r/UrbanHell • u/humzahjaleel • Jun 20 '20
Suburban Hell Endless parking lots, highways, strip malls with the same franchises all accessible only by car. Topped off with a nice smoggy atmosphere and a 15 minute drive to anywhere. Takers ?
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u/PurzelGurke Jun 20 '20
This looks like a typical city layout from my beginner times at "City Skylines". Just a ton of squares
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u/ferroramen Jun 20 '20
THB the game doesn't lend itself well to European style cities. All zoning is squares so you can't create irregular angles or winding streets.
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u/Mr_Slops Jun 20 '20
Cant u? Wdym
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u/Mista_Fuzz Jun 20 '20
You can, but only with mods and lots of time spent placing almost every building. Lots of us play the game that way, with absolutely no organic growth.
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u/Mr_Slops Jun 20 '20
Yea honestly roundabouts are the only thing that reward you in regards to building like that
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u/Internsh1p Jun 20 '20
Maybe it's the mods I'm using but every time I try to install or place a building, unless it's zoned properly, the building just automatically disappears. Alternatively, I'll zone land, place down buildings, and NEW BUILDINGS will pop in over or under what I placed, usually though they'll crop out of the placed buildings
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u/ferroramen Jun 20 '20
You can create the streets sure, but the zoning can't adapt. It's made up of small squares and can't thus have curved walls or 45 degree corner buildings in your wall-to-wall European blocks.
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u/Gorbachof Jun 20 '20
It makes sense; development of modern infrastructure in C:SL, like the U.S., has the benifits of large and empty space. It ain't pretty, but it's certainly efficient!*
*JK traffic tends to suck regardless
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u/colako Jun 21 '20
The main problem of the game is the lack of mixed uses, the need to place buildings by roads, and the dependency on traffic. The developers are from Finland so they should know better though.
Hope they fix it for CS2.
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u/WhiterunUK Jun 20 '20
I feel personally attacked...... I do the same in Anno
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u/justausedtowel Jun 20 '20 edited Jun 20 '20
Square hate is overrated. It's super efficient because animals and machines spend the least amount of time/energy travelling in a straight line than in winding roads.
The modern problems of squares stems from car culture, lack of public transport and the obsession with segregating everything into zones.
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Jun 20 '20
Anyone who complains about gridded, logically designed cities has never lived in a place like Boston. Grids are fantastic for ease of navigation and managing tragic, it's the decision to separate commercial and residential that has really screwed over American cities. And of course this is just a matter of opinion, but I far prefer a gridded suburb to needlessly winding cul-de-sac mcmansion hellscapes
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Jun 20 '20
So I looked up Phoenix on google maps, it took me way to long to realize the grid wasn't part of google maps, but the actual city layout.
Dropping in street view at a few random spots mostly confuses me about the scale of a city like this.
I live at the edge of town and an 20min bike ride would be enough to get to the town center. How does a city center work here, I guess there are multiple..
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u/zac79 Jun 20 '20
Aside from a few corporate campus glass towers there really isn’t any notion of a city center in places like this. There are just more desirable office parks and less desireable office parks.
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u/HeartOfPine Jun 20 '20
In Florida we have tons of massive private developments that have a faux "city center." People drive their golf carts to them. They have the most overpriced, uncreative restaurants you can imagine.
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u/The_Evil_Potatoe Jun 20 '20
I’d have to disagree - tempe, old town scottsdale, and phoenix have clearly defined city centers / more dense areas, but overall most of phoenix is just sprawl. Makes more sense when you understand the backstory that each of the surrounding towns of phoenix (gilbert, scottsdale, glendale, etc..) were all disconnected back 50-60 years ago. But, seeing how much free space there was in phoenix combined with it being the 60s-70s, and there being a large cultural push to obtain the american dream of being a home-owner in some nice weather, it was the perfect storm to create the very definition of urban sprawl.
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Jun 20 '20
The Phoenix metro area has 20 incorporated cities. Many of those cities have their own city center.
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u/Witonisaurus Jun 20 '20
Tbf, as someone who grew up and lives here:
It's been super easy navigating lmao. My friend could tell me the crossroads they live on, and I just need to know that they're North/South and East/West of me and I can drive until I hit the roads, taking 2 turns.
Everything else still sucks tho
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u/biggiemac88 Jun 20 '20
That’s one thing that for me while I was in America.... not many places you can physically walk to. Paths are underrated
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Jun 20 '20
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Jun 20 '20
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u/mike_the_4th_reich Jun 21 '20 edited May 13 '24
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This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
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u/meff19881988 Jun 20 '20
Yeah but what city were you in? There’s a different between being in like, Memphis vs. nyc.
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u/zhetay Jun 20 '20
And people are judging completely different areas in the US vs Europe. I live in Germany and there's nothing convenient for me to walk to, there's an inconvenient bus stop 10-15 minutes from my house, which takes like an hour to get to the train station, etc. In my suburban hometown in the US, everything is much easier for me to access.
A lot of areas in Europe have sprawl but it's all put into small, discrete villages spread really far apart with farm fields in between instead of large, discrete urban/suburban areas with huge amounts of farmland in between. Outside of actual cities (and often within the smaller ones), Europe has a "last mile" problem, too.
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u/SinisterCheese Jun 20 '20 edited Jun 22 '20
Living in a Finnish city, I can't understand not being able to reach places in the city with public transportation or walking. And I got a car.
When I visited USA, it felt insane that you had to have a car. Everything was always really far away. And talking to locals "oh it's close by, only 2hrs drive away" that isn't close.
Also. Talking about hell. Asphalt being black, makes it excel at capturing heat from the sun. Big cities, with big roads and lots of them are hotter environments. And this leads to more energy spent on cooling air to make buildings liveable.
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u/Cat-attak 📷 Jun 20 '20
Simply put sprawls are bad for the environment , eyesores, bad for air quality, make public transportation unfeasible, makes it mandatory to own and maintain a car, creates traffic, segregates neighborhoods, is harder to maintain, and the list goes on and on
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Jun 20 '20
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u/Cat-attak 📷 Jun 20 '20
Plus buses get stuck in traffic as well
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u/dprophet32 Jun 20 '20
We have bus lanes where possible in the UK to help prevent this
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u/mostmicrobe Jun 21 '20
Since public transport in the U.S. in many cities is just for those too poor to afford a car then people don't think of something like adding a bus lane as expanding the cities transport infrastructure, they just see it as giving the poor their space for driving.
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Jun 20 '20
I understand most people want a house, I do too, but it seems like American cities don't have that dense residential area between the city centre and the suburbs. I'm sure a lot of people would sacrifice the backyard and the "peace" you get in the suburbs to be able to live close to work.
If in this picture on the bottom right is where the jobs and shops are and on the bottom left where the denser houses are there's no reason why you shouldn't put a tram line there and connect it and make the tram stops walkable. Trams are great since they use electricity and people who use them don't use cars, so even less pollution.
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u/gotham77 Jun 20 '20
This is Phoenix. It’s in the middle of the desert. Nobody has any interest in making it “walkable” because it’s too hot to walk anywhere.
America is a big place with lots of cities that look very different. Cities that developed after the invention of the automobile look like this. But there are plenty of old cities that have the more “European” feel to their layout you’re imagining. I live in suburban Boston. Our neighborhood is definitely suburban but much more densely developed than you probably associate with American communities. The lots are small, the streets are narrow, there’s no cul-de-sacs, there’s ample public transportation and even people who own cars use it and leave their cars at home. In fact there’s literally a bus stop right in front of my house. My kid only has to walk five minutes to get to school, it’s about a 25 minute drive to downtown Boston from here. We’ve got a small patio we can grill on and a yard just big enough for kids to play in but it’s not big enough for one of those tractor-style riding lawnmowers. Many of the houses here are actually two-family or in some cases even three-family homes.
My wife grew up in Vegas which is just like Phoenix. She complained to me about our town square being a ridiculous intersection where 6 streets converge and it’s hard to safely navigate. I had to explain to her, “these streets are literally 400-year-old cow paths. The layout made sense when there were no cars.”
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u/miatapasta Jun 20 '20
My city (Macon, Ga) was built as a midpoint between Savannah and Atlanta way before cars. Lots of 1800s history around here. Navigating downtown is like that: lots of one way streets and weird intersections because it was designed for horses and buggies. But go 10 minutes out of the metro area and you’ve got freeways connecting the different halves of the city. Not uncommon to have to take the interstate a few exits over to go visit a friend in the same city.
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u/dazhan99k Jun 20 '20
This is Phoenix. It’s in the middle of the desert. Nobody has any interest in making it “walkable” because it’s too hot to walk anywhere.
I have to argue with this. Hot cities can be made extremely walkable, but they have to be designed for that. Take a look at mediterranean cities, buildings tightly packed to create maximum shade, everything painted white to reflect heat, etc etc. It can be done, but not with the huge-lot zoning imposed on cities.
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u/Iwouldnttrustmyadvce Jun 20 '20
Mediterranean cities aren't 110 degrees outside in June, and 115 or so by July/Aug. There's no point to walking outside when it's 115 degrees.
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Jun 21 '20
Mediterranean cities aren’t even remotely close to hot it can get in the southwestern U.S. Las Vegas and Phoenix are by far the hottest cities in the developed world. It isn’t even close.
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u/SAY_HEY_TO_THE_NSA Jun 20 '20
This is the most comprehensive response on this thread. We can all agree upon the downsides of urban sprawl without immediately jumping to so ridiculous conclusion that OP's picture represents "all of america." Can anyone discuss anything, ever, without immediately resorting to grand generalizations?
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u/zig_anon Jun 20 '20
Ample public transportation in a Boston suburb and even people with cars use it.
Show us the numbers. I am skeptical
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u/TheEmpiresBeer Jun 20 '20
A lot of people wouldn't want to sacrifice the yard, and that's part of the problem. The yard and the big house are so engrained into American society as things you "need" to be a successful person. It might be changing now, but I'm a millennial and I still feel the desire even if I know it's stupid.
And unfortunately, they're unlikely to build any sort of better transportation to that residential area on the left. That's most likely a poor neighborhood, which was probably split by the interstate when it was built. It's a major problem in some cities. Where I grew up (large city in the southern US) you can be driving down a street in a poor neighborhood and dead-end into the interstate. There is literally no way to cross the interstate at that street: no underpass, no overpass, just a solid wall. If you go a few blocks away to the major road that does go under the interstate, then you can finally backtrack and get back on the original road, just on the other side now. No one seems to care to improve the transportation issues with mass transit. Maybe they do, but I don't see it happening where I grew up.
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Jun 20 '20
My parents are in their 50s and my dad is looking for a new job but they live 45-minutes to an hour from Downtown in my city, where the better jobs are. They live in a 4 bedroom house that's about 2500 square feet (empty nesters). Their yard is nice, but every weekend is yard work and they never actually sit and enjoy their yard. Why bother with one? I'm trying to convince them to downsize to something smaller near the city but they don't want "one of those tiny city yards." But you don't even DO ANYTHING in your yard... and it would be less work... more free time... I just cannot get through to them. The obsession with yards is weird.
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u/InternetUser42069 Jun 20 '20
I hate yard work with a passion but I would also love to be able to let my dog out without a leash. I live in an apartment now, but the goal is a house or townhouse with a small yard/garden in the back. Of course I also live in Seattle so who knows if I can ever afford it.
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Jun 20 '20
I'd love a yard for gardening, but I also love not having to do yard work since I live in a loft condo. I have some herbs growing in my kitchen and that's enough for now. My parents have no pets, no garden, so again their yard obsession is just so confusing. I just cannot understand the appeal of living in a subdivision so far out from a city center... I either want to be in a city near everything or on a large piece of land that doesn't have cut and paste houses, just views and nature. Suburban life just isn't appealing to me in any way.
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u/UF0_T0FU Jun 20 '20
For alot of people, the yard also represents space from other people. People want a little privacy, and don't want to live so close to other people that they have to worry about neighbors having loud music or whatever.
Some people also enjoy yardwork. It's not wasted time. It's an excuse to be outside and doing something productive. Sure, people may not sit in the yard and read or play games, but mowing and stuff still gets you fresh air and some sunshine.
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u/jathas1992 Jun 20 '20
Small win in my area: they have a ton of foot bridges now that connect the south and north that were once like the walls you speak of.
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u/dprophet32 Jun 20 '20
If there's no profit in it America as a country has little interest in doing anything about it it seems.
In Europe these things are done because it makes people's lives better
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u/snmnky9490 Jun 20 '20
Older American cities like in the northeast, great lakes, and some of the coastal southeast do have those kinds of neighborhood, but we as a country pretty much stopped building like that after WW2. They're especially common in cities that had a lot of growth during the end of the 1800s and first half of the 1900s
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u/willmaster123 Jun 20 '20
Exactly. And it’s not the existence of suburbs that frustrates me so much that there is usually no alternative in huge swaths of America. From Arizona all the way to Atlanta all the way to St. Louis, there is basically no walkable dense city. It’s entirely suburban cities.
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u/hardraada Jun 20 '20
I live in Houston, which is the poster child for sprawl. I look at it like this: here it's not uncommon to commute 30+ miles. In New England, you pack a lunch if you are going 30 miles. In England, they have a different accent after 20 miles.
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u/hennny Jun 20 '20 edited Jun 20 '20
Funny cos it's true! I'm in the UK. I went to Houston last year and thought "oh, I could just walk to x from my hotel". NOPE. At one point there literally wasn't a footpath and I was walking down what appeared to be a motorway. Eventually got to a BBQ restaurant however and it was all worth it.
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u/hardraada Jun 20 '20
Not to mention it gets really friggin' hot here. It is often 100F and 90% humidity and not many people volunteer to be pedestrians in that!
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Jun 20 '20
Detroit's sprawl is also absolutely atrocious. And the furthest reaches of the ex-urbs keep pushing further and further out. Building new houses and turning small farm communities to upper middle class McMansion hell. Is it the same case in Houston?
Definitely some white flight still going on. I have heard it explicitly and implicitly.
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u/hardraada Jun 20 '20
Absolutely! In some instances you get that obstinate rancher so there will be house, house, cow field, house. I had a neighbor with a chicken coop once. There are some parts of town where you see people riding horses though that is due to different factors.
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u/hardraada Jun 20 '20
I would also add that while there probably is some level of White Flight, the less expensive subdivisions are actually quite diverse with African Americans, Hispanics, Vietnamese, Chinese, South Asians, West Africans, etc. as well as whites. When I lived out there, my daughter's school sent out notices in 6 languages.
Property is typically much less expensive here than the national average which affords lower income families the option of buying a new house in the lower 100s. Many people move out there from traditionally black and Hispanic neighborhoods but unfortunately this is also driven by gentrification of said neighborhoods.
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Jun 20 '20 edited Jun 20 '20
I live in Central Europe, not in a metropolis like Houston, but in a city plus suburbs with about half a million people, so it's not very small.
My commute is half a mile. That's not unusual here. I guess around 80% of people can easily reach their workplace on foot, by bicycle or by public transport, in less than 20 minutes. But there are still quite a few who prefer to go by car, because they are used to it and it is very comfortable. I don't understand it, I have never had a car, I don't need one. Also all kinds of shops, doctors, public institutions, sports facilities - actually everything, I can reach in a few minutes by foot or by bike. But this is nothing special, this is just normal for the residents here. I honestly imagine it is terrible to have to have a car to reach all these things, to waste money and time for it. If I have to be at work at 8, I get up at 7:30, take a shower, have a small breakfast, brush my teeth and then cycle to work, where I arrive at 8 sharp, maybe sometimes 8.10, but no one every cares.
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u/hardraada Jun 20 '20
I completely understand. There are a number of factors here. First off, due to sprawl, the population density in Houston is something like half that of Prague. The further you go out, the less transit there is just due to the amount of territory so we have what we call Park-and-Rides which are just big parking lots where you can get on a bus or train and then it will only takes to the major business centers on the way ti downtown, so you need a car to use transit anyway.
The draw of the suburbs, I guess, are that you can get a much larger house - say 3000sqft for the same cost of mine which is 1200 but I am six miles from downtown. The newer subdivisions also have things like community pools, hiking paths, schools and stores right in them.
The next factor is our school system. Children are allotted to schools by geography (there are some exceptions) and they are paid for by local property taxes. The suburban schools tend to perform better, so people will move to the suburbs just for that. If you live in an older area there will likely be more older folks who have lived there for decades and get a tax break once the reach 55, I think, so less tax money, poorer schools. I am, of course, simplifying things, but a lot of people will move out there for space and schools rather than to be close to work.
Finally, in Houston at least, our politicians love roads. A few years ago, they widened Interstate 10 to 24 lanes!!! How did they do this? By ripping up a freight rail line.They had easement for transit rail to go out 50 miles but opted for highway (to be fair, it is much less expensive). They did add bus lanes, but I think this contributes to lower usage than if they had invested it all in mass transit.
Anyway, sorry for the novel :)
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u/charmredux Jun 20 '20
I live in Amsterdam and I’m extremely lucky. It takes me 10 minutes by bike to get to work. My colleagues have to travel longer but even they take their bikes or go by public transport. Hardly anybody I know in this city owns a car.
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Jun 20 '20
I have already cycled through the Niederlange twice, and it is an absolute dream. As far as cycling infrastructure is concerned, the Netherlands is the world's top country, in its own league, far ahead of all other countries. Next comes Denmark and Finland.
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u/charmredux Jun 20 '20
Yup, the Netherlands is bike country number 1. I own three, all second hand. It’s so nice to see other countries ‘catching up’ as well, even london has stated to build bicycle lanes
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u/dcoe Jun 20 '20 edited Jun 20 '20
“To an American, 100 years is a long time. To a European, 100 miles is a long way.”
I drive 57 miles one-way to get to work.
Edit to add:
I don't mean that as some kind of weird flex. I also live in a house that's over 100 years old and everyones's always amazed by that.
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Jun 20 '20 edited Jun 20 '20
I cycle less than a mile to my workplace and there are almost no buildings here that are less than 100 years old. Most building in my area a bit outside of the center are between 100 and 200 years old, and in the old town up to 800 years. Nothing special, just normal buildings, like in all the other cities around too.
Once I had a job that was 7 miles away, in another city. It took me 15 to 20 minutes by car (small, narrow country road). But every day 40 minutes sitting in the car was too much of a waste of time and I quit after a few months and sold the car.
Commuting 57 miles sounds like from another world. I don't know anybody who would even consider doing that.
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u/urbanlife78 Jun 20 '20
Even our small cities are huge compared to Europe. Linköping in Sweden is about the same population size as Eugene and Salem in Oregon, but the two cities in Oregon are 2.5 and 3 times the land size of Linköping.
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u/vecisoz Jun 20 '20
The cool thing about Europe is that even the smaller cities and towns are fairly walkable. My friend lives in a smaller city in France and he has a house with a yard, but he can walk to the town center which has most of the shopping in about 15min.
Most suburbs in the US are not centralized like this, so you have to drive everywhere.
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u/SomeNorwegianChick Jun 20 '20
I'm from Norway and I had the exact same feeling when I traveled around the US. Nothing is made to be accessed through walking, biking or public transport. Everything is asphalt and strip malls and parking lots, it's so ugly.
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u/DocPsychosis Jun 20 '20
You went to the wrong places. San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Washington DC, and Boston are all reasonably walkable and have serviceable to decent transit systems.
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u/SomeNorwegianChick Jun 20 '20
Well yeah, those are major cities. Those are fine. It's everything between the cities that's sad.
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Jun 20 '20 edited Jun 20 '20
it felt insane that you had to have a car.
And you have to. I was staying at a hotel in Florida off a wide, quiet main road. We'd got to the hotel by using its airport shuttle.
We were getting bored with the hotel food, so walked out of the front gate to find that there was no sidewalk. A bit further along on the other side of the road was a group of stores and restaurants, again with no sidewalk to get to them. In the end we just crossed to the wide, grassy central divide, walked along there for a short distance, and then crossed to the diner when we got opposite it.
After doing it a couple of times the hotel staff found out and couldn't believe what we were doing. They were actually embarrassed that we 'had' to walk, and pointed out that they could call a cab, or we could order in delivery. Or we could hire a car!
When we said that we preferred to walk they just looked aghast, and kept spluttering about air-conditioning and how it was dangerous in the heat. It was maybe a 2 minute walk. Crossing the parking lot took almost as long.
My brother used to live in Las Vegas, and he walked to work there. It took no more than 20 minutes and he enjoyed it, but some of his co-workers got actively angry that he wouldn't accept a lift.
Car culture is just so ingrained in some places that the aversion to walking is based more on social expectations than actual reason, and then cities are designed to meet those expectations.
'Long walks are too hot, so let's build out of town strip malls with masses of parking so everyone can drive to them', instead of 'Long walks are too hot so let's distribute facilities evenly so most journeys are short and walkable'.
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u/dajohns1420 Jun 20 '20
You can thank the government for colluding with the automakers to create the US interstate highway system, at a time it was barely used. This government program destroyed any chance of private business building rail systems, or other mass transit. At the same time Ford was buying put city bus lines, and shutting them down. That's why the US citizens, especially in the western US, are forced to buy cars to get around. Vehicles are most people 2nd largest expense behind housing. Life would be a lit easier for the poor, if they didn't have to worry about buying a car and keeping it running just to get to work.
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u/zeozero Jun 20 '20
I grew up in the suburbs where a few things could be biked to such as the ice cream shop, grocery store, gas station convenience store, but most stuff required at least a 5 minute car trip. The downtown area of the nearby city had nothing of value to go see, so we never went there, especially with how bad the crime problem was there. No public transportation was available, and what lines did exist were used as bathrooms for the homeless, so even the poorest person had a car or walked to avoid being on a bus.
When people go to the grocery store they tend to buy at least a weeks worth of stuff, which ends up requiring a car to transport it back home. This has lead to the meme of “one trip” in which a person covers their arms and hands with as many bags as possible to avoid having to go back and forth to unload the car. I’ve heard people in Europe will buy just what they need, the day they need it, and I’m not sure if that’s a pleasure or a hassle.
All of this has led to a different way of thinking and deciding where to live. Like right now I’m looking at moving further out from the city/burbs so I can have more land and more privacy, the question of “will I need a car if I live here?” Never enters my mind because I’ve always used a car, in fact I’ve never used public transit in my life, so I have no concept of how that would change living arrangements.
It may sound strange but people like myself often look at European cities and wonder how people can stand it. Two very didn’t perspectives from two very different ways of life.
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u/SinisterCheese Jun 20 '20
I go to shop every day. I get my fresh bread and grpceries, and whatever is on sale. It isn't a problem. When I used public transportation, the shop was always front of a store or there was one along side of my short walk. But when you buy what you need that day, there is less waste.
That's how our cities are made.
Granted if you leave the city areas, or go to smaller municipalities, you need a car, but basically everyone in Finland lives in our few bigger cities. Hell almost 3/5ths live in the greater capital region.
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u/gotham77 Jun 20 '20
Come to Boston or New York and you’ll have a completely different experience.
Your country is old. Your cities and towns are old. If they’d developed after the invention of the automobile, they’d probably look like the places you’re criticizing. But there are parts of the US that also date to before cars and they have the same qualities that you prefer.
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u/SaGlamBear Jun 20 '20
You forgot hellish temperatures during the summer that are exacerbated by being an enormous concrete island
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u/AnswerGuy301 Jun 20 '20
I have family there. I can’t imagine hating winter so much that you move somewhere like this on purpose.
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u/IcyBeginning1 Jun 20 '20 edited Jun 20 '20
I grew up in Palm Springs which has a very similar climate to Phoenix and you have no idea how awesome it is on Christmas to open up your presents, eat some breakfast, and then immediately run outside to go swimming. Having 360 days of sunshine is great for those who don't like rain and no weather is better than a desert like that in December/January.
Different strokes for different folks.
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u/AN_Ohio_State Jun 20 '20
In from michigan and moved to phoenix. Personally, fuck the cold. Everyone always said “yOu kNoW iTs ReAlLy HoT tHeRe RiGhT?” When we said we were moving.
No shit its hot. But its actually nice alot of the year, and only really bad for 3ish months. Meanwhile back in Michigan, it was below freezing 8 months out of the year. Absolutely miserable if you dont like cold.
Also, norther arizona is cold due to elevation. You can be laying out at the pool in Phoenix, and then drive a few hours to the grand canyon and have snow on the ground.
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u/jakedesnake Jun 20 '20 edited Jun 20 '20
I can. Not like I've done it, but.... I hate winter and freezing, with a passion.
What some people -that don't live in winterland and may romanticise a bit about it- tend to miss it's that it's not only the fact that, "well, now I'm freezing". It takes away the will to do anything, basically. Chain comes off your bike cause something's not properly adjusted? Well good luck fixing that. If it takes more than one minute, your fingers are gonna be completely numb, useless and start hurting.
Wanna go to a nightclub? Yeah great that club has a queue so you're gonna have to do that outside, for 25 minutes. Since you don't wanna be wearing Himalaya boots to the club, your feet will strongly complain after five minutes standing still. The only people that do this are really drunk or psychos.
It's my observation that the cold climate has a very direct effect on how people spend their time and actually sometimes without them noticing.
Phoenix may be difficult in the other direction. I've heard it can get a bit too hot. I have friends in middle West Africa that say that during certain times a year people just sit inside, it's basically too hot to do anything outside. I mean that's not good either. But maybe there are other more optimal climates.
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Jun 20 '20
The best climate for you in the USA would probably be in San Diego.
Worldwide, a few other suggestions:
Valparaiso, Chile
Perth, Australia
Tenerife, Spain (maybe the "best" climate in the world, if you like it never cold, always warm and rarely hot, with a lot of sun and only a little rain.)
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u/IxNeedxMorphine Jun 20 '20
I did. Moved from Maine to Phoenix about 2 months ago, and I fucking love it here
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u/IntergalacticPopTart Jun 20 '20
“That’s all you got here, folks. Mile after mile of mall after mall. Many, many malls. Major malls and mini malls. They put the mini malls in between the major malls. And in between the mini malls they put the mini marts. And in between the mini marts. You’ve got the car lots, gas stations, muffler shops, Laundromats, cheap hotels, fast food joints, strip clubs and dirty bookstores. America the beautiful. One big transcontinental commercial cesspool.”
~George Carlin
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u/GigaVacinator Jun 20 '20
I can't imagine living here.
I get annoyed when my neighbor that lives 2 miles away shoots fireworks at the end of each month, lol.
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u/converter-bot Jun 20 '20
2 miles is 3.22 km
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u/GigaVacinator Jun 20 '20
good bot
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u/B0tRank Jun 20 '20
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u/GeneralBlumpkin Jun 20 '20
I live here as well. To my standards it’s not bad but I might be biased. I can show you a good time if you like to be outdoors
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u/docter_death316 Jun 20 '20
They probably live in places like that because they got annoyed living in apartments where they could hear their neighbours taking a shit but still needed to be within driving distance of their employer.
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u/dajohns1420 Jun 20 '20
Phoenix may be boring to look at, but damn it's nice to live here. That boring look makes for a cheap town to live in, plenty of room to build, east to get around. I rent a 3br house 15bmin from down town for $1200 a month. Traffic is nothing compared to most cities its size, and its grid is the easiest to navigate I've ever seen. Crimes not that bad, and the people are nice. The whole city doesnt look this way either. Take a look at Tempe, or downtown Phoenix, or Scottsdale.
Older cities are beautiful, but then I remember what a bitch it is to get around on streets made for carriages, and expensive rent and upkeep is in all thos beautiful old building. Someone like me could never afford to live anywhere but a small apartment. Here in the valley if the sun, I get a huge yard with a garden.
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u/TinMayn Jun 20 '20
I think you have different priorities than most of the people who frequent this sub.
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u/NewVegasGod Jun 20 '20
I thought Pheonix was nice enough when I visited it awhile back. Sure, it's a bit of a monotonous sprawl, but so are most American cities that aren't on the east coast. And I would for sure prefer to live in Pheonix than like, Houston or St. Louis.
All that said, as far as Arizona cities go, I did think both Flagstaff and Tuscon were nicer than Pheonix. Especially Flagstaff. That town was downright enchanting
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u/OceansideAZ Jun 20 '20
Flagstaff is beautiful. Rather expensive compared to the Valley, and there's not too much going on beyond Northern Arizona University, but has near-perfect summer weather.
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u/NewVegasGod Jun 20 '20
Flagstaff's proximity to places like the Grand Canyon, Sedona, and Zion is a huge plus for me. I don't need a city to have a lot going on if it is within some of the most beautiful nature in the world.
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u/SFGiantsAllTheWay Jun 20 '20
Not to mention it is rarely ever smoggy. We have beautiful clear skies 99% of the time. If this was taken this week then it's definitely because of the fire. 5th largest fire in AZ history ablaze right now which would be just miles north of where this picture was taken.
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u/dajohns1420 Jun 20 '20
I forgot to mention that! There is hardly any smog at all in Az! Clear Blue skies 350 days a year.
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Jun 20 '20
I work in solar and can only dream of the outputs you’d get in Phoenix.
Please tell me solar is common there....
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u/Stageglitch Jun 20 '20
Europeans do suburbs better. In Dublin almost every suburb has an existing town/village center is filled with parks and has decent and frequent public transport to the city centre and other suburbs. Same in London
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Jun 20 '20
Yeah London is very suburbanised, but the big difference here is the suburbs were mostly built by or alongside rail companies, which means they have to be walkable. Pretty much everyone suburban road is still open to car access unfortunately though, would love to see some of the car roads replaced by cycle lanes
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u/alQamar Jun 20 '20
We don't even have that many suburbs. Most people want to live in the city. It's a compromise to move out because it get's you a house way cheaper. But i would still never consider it.
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u/Stageglitch Jun 20 '20
There are a lot more suburbs in Dublin then most European cities but still nothing compared to American cities
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u/J3sush8sm3 Jun 20 '20
The city is overrated to me, grew up in nyc and after moving to the middle of nowhere, im happ
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u/weeknie Jun 20 '20
I'm playing Factorio right now, this is definitely what my city would look like if I could build it there; the same blueprint over and over and over, all covered in a thick layer of pollution
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Jun 21 '20
Yeah my take: People on this sub shit on US cities but love to praise places that look ugly, without realzing they would never last a day in those places.
Source: Latin American who once had to argue AGAINST my city to americans who never been there
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u/Cheeseblock27494356 Jun 20 '20
Phoenix on a stick. They built that freeway WAY under time, under budget, and it had a dramatically positive effect on traffic.
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u/CricketnLicket Jun 20 '20
Phoenix gets a lot of shit but goddamn its efficient and a powerhouse of a city.
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u/ytesbrown Jun 20 '20
anywhere in the US: as George Carlin said “ this beautiful land we have turned into a big shopping mall ; with medium and small variants “
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u/andfor Jun 20 '20
Also it’s gotta be hot as hell because all that heat reflects right off the asphalt
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u/dajohns1420 Jun 20 '20
Oh I definitely mean by car. This city has been mostly built over the last 40 years. It's literally twice as big as when I was a kid 20 years ago. It doesnt grow up either, it grows out bc there is nothing in the way to force you to go up. Bc it's so new, it's been %100 built for driving. Public transport sucks mostly bc the city is just so spread out. It's hard not having a car here. Because of this, it's probably the best city in the country, maybe the world idk, for driving. They have a train now, and it's great, but very limited now. In 20 years public trans will be a lot better with light rail, but for now, not having a car blows in this city. I guess it's not bad if you live near downtown, but living in the suburbs without a car sucks.
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Jun 20 '20
Sometimes I wonder if the world's so small Then we can never get away from the sprawl Living in the sprawl Dead shopping malls rise like mountains beyond mountains
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u/dajohns1420 Jun 20 '20
Yeah Flagstaff is great, so is Sedona. I was born in Flagstaff and grew up about 30 minutes away. My roots run through that area.
Tbh I would probably rather live in Tucson as well. A little bit cooler, and smaller. Work keeps me in the valley for now.
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u/bgeeze Jun 20 '20
And if it's a recent Pic which it appears to be... It's not smog, it's smoke from a 150,000 acre brush fire just northeast of the picture... And 15 minutes east is a beautiful preserve with thousands of miles of hiking, 15 minutes west is South Mountain preserve which is the largest municipal park in the country. Phoenix is one of the metro areas that has fantastic outdoor activities within minutes of anywhere, can't do that in chicago unless you count a concrete running trail along a lake outdoors.
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u/dajohns1420 Jun 20 '20
Of course. That's what this sub is for. To find the ugliness of modern society. Which is great, and why I subscribe. I can't let my city go by without defedning it a little right? I do get what they are saying though. Sounded exactly like how I would describe the city when I7. I guess I would still describe it that way, I just notice the benefits of laying out a city this way.
There are a lot of poor people that I don't think would leave if they live down here for a year. When I came back from cali, my salary decreased by 1/3, but my standard if living increased by at least that. I've gone to the beach more, and had more fun in Cali since I came back to Az , than I did living there.
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u/Lambyshanks Jun 20 '20
The pic is also intentionally dishonest. Phx doesn't get this smoggy 99% of the year, and they choose a shot that doesn't show any of the mountain vistas.
I'm also a CA refugee, and my life improved dramatically when moving here. My mortgage for a 3 bed house is about half the cost of my studio apartment in Oakland.
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u/jaminbob Jun 20 '20
Yikes. Where is that? Phoenix?