I'm not an expert on sprawl and QoL, but I'm pretty sure sprawl makes it harder to design effective public transportation (among other things). Likewise, the unavailability of effective public transit places a heavy reliance on personal transportation (i.e. cars), and by and large means long commutes in said car. Long daily commutes in a car don't sound very desirable, and probably do negatively impact QoL.
I would definitely prefer a longer commute coming from my single family home with a yard over being forced to use public transport and live in an apartment, and it's a preference shared by a large percentage of people.
Sure, I would like my own single family home, as long as I have access to all the other people and activities that make life worthwhile. Even better, I would like to have a castle in the wilderness, permitting no entrance without permission, with a teleporter so I can instantly commute to civilization.
The implied argument here is that suburban living is subsided by others, while urban living is not. This simply not true.
Just as one example, the light rail lines in my metro does not even make enough in fares to cover operating expenses (which is actually a stated goal of out MetroTransit authority), much less their initial construction or ongoing maintenance costs.
Both are subsidized by unlimited debt financing. The difference is that car-free cities are physically possible to do without subsidy, mainly having a corruption problem, while suburbs as we know them are not.
In particular, mass transit works if the average number passengers per mile is pretty high. The most obvious way to do that is to have a lot of homes and destinations close to each other, so the cars have a lot of passenger trips per vehicle trip. And then to take care of crowding, they can have higher frequency service and longer hours, which make mass transit more attractive, allowing more people to take transit instead of cars. Transit and housing are interconnected.
If you start from a sprawled, low-density city, then light rail doesn't work economically.
Ah, your previous statement was unclear. I thought that 100% farebox recovery was a goal, but it is not.
Again, corruption covered by unlimited debt financing. It’s like the US has the worst version imaginable of all sorts of common things. Of course the LRT is not going to make back its costs if it’s not even designed to make back its costs. The best it can do is to be more efficient at getting people to their destinations than spending that amount on roads and parking garages.
Passenger rail used to be a profitable privately financed business, but they all went bankrupt because car infrastructure was massively subsidized, surface rail was missing its schedules due to congestion from cars, and operators were forbidden by law from charging enough to cover their expenses. Now, the existing public transit systems are subsidized by the government, with a few profitable routes that require a lot of unprofitable routes to make them viable; and a farebox recovery ratio of 35% is considered pretty high.
Also, I have learned not to trust Americans when they use words like “very dense.” Looking at ZipAtlas.com, the densest zip code in the Minneapolis-St Paul area has a bit less than 16,000 people per square mile. I think of San Francisco as being not very dense, and it averages over 18,000 people per square mile; over 53,000 in the densest zip code.
Luckily, using the power of statistics we can get results using only a small number of people that are nevertheless valid for the whole population with reasonably high probability. There have been some studies regarding commuting time and well-being, for example [1], that show that longer commutes impact well-being negatively. Sprawl tends to increase commute times.
Should people only voice their opinion after the people of the world have had a vote on whether they're interested in it? Because I don't remember voting on your opinion either.
Make you a deal: you can live in the type of community you want, and I will live in the type I want, and we won't try to block eachother's pursuit of happiness.
Then we don't need to conduct a poll to determine what lifestyle everyone else is going to be forced into.
I'm not seeing opinions being voiced in this thread. I'm seeing them stated as objective facts.
You're entitled to your opinions, and maybe you're even entitled to your own facts in this remarkable age in which we find ourselves living. But either way, when you presume to speak for others, you should expect to be called out for it. "Quality of life" is a pretty subjective thing
It absolutely is, but that doesn't mean you can't know anything about it. You can research subjective things by asking people how they feel about their quality of life. How happy they are. It turns out that in general, people with long commutes in areas dominated by cars are less happy than people who bicycle to work.
It must be so nice to have the wisdom needed to prescribe everyone else's lifestyle.