You also get those people to their jobs so that they can serve you at the Denny’s/Albertson’s wherever you eat and shop.
This is a non-sequitur you are attempting to beat to death. The problem is sprawl not the existance of smaller towns. This whole idea that I don’t know where food comes from is ridiculous, I grew up in a farming community and have worked with livestock, I know EXACTLY where it comes from and it’s not the suburbs.
I was thinking about local mass transit anyway.
Yes, but they don’t need to be poorly planned sprawls.
Right, I agree with the sentiments in this paragraph. When I lived in my exurb growing up there was no store that was easily walkable, but I did it and I often rode my bike the three miles.
Again, you are defining efficiency very narrowly. Efficiency does not equate to “propensity to use mass transit”. Transportation costs, both economically and in terms of energy, are just one small measure of overall efficiency.
As I pointed out before, teachers in New York City make much more money than teachers elsewhere, which raises the cost of education. But these teachers don’t have higher standard of living, because the difference in salary goes to the increased cost of living.
This means educating a child in New York is less efficient than it is elsewhere. And the same is true for many things.
Let’s try CNN’s cost of living calculator, found here. From that, we find that an income of $58,780 in Newark NJ creates the same standard of living as a salary of $100,000 in Manhattan.
And look at where the differences are:
You’re going to have to work pretty hard to convince me that living in Manhattan is more efficient than living in Newark, NJ, given those numbers.
Or, let’s consider Los Angeles vs Bakersfield: You only need about $70,000 in Bakersfield to have the same standard of living as you’d get for $100,000 in Los Angeles. You only need $69,000 in Sacramento to have the same standard of living as $100,00 in San Fransisco.
And of course, all of those are relatively expensive places. If you move into less densely populated suburbs or bedroom communities, the cost of living drops even more. You only need $43,000 to live as well in Buffalo, NY compared to Manhattan, or $61,000 to live as well as in Queens.
Tell me again how New York or San Franscisco are more ‘efficient’?
And before when I said economics is no different than energy, you said “Yes it is.” But you’re wrong. Clean, no-CO2 energy is available to us, but we don’t use it because of the cost. But for a difference of $40,000 per year, I could buy a new Prius every year, and install geothermal, solar, or wind power at my home and still come out ahead.
And how much do they spend on gas? The average car gets about 27 mpg. The U.S. average for the auto fleet is about 12,000 miles per year, so the average American consumes about 444 gallons of gas a year. Even at $4/gallon, that’s less than $2,000 per year.
So we’re talking about costs of living that absolutely dwarf any savings in energy. With that savings, you could charge suburban dwellers a 100% surcharge on all their energy and use it to buy carbon offsets or pay to subsidize higher-cost alternative energy, and their standards of living would still be much, much higher.
And cities often put extra stress on water supplies, downstream effluvients are harder to manage, waste disposal is more difficult, and the concentrated pollution requires much higher ‘clean air’ standards that contributes to overall cost of the auto fleet.
That’s it? That’s your entire argument? There’s more cars?
What about waste disposal? Water usage, pollution, effluents? Soil contamination? Air pollution coming from non-transportation sources? What about disease rates, sewage, heat, electricity use? Are you seriously just looking at car ownership?
If that’s the only problem you can think of, just tax the hell out of cars, toll all highways (I actually would be in favour of this), and raise taxes on gas, and that answers the OP. But, wow, I was hoping you had more than just “they own more cars.” That doesn’t prove much.
I don’t have numbers to crunch, but from a strictly energy and resource consumption point of view, it seems intuitive to me that dense cities have to be more efficient. Everything is more compact and centralized. Less reliance on automobiles. Economies of scale. Etc, etc.
“Efficient” does not equate to “high standard of living” however. A college dorm is highly efficient too. So is a prison or an Army baracks.
Basically the economics is such that your cost per sq ft decreases at a faster rate than your transportation and other costs increase as you move futher out from the city. IOW, as you move out of the city, lower housing costs and greater space in exchange for a little longer commute time makes the suburbs a desirable alternative, in spite of the higher transportation costs.
You want to talk about inefficiencies of cities. Fair enough. Lets start with New York and compare it to my area.
A local suburb near my office needed additional water so they drilled a well and built a water tower. I watched them do it over the space of a month. The tower cost about $350,000 plus another 100,000 to connect the system.
New York is on it’s third water tunnel, started in 1970 at a cost of $6 billion dollars. It’s 60 miles long. That’s just to get the water TO New York. Once it gets there, you have to add water tanks /pumps to manifold the water to the top of the building. It is a kingdom of extra water towers fed by 3 massively expensive water systems.
Los Angeles pulls its water from 2 aqueduct systems. One is 223 miles long with 500 miles of roads and the other is 137 miles long. Add the same extra plumbing needed for water pressure in buildings.
Atlanta’s “efficient” use of space is 30 miles away from their water source and it’s going dry.
Lets look at another efficient use of space, New York’s trash disposal. They spend over [$70 a ton](A new barge and rail system intended to reduce trash hauling by truck within the city by 3.5 million miles) and almost half of that is transportation. It all has to move out on a combination rail/barge system. We bury our garbage locally at $33/ton.
Everything in a city cost more because it’s dragged all over hell’s half acre to get it there. Once the city is established, there is no simple way to alter utilities. It’s all a big, industrial sized waste of money and you see it all the time. Look at Boston’s “big dig”. A $22 billion dollar clusterfuck of money poured down a rat hole because they are landlocked by their own infrastructure.
What about taxis that run 24/7 to move you from place to place? My car sits in the garage when I’m not using it. Your taxi has to position to/from your pickup and destination point. More miles are driven for a given task.
So you are comparing the water needs of a suburb consisting of maybe a few tens of thousands of people with the water needs of a city of 8 million people? And your conclusion is that your suburb is more efficient in it’s water use?
If the population of New York City had the same density of Phoenix, AZ, it would require an area of 2800 square miles. Or IOW an area greater than the entire state of Deleware covered with this. How many water towers would such an area require? How many pumps? How many miles of pipes to distrubute it? Where would the water come from?
Again, flawed logic. You think because a single taxi uses more gas than your car which sits idle in the garage or parking lot 90% of the time, you are more efficient. You are not. A taxi is constantly in motion picking people up and dropping them off. Many cities have Zipcars where people can rent cars for a few hours when they need them and then return them so the next person can use them. IOW, these taxis and Zip cars can take the place of many times their number in personal automobiles.
To compare efficiencies, you need to compare the resources being used by two groups of the same number of people. Yes, in absolute terms, NYC uses more resources than Jerkwater USA. But Jerkwater USA can’t support 8 million people.
Yes, I’m comparing the water needs of 8 million people. My conclusion is that high density communities require greater resources per person. In this case 8 million people require a third water tunnel, that’s been under construction for 39 years, at a cost of $750 per person compared to a suburban water tower that cost $15 per person (built in a month). Without factoring in the individual building water towers, extra pumps and manifolds found in an apartment that’s a difference of $735 per person. I also didn’t figure in the carbon footprint of a work project that’s 39 years old. When you apply the difference times 8 million people you have wasted $5.9 BILLION dollars. That money could have been spent on environmental projects.
It would require $735 per person less and 39 years less construction time. The water would be pulled locally because the population density wouldn’t outstrip geographic location.
NYC uses more resource dollars per person. It it an environmental pig requiring more resources to support it. The individual carbon footprint is greater because there are fewer trees per person. This means less carbon is removed, less oxygen is produced and the temperature in the summer is greater requiring more energy to cool it.
You’re equating space utilization with efficiency and they are not related. The higher the density, the farther you have to go to get resources. Everything costs more which means fewer dollars available for environmental concerns. In the case of NY, they spent $735 per person more ($5.9 billion dollars) for water than a comparable suburb would have and that could have purchased a nuclear power plant.
Whoa there, Chief. Lake Lanier supplies the entire Metro Atlanta area, which happens to be 90% suburbs (of the 5.5 million people in the metro, only a half million are actually in the city). The reason it’s going dry is because there was absolutely no oversight or control of building permits out in the suburbs, which for 20 years have been churning out cookie-cutter developments as fast as they could get crews on the land.
There might exist a worse example you could have chosen to support your argument, but darned if I can think of what it might be.
The reason it’s going dry is because Atlanta is pulling water from 30 miles away instead of using local resources. It has grown too large to support itself and that’s why I used it as an example of the inefficiencies of cities. The larger they get, the further away the resources get.
I don’t think you’re grasping that when you’re talking about “Atlanta” you aren’t even talking about a city. “Atlanta”, the metro area currently experiencing water problems, is 90% suburban and one of the worst examples of textbook sprawl in the nation. “Atlanta” is not 30 miles away from its water source… the Chattahoochee river runs right through the heart of the metro, and no more than 5 miles from downtown proper. The actual and precise city of Atlanta has grown well within the bounds of its resources. I’m not sure where you’re getting your information, but it’s wrong.
trying to separate the metro area from downtown makes your argument worse. If “metro Atlanta” built to the denser city footprint you would have an even bigger mess. The denser a city gets, the more dependent it becomes on distant resources. It is an ecological inefficiency.
Your conclusion is wrong. You are comparing the needs of 8 million people in a centralized location against a few thousand people in one suburban subdivison. You need to compare it against the entire freakin state of New Jersey (pop about 8 million). Read this instead.
“New York City, for example, turns out to be the most energy efficient place in America. Yes, it houses 8.2 million citizens, and uses an enormous amount of energy to do so. Its electrical load, more than 12,000 megawatts, is as large as all of Massachusetts. Yet because the buildings are dense and thus more efficiently heated and cooled, and because 85 percent of all trips in Manhattan are on foot, bike, or transit, New York City uses dramatically less energy to serve each of its citizens than does a state like Massachusetts. Indeed, it uses less energy, on a per capita basis, than any other state in America. When one considers that another 750,000 commuters also enter New York every day to work, and use large amounts of energy in their daily business there but don’t even count in the per capita energy calculation, the city’s efficiency performance is even more remarkable.”
Well then. You don’t have a computer for a week and look what happens.
I doubt this will do anything to change the course of this thread, as urban and suburban chauvinism seem to run pretty deep, but this thread has gotten a bit off-topic. I really didn’t want this to turn into “the suburbs are teh suxxors” “nuh-uh, the city is” “nuh-uh” “yeah-huh” but alas, that happened anyway.
So I will clarify a few points, and ask some questions, if anyone is still listening to me.
This urban/suburban split is truly a false dichotomy. About 45 minutes north of me is a quaint little town called Dunedin. Its total population is around 36,000 people. The tiny “downtown” (I don’t think there’s anything taller than 3 stories there) is surrounded by traditional (i.e. pre-1950) “suburban” neighborhoods, which turn into unmitigated sprawl the farther you get from the water. Downtown and its environs are the epitome of walkable, bikable, charming neighborhoods and I will classify them as “urban” for the purposes of this discussion, for the sole reason that there’s mixed use development and pedestrian-friendly streets. But there’s very low crime and fairly low population density, and the majority of people in Dunedin have yards.
I don’t think everyone should live in Manhattan, but I fail to see why people would choose to live in a sea of strip malls and parkings lots and St. Augustine grass when they could live somewhere like Dunedin. IMO, you do get the best of both worlds there- you can afford to have a large house and yard, but you can still walk to the bar down the road. So what’s the problem with living in a pleasant neighborhood like that? Why don’t people that would rather have a little more room than they’d get in a big city find a small town with a small commercial district “downtown” surrounded by neighborhoods instead of opting for strip malls and 8-lane roads?
Now, I have scanned the thread, so I can’t fully reply to everything that’s been argued, but I would like to emphasize some important points re: walkability. Someone brought up an important point- suburban dwellers are more conditioned to driving their car. Now, I’m not saying they’re all lazy lardasses but just aren’t used to the idea of hoofing it for transportation. Therefore, something might be entirely within walking distance, and there might even be sidewalks and crosswalks so it’s safe to walk there, but the distance seems so huge because that’s not what they do.
Case in point. I’ve lived downtown virtually since I moved out of my parents’ house, and I walk as much as possible (I actually lost 10 pounds the first 6 months I lived here simply because I walked everywhere). So for me, walking for 20 minutes to get to one of the lovely waterfront parks here is a completely normal, weekly occurance for me. Now a friend of mine has lived in the suburban areas of the city her entire adult life, she even drives to the conveniece store that is quite literally at the end of her street, a distance of less than 1/10th of a mile. So we were out at a bar in my neighborhood one evening, and wanted to meet another friend at a bar a few blocks down the road. I just looked on Google maps, it’s half a mile. They even gave a 9 minute estimated walking time. Well, this friend stopped as we headed up the street and said “We’re going to be walking forever, aren’t we? Let’s take my car.”
That sort of behavior is worsened by sprawling areas where people are forced to rely on their cars. In some cases things may be within walking distance but you have to worry about lack of sidewalks and playing Frogger across 8 lanes of traffic. But as someone upthread mentioned, you see it in parking lots too, where people have become so lazy by virtue of driving everywhere they circle the lot to get the closest space because walking an extra 50 feet is too damn far.
Wrong. If the suburbs built like the city of Atlanta, they’d regulate their growth like Atlanta, and they would have only added another 200,000 people just like Atlanta, and there would be more than enough water for everybody in the tri-state region.
It’s the growth, get it? Suburbs could be sustainable if they’d just regulate themselves and organize themselves a little better. It’s not the city plan, it’s the mindset.
I compared the costs of each freakin individual and showed you that just in water alone there was a $735 gap in costs. That money would have been used for ecological ventures such as a nuclear power plant or wind generators.
None of your site figures in the waste involved delivering goods to small shops. In the suburbs we have one stop shopping which is fed by distribution hubs. I just bought a month’s worth of groceries along with hardware/home items at one store.