This video aligns with my experience. The highways around me in the Western Rockies are plowed 24/7 in the long winter but the bike paths end up with 2+ feet of snow/ice on a warm day and upwards of 5 feet in blizzards/squalls and the snow trucks only make it worse. People ride their snowmobiles on the bike paths in the winter. Nobody rides their bike on the highway in the winter as cars/trucks rarely slow down and the wall of snow made by the snow trucks don't give the bicyclists anywhere to go.
Can't even bike safely in the summer in my smallish city in Canada. No bike paths, with roads that keep getting wider with increased speeds, such that the city recommends riding on the sidewalk, and then you are supposed to dismount to cross the road every block. Cycling in Los Angeles where near misses were a daily occurrence felt safer.
My Canadian home town is not even walkable in the winter. You can't plot a route from home to the mall because some parts have no sidewalks at all, and snowbanks force you into muddy snow and traffic.
I've attempted it and a concerned driver stopped to tell me how dangerous it was.
> US-style suburbia is fundamentally unsustainable.
Why?
Personally, I'd like to live in American suburbia and backcountry. No crime, peaceful, plenty of resources and space, safe for kids, and cheaper than urban cesspool. Small towns are fine but they need good economy.
The further apart you build each house the more asphalt, electricity cables, waterpipes, plumbing you need per house. The further you build these houses apart the more each house needs to pay in taxes to maintain it all.
Compounding that problem is that according to the linked videos local governments have been getting subsidies to expand and build more, while the maintenance isn't subsidised and has to come out of property taxes which in most cases don't cover the cost.
"No crime"? Crime correlates to economic wealth, not population density. Plenty of non-urban areas in the US have astronomical crime rates due to poverty and substance abuse; plenty of cities are some of the safest areas you could possibly live in....and you benefit from fast police, EMS, and fire response times. In many rural areas, you're lucky if there's a cop within 20 miles of you and the firefighters have to drive to the fire station before they come out to put out what's left of your house.
In my city, you call the police or fire department and 3-4 minute response times if it's a life-threatening situation. Depending on the severity of a medical call, they may dispatch multiple ambulances to speed response time.
"Safe for kids"? In many cities kids take public transit to school and have access to everything within walking distance of their home. See note above about crime rate. Plenty of kids in rural areas can't leave their neighborhood, or even the end of their driveway, because there's a 50mph highway and everything is a 10-20 minute drive away.
"Cheaper"? There are costs beyond per-square-foot purchasing/leasing. In cities with good public transit and pedestrian infrastructure, you don't need a car. No financing costs, no depreciation, no fuel/maintenance/repair, no vehicle-related taxes, no parking, nothing (also, public transit is orders of magnitude safer per mile traveled.) If you live in an apartment, there's probably substantially less exterior surface area per square foot of living space due to shared walls/floors/ceilings so heating and cooling costs are lower. If you're in a condo association, maintenance and repair costs for the building are shared.
There are numerous studies showing people living in cities cost society less and have a lower carbon footprint.
There's a lot of information... Strong Towns wrote several articles and a book on this, then this youtube channel tried to summarize the important findings into a 7 part series.
The gist is this:
- US-style car-centric design has created cities filled with parking lots, wide roads, sprawling low-density development, and as a result also sprawling water/sewage infrastructure
- High-density downtown neighborhoods produce much more revenue per acre than low-density car-centric neighborhoods. The higher revenue is more than sufficient to fund yearly maintenance as well as pay off the replacement cost of infrastructure (whereas the low-density, low revenue areas can't fund the replacement cost so need to be subsidized by downtown)
- New neighborhoods enjoy their federally-subsidized new infrastructure as they don't need to concern themselves with replacement cost for decades.
- But when it comes time to replace the infrastructure, these low-density areas cannot fund the replacement (e.g. Backus, Minnesota has very low density and sprawling sewage infrastructure; replacement cost would be $27k per resident, which is greater than their average income). So they go into debt
- The piling debt is obviously unsustainable. e.g. Tampa, Florida needs $3.2bn to replace its water infrastructure. It already spends more money each year to service the debt it has borrowed for its water infrastructure than it spends on actually maintaining it.
- Some cities are lucky - they have a growing population so can kick the problem down the road by using new tax revenue from new developments (remember, yearly maintenance cost of new infrastructure is very low, so new developments are net tax positive as long as you pretend like you never have to replace the infrastructure). This is the growth ponzi scheme.
tl;dr Only high density downtown areas are able to simultaneously fund their infrastructure maintenance cost as well as the replacement cost over decades; lower density areas outside downtown depend on downtown's excess tax revenue to fund their replacement cost. But some cities just depend on ever-growing urban sprawl to use the new tax revenue to fund their growing debt and aging infrastructure
These are all high-level ideas and conclusions, which is why Strong Towns' publications are so important. They investigate tons of actual cities and towns across America and show you actual numbers.
I just don't have the time to watch a 7 part series mini-docuseries to "inform" myself. I've lived all over the world (yes, Europe as well) and personally find American suburbia amazing for the reasons stated above.
Americans on HN think that there are no cars in Europe and everyone just bikes in beautiful small towns. Europe has 250 million passenger cars.
In short, theory is taxes from suburbia aren’t sufficient to pay for maintenance of their roads and utilities. Looks fine for a couple of decades after initial construction, but falls apart afterward. Place I grew up in looks just like this, once nice roads crumbling.
Interesting. Hasn't infrastructure become impossibly expensive in the west? We can't even build a small access road to a bridge without spending millions of dollars. Forget about subway, costs like $2B per mile.
May be we should question policies as well as why governments have become so hopelessly inefficient. Yet, we want to fund it with more taxes. No one seems to care and quantify inefficiencies of contemporary governments. Journalists aren't interested. Population is convinced that more taxes leads to better QoL which hasn't been the case lately.
Instead of saying that taxes aren't suffient to maintain roads and basic services, perhaps Governments have become too bloated to serve their populations and administration class malaise has settled in.
Not really. Those activities are externalised to the best bidder. Cost are high because private companies can't make it for less work _and_ because safety standards are quite high in the West (and even then you get some bridges collapsing and killing people here and there).
If you want it "cheap" then you need to apply second world standards and accept people getting regularly killed under crumbling infrastructure.
Yes, yes. I know about the money that is "lost" in bribes, etc. but that's not because the administrative state is inefficient but because politicians are greedy. In fact, one reason for externalising so much to private companies is to make it easier to get bribes or nice posts after finishing public office.
Canada is notoriously mediocre in every aspect of government and life in general. So it is not a surprise that this is the case. Perhaps the worst out of all the developed countries.
In some Canadian cities, no transportation method works very well in winter, not even moving to a more interesting urban area because there's sometimes no way to do that.
I biked to work everyday for 4 years in the Yukon. It gets fun after -40c/f.
But yes, I illegally road on the footpath in winter, being near the cars was certain death if you slipped on the ice. Actually Whitehorse has the highest rate of bike commuting in Canada, despite the cold & dark.
Does it get cold and stay cold up there? It must. -40 sounds pretty brisk.
Most of my winter cycling was in south western Ontario. My biggest issues were because it wouldn't stay cold. When it thaws, then gets cold again there's ice everywhere. It also seemed to cause all of the fluffy snow to turn into a crunchy layer of ice, which is much less comfortable to ride through and fall into.
I used to, but it changing now. My first couple of years it would stay below -30 for a few months. Now it gets up to +10C in the middle of Jan randomly.
I put studs into my tires and actually never slipped on ice once (though I sure have on foot...)
Because of how human populations are presently distributed, comparing population densities of two countries is really mostly comparing how much of each country's land is in truly depopulated swathes. Unless the countries you're comparing are, like, city-states, or oppositely they both lack urbanization, population density tells you very little about density as actually experienced by the inhabitants.
Think of average class size vs. median class at a university. The majority of students' class experiences are class sizes are smaller than average. The average is dominated by the rare classes which are huge.
Likewise, the vast majority (80%+) of Canadians and Finns live in cities or suburbs. These places are far denser than the national average, and occupy tiny portions of the total land area, in both countries. So to that 80% of the population, the density they live in is nothing like the national average.
I recall some figure that 90% of the Canadian population lives in a thin band extending a few hundred miles north of the US border. So average population density is very misleading.
The stat is that 90% of Canadians live within 150 miles of the us border.
Over half of all Canadians live at a lattitude south of Seattle.
Most of Canada's population live in the small area between Toronto and Montreal.
What I'm saying is that population density using Canada as a whole is a dumb statistic. Where there's people in Canada, there's lots of them, and most of the land area is literally uninhabitable by almost any standard.
