprawling places, you could walk for a day and not reach the countryside.

gmazza• 10 years ago

On a plus side, you don't have this in Atlanta Interchange:

http://www.lanazione.it/firenze/voragine-lungarno-torrigiani...

athenot2• 10 years ago

One nitpick: this is not "a nameless interchange", this is known to us in Atlanta as "Spaghetti Junction"[1]. The side-view[2] shows that a bit better.

[1] Yes there's an official name but almost nobody uses it.

[2] http://media.cmgdigital.com/shared/img/photos/2014/01/17/a7/...

szarecor• 10 years ago

Actually, I don't think that's spaghetti junction (Tom Moreland interchange) at 285/85. I think it's the 285/75 interchange at Cumberland.

athenot2• 10 years ago

It's I-85 southbound at mile post 95.8 (see the sign on the median). ;)

But I agree that 285/75 is comparable in size.

chucksmash• 10 years ago

I believe your nitpick is incorrect - it looks more like I-285/I-75 interchange than Spaghetti Junction (which, for out of towners, is the intersection of I-85/I-285 on the northeast side of Atlanta).

quantumhobbit4• 10 years ago

I've always suspected that one of the driving forces of the expolsion of the suburbs in post war america was due to atomic weapons. This picture, if true to scale, reminds me of that. Older cities could be easily wiped out in ww3. Atlanta, which saw a huge amount of growth in the second half of the twentieth century, would be harder to completely destroy.

I've never really seen evidence that there was a real effort to spread out cities due to the cold war. Most histories of suburbia focus on white flight and yhe automobile.

merraksh3• 10 years ago

I would suspect atomic weapons scale much more easily than cities. Even if that wasn't the case, assuming the target is the commercial center of a city you don't even have to use more powerful warheads.

I see a much less scary, but still ignoble, incentive behind this: the cementification of cities and the money it brings to all people involved.

eitally• 10 years ago

No, it was pretty much just cars and building technology that allowed for quick construction of private homes that were much nicer and larger than any housing available in city centers. The trend continues today.

ghaff5• 10 years ago

The notion that people moved to suburbia because of the cold war assumes a level of centralized planning that the US, by and large, did not have. Many people did not want to live in cities, given the choice, for white flight and other reasons and the suburbs/automobile provided an option for more living space.

Even today, there's a strong migration to cities meme that the numbers don't really bear out. There's something of a trend for college-educated 20-somethings to live in a handful of specific urban locations but it's not a lot broader than that.

adricnet• 10 years ago

Speaking vaguely on purpose without sources (apologies), the folks who were concerned about weapons targeting a few decades back had no expectation that any part of the greater metropolitan Atlanta area would survive a nuclear strike.

The historical maps are still around and might be FOIA'able from US gov or others. shiver The doctrine and culture around MAD is, even a few decades on, really quite frightening.

arbuge• 10 years ago

From that graphic, it looks like this argument is being made to work by stretching the definition of interchange. Most people would think of the area right around the clover loops. What is being discussed here is actually an extent defined by the furthest service road entrances and exits connected to that interchange.

aaron695• 10 years ago

Unless there are people living on the interchange it's a little pointless.

We need very high density around where people live. This is the most important thing ever.

Low energy costs for transport which I would say equals better communities and a better way of life for a large proportion of the population.

Of course acknowledging there exists at any time a smaller proportion of the population for who this doesn't work, but this also allows them an easier access to their lifestyle.

Allowing/encouraging high density building is whats it's about, not roads which are just the side effect.

djrobstep2• 10 years ago

Money talks. We need to shift the tax burden to encourage higher density land use.

We need high enough land taxes on the highest value land to encourage high density buildings on that land.

themartorana• 10 years ago

Do we, though? I agree encouraging density in the places people want to live densely is a Good Idea - think SF, NYC, etc. People and entrenched interests working to prevent density where appropriate are worth defeating.

That said, some people want to live in sprawling suburbs, and taxing them unnecessarily for the inconvenience seems like a Bad Idea.

lettergram6• 10 years ago

We need very high density around where people live. This is the most important thing ever.

Strongly disagree, why? In the suburbs you spend 10x less time in traffic, and have access to 10x more because it takes 15 minutes to go 10 miles vs the 1 hour I spend every day traveling 7 miles to work in the bay area.

Significantly, less energy and time is lost in the suburbs. Plus, cities have ridiculous pricing for less space, hence people with families dislike cities (on average).

julespitt2• 10 years ago

You do not have access to 10x more things, because the suburbs have less things spread out over much more area. There's no free lunch.

hx874• 10 years ago

it takes 15 minutes to go 10 miles

Said no one who lives in suburban Boston, ever.

Decade2• 10 years ago

Strongly disagree with your disagreement, why? Bay Area traffic is horrible because of the low density and poor street planning of the past, pushing people into cars.

Modern urban planners call it “induced demand” for traffic. [0] I recently saw a Planning Department presentation about one particular neighborhood of San Francisco (slides here [1], web site here [2]), and the key issue is that traffic is horrible because there are too many parking lots and transit is impractical. Even in San Francisco, neighborhoods like the Outer Sunset practically require you to have a car, especially if your daily routine deviates from doing home -> work downtown -> home.

Significantly more energy and time are lost in the suburbs. I’m concerned about long-term sustainability, and it takes tremendously less energy to walk 3 blocks to a grocery store than to drive 3 miles. For an extreme, outside the Bay Area, example, my grandmother moved to Tucson because she thought she could play with friends who live in Tucson, but then she discovered that Tucson is spread over 200 square miles, and she would have to drive an hour to reach her friend. They play much less than she expected.

Not to mention the vast expanses of roads and pipes necessary to keep the suburb working. I hear the bonds that are used to finance suburb infrastructure inherently require growth, in that without growth, they would be unable to afford the upkeep. I think this is behind so many crises about poor infrastructure maintenance across the US. [3]

[0] http://www.wired.com/2014/06/wuwt-traffic-induced-demand/

[1] http://default.sfplanning.org/plans-and-programs/planning-fo...

[2] https://www.sfmta.com/projects-planning/projects/transportat...

[3] http://time.com/3031079/suburbs-will-die-sprawl/

Spooky23• 10 years ago

If you need high density, go for it. I don't want to live in a high density place, nor does just about anyone who can afford to.

ctdonath• 10 years ago

That interchange is on the outskirts of Atlanta, a sprawling region with no geographically limiting factors. Move the camera 15 miles away from Florence and you'll likely find similarly sparse areas. Move the camera to downtown Atlanta, and you'll find high rises and other features similarly spectacular, populated, and dense.

chasing2• 10 years ago

This is blogspam, by the way. If you click through to the Treehugger article you'll get a link here -- http://www.originalgreen.org/blog/costs-of-sprawl---the-spee... -- which appears to be the original article.

It has more to say, as well, than just some sort of dopey "Atlanta should replace its highways with Duomos" argument.

honkhonkpants• 10 years ago

It is not "blogspam". Streetsblog is a well-known and valuable site that rounds up links from related sites into a once-daily post.

chasing2• 10 years ago

Someone posted a blog post to Hacker News which summarized another summary of an original article -- and neither summary adds any thought to the original idea. In fact, they strip the original article down to a single idea and attempt to make it as outrageous as possible.

Blogspam?

thescriptkiddie2• 10 years ago

It doesn't matter if it is a good blog. Any time a blog links to another blog is blogspam. Blogspam is fine in some contexts — it's a great way to share articles between communities that would otherwise be unconnected — but it doesn't belong on a link aggregator like Hacker News. It's mandatory to always link to the original article.

Declanomous• 10 years ago

Related note: representing information with a red and green overlay is completely useless to 6% of men in the general population, and up to 8% of men in certain European ancestries. I cannot tell what is going on in the graphs on this page, and I have a comparatively mild form of red-green colorblindness.

sctb• 10 years ago

Thanks, we updated the link from http://www.streetsblog.net/2014/06/13/the-whole-city-of-flor....

ProfChronos• 10 years ago

"Because of the need for speed, Atlanta has a great big expensive hole the size of Florence that does very little beside getting a small fraction of Atlanta workers to their jobs a bit sooner, barring any accidents." => how can you compare a city in a country like Italy (60M people, 116K sq miles) with an interchange in the US (323M people, 3.8M sq miles) and conclude that? Of course the US have enormous transport infrastructures, simply because it was a need during the 19th century to have a full "colonization" of the land instead of only large cities with high density (just think about agriculture) and it is now a need for a competitive economy to have low costs of transports per km. Sure we have to improve the energetic efficiency of our transports, but that won't be done my taking comparisons that make absolutely no sense

sgnelson• 10 years ago

No, it's a thousand times worse than that. They're comparing a city from the 1400's to a tiny piece of a city of the 21st century. It's such a bad comparison, it blows my mind.

grb423• 10 years ago

How many Walden Ponds would fit in the Moscone Center?

peterwwillis• 10 years ago

Of all the densely populated metropolitan cities in Italy, I don't know of any of them that are located right next to each other.

Sure, we have sprawl. We also have some of the most densely populated cities in the world, and we're one of the biggest countries in the world. There's going to be some wasted space.

oldmanjay• 10 years ago

I don't want to flag this because it's not offensive, but this is pretty stupid on a lot of levels. I don't see the point in emotionally charged inapplicable comparisons.

johngalt• 10 years ago

Interchanges have a beauty of their own. Maybe just to an engineerish person. Tons of steel reinforced concrete arching through the air in smooth curves. Grade separated to allow the constant flow of traffic zipping through without stopping. Roads and highways that connect your driveway with an entire continent, and interchanges are at the heart of it.

Trumpet interchange is beautiful in it's simplicity:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/shanta/2220012922/in/set-72157...

Or the Dallas High 5 stack interchange in it's complexity:

http://googlesightseeing.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/HF1-...

madcaptenor5• 10 years ago

You might like Nicholas Rougeux's "Interchange choreography": http://www.c82.net/work/?id=350

legodt• 10 years ago

Or Sufjan Steven's The BQE!

https://vimeo.com/100146540

brudgers• 10 years ago

We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath ... a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace. -- The Futurist Manifesto, 1908 [1]

It didn't turn out well. http://bactra.org/T4PM/futurist-manifesto.html

SteveMouzon6• 10 years ago

I'm the author of the original post on originalgreen.org. While the images are sensational and actually went viral a couple years ago, the real message is to point out that the need for speed necessitates massive waste of land and resources. At speeds experienced in Florence, the curb radii of the streets are essentially invisible, whereas the expressway radii each take up much of the Atlanta image. Yet which place provides wonderful experiences? Isn't it time to slow down?

zfnsgmdydmy• 10 years ago

So how's that war on urban sprawl going in San Francisco? Oh right...

blendo• 10 years ago

The need for speed also leads to urban pedestrians having to see and avoid vehicles that are optimized for Atlanta-sized interchanges. And the trendiest "green" cars are the worst: the Tesla Model S P85D weighs about 5,000 lbs and accelerates from 0 to 60 mph in 3.2 seconds in "Insane Mode".

Really hoping something like the Toyota i-ROAD takes off: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgygLfbzLqM

g8oz• 10 years ago

Also relevant "Why suburbia sucks" https://likewise.am/2016/05/08/why-suburbia-sucks/

Costs of Sprawl: The Speed Burden (2014)

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