Is Your City Infrastructurally Obese?

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/10/29/is-your-city-infrastructurally-obese

by jseliger • 7 years ago

17 9 7 years ago

strongtowns.org

jandrese• 7 years ago

Obese in this case seems to mean your city isn't built like Manhattan or Tokyo. Cars are fat.

learnstats2• 7 years ago

Having more infrastructure than you currently need is a good thing (since the inverse is clearly bad).

Comparing this to 'obesity' is an overtly political choice.

sharpercoder• 7 years ago

It means your taxes will go up and thw city has lost oportunity cost. That seems to me as a bad thing. You'd want the right amount of infra.

sliken• 7 years ago

Right, but the problem is it's VERY expensive to change the amount of infrastructure. Widening roads is expensive, sometimes impossible. Parking lots can't be resized later. When you put down a grid of streets you can't just readjust that grid later.

Pittsburgh is one of the cities mentioned as obese. Homes are cheap, the cost of living is cheap, and generally I find it a pleasant place to live. Owning a home is a possibility, even relatively easy for the middle class, without major sacrifices/crushing debt. The public schools are pretty good, crime is relatively low, libraries are pretty good, there's quite a variety in bars, restaurants, concerts, etc.

Currently I live in California where the rent is sky high, and it makes me generally sad. People who don't focus on making money are generally ejected from the communities because they can't afford to stay. Similarly businesses that don't have high profit margins or at least really pack in the customers generally die pretty quickly.

In Pittsburgh you get tons of small businesses, often have an acre or two of land (usually from the road back to the treeline) and it's easy for them to break even because the rent is so low. Wander into a hardware store and the person has been working there for 10 years, actually understands what he sells, and can break even on a few customers an hour.

Contrary to the story, my non-obese city (with no parking, high rents, a shortage of houses, high traffic) requires more driving than the obese Pittsburgh. The main issue is that low margin businesses can't afford to be here. People that make $10 an hour can't afford to live here. The public transportation is still terrible. So Costco ... drive to a different city. Windshield repair... different city. Buy a pair of socks... different city. If you have an entry level job in any profession... you have to live elsewhere and generally drive to work. To make matters worse that entry level job ends up paying a fair amount just to park.

ravar• 7 years ago

Your logic does not justify your conclusion. Having too much of a good thing first of all brings the obvious opportunity cost. But there may be (and are) additional costs with too much infrastructure.

GuiA• 7 years ago

We’ve known how terrible North American city planning is since A Pattern Language (70s) and Life and Death of Great American Cities (60s).

How do we turn it into concrete, short term action?

What’s the 2019 equivalent of smashing curbs for wheelchair access? (https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/curb-cuts/)

svachalek• 7 years ago

Probably pedestrian fortifications like the bulb-out?

jeffdavis• 7 years ago

The obesity analogy makes no sense. It's a bad logical fit, not illustrative of the point, loaded with distracting negative connotations, and doesn't suggest any analogous remedy.

rollerboi• 7 years ago

I love strongtowns. Such an interesting blog rich with data and thought-provoking ideas.

He brings up a few ways to measure "Infrastructure Obesity," but really it boils down to over-investment but under-utilization, aka malinvestment.

Some might argue that "well eventually this infrastructure would be used" but he makes a good point that bloated infrastructure "impede(s) social connections" so people will move away or not move into these areas, and entrepreneurs take notice when foot traffic declines. Then these entrepreneurs decide not to expand to areas with increasing infrastructure obesity. Like a positive feedback loop.

The wannabe social psychologist/economist in me would've loved if he included some stuff related to game theory/tragedy of the commons, e.g. Braess' Paradox. It's probably not as impactful in cities where populations are declining, but Braess' paradox posits that adding capacity to a system (like an extra road) actually impedes (traffic) flow, rather than facilitating it.

In theory, this is because the aggregated "normal route" across all drivers in a system (i.e. a morning commute) eventually reaches a Nash Equilibrium. Adding capacity changes the "normal route," so drivers will have to re-adjust and discover new optimal routes, which has cascading effects to other drivers, etc. etc.

This is fascinating to me because conventionally, you'd think "Extra capacity = more people on the road = better throughput" but we're seeing evidence that maybe this isn't the case. Would love to hear yc's thoughts on that, though.

Is Your City Infrastructurally Obese?

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