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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29600 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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When reading Is Seattle a 15-minute city? this morning, I couldn't help thinking about what's missing from it. For context, the 15-minute city is an urbanist idea about making every residential area a 15-minute walk to important amenities like grocery stores. It's a good idea if it could be achieved without incurring too many other costs, and it's the other costs that I couldn't help thinking about. Specifically, crime.

The metric "walking time to the nearest supermarket" I'm sure correlates closely to rate of property crimes. Where I live, homeless encampments tend to spring up close to grocery stores. These things are related.

I'm very sympathetic to concerns about car dependence, and how much better life could be if housing was built closer to stores, schools, and workplaces. But the problem is always crime. Requiring a car to get to a place disproportionately screens out would-be criminals, even if it also screens out some upstanding citizens who cannot or will not drive. Suburbia is the epitome of this phenomenon, where everything is too far from anything else to live without a car. In cities that are naturally denser, there are constant fights over zoning that dance around this issue but don't address it directly (at least when the participants are nominally progressive and need to be seen as non-discriminatory).

There's a more general point here, which is this: discrimination is required for a well-functioning society. I'm using 'discrimination' in the more technical sense here, as "To make a clear distinction; distinguish." The concept of statistical discrimination covers a lot of what I mean here, but discrimination based on signaling is important too.

Statistical discrimination is basically using Bayesian inference, using information that's already available or easy to get, to make inferences about hidden or illegible traits that predict some important outcome. In the context of walkability, people who don't own cars are more likely to commit crimes or to be bad customers and neighbors than people who do own cars. So you end up with a better-behaving local population if you require a car.

By discrimination based on signaling I mean things like choice of clothing, personal affect and mannerism, accent, vocabulary, presence of tattoos, etc. These things are useful for statistical discrimination, but they're under conscious control of the person in question, and they're hard to fake. They basically prove "skin in the game" for group membership. It takes time and effort to develop a convincing persona that will get you accepted into a different social class, and higher social classes have much stricter standards of behavior. Basically the guy speaking in Received Pronunciation, with no tattoos, who uses PMC vocabulary and dresses in upper-middle-class business attire is very unlikely to rob you, because it would be very costly to him. He'd lose his valuable class status for doing something so base.

Why is discrimination required for a well-functioning society? Because every choice is almost by definition discriminatory, and preferentially making positive-sum choices leads to a positive-sum society. Imagine if you made zero assumptions about a new person you met, aside from "this is a human." You wouldn't be able to talk to them (you'd be assuming their language), you wouldn't know what kind of etiquette to use, you'd have no idea whether they're going to kill you for doing something they consider obscene; you wouldn't be able to get any value out of the interaction. If instead you inferred based on their appearance that they're a middle-class elderly American woman who speaks English, you could immediately make good choices about what to talk about with them.

I'm sure this is all pretty obvious to anyone rationalist-adjacent, but I had a confusing conversation with a more left-leaning relative recently who seemed to have internalized a lot of the leftist ideas that are basically of the form "statistical discrimination is useless." Setting aside topics outside the Overton window like HBD, even for questions like "does the fact that a person committed a crime in the past change the likelihood they'll commit a crime in the future, all else equal?" the assumption seemed to be "no." Michael Malice's assertion seems to be true, that answering "are some people better than others" is the most precise way to distinguish right-wing from left-wing.

Bringing this to the culture war, there is a scientific or factual answer to every question "does observable fact X predict outcome Y", and pointing out that leftist assumptions contradict the evidence is how to convince reasonable people that the leftist assumption is false. I'm speaking as a person living in one of the most left-leaning places in the country, so the false leftist assumptions are the ones that most harm my life. Rightist assumptions of course also contradict the evidence, but I don't have salient examples.

The astute observer will note that most of the leftist intellectual movement of the last 50 years is trying to poison the evidence (via ad hominem and other fallacious arguments). How can one improve the quality of evidence when the wills of so many high-status people are set against it?

P.S. I'm sorry for the emotional tone of this post. This community is the only place I have to talk about this and I appreciate your thoughts.

Michael Malice's assertion seems to be true, that answering "are some people better than others" is the most precise way to distinguish right-wing from left-wing.

This is ironic given that it is mostly progressives that I see unironically declaring that so-and-so is a "terrible person" for having right-wing opinions, or is a "certified Good Person" (no shit, I saw somebody use that exact phrase and capitalization on social media recently) because they support LGBTQ folks.

What's probably more at the heart of right-wing vs. left-wing is the extent to which you think somebody's status as a better or worse person can be changed with the right (re)education.

Slight tangent:

Aah Seattle.... my favorite city to complain about.

Seattle is one of those places, where the more you look, the weirder it gets. Nothing about the city makes sense, and it seems to find the least intuitive solution to every core problem facing it.

I'm leaving Seattle for NYC in 2 weeks, and could not be happier about it.

The 3 words that come to mind when you think of the Seattle landscape are :

  • Rainy

  • Hilly

  • Dark

So, you'd think that the infrastructure would be built to work around these 3 traits. NOPE. If anything, the city tries to pretend as if none of those exist and gaslights you for complaining about it.

It's the rainy, so you'd want covered indoor spaces for people to socialize in for the 9 months of the year. There are none. Maybe covered outdoor spaces ? None.

It's dark, so you'd there to be well lit central walkable streets so people feel safe when it is dark at 3pm outside. There are none. But, dark places means amazing nightlife right ? Nope. Everything closes at 9.30.

It is hilly, so you'd want a street-cars/funiculars for the worst hills right ? Nope. The 2 paltry streetcars follow some of the flattest terrain in town.

Now here is the hilarious thing, this wouldn't be that big an issue. Afterall, all of America is abysmally planned and it manages to get by just fine. Thing is, all of Seattle's problems become 10x worse once you add the right variable into the mix. Yes ofc, Homelessness. (plus the dilapidation, drugs and crime resulting from it)

  • Why can't we have warm-ish covered public spaces --> because homeless people.

  • Why does no one want to walk in dark, badly lit, cold, rainy downtown neighborhoods unlike Northern Europe with similar weather --> because meth crazed homeless people

  • Why does no one use public transit --> because drooling drugged out homeless people

  • But why does driving into downtown also suck --> because property crime : homeless people

Should we do anything to solve it. Maybe start with politely asking homeless people to move or telling Mr. Felony that 22 strikes are 22 too many ? (/s)

No, we show compassion. Because there is nothing as egalitarian as allowing thousands of people to steal, stalk, harass & assault people while they waste their life away on increasingly accessible drugs.

Requiring a car to get to a place disproportionately screens out would-be criminals

I refuse to buy this uniquely American association of "suburbia = soft discrimination through differential access = class war = signaling". In every well-connected European & Asian city, the rich & high-status live in the middle of the city. It is where all the subway lines are, it is where all the people are, it is easy to access and has everything you need within a tiny tiny walk.

You are correct in that discrimination is central to signaling class. But, using the world's most inefficient urban planning to facilitate this is a uniquely American (and associated fake countries that pretend they aren't vassal states).

It is where all the subway lines are, it is where all the people are, it is easy to access and has everything you need within a tiny tiny walk.

It is that way in those cities because the authorities make it that way. We used to have dense urban cores that were safe, prosperous, and full of healthy communities. The authorities (loosely defined) destroyed them, often on purpose, and have made lasting commitments to prevent their regeneration. The story of how and why they did this is long, and despite being matters of public record, not widely known, but that explains the difference. We destroyed our communities, and committed ourselves to ruinous policies that preclude anything like them from arising again. Suburbia is not anyone's first plan, it's merely the workable option somewhat out of reach of the authorities' malign influence.

The story of how and why they did this is long, and despite being matters of public record, not widely known, but that explains the difference.

Could you provide links to this story, or at least provide a hint where to start looking? It seems worth knowing more about, if only so other countries can avoid the American issues.

Everyone is discussing race related issues- but car culture led to freeways, which the federal government built through the centers of beautiful dense cities knocking down beautiful stone buildings etc. Here is a video covering this transformation: https://youtube.com/watch?v=n94-_yE4IeU&list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6OGLN69ehUTVa&index=8

It is from a great series on the wild economic incinerator of suburbia, how poor downtowns produce more economically (well, income for cities) than upperclass areas or newer malls etc.: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6OGLN69ehUTVa It also explains a lot of American cost disease re infrastructure.

If you look at pictures from 1930s downtown anywhere in the US, it looks very similar to a European equivalent. Massive beautiful stone structures erected in the late 19th century etc. 9:16 on the first video has some good pictures.

Darryl Cooper did a good 5-part series on this recently: Part one; part two; part three; part three point five; part four; part five.

Wow! This truly is a great series.

As mentioned, it's a long story, but I can try to get you started. Some elements:

  • Desegregation/Blockbusting/"White Flight", and the mechanics thereof. @The_Nybbler links one history, I offer excerpts from another here. The short version is that desegregation failed on its own terms, injecting massive amounts of interracial violence into previously peaceful and prosperous communities, which the authorities completely failed to anticipate or respond to.

  • The housing projects. See the discussion of Pruitt-Igoe here. These occurred more or less contemporaneously to desegregation, and were likewise driven by Progressive social-engineering theories with the aim of creating peaceful, prosperous communities for the underclass. The result were, in the words of Spike Lee, "self-cleaning ovens."

  • Deinstitutionalization resulted in insane people living on the street, rather than in controlled environments.

  • De-criminalization and toleration of vagrancy allowed the homeless to become a long-term problem within communities.

These specific policies did fatal damage to the communities of most major American cities. With the communities destroyed, the social basis for reform and regeneration no longer existed, and so the problems became self-perpetuating, and have continued since. Attempted solutions to the problems created by the last attempted solutions have created significant problems of their own.

The damage of these policies was aggravated by a number of other social trends and interventions, which amplified the damage they did. In most cases, the harms disproportionately fell on minority and especially black communities.

  • No-fault divorce, which delivered few of the benefits its advocates claimed, and all the harms its opponents warned of.

  • The Sexual Revolution generally, which likewise failed to secure the benefits its advocates claimed, caused a whole host of problems in its own right, and is effectively irreversable.

  • Lax drug policies and the cultivation of a ineradicable drug culture. The war On Drugs is one of the go-to examples of systemic racism, ignoring the historical fact that harsher punishments for the drugs ravaging black communities was a policy explicitly demanded by those communities, in an attempt to control the damage flowing outward from the above policies.

  • Educational "reforms" that have generally degraded the educational system's effectiveness, failed at all stated goals, massively increased costs, and occasionally observably made kids more violent.

...And the list goes on and on, but these would be a start. I suppose the short summary would be that, in the 1960s, Progressivism gained a critical mass of support sufficient to implement its policies, and that we live now in the ruins that they made of what once was a remarkably prosperous and orderly society.

How do you square this theory with the fact that many European countries have gone further with their progressive reforms along all of these dimensions (at least, that is my general impression - I'm not willing to claim expertise in every single EU member state's social policies and what it's like to live there, but I am willing to claim that most Americans perceive that European countries are both more progressive and less disordered than the US).

So, do European countries not have no-fault divorce? Do they not have lax drug policies or housing projects? Are the cops in London going around cracking rough sleepers over the head with their billy clubs and shipping them off to institutions? (I mention London specifically because the UK is the only European (kind of?) country I have any experience traveling in, and it's generally amazing to me how few "street people" you see in the cities. Most people I've talked to about this cite the stronger social safety net as being the reason.

As much as I instinctively would like more aggressive policing of vagrancy, vandalism, and property crime in American cities, I'm not sure it will solve the fundamental problem of too many people without jobs or other economic support. Given what it costs to actually arrest, jail, bring to trial, convict, and imprison somebody, it's simply not worth prosecuting most low-level property crime, even if it makes living in cities hell. Low-crime times and places seem more correlated with "enough jobs and housing to go around" than with "enough cops, courts and jails".

European countries are more or less racially homogeneous in comparison. That's how, I'd say.

Here's one version: http://www.phillywarzone.com/

There used to be longer excerpts of the book online but they seem to be gone or at least hard to find. The short version is the "white flight" you've heard about, where white people would run to sell their house at the slightest hint of black people moving in.... well, it turns out often the black people weren't just moving in. They were violently driving the white people out, with the assistance of the local authorities. The book is about Philadelphia, but I heard similar stories about Baltimore a long time ago.

There’s about 10 different versions of it, including that is was part of a Jewish plot to weaken Christianity, but I suspect he’s referring to poor implementation of desegregation policies.

Michael Malice's assertion seems to be true, that answering "are some people better than others" is the most precise way to distinguish right-wing from left-wing.

I think the key thing here is “people.” In causal conversation, most progressives I know seemingly act and believe that they are better than some person (eg Kevin).

The differences is rightists seemingly say if A is better than B, it follows there can be a group of As better than a group of Bs. And we can look at evidence (eg worse outcomes for Bs) to prove this out. Whereas progressives would say it must mean that As are oppressing Bs.

I dunno where that Michael Malice quote actually came from. Did he say that and where? If 'better' is defined as earning more money or being better educated (the two tend to be correlated) would suggest blue-leaning people overall are better. The 'PMC' sems to be almost all blue or some grey.

Malice did say it. I heard it with my own ears listening to the Tom Woods Show podcast, where he is a frequent guest.

Woods asked what “better” meant, and Malice responded, “You have to answer the question as asked in the way you feel you should.”

The version I heard does not claim that right/left separate into yes/no responses. He says:

“If you ask a right winger, you get a yes. If you ask a left winger, you get a speech!”

Rightists would probably value it differently (eg strong family unit, relatively self sufficient, etc.).

Is it possible that US anti-homeless efforts are uniquely effective in a way that leaves the remaining homeless (from a presumably larger initial pool) on average more crazed than in other countries?

Yet again, drugs make everything worse and is why Singapore has the right idea on how to fix the problem

I agree. The drug overdose rate has increased by over 1000% since the 1990s and no one in power seems to care. Is there any country besides the United States where such a massive drug problem would be tolerated?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_drug_overdose_death_rates_and_totals_over_time

Well, Canada -- but the memeplex is similar I think.

I'm very sympathetic to concerns about car dependence, and how much better life could be if housing was built closer to stores, schools, and workplaces. But the problem is always crime. Requiring a car to get to a place disproportionately screens out would-be criminals, even if it also screens out some upstanding citizens who cannot or will not drive. Suburbia is the epitome of this phenomenon, where everything is too far from anything else to live without a car. In cities that are naturally denser, there are constant fights over zoning that dance around this issue but don't address it directly (at least when the participants are nominally progressive and need to be seen as non-discriminatory).

Then this would imply rural areas are safer than urban. the evidence suggests otherwise. NYC became much safer in the 90s after the crime crackdown. It's not like you have to choose between criminality or convenience.

Suburbia is poorly-planned in the US. It SHOULD be based on the European village model: centered around a school, post office, pub, playing field/park, church/community hall, local small grocery, so it's walkable for most leisure activities and for kids, even if the parents have to drive somewhere for work. Modern suburbs are just houses without community, though there may be a school tucked here and there. Part of the reason is that people don't want to pay taxes for parks, and part of it is that suburbs don't have community leadership to address zoning. The "leadership" is some developer who doesn't care about anything but selling 500 houses.

Then this would imply rural areas are safer than urban. the evidence suggests otherwise.

Can you elaborate on the evidence you believe supports this assertion? The stats overwhelmingly show the opposite, and it's one of increasingly fewer things that are still pretty easy to Google.

Eyeballing their "Most Dangerous Counties" list, we find:

I think there's two ways to think about an area being safe, and you+bloomberg are using a different one than most folks here.

Bloomberg/your numbers are meaningful if by moving to Big Horn County, I would then also give up my laptop class remote work job and take up lumberjacking. In the kitchen I'd stop cooking vegan adaptations of low carb japanese food and instead cook the heavily fried fatty foods more typical to American Indians, as well as the heavy drinking common to that demographic. (In spite of my nic I don't actually drink much, and actually specialize in low ABV stuff. Shoju FTW!) And I guess my genetics would also change.

However most people assume that they would move to a new place, adapt their current lifestyles to what is available locally (regular instead of malabar spinach), and not make adaptations that are too far removed (daily opioids laced with fentanyl instead of LSD microdoses).

The person you were responding to is talking about crime, not overall safety. Additionally, they claimed that people want to move to a place where criminals would realistically require a car to reach, and that is satisfied with suburbs, not rural areas. Suburbs, as the link you gave agrees, are far less hazardous than rural areas.

And when it comes to crime, the second graph in that link indeed shows that the most urban geographies (light blue line) have by far the highest homicide rate of all the geographies. If you want to talk about "the specific urban area with the lowest urban homicide rate in the country" (NYC) rather than "urban" in general, you can certainly do that, but I don't think "just move to NYC if you care about crime in your St. Louis neighborhood" is going to get much traction.

And if you want to argue that people should include other hazards (e.g., car accidents) in their decision about where to live, you can certainly do that, too. But I would respond by saying that violent crime is pretty unique in how it affects our sense of safety and quality of life. I suspect people will tolerate quite a lot of risk of death by car accidents, lightning, and farm machinery if it means not having to be worried about crime.

Yeah, I was gonna say. Rural areas are way safer than urban areas.

Back when I made the unfortunate decision to live in Seattle, I did actually live less than a 15-minute walk from a supermarket. And I literally never walked to it, because Seattle is full of steep hills similar to San Francisco's and even if it wasn't you can only carry so much in a single trip. Asking if it is a 15 minute cit is asking "Do you want to make a 30 minute round trip to the grocery store on foot every three days?" And I'm guessing for most Americans the answer is a resounding no.

If everything is within a 15 minute walking distance, the average person is only going to be a 7.5 minute walk from each thing.

the average person is only going to be a 7.5 minute walk from each thing

That's for one dimension. Wikipedia suggests that the number is 10 minutes in two dimensions.

Not if your neighbourhood is a grid.

A grid is two-dimensional, not one-dimensional. The number of walkable destinations still increases with the second power of distance, not with the first power.

(The abstraction could break down if the city's blocks are gigantic—but Wikipedia suggests that a typical block size is 1/8 mile × 1/16 mile, which is much smaller than the distance of 1/2 mile that ASTM uses as the limit of walkability, so I think the abstraction remains valid.)

The number of walkable destinations does not increase with the square of the distance. It increases linearly until you're halfway to the maximum distance and then it decreases linearly.

Imagine a grid of grocery stores each half a mile apart. For each grocery store, there is a half mile by half mile square area that is closer to it than to any other grocery store. Each corner of this area is a quarter mile in each direction from the grocery store.

Now we can divide this area into four squares and use the average distance from the grocery store to a point within one of the squares as the average distance from the grocery store to a point within the larger area, because it's symmetrical.

Now, split the square into two triangles, with one triangle containing the grocery store and the other containing the point farthest from the grocery store. The square is symmetrical with respect to the diagonal line dividing the two triangles, so we know that the distance from the grocery store to any point on that diagonal line is equal to the average distance from the grocery store to any point within the square.

Since you can only travel in a direction that is parallel or perpendicular to the lines connecting the points of the grid, the distance to any point on this line is a quarter mile. So the average distance from a grocery store to any point closer to that grocery store than any other is a quarter mile.

This rough sketch appears to vindicate me.

You're assuming the grid of grocery stores is rotated 45 degrees relative to the grid of city blocks, when it would make more sense to for them to be aligned.

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Right. When we go to grocery store, we do it twice a month, we load up the back of our car with anything we could need for two weeks or more, and we also can visit several stores because one has good meat, another good veggies and another good dog food, etc. Replacing all of it with a walk to single supermarket with as much stuff as we could carry in our hands (actually I could, my wife couldn't carry much for that far) would be an insane drop in our quality of life. And while we're not very young, we're also not old yet and mostly healthy. What about those who are less healthy and agile than us? This is one of those "good ideas" that can seem good to a college freshman but dissolves quickly one you apply it to real people living a real life.

I think you're comparing apples and oranges a bit.

In cities where people shop by foot shops are not placed randomly but in close proximity to public transit, so what happens is that you shop much more frequently as part of another activity, such as going to and from work, which means you shop way less each time and that you won't have very heavy bags to carry.

This of course means that turning a car focused city into a "15 minute city" requires far more fundamental changes than just adding shops and this might not be viable or even thought of by the proponents, which is likely to make changes in that direction just make things worse.

you shop much more frequently as part of another activity, such as going to and from work

That is provided you can choose where you work and it's in a place near grocery store which carries all the things you need. And, of course, you have time and energy left after a full workday (or an energy to raise earlier - provided the store is open at that hour, and your workplace has storage facilities to store groceries for all the workers' shopping needs) to do the shopping. And you never buy anything you can't transport in your hands through an hour of commute.

At one period of my life, I have been commuting from my house in Bay Area to San Francisco office, on public transport. About an hour door to door. I've seen thousands of people doing the same commute. I don't remember many of them carrying groceries with them.

That is provided you can choose where you work and it's in a place near grocery store which carries all the things you need.

No, that's an Ameirca/Canadian/Australian thing. Explore, "walk" with google street view, clicking forward around in Istanbul, Chelyabinsk, Kyoto, random places in Africa whose names I don't know... There are grocery stores with better, cheaper and more variety of food than US supermarkets everywhere. It's mindboggling.

Ljubljana: https://www.google.com/maps/search/supermarket/@46.0395398,14.4861671,15z search "spar", "mercator", "hoffer". You're rarely 2000 ft from multiple markets at any point. And those are just the chains. There are then plenty of independent butchers, some farmers markets etc.

This is how most of the world is.

Here's Szeged, a city in Hungary: https://www.google.com/maps/search/supermarket/@46.2584053,20.1461581,14z searching grocery will give you different locations - near the same.

Now Guadalajara, Mexico https://www.google.com/maps/search/grocery/@20.6755284,-103.3554495,15z

try mercado and tanguis, but a lot of stuff isn't actually there. Almost every corner will have a shop selling meat, dairy and fruit - often on a corner.

There are grocery stores with better, cheaper and more variety of food than US supermarkets everywhere

I've never been to Kyoto (maybe one day), but I severely doubt it about Chelyabinsk. I haven't been there either, but I have been to many many other Soviet city, and central planned system does not allow too much variety. So the way it works in Soviet cities (I am talking about 20th century of course, post-Soviet period is a bit different - the places are the same but the patterns shifted a bit) is that you have one bigger store (compared to US supermarket like Safeway) per micro-district and a bunch of smaller specialized stores (basically, bread, milk, eggs, basic veggies, you're done). The smaller stores are within ~10 mins walk from your dwelling usually. The bigger one would be about 20 minutes walk (on average, you could happen to live right next to it - or have to walk more, but probably no more than 30 minutes). No public transportation whatsoever within the micro-district whatsoever, if you can't walk for 20 minutes loaded with all the groceries that you need, you are so much screwed. Find someone who can, or subsist on the basic choices available in the mini-stores. The choice in the larger store would be about as good as in a below average US supermarket, with corrections for local conditions of course. The situation is a bit different if you live in the center of the city (majority of people don't since it'd be a) very expensive and b) there's just not that much residential space in the center) or in the places which are not part of the system of the micro-districts for reasons of remoteness or history. In the former, you'd probably have access to closer stores, in the latter you'd have to go farther.

The situation has changed a bit in post-Soviet times due to several factors: 1. people got access to personal transportation (of course nobody planned the parking nearly enough to cover the needs, so the parking situation usually would be not ideal) 2. There's now informal public transportation networks supplementing official transportation and 3. There are private markets and mini-stores popping up everywhere, which are usually hideously ugly, but significantly improve access to goods and groceries.

I don't understand this comment. Today is now, not 30 years ago. But you doubt things have changed while you give the historical background of what it was 30 years ago, then say it changed?!

The situation has changed a bit in post-Soviet times

Yes...?

You don't carry them on the commute, there are supermarkets at literally every subway stop.

You get off at your stop, get your groceries from the supermarket right by the station and walk home with them.

Generally I would say that even the smaller stores carry 99% of what you would need but there can be reasons for you to go to a larger store occasionally anyway. I go to a larger store and buy a bunch of meat to keep in the freezer and larger packages of non-perishables, because those items significantly cheaper in the larger store.

And it only gets worse when you get married and have kids. I briefly had to bike to the supermarket almost daily to buy meat and vegetables and other sundries for our family of five. It was a short bike ride, but the sheer amount of stuff required ghetto engineering to get home. Several time I had to lash a box of diapers to the back of my bike because my basket and backpack were full. First world problem, perhaps, but simply living close isn't always enough to make walking or biking convenient. We have a car now and life is way easier.

Sorry that's just a poor excuse. There are plenty of bikes in Europe which have cargo space.

https://electrek.co/2020/11/21/bunch-the-coupe-cargo-e-bike-dutch-design/

The fundamental problem is that the US is a car-centric society and too many Americans try to find ways to keep it that way.

There's a good intro/overview of these bikes, which are quite common in the Netherlands, here:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=rQhzEnWCgHA

Sorry, but no, it's really not. I was living in Tokyo at the time, and Japan is not really a car-centric society. Not only do they not sell bikes like that in Japan (never seen one in years living there) but the sidewalks and parking areas are way too small for something like that.

Congrats to the Netherlands I guess, but not every country has been built around bikes in the same way and so you can't extrapolate what works in the Netherlands to other non-car-centric countries.

Also not to get personal but I'm tempted to ask whether you have personally spent a year carting groceries back and forth on a giant tricycle for your spouse and children. Have you done it with a 39 degree fever? Have you done it when it's raining? Freezing cold and snowing? While heavily pregnant? When your spouse is travelling and you've got no one to watch the kids? It's not as easy as "get a giant trike bro."

I don't know much about cargo bikes, nor do I care about them in particular. But either way, I'm sure most people who use them are villagers who have their own closed yards.

Would you be surprised to know that urbanists scoff at most of those things? Here's NJB saying "cold weather is just an excuse; the real problem is inadequate bike infrastructure". Here's him again saying "it sucks to have to walk or bike in the rain, but by golly, it's simply better to force me to exercise". I wouldn't be surprised if they came up with other defenses against objections of someone being pregnant or has a 39-degree fever. And that's if they consider them at all and don't just say "okay but most of the time you don't have these conditions; really you're just being lazy".

For the record, I agree with you and do not agree with NJB; I'm presenting this because I've spent way too long trying to get into the headspace of online urbanists and can recite most of their arguments from memory.

There might be a lot of them in Europe, but they certainly are not evenly distributed. For one thing, nobody is riding a cargo bicycle in Eastern Europe. It’s simply not a thing. Babushkas are pushing carts like in these photos, middle aged drunkards carry vodka in plastic shopping bags hanging from the handlebars of their bicycles. Everyone who can afford it drives. If you can’t drive, and live in a city, you can walk 5 minutes to a grocery store that carries extremely limited selection of food, which is fine, because you can’t afford much anyway (otherwise you’d have driven to a proper supermarket).

Frankly, I often get a feeling that Americans seriously underestimate how much Europeans actually drive (especially ones outside London, Paris or Amsterdam, which is to say, overwhelming majority of them), and what makes them choose other modes of transportation than driving (spoiler: most of the time it is simply the cost).

Also, forgot to mention: where do you think people are supposed to keep those big, heavy cargo bikes? Most of the apartment buildings in Europe don’t even have elevators.

This probably varies by country, but all the apartment buildings I've lived in have had an elevator, and only a handful of the ones I've even visited would have lacked one, generally older buildings in city centres.

If I had a cargo bike I'd keep it in the same place as my regular bike, the bike storage room in the basement (which is where we keep our two-seater pram, which is too big to fit our elevator.)

Also, forgot to mention: where do you think people are supposed to keep those big, heavy cargo bikes? Most of the apartment buildings in Europe don’t even have elevators.

Outdoors. It depends which city you live in but crime tends to be significantly lower than in the US generally speaking. That said, I agree with your points that some naïve center-left Americans have a very rose-tinted view of how car-dependent cities are in Europe, even in fairly progressive cities. But there has certainly been a huge amount of progress and it just keeps snowballing.

what makes them choose other modes of transportation than driving (spoiler: most of the time it is simply the cost).

This isn't so obvious anymore, depending on your class situation. There's more than enough of "climate conscious" middle-class families with fairly comfortable incomes who may have a car for occasional usage, but who typically use bikes and public transportation for most daily needs. It also depends whether we're talking about someone owning a house or not. Most families in big cities live in large apartments.

Outdoors. It depends which city you live in but crime tends to be significantly lower than in the US generally speaking.

Nobody does this. Use Google Street View to walk through a random residential neighborhood in Europe, and count bicycles outside. Check out Torino, or Bielefeld, or Bydgoszcz, or Ghent... wait, actually, unlike the other places, Ghent does seem to have a lot of bicycles everywhere I check. After more searching, it seems to me that some cities do have outdoors bicycles everywhere, and other places have basically zero bicycles, and it very much depends on the country more so than on the crime rate. No cargo bikes, though, even in places which have lots of bikes in general. In any case, outdoors bicycle are not a thing at Europe in general, though they are common in Belgium, Netherlands and Denmark.

That said, I agree with your points that some naïve center-left Americans have a very rose-tinted view of how car-dependent cities are in Europe, even in fairly progressive cities.

I think a lot of it is that even if they have first hand experience with Europe, it is in places that are highly atypical, like Paris, London, Copenhagen, etc. Places like Bielefeld or Bydgoszcz are much closer to what the typical European lifestyle is like, and it does involve a whole lot of driving to get to places.

There's more than enough of "climate conscious" middle-class families with fairly comfortable incomes who may have a car for occasional usage, but who typically use bikes and public transportation for most daily needs.

This is somewhat true about people living in top metros, because driving and parking there is simply hell, but in more typical places (like Bielefeld or Bydgoszcz), public transit is shit compared to driving, and is only used by students and retirees.

I don't really like to bike for groceries but that is mostly because I dislike biking not because of the issue you had which is easily solvable by getting some kind of side bags.

I did this for a few months in Seattle too, and it was ridiculous. Like what are these walkers even buying, single serving microwaved meals and a pack of orange juice? I needed a hiking backpack to be able to haul milk, rice, and flour bags (walking 15 minutes with one of those and seeing how much flour you have left is always fun!)

And that was 20 year old me. What's an 80 year old woman in the same situation supposed to do, hop on her skateboard with a turkey under her arm?

Everyone going "oh, just spend 30 minutes walking to and from the store every day instead of shopping once a week" needs to take an economics class, or maybe they just don't see other people's time as having any value. Which would explain the Seattle bus system, come to think of it...

Plus the week after I moved out of that strip along I5, a guy got mugged on my store route. If people want to mandate how we live according to their urbanist fantasies, they should bloody well be made to fix their own cities first.

Our carfree home's solution to this is simply ordering most of our groceries using home delivery. Big delivery once every two weeks, costs 10-11 € per delivery which is partially recouped by the greater ability to select offers and cheap goods when shopping online as compared to being distracted by shit in the store, small replenishments throughout the week when coming back home to work etc.

Isn't home delivery an option in a lot of places? One would think that Covid would have made it more common.

I just stop by the store after work and grab enough for a few meals, a couple steaks, some veggies and other needs. Not sure why this seems weird.

I don't think things being within a 15 minute walking distance means people can't drive if they prefer.

I don't think things being within a 15 minute walking distance means people can't drive if they prefer.

It does, because the anti-car people are correct when they note that the space used for cars means distances must be greater.

I did this for a few months in Seattle too, and it was ridiculous. Like what are these walkers even buying, single serving microwaved meals and a pack of orange juice? I

I do not understand this 'discourse'.

There's a LIDL almost exactly 15 minutes away from my place.

If I went there with a hiking backpack - one of those big 60 liter backpacks I could probably cram in enough food for 10 days. Maybe even 14 if I went for dense stuff.

As things are, I have my old backpack - maybe 20l, and maybe a 15l ancient black shoulder bag for the lighter stuff. I can, without much trouble, get enough food for 5-6 days.

Sure, it's fairly heavy - if I'm buying for 5 days, it's 25 lbs. Half of that is milk, but in any case 25 lbs is no big deal to a guy unless he has muscular dystrophy or something like that.

If you were buying bottled water for a week in summer, you could make a case of walking being impractical, but I say bottled water is a scam and if your water is that bad, get a filter.

While I get the utility of cars, if I lived in the same spot I live in now and had a family, I could still do a weekly grocery run by simply getting a bigger backpack.

My record in load carrying was 120 lbs. Well, wasn't pleasant but hey, probably not hazardous to one's health seeing as soldiers do that all the time and they spend way, way more than 40 minutes a week on that.

Ehhh, I don't know, groceries are pretty heavy if you cook at home all the time. I'm not usually the kind to make a big deal about small inconveniences, but back when I was biking, I decided to switch from potatoes to pasta or rice so that I wouldn't have to carry the extra water weight. Much, much easier to have it piped in or brought in a car. This was a young man with no kids who biked 20 miles to work every day.

So fantasies about painful hourlong trips to carry back-breaking groceries back home for a (very suburban) once-a-week shopping trip are just that.

When I was living in a city, there was a small convenience store five minutes away, with prohibitively-high prices for my limited budget and very poor selection. If I wanted actual food, I needed to either walk 30 minutes uphill to the actual grocery store, or more frequently, take public transit to the other grocery store, at an hour and a half round-trip, which involved pulling a 40-60-lb shopping caddy up multiple flights of stairs and about a quarter-kilometer of 30-degree incline, often in the rain.

That really seems like a specifically American experience to me. I've lived in various cities all over Germany and Europe and never been in a situation where the next grocery store offering about 95% of what I'd buy in a month is farther away than 10 minutes on foot. From where I'm currently sitting in Berlin there are no less than 6 medium-sized supermarkets of varying price- and quality-ranges within that radius. In the north-eastern countryside where I spent parts of my youth every third village had a store run by one of the large German chains, so even for rural residents it was either 5 minutes by foot or 10 by car.

Well, Canadian in this case. Vancouver.

This is the same in the UK. Wherever I've lived, the closest shop has always been much more expensive than a larger supermarket, to the point where milk was double the price in the local corner shop compared to the nearest supermarket

I loved it when I did it. I lived about four minutes from a grocery store and it was very convenient.

In most dense cities the walk to the grocery store is more like 5 minutes than 15

Not a chance, unless you're counting convenience stores.

When I lived in a big dense city, I had two convenience stores within a 30 second walk of my apartment and five grocery stores within a five minute walk. One of them was pretty big.

To be fair, until just last year the authoritative North American Industry Classification System did include both supermarkets and convenience stores within the overarching "grocery stores" category, so there is precedent for this nomenclature. (The 2022 edition of the NAICS now calls the overarching category "grocery and convenience retailers".)

5 minutes is true for my experience of urban Europe and Asia. In both one can drive further to a big box store and do weekly shopping, but walkable grocery stores are near major walking commute routes and sell quantities of food that the single person can carry back to their home.

I usually buy fresh groceries daily 5 min from my house (but 10 seconds off my route) on my commute home and nonperishables 1.5 hours away by bus once a month.

It does, but in the opposite direction from your hypothesis.

Yes, and if that generalizes to other cities and is a big enough correlation then that's a good argument for walkability. But I don't think the data in that paper supports this claim - with WalkScore as the independent variable, these are the standardized betas for different kinds of crime:

  1. Property crimes per 100,000 residents, 2004, by LMPD district: -0.026

  2. Violent crimes per 100,000 residents, 2004, by LMPD district: -0.039

  3. Total crimes per 100,000 residents 2007: 22.034 !!!

  4. Murders per 100,000 residents, 2004, by LMPD district: -0.068

I'm assuming that there's an error in the "total crimes" statistic considering its magnitude, but regardless, the other correlations are low and not statistically significant. (I'm having a hard time interpreting that table - some of the signs of the unstandardized coefficients are different from their standardized betas, and the magnitudes of the betas are much larger than the others which suggests maybe they've standardized the independent variables but not the dependent variables, since the total in category 3 is much larger corresponding to the larger standardized betas).

The article linked shows that correlation between WalkScore™, the propriatery metric chosen by authors to measure walkability, and violent crime per 100000 residents, is -.039. As authors didn't put any stars or pluses next to it, which is their notation for highly statiscally signifcant finds, measured by the p-value, I assume p>.1.

Also the area which the authors examined was Louisville, KY, thus making this study hardly comprehensive.

It seems like junk. 'Proprietary index'. -.039 correlation.

That's almost as much BS as the guns / homicide rate correlation of .02 .

Real correlations in social science and criminology are something like the correlation between black population and homicide rate, a very robust .8 .

Albuquerque has a combination grid and non-grid city plan in the uptown which was built post-WWII. Every half-mile is an E/W or N/S boulevard, and within each square half-mile is a neighborhood.

The neighborhoods with less crime are not internally gridded; the streets are curves and swooshes which are hard to drive through at speed. The International District, still called the War Zone by everyone except city officials and the nightly news, is full of heavily gridded residential neighborhoods, six-home single-story apartment buildings, and no services except on the half-mile major roads. The Wal-Mart which serves the War Zone is shutting down due to high crime.

Density isn't enough for a high walk score; you also need certain amenities within walking distance, and criminals tend to drive off said amenities.

Authoritative list of said amenities, for anyone who's interested (for a different, but similar, walkability metric that's less opaque)

  • Office supplies, stationery, and gift stores
  • Accounting, tax preparation, bookkeeping, and payroll services
  • Elementary and secondary schools
  • Florists

All known hotbeds of crime.

Yes, if you want to look at the effect of density on crime, start by looking at the correlation between density and crime; don't use a proxy like WalkScore.

The metric "walking time to the nearest supermarket" I'm sure correlates closely to rate of property crimes. Where I live, homeless encampments tend to spring up close to grocery stores. These things are related.

I'm very sympathetic to concerns about car dependence, and how much better life could be if housing was built closer to stores, schools, and workplaces. But the problem is always crime.

As someone who lives in a city without a car and has for close to a decade now, in two different locations in Chicago, this really doesn't seem right to me at all. And I don't know how it connects to the rest of your comment about discrimination.

Is your area actually walkable in the way that the 15 minute city implies? It's not at all my experience that the homeless congregate around grocery stores but there are grocery stores in enough density that it wouldn't even make sense, nearly everywhere near me is 15 minutes or less of a walk from a store, this kind of breaks the needs for homeless people to gather there specifically where they might if they needed to in order to regularly buy/shoplift groceries.

This is the opposite of how grocery stores actually work in true urban areas: in the walkable urban area, the grocery store (and its selection) scales to fit the space available, so that it can afford to rent out a profitable location. My neighborhood grocery is less than than 30 ft wide and 90 ft deep on the ground floor of an old 3-floor building, but that building is halfway between a residential area and the subway and right next to a bus stop, so the foot traffic on the sidewalk is on the order of 10 people per minute. (The walk from subway to residential area is 10 minutes, tops.) They do their best to lure in customers by placing fresh fruit and sale items literally on the sidewalk. (I hear this would not work in America, because all the food would grow legs and walk away.)

Before a recent move, this grocery store was in an adjacent building with even less floor space (which building was torn down to install a 20-floor monstrosity). A tradeoff is made to between selection and bulk: the "snacks" aisle only has one, maybe two display items of each product, and the average American grocery run (with a grocery cart) would buy them out of their standard inventory. (They don't have grocery carts, the aisles are too narrow for them.) Fruits and vegetables are available fresh and in bulk, but you get what is seasonal or standard for local cooking. You pay a lot more than at a big box store like Costco, but that's the price of convenience and for having a store halfway between the subway and the residential neighborhood.

But I don't think the store would possible in America. The only parking is the loading area in the back, the display which lures people in would be subject to too much theft for the sole proprietor to make a profit, the aisles are too narrow for wheelchairs, and the entryway has a few stairs up from the sidewalk, which would fail any ADA requirements.

Grocery stores tend to need a lot of open space.

I would point out that in addition to space for loading and restocking, the American grocery store has been trending larger to offer a wider variety of products. The economies of scale allow stocking two dozen types of cheese and a dozen different varieties of apples in a way that a corner store (which I've visited when travelling) just can't match.

Although I'm rather skeptical of the 15 minute number because despite living in a suburban (in-city) area of single-family homes, there are two major grocery stores within a hair over that that I'd never consider walking to because it'd be impractical to carry a family load of groceries that far. There is a corner store a few hundred yards away that I rarely visit because their selection is pretty small. It's too long of a walk to be a great idea, and I wouldn't trust a bike to not get stolen in a 20 minute visit (or carry an extra 50 pounds), so I drive.

Although I will vouch that the grocery stores tend to be near larger homeless encampments: I suspect it's partly space like you mention, also that food is readily accessible, and also that major grocery stores tend to be on major street corners for easy access. The supply of shopping carts is probably at least a bit attractive too, but I don't have a sense of the scale of that particular problem.

I wouldn't trust a bike to not get stolen in a 20 minute visit

Is crime really so bad where you live that you're seriously worried about someone cutting your bike's U-lock in an area with heavy foot traffic (the entrance to a grocery store) in the time it takes you to do your shopping?

I used to regularly do my grocery shopping by bike back when I didn't live walking distance from a grocery store, so I understand that having to worry about whether the groceries will fit in the bike bags can be a pain and that's a good enough reason to use a car instead, anyway.

I’m confident that I live in the 95th percentile of American ‘bad neighborhoods’ by motteizan standards and I absolutely would not worry about someone cutting a bike lock while I was shopping, if I used a bike. My neighbors seem to make the same calculation based on the number of bikes I see chained outside my local grocery store when I go.

Now leaving a bike outside and completely unattended I understand worrying about, but it seems like anyone who actually uses a bike to get around owns a bike lock.

Perhaps I've personally over-estimated the risk, but the small empty bike rack outside the store next to the store a hundred yards from the local homeless encampment that seems full of likely-stolen bicycles is not confidence inducing. You may have convinced me to try it some time: I do bike to work (which has safe bike storage) sometimes.

This doesn't sound right at all. It is certainly not true of grocery stores in Manhattan, such as these and of course these. They certainly do not have crappy produce and meat.

The stores you link to are gigantic because they relatively few and far between; they are in places where people cannot easily walk to the grocery stores, so they really don't provide evidence for the claim that places where people can walk to grocery stores have homeless encampments near them.

What does price have to do with your initial claim?

? I am skeptical that the cost of unloading the trucks is a substantial portion of the overall cost of running a grocery store. Surely, to the extent that groceries are more expensive in Manhattan than elsewhere, that is more a function of real estate costs and perhaps overall labor costs.

Stocking is actually a huge labor cost for grocery stores, partly because stockers often get a shift differential to work at night and partly because there’s so much stocking going on all the time.

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That's pretty clearly a market designed for suburbia. Here are the two(potash, jewel) grocery stores near where I used to live, there is now also a nearby Aldi and whole foods. They reliably had fresher meat and produce than any walmart I've ever been to. The Jewel definitely has room for bays but the potash, not so much. Seriously, look at the pictures of the potash, it was no low quality produce or meat and they did not run out.

There is a particular form of grocery store like walmart that is gigantic and meant to serve entire neighborhoods, but that's not the only model that works and I frankly think it's inferior. I much prefer popping in every few days and buying only a few days worth of food that will stay fresh to buying in bulk and freezing half of it.

That jewel osco is right on the border between the very dense gold coast and where it starts to transition to Lincoln Park. Around a mile from dead center of down town and on a red line track. It is very very not suburban. You could walk from the Hancock tower to it in 15 minutes.

The metric "walking time to the nearest supermarket" I'm sure correlates closely to rate of property crimes. Where I live, homeless encampments tend to spring up close to grocery stores. These things are related.

Maybe, but not nearly as strongly as you think. I live within walking distance (less than 15minutes) to two grocery store, both anchor stores to smaller shopping complexes. You can, if you so choose, walk through a park to get to each of them. Shit, there's even a liquor store next door to one. Never had to deal with homeless encampments, petty crime, any of that. Maybe you just live in a shitty area.

Yes, this may be a correlation specific to the city in which I live, because of the way it enforces laws.

Problem: Walking is slow and difficult.

Solution 1: Keep everything nearby. Work is nearby, shopping is nearby, restaurants are nearby, schools nearby, etc, etc.

Drawbacks: When you need to have everything within walking distance, there's not a lot of room for it. You've got to cram a lot of people, a lot of employers, a lot of stores, etc, in a space. So there's little space for any one thing. You're limited in the variety of what you can reach. Recreational space is very limited and always oversubscribed. Infrastructure is harder because it has to be crammed around all that density. You're living, working, and shopping in an anthill.

Solution 2: Embrace the vehicle

Problem: Traffic. But it sure beats the alternative.

Is walking difficult? It is slow, but seems pretty easy to me. Do people really find walking to be difficult?

Oh sure, it's easy at first, but once you're a few miles into it it gets pretty difficult. I went 40 miles in a car today, even if walking didn't take forever to go so far I'd be hurting really early on.

With small children, while holding something heavy and/or cold, and especially while trying to hold something heavy and/or cold with children, yes. When old and feeble, also yes. I barely made it from the car into the library today with a one year old, three year old, and stack of books. My older family members often need to be dropped off at the entrance of the place we're going, since just walking across the parking lot is rather difficult. The two states combined might make up about a quarter of a person's life.

But, yes, a moderately healthy single person living in a European style town will not find walking while carrying things difficult.

I know I'll sound like some asshole for asking, but I don't care: who did you bring two toddlers to a library in the first place?

Holiday crafts, board books, a nice rug they like, stuffed toys, snacks, storytime, free toys. A lot of library events are aimed at toddlers, I assume so that they and their parents have a positive feeling about libraries and physical books. I'd also rather check out kids books than buy a bunch of books they'll outgrow in a couple of months.

But, yes, a moderately healthy single person living in a European style town will not find walking while carrying things difficult.

This reminds me, for all the arguments about "how will disabled/eldery get around without a car" "actually, walkable cities are better for them", a wheelchair user visited the Netherlands, wrote a Twitter thread about her experience, and came to the same conclusion that you did:

Overall, my assessment is this. Amsterdam’s transit system is world-beating…IF you are a young, fit, healthy, non-disabled person who can cycle.

The Netherlands are pointed to a lot in conversations about urban planning and active travel. This is probably why, in my head, I had built Amsterdam up as some sort of mecca for pedestrians, walkability and accessibility.

It was interesting to see the reality.

You're limited in the variety of what you can reach

This seems to be belied by the fact that dense urban areas tend to have a greater variety of attractions on offer than to less dense places, whether than be a variety of restaurants, music and other liver performance venues, film, etc.

To me, this seems like one of those things where the disease is worse than the cure, but people don't realize it. Driving is very dangerous; for example, several times more Americans are killed every year in car crashes (including people outside of automobiles being hit). One could certainly argue about all of the relevant costs of crime vs cars, but at the very least it's worth thinking seriously about, and I suspect most Americans don't weigh them anywhere close to what really makes sense.

(I should emphasize, this doesn't mean I think crime doesn't matter, or people should just suck up having to deal with it, or anything like that. A number of American cities have done themselves a great disservice by failing to do anything about crime, homeless encampments, etc. and having lots of these things in your neighborhood is a legitimate concern.)

This is definitely an under-recognized consideration. This is data from 2012-2014, but in those years the average number of traffic deaths per year in Manhattan was 40. In Queens it was 93. [Staten Island]9https://www.health.ny.gov/statistics/prevention/injury_prevention/traffic/county/richmond/2014/richmond_co_res_fs.pdf) was 17; Brooklyn was 94, and the Bronx was 48. That is 292 per year in a city of 8 million. If the entire US had that traffic death rate, there would have been 12,000 deaths per year, rather that [32,000](https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/812246#:~:text=Overall%20Statistics,2013%20(see%20Figure%201). And, no, the numbers don't change much if you add the fifty or so subway deaths per year, most of which were suicides.

PS: I am sure someone will be tempted to respond with a claim about the benefits of cars. Please don't, because I agree with you about the benefits. I merely am noting that traffic deaths is "an under-recognized consideration", not that, on balance, the costs outweigh the benefits.

They're not "under-recognized" because we hear about it them the time. Former NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio spent years pushing his "Vision Zero Action Plan" and his replacement Eric Adams has been banging on about it too.

It is underrecognized as a** cost of driving **. Obviously, "it would be sound public policy to reduce traffic deaths" is a common sentiment

I believe you underestimate the side effects of the cure. Cars are a tremendous tool for personal freedom with all that entails. Making their ownership less common means curtailing exit rights for many, and placing more control in the hands of those that manage both public transport and the restrictive legislation that is supposed to enable this urban planning.

How much freedom do those cars provide to children, anyone with a disability that prevents them from driving, people who are too old to drive safely, or anyone for whom a car is a significant expense? Or even someone who just dislikes driving? Who gets to experience those exit rights when housing is so expensive?

Cars are still entirely dependent on the government decides to do. Where roads go, when roads are closed, how lights and signs are used to direct traffic flow, road maintenance, etc. I'm all for freedom, but heavily-subsidized "freedom" is a contradiction in terms and an illusion. Dense, walkable, urban environments with a mix of things are what people created spontaneously. Car-dependent suburban sprawl is what the top-down planners created over the past 70 years.

Yes, cars provide some benefits. They also have a lot of costs.

Even for adults with a driving licence, cars only provide freedom in an environment designed for it. That cars provide the illusion of freedom because of an extensive system of government roads is trite, and that the US does not collect enough in gas taxes to fund state highways is well-known. That private car use is associated with an extensive system of licensing and enforcement that is the main cause of negative interactions between government employees and non-career-criminal citizens is also well-known - the "cars are freedom" brigade claim that this enforcement is a tyrannical imposition on them by Blue Tribe car-haters, but when you relax it people start dying.

The bigger issue is parking. A car is a very good way of moving 1-4 people, with luggage, exactly when they want, with the people having full control over their in-journey environment; but only if the journey is from one parking space to another and only if the second parking space is vacant at the time the car gets to it. Driving in London simply doesn't create the sense of freedom that the open road does - partly because of the traffic, but mostly because you can't park anywhere you want to go. Driving in Long Island, on the other hand (I spent a summer working at Brookhaven), does feel freeing because even when the traffic sucks, you are still able to go where you want when you want in a non-shared space and expect convenient parking at your destination. But the price of that freedom is that anywhere you might want to go turns out to be (to Londoners' eyes) a shed on the edge of a giant parking lot.

Delivering enough parking that driving feels freeing requires YUUGE government intervention. Parking mandates are by far the most consequential piece of American land use regulation. Parking scarcity is the main stated reason for NIMBYs NIMBYing.

Even in rural areas, it isn't the people who ruin the popular beauty spots, it's the parked cars. The open road is fun, but when anywhere you might want to stop turns into a battle for a spot, it kills the experience. The only serious crash I have been in was while circling for parking at Old Faithful in Yellowstone National Park - Yellowstone has already crossed the "visiting the popular bits is unpleasant because parking" threshold and they need to do what Zion or Disney have already done and put the parking lots at the gates and campgrounds and move people round the sites on park transit.

Above a certain population density (and most European and 1st-world Asian cities with metro area populations > 1 million get there), frequent, ubiquitous, clean public transport can provide the sense of freedom that private car ownership does for American suburbanites. It can also cover its operating costs at the farebox if people want it to (only London does this - in other countries local voters have more power, and trying to cover the operating costs of public transport with farebox revenue in dense cities is about as popular as trying to cover the cost of rural roads with gas taxes would be in Red Tribe America). Urban transport in large cities is a solved problem. (So is rural transport - buy a car!)

The interesting question is why the US is unable to adopt the solution outside New York. Clearly the issue is something to do with crime and anti-social behaviour - if American public transport is as unpleasant as motteposters say it is, then I wouldn't want to ride it. In the unlikely event that public transport in Houston suddenly became as clean and crime-free as public transport in Seoul or Taipei, I would happily bet on people being willing to use it, kicking off a virtuous circle of ridership, investment, and supportive land-use changes until 20-30 years later Houston was one of the world's great transit cities.

The real reason Americans don’t use mass transit is not because it’s full of unwashed, mentally ill criminals being creepy weirdos. It’s because mass transit takes forever to get anywhere, and Americans are impatient and rich.

Why can’t Houston build up its mass transit system to where it’s as efficient as NYC? Partly it’s population density- Houston sprawls more, so you’d need many more stops per person to achieve the same coverage. And of course, no one wants a bus stop in their backyard or adjacent to their business. Rich people want bus stops a few miles from the entrance to their neighborhood, so they can go pick up the maid in five minutes, but not so close that it’s easy for poor people who aren’t employed there to get in. Of course, people rich enough to afford an adequate number of cars but not rich enough to afford a maid want no bus stops near their neighborhoods, and in fact are often opposed to sidewalks between bus stops and their neighborhoods. This isn’t so much due to concerns about serious crime as it is concerns about poor people showing up looking for a handout, and littering while they’re here.

Business owners want bus stops located conveniently in front of someone else’s business, not so much because of crime concerns- people taking the bus are understood as working poor who are unlikely to assault or steal- but because they’re assumed to litter and smoke(cigarettes) while looking like they’re loitering, which turns off paying customers and makes it harder to monitor the security situation.

So you’ve got huge swathes of the city where it’s politically impossible to build bus stops, alongside the city needing more of them. Now let’s add in that Americans who vote are rich and can afford cars, especially in Houston where the working poor who actually need to have convenient bus access to the city have extremely low rates of political participation. Now let’s add in that American cities are notorious for fiscal mismanagement and cost overruns in a way Tokyo and London aren’t, and nearly all of them have massive unfunded liabilities to begin with. Finally, if the city is highly reliant on public transit, it’s going to face negative PR in the event of a mass disaster(and Houston suffers from hurricanes)- either the media will be mad at the city for not letting bus drivers evacuate, or it’ll be mad at the city for canceling bus routes that people in Houston have now come to depend on.

What? Rich people pick up their maids in cars? Is this actually a thing?

From the bus stop, not from section 8.

I know, but still.

And people keep denying it when I claim YIMBY and anti-car pro-densification urbanists are the same people.

Following on from my previous post, one obvious implication is that self-driving cars are a game-changing technology for cities in the way that trains (enabling commuter suburbs) and cars (enabling sprawl) were. The success of Uber in cities like New York and London suggests that it is the parking problem that stops people driving into dense urban cores, not the traffic problem. What does an optimised-for-actually-existing-people downtown look like where unregulated car use gets you dense urban places linked by bumper-to-bumper queues of slow moving cars that never actually need to park? What does a sprawl suburb look like if every non-residential land use no longer needs a parking lot larger than the building? If the history of the train and the car is anything to go by, it will take 50+ years to get this right and we will make city-ruining mistakes in the interim.

I can prove to you this way walking is bad too.

Surely, you must think walking is great - you can get to where you need to be, using only your feet! But what use the walking is to the toddlers, the disabled, the people who are so old or ill that they cannot walk? Or even someone who just hates to walk? What if it rains or snows outside? You could slip and fall and break your leg! And the medical costs after that would be horrendous!

Also, what about shoes - they are not free to, and in most places it is not safe to walk barefoot! Some people can not afford expensive shoes! And active walking ruins most of them in mere years. What if there's hot and sunny day? You'd need to bring a hat (more expenses!) and a sunscreen and possibly sunglasses, and maybe also a bottle of water, or you risk a heat stroke. It's not a simple business.

And then there are government regulations to consider too. You can't just walk where you want. There are traffic lights, and most of every street is allocated to cars, you can not walk there without the risk of being killed (and fined). You are confined to a small area on the sidelines. Some of them may also be closed for maintenance, etc. And you can not just walk into many buildings, security would yell at you and demand you walk out. And the walkways need to be cleaned and paved, and somebody has to pay for that. It is clear that your imaginary "freedom" of walking is just a naive illusion brought on by ignorance. Those pavements did not pave themselves, and did not maintain or clean themselves. Dense, walkable, urban environments is what the top-down planners created over the past 70 years.

Yes, walking has some benefits. But there are also a real lost of costs.

"Unlimited cosmic power freedom" is the argument of car enthusiasts. Of course all modes of transportation depend on government decisions/can be interfered with by the government. As far as I know, urbanists don't tend to try to pretend otherwise. And yet even with that admission, most of your arguments are just silly. The cost of a car vs the cost of walking? There's no comparison, so I don't know what you're even trying to do. "Lots of space is dedicated to cars and that makes it dangerous to walk" is exactly the argument that urbanists make, and claim that this situation is bad. And this claim:

Dense, walkable, urban environments is what the top-down planners created over the past 70 years.

Is just so utterly wrong and backwards. Taking something I said and changing a word so that it's completely wrong doesn't make an argument, it just makes you look like you're trolling.

The cost of a car vs the cost of walking? There's no comparison

Compared to utility? There is. How much would you spend to be able to walk 500 miles? How much would you spend to be able to walk with a ton of load?

is exactly the argument that urbanists make, and claim that this situation is bad

I've seen a few cities hostile to personal transport, and it didn't make them significantly more friendly to walk. It just made them less convenient to those for whom walking, for one reason or another, is not the preferable mode of transportation.

Is just so utterly wrong and backwards

But is it? I mean, cities certainly existed for thousands of years, but were those "15 minute walkable" cities? Was everything accessible to a person in medieval city within a 15 minute walk? Or did you have, for example, to keep a large, smelly, expensive beasts to get to some places and to bring some things - or pay people that have such to bring yourself and your things places?

changing a word so that it's completely wrong doesn't make an argument

The point wasn't to make a good argument. The point was to show the original argument wasn't good.

How much would you spend to be able to walk 500 miles? How much would you spend to be able to walk with a ton of load?

I'm not doing either of those things on a regular basis, and 500 miles is by definition outside of my metropolitan area and thus irrelevant to the question of city design. I don't really see why it makes sense to spend thousands of dollars a year on a car if the reason to do so is things that I do maybe once per year, but you do you I guess.

Was everything accessible to a person in medieval city within a 15 minute walk?

Most people did walk, yes. Your average person probably could not afford to take a horse everywhere. But do you think that history jumped straight from the middle ages to 1960? Why not at least try to make the best comparison possible, and look at what cities were like, say, after the invention of trains and street cars?

The point was to show the original argument wasn't good.

The statement I made was true, so I don't know why you think making an incorrect statement shows anything.

I'm not doing either of those things on a regular basis,

Are we discussing your personal life, or societal patterns? If the former, then you are the expert and I have nothing to say here. If the latter, then my experience shows a lot of people travel distances that are not easily walkable every single day, multiple times. How long you can walk - not 500 miles, but how about 10 miles, 20? Can you walk it every day, back and forth, day to day, rain or shine? Maybe you can. I wouldn't.

I don't really see why it makes sense to spend thousands of dollars a year on a car

Then don't buy a car and leave it to people that so see it. I, for example, see a lot of sense and so, obviously, do many other people - do you think all people that buy cars are stupid? No, we aren't - we derive a lot of utility from it. Much more than the cost. I am not sure how typical my costs are, so let's see: https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/auto-loans/total-cost-owning-car - this site says the car driven 15k/yr (more than I drive) costs about $10k/year. Would I agree to forgo all the use of my car in exchange for $1000/month? Not likely. Just a simple calculation - if I only use it twice a day (it's likely more) and I only drive to places which can be covered by $20 taxi/Uber ride (also not completely true) I'm already over $1000. And that's not even counting various additional utility.

Most people did walk, yes.

Did they only walk? Did they walk if they had a choice not to walk?

The statement I made was true

No, it was not. People lived in non-dense-ubran places long before "past 70 years". And people in cities used horses - a lot. So much that there's a famous example of how people were worried they'd drown in horse manure right before the car was invented. Why do you think they had this worry if they could easily find anything within a 15-minute walk before top-down planners spoiled all the fun? Why they insisted on keeping and using those massive, unwieldy, smelly, voracious and dangerous beasts? Were they all stupid?

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How much freedom do those cars provide to children, anyone with a disability that prevents them from driving, people who are too old to drive safely, or anyone for whom a car is a significant expense?

Yes, and why AM I paying for these schools when I don't even have any children?

All of those people will have friends, family and other important people in their lives like carers or whatnot who will find it much easier to see them and help them because of owning a car. Everyone knows that the dude with the van is everyone's saviour when it's time to move house. That happens on a smaller scale every day. Driving someone to the store to pick up a TV so they don't have to pay delivery. Driving someone to the doctor or hospital. Rushing over when someone says they need you there right now.

So, you know. Probably a fair bit overall.

Yes, and why AM I paying for these schools when I don't even have any children?

I unironically agree so I'm not sure what your argument actually is here.

"If you can't drive, you can at least rely on other people to drive you around" is not what I would call "freedom."

It's more than you would be able to do if nobody could drive. An increase in the number of options you have. Therefore, greater freedom? What, you think the freedom to be able to walk to the store and haul a 40 inch TV back home is of any comfort to someone in their 60s?

How often do most people actually need that much carrying capacity at once? What's the cost of owning a car vs renting one for those specific use cases (or paying for delivery?)

"What if nobody could drive" is a weakman. Being able to drive is an increase in freedom, in this sense. Being required to drive is a reduction in freedom.

More often than you think, if you've ever had to live without access to a car. I wouldn't want to carry anything remotely expensive or breakable on the bus, and I wouldn't be able to carry a week's worth of shopping home from the nearest supermarket while walking -- to say nothing of my ability to bounce around different shops and get my preferred brands of things.

Renting a car and paying for delivery are both absolute ripoffs in my opinion. IKEA, for example, is goddamn atrocious. And food shopping by delivery always runs the risk of nonsense substitutions. The cost would probably equalise faster than you realise, I'm looking at 50 quid a day to rent a car.

And that's only looking at the utility of absolutely needed cases, not taking into account all the things you could suddenly do on a whim once you own one. Visiting my parents costs half as much if I drive as opposed to taking the train. It's faster, I can being back as much crap as I want, and I can choose when I leave and stop for a break when I want. I don't think you can put a price on that kind of thing, but if I had to, it would be high. Driving could cost more than taking the train and I'd still choose to drive because of this.

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Exit rights is a separate issue, and cars are great in this sense; every household should have one. Indeed, a car is also a great lethal weapon, a storage, a mobile lodging – a necessity for any high-agency individual (it's a shame cars are so easy to break into, though).

As for more mundane applications, in reality it seems like there's no stable position of «walk only»; dense cities with fewer cars and more emphasis on public transport encourage greater access to personal transport, self-powered and human-powered, like bicycles, motorbikes, scooters and such. My favorite lazy way to move around is EUC. 15 mph is enough to vastly exceed the pedestrian range and explore other zones, especially if you hop on and off public transport lines. It's really very neat, the apex of small electric transport: you get free hands, intuitive control, decent speed, virtual independence from roads, and it's the size of a suitcase.

I suppose that for many Americans, not even old ones, such modes of transportation constitute an apparent indignity and, crucially, a serious health risk. Nevertheless, in the limit, the allure of the «European» way where living isn't car-centered is clear. Hauling your 300 pound ass 15 miles to Walmart to pick up 10 gallons of HFCS and other trash in your 1 ton pickup truck is... freedom in some sense, and shouldn't be made inaccessible; but it's also clearly grotesque. There is vastly more indulgence than embrace of freedom to ordinary car use.

My favorite lazy way to move around is EUC

It looks extremely risky, and sure, it's far handier to carry around than a 50 lbs bicycle, which does get old after six flight of stairs, but then, a bicycle is somewhat faster and has no microchips in it whose failure means you'll smash your head into the pavement which .. really hurts.

Unforgettable experience, really. EUC wasn't at fault, a white van was.

Hauling your 300 pound ass 15 miles to Walmart to pick up 10 gallons of HFCS and other trash in your 1 ton pickup truck is

What about hauling my 200 pound extremely handsome ass 15 miles to Whole Foods to pick up a selection of organic vegetables and free pasture locally grown sustainably produced eggs? I mean, if anything, my experience shows blue-tribe-coded groceries are available in significantly fewer places than red-tribe-coded ones, so if I'd go to a random grocery store that has to survive solely on a clientele than can walk to it, I'd much sooner find HFCS than organic kale there. Not because they'd hate organic kale, but because HFCS is reliable income and for organic kale to become one, you need a very special populace around which is not present everywhere, especially not in less affluent locations.

I totally agree with this and it’s an under appreciated issue. It basically traps you to wherever the bus/train/subway goes with very few other options. And I think that the ability to pack yourself shit in a pickup truck and leave is something that gives people more power than they appreciate. I’m not stuck beholden to whatever stores are close by, or whatever jobs are on the bus route, or the schools close to my house. If the only grocery store I have reliable access to is the Piggly Wiggly in my “zone” they know they have a mostly captive audience, thus have little reason to keep quality high or prices low. If I can only get jobs along the bus routes or near my home, the employers get a bit of leverage because they might well be the only people employing my skills within that zone. If I’m a specialist, and want to quit but don’t have a car, it’s a bit of friction, and thus the employees aren’t able to get good wages.

The metric "walking time to the nearest supermarket" I'm sure correlates closely to rate of property crimes. Where I live, homeless encampments tend to spring up close to grocery stores. These things are related.

Were the relationship all that strong, then NYC's crime rate would be much higher than it is

Distinguish two questions.

First, is statistical discrimination instrumentally useful? That is, can I use statistical discrimination to accomplish some goal? Does statistical information about demographic groups let me make predictions at a rate greater than chance? It seems to me, as you note, the answer is clearly yes. If I have some information that P(A|B) > P(A|C) I can use the distinction between B and C as a discriminator to predict A. How powerful or accurate those predictions will be, how much better than chance I can do, depends on the relative difference between P(A|B) and P(A|C).

Second, is statistical discrimination just? When I make judgements about an individual on the basis of demographic groups they belong to, am I doing something morally impermissible? I think statistical discrimination is hard to justify from the perspective of an individualist system of ethics. After all, it almost definitionally involves judging how individuals ought to be treated by actions that other members of their demographic groups have done, rather than anything they have done.

I suspect part of what motivates a rejection of the instrumental utility of statistical discrimination is a belief that instrumental utility would imply moral permissibility. I expect the reasoning (not necessarily consciously) proceeds something like:

1. If some piece of information has instrumental utility, then it is morally permissible to act on it.

2. It would be morally impermissible to act on certain kinds of statistical information.

3. Therefore that information must not have instrumental utility.

I think the better answer is to deny (1), that all information which is instrumentally useful is therefore morally permissible to act on.

I think the better answer is to deny (1), that all information which is instrumentally useful is therefore morally permissible to act on.

Yes, this is the stance that I take. I think it's very uncomfortable for many people, though, because it implies that there is a cost to non-discrimination. You (the general you) will be making poorer choices because you can't take advantage of all the available information.

This is related to Robin Hanson's recent ideas about the sacred, specifically that sacred things cannot be traded off against non-sacred things. Non-discrimination is sacred. Admitting that there is a cost to it is profane and suggests there would be circumstances in which it was permissible to immorally discriminate when the cost of non-discrimination is too high.

An example I was fond of, about 15 years ago, which I have rarely ventured to trot out in the last decade: taxi cabs. They drive like assholes, in a rush, making last minute ill advised lane changes and turns with minimal signaling.

You’re a soccer mom driving a minivan full of kids down a 50 mph boulevard, from the suburbs going to the grocery store. You see a yellow car at a cross road, inching forward, obviously desperate to turn in front of you. Do you treat it like a taxi cab and take extra caution? Of course you don’t, bigot! You shouldn’t cross the street at 3am to avoid a thuggish man either!

Why can’t these people just fuck off and leave everybody alone? If you want to live by a grocery store, then do it. If people want to live in suburbs, then let them.

Stop trying to impose your pet ideas on everybody else.

"Seattle" is in the title of the article. This is about a city, not the suburbs.

The article is vague about suggestions but they include

In some neighborhoods, including Loyal Heights, Mid-Beacon Hill, and South Park, walkability is one well-placed library or grocery store away.

and

Blocks with 15-minute walking access to basic amenities extend far beyond the boundaries of the “Urban Villages” targeted in Seattle’s previous Comprehensive Plans. These pockets of walkability could be the starting point for targeting more inclusive growth across the city.

The former seems to be suggesting some targeted commercial zoning (or perhaps just encouraging commercial use on land where it's already allowed) while the latter is suggesting allowing more housing to be built within 15-minutes walk of a grocery store.

If you want to live by a grocery store, then do it.

Only works if there's places where it's legal to build housing near grocery stores / grocery stores near housing.

I can't get over how US-centric that discussion is. I live within literally two minutes of a supermarket and it doesn't attract a homeless encampment. Probably because there's nowhere to camp at - if it's in a walkable neighborhood it doesn't have a humongous parking lot around it. I also live within literally two minutes of a metro station, and while its air curtains attract some homeless in winter, they don't go around committing crimes.

I live within literally two minutes of a supermarket and it doesn't attract a homeless encampment.

Same. For myself, I blame winter: If you don't spend several days a year in a heated shelter of some sort, you'll simply die. The death rate due to exposure is around 1.5/100k/yr (not counting starlight tours), or about a quarter of the murder rate. Those numbers have to be taken with a grain of salt: They aren't perfectly tabulated, they include ones caused by bad resources (eg. homelessness) as well as bad skills (eg. driving into a ditch), and they are what's happening after the mitigation measures have been put in place.

That's not to say there aren't any homeless encampments here; they do exist, but they take a lot of resources to build (insulation, shelter, heat), and don't receive support from the government or NGOs (see 1, 2). IIRC, the biggest ever was ~100 people and it was practically the entire city's unsheltered homeless population.

In the US I live within easy walking distance of a supermarket while carrying groceries by hand in a not particularly wealthy city(as in, section 8 on the same street) with a slightly above average crime rate. There’s no homeless encampment here despite abundant space for one because the police do their jobs and clear them out, nor are there random crazy people doing drugs and harassing people in broad daylight because the police don’t tolerate such behavior. Even in the US, this discussion doesn’t cover broad swathes of the country.

I live within literally two minutes of a supermarket and it doesn't attract a homeless encampment.

I'm in the United States and live within two minutes of a grocery store and lack a homeless encampment. Something that had started to look like one started to pop up in a nearby park last summer and it was broken up by a combination of police, park rangers, and social workers. Tolerating homeless encampments in areas of cities that should be desirable is entirely a policy decision, not some brute fact of how population density works.

Not just US centric but specifically the most rabidly left-wing parts of the US.

I know I'm starting to sound like a broken record on this particular topic but the things @ChestertonsMeme are complaining about are not universal or even "American" problems they are "this is what happens when you let wealthy academic types who are completely divorced from ground level reality run the show" problems.

The Red Tribe solution to "I need a vehicle to shop" is stereotypically a truck, is it not? It's certainly not to design the world around the limits of a human on foot.

The Red Tribe solution to "I need a vehicle to shop" is stereotypically a truck, is it not?

In more rural areas? certainly. You might only be going to the store once a month because it's an hour drive there and an an hour drive back and you're only going to do it once or twice a month. Accordingly you need to haul all your shit in one go plus what ever your neighbors need picked up as well hense the popularity of pick-ups and deep-trunked sedans in comparison to other vhehicles. Meanwhile Red tribers who live in town typically drive hatchbacks like anyone else.

That said, I think @hydroacetylene's on to something below when they get into the psychology of the two tribes.

The red tribe solution to ‘I need a vehicle to shop’ is ‘well get you a vehicle’. The blue tribe solution is ‘we need to rearrange the city so you don’t need one’.

This says something about the psychology of the two tribes.

Which one shows greater will to power ?

No one's going to dedicate their life mission to getting cars for other people.

No one's going to dedicate their life mission to getting cars for other people.

Driving instructors. Mechanics. People who manufacture cars? Heck, in a tangential way, my job ultimately involves getting cars into the hands of people to drive them. And among all those people, surely some are genuinely dedicated to what they do.

They're mostly bad at it (especially driving instructors, they can afford to be bad) and only doing it because they're incentivised through the profit motive.

People who want to rearrange the entire economic system because X are almost invariably desire doing away with the idea of profit and subordinating the economy under some system of command and control.

Under such a system, even those who'd truly desire to give people the means of personal transportation would be unable to do so unless the government consented. Y

Which one shows greater will to power ?

The blue but then the blue tribe have also always been the most corrupted by power. I don't think that's a coincidence.

Yes, the blues.

If it wasn't for AI or war, I'd be fairly certain blue tribe would collapse this century due to running out of susceptible human resources to psyop, however, with AIs all bets are off except the ones that says no one will bother to write SF because you could get the same fix just reading obscure internet forums. Things will get impossibly weird.

I live in a rabidly left-wing city in the US within two minutes of a supermarket, and I still have no idea what they're complaining about, other than their desire for the isolation of suburban/rural living so they don't have to interact with anyone that doesn't fit their template of

the guy speaking in Received Pronunciation, with no tattoos, who uses PMC vocabulary and dresses in upper-middle-class business attire

which, uh, if you want to be isolated and limit interactions with anyone different from you as much as possible, may I ask why you also want to live within the city borders of Seattle (or any other city for that matter)?

I'm not saying that I would prefer suburban or rural living; there are a lot of good things about living in cities and I prefer them. The people are, in general, polite and law-abiding. Suburban and rural areas have their own pathologies. The main thing I am incensed about is that cities could be so much better if policy decisions took into account the fact that behavior varies from person to person in predictable ways and some people are net negative for the rest of the city.

which, uh, if you want to be isolated and limit interactions with anyone different from you as much as possible,

The fact that I referred to the hypothetical man as using "PMC vocabulary" suggests that I don't particularly identify with him. I'm happy to live next to people who are different, just not different in such a way that they will burglarize my house, drive recklessly, or harass my daughter on the street.

Others in this thread have shared contrary examples of walkable areas that don't have higher crime, because the police enforce the law and arrest or harass lawbreakers to keep them away. Where I live this happens much less often. The whole concept of incapacitation depends on statistical discrimination - that people who have a history of committing crimes are more likely to commit more crimes in the future. The discourse in leftist enclaves is focused on rehabilitation and compassion, not incapacitation, and the police are basically barred from incapacitating criminals.

In my area the response of urban lawmakers to the vast majority of the troublesome people being in the city is to make laws to try to make suburbs take their "fair share" of these people (e.g. with "affordable housing" requirements, which handily double as a way to increase Democratic representation in suburbs). And at the same time prevent the suburbs from treating them with any less deference than the cities do. Can't make the cities better, so try to make the suburbs worse.

Probably because there's nowhere to camp at - if it's in a walkable neighborhood it doesn't have a humongous parking lot around it

You are not giving the homeless enough credit for their willingness to set up camp on sidewalks, door-steps, and gutters even where that blocks the public right-of-way.

Nor are you giving the dysfunction of U.S. legal and governmental structures enough credit: in the western united states enforcement of anti-public-camping ordinances is illegal unless the city can demonstrate that it has an empty homeless-shelter bed for every single homeless person in the area.

Wow. That is a crazy ruling. That's basically holding that society must provide some form of shelter to everyone, either directly or via land-grants at the location of their choice, and it must be situated within city limits. I thought declarations like that were usually constitutional amendments or acts of congress, not court decisions.

As a heartless pragmatist, I would like to point out that the local prison is shelter, and usually has plenty of capacity. There is also a ton of room for innovation in public shelters/public housing: public office space is not used at night which could double as shelters, public parking space could be requisitioned for the contruction of shipping container capsule hotels, and cheap homes could be bought up and partitioned.

In principle the decision isn't completely nonsense. You can't make it impossible for someone to not commit a crime. So if someone doesn't have a home, you can't arrest them for being homeless, since they have no choice but to be homeless.

However, they actually do have a choice--leave the city--especially since many of them were drawn to the city in the first place by homelessness policies. There should also be (but probably isn't) the possibility of arresting them for bad behavior; if there are public restrooms, you should be able to arrest them for urinating on the sidewalk instead of public restrooms, blocking places, aggressively begging, etc. since they do have a choice not to do those things.

There's also the problem that many homeless will refuse to use shelters. If I had to make a more sensible version of this ruling, I'd demand that 1) the city is only required to have a number of beds equal to the number of homeless willing to use them, not the total number of homeless, and 2) if a homeless person refuses to use a bed, or is sent to a bed and later caught outside sleeping on a street, they can be jailed.

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