> This is true, but the real elegant solution is to build everything closer together by an order of magnitude, thereby raising the number of destinations in an N minute walking radius and eliminating the need for tunnels. [...] We should keep building cities the way people did for thousands of years, with mostly little 10-foot wide (building-face-to-building-face) streets and a very few larger boulevards.
That's what we have in Europe and it doesn't solve anything.
I only works when the size (diameter) of the city is small. Then a single point in the centre of the city can irrigate the whole city. And a point to point transportation between the centres of several such cities is highly efficient.
But cities have spread, so now the problems are the same as in the USA, except that when the city keeps repeating the same pattern of density while spreading, it makes those problems even worse (infrastructures are more saturated, because there are more people using them and because they are smaller and rarer). Dense or not, your job is nowadays unlikely to be in the same part of the city and generally not in the same suburb either.
There is no benefit in having density on a wide area. What worked when the city was built (or slowly developed into) and was 1-2 km wide was challenged when it grew to 3-5 km wide, and stopped working now that the city is 10-20km wide.
The denser the area, the slower the transportation: be it cars, buses, trains, bicycle, foot, whatever: everything moves slower in dense areas. And there is only so much that happens to be closer and more or less compensates the loss of speed. The rest suffers the density slowdown penalty in full.
I very often read Americans here, who write the same thing you did. It sounds like you all think there is a magic bullet: densification of your suburbs and suburb-like urbanisation. Let me tell you that if you densify this way, you won't solve anything, you will even make everything worse, for you will concentrate more people everywhere around the centre, in a neverending slick of density, and all those people will need or want to commute to other neighbourhoods daily, and you won't be able to offer efficient mass transit for most O-D in those newly densified areas.
You often have a rose-tainted view of European and Japanese urbanisation. Problem can have a different nature, or a different reason, but they exist as well and are as important.
That's what we have in Europe and it doesn't solve anything.
I only works when the size (diameter) of the city is small. Then a single point in the centre of the city can irrigate the whole city. And a point to point transportation between the centres of several such cities is highly efficient.
But cities have spread, so now the problems are the same as in the USA, except that when the city keeps repeating the same pattern of density while spreading, it makes those problems even worse (infrastructures are more saturated, because there are more people using them and because they are smaller and rarer). Dense or not, your job is nowadays unlikely to be in the same part of the city and generally not in the same suburb either.
There is no benefit in having density on a wide area. What worked when the city was built (or slowly developed into) and was 1-2 km wide was challenged when it grew to 3-5 km wide, and stopped working now that the city is 10-20km wide.
The denser the area, the slower the transportation: be it cars, buses, trains, bicycle, foot, whatever: everything moves slower in dense areas. And there is only so much that happens to be closer and more or less compensates the loss of speed. The rest suffers the density slowdown penalty in full.
I very often read Americans here, who write the same thing you did. It sounds like you all think there is a magic bullet: densification of your suburbs and suburb-like urbanisation. Let me tell you that if you densify this way, you won't solve anything, you will even make everything worse, for you will concentrate more people everywhere around the centre, in a neverending slick of density, and all those people will need or want to commute to other neighbourhoods daily, and you won't be able to offer efficient mass transit for most O-D in those newly densified areas.
You often have a rose-tainted view of European and Japanese urbanisation. Problem can have a different nature, or a different reason, but they exist as well and are as important.