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China Planning For Sustainable Cities

Posted by Zonk on from the sounds-like-a-plan dept.

TapeCutter writes "In a BBC article William McDonough says, 'The Stone Age did not end because humans ran out of stones. It ended because it was time for a re-think about how we live.' The Chineese appear to agree with him and have commissioned McDonough's company to create an environmentally sustainable village as a pilot project for the more ambitious idea of sustainable cities. McDonough and chemist Michael Braungart have also written a book on the subject, Cradle to Cradle, previously reviewed here on Slashdot."

41 of 529 comments (clear)

  1. Easy for China To Do by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    China would have a much easier job of planning like this when the people there can't challenge the government.

    In a free country that lived by the rule of law, the people have a right to object and challenge such reshaping of the land. Not in China, sadly.

    1. Re:Easy for China To Do by Freexe · · Score: 3, Insightful
      Chinese philosophy of not given its citizens many rights its one of the worst things about the country, but there ability to do good is also alot greater, I think that this is one of the examples of the advantages.

      If we are all going to live on this planet I don't think we can all do what we like or the planet is going to run out of resources. Sometimes we need to be told/made to do things that we dont want to (Like polution and population control) and china have acted quickly and sensibly on both these issues.

      We might see it as not having any rights or an abuse, but the same thing (just to a lesser extent) happen in the west anyway

      --
      "In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act." - George Orwell
    2. Re:Easy for China To Do by demachina · · Score: 4, Insightful

      " Sometimes we need to be told/made to do things that we dont want to (Like polution and population control)"

      Uh, China might have an advantage in population control now though they were way late in starting, but its my understanding China is a disaster on pollution control. Thanks to central planning and the desire to industrialize fast, they've massively overbuilt coal fired power plants and coal fired steel mills and put them next to pretty much every city. As they abandon sensible bicycles for cars in an effort to catch up to American's in wasting energy and pollution, I think some cities have air so bad its not just a long term health risk, it is an immediate health risk.

      One reason they have so many mining disasters is they mine so much coal. They along with the U.S. are probably the two leaders at fueling CO2 buildup and global warming.

      Problem with central planning is if the central planners make bad choices they can do a lot of damage fast. For example they have almost always opted for economic growth over environmental protection. Thanks to central planning they can grow their economy really fast and destory their environment really fast too. They can also insure no tree huggers get in their way, in contrast to the U.S. The fact enivornmentalist have clout in the U.S., though less then they did thanks to Republicans being in power, is one reason U.S. economic competitiveness is falling while our environment is improving some. Though environmental protection is just one of many, others being out of control health care costs, uncompetitively high wage rates, bad education, and workers lacking motivation.

      --
      @de_machina
  2. IP Laws will keep the idea from gaining traction by rdean400 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Sorry to sound like a cynic, but it's this kind of innovation that our IP laws will obstruct. Someone in the U.S. and the E.U. will get a patent on the very idea of sustainable cities and cause the whole thing to get bogged down in licensing.

  3. They'll need them by winkydink · · Score: 4, Insightful

    seeing as most of there current cities are polluted beyond repair. Clean drinking water from the tap? I guess if you're cholera-resistant.

    --

    "I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey

  4. Sustainable cities? by kc32 · · Score: 5, Funny

    You mean like the ones the Greeks had over 2000 years ago?

    1. Re:Sustainable cities? by Roger_Wilco · · Score: 5, Interesting

      The Greeks are a bad choice of example. Here's what Plato had to say about a once fertile region, destroyed by the kind of irrigation now being heavily practiced in California, among other places:

      What now remains compared with what then existed is like the skeleton of a sick man, all the fat and soft earth having wasted away.... Mountains which now have nothing but food for bees ... had trees not very long ago. [The land] was enriched by the yearly rains, which were not lost to it, as now, by flowing from the bare land into the sea; but the soil was deep, and therein received the water, and kept it in the loamy earth ... feeding springs and streams running everywhere. Now only abandoned shrines remain to show where the springs once flowed.

      (Quoted in A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright. Go read it. A complete English translation of Critas is here.)

      Has it never seemed strange to you that the area called the "Fertile Crescent", mostly Iraq and Israel, is now anything but fertile? It's that way because of too little long-term vision in farming practices. We have been stressing our environment for a long time.

    2. Re:Sustainable cities? by SQL+Error · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The problem in Greece, the formerly fertile crescent, northern Africa (the bread basket of the Roman Empire) and similar areas is deforestation. Clear the trees for your pastures, and sooner or later you'll find that the land has degraded to the point that your pasture is too poor to support cattle anymore. So you bring in sheep, and they degrade the land even further. You end up herding goats, which can live on anything, but prevent the land from ever recovering.

      The solution is to come up with something that does for goats what myxomatosis did for rabbits.

    3. Re:Sustainable cities? by maxpublic · · Score: 5, Informative

      I disagree with your statements, entirely

      Disagree all you like, but it is indeed historical fact that the Fertile Crescent was covered in huge temperate forests, and that deforestation caused by humans dramatically reduced the rainfall the region received. Here are a few excerpts on the topic for ya:

      "Along with its other distinctive qualities, the Epic of Gilgamesh is the earliest recorded story of desertification caused by the extensive destruction of forestlands. Lebanon went from more than 90 percent forest (the famous Cedars of Lebanon) to less than 7 percent over a 1,500-year period. Trees and their roots are an important part of the water cycle, so rainfall downwind of deforested areas decreased by 80 percent. Over time, millions of acres of land in the Fertile Crescent area turned to desert or scrubland, and remain relatively barren to this day...

      "The result of this local climatic change more than 5000 years ago was widespread famine. The collapse of the last Mesopotamian empire happened around 4,000 years ago, and the records they left behind show that only at the very end of their empire did they realize how they had destroyed their precious source of food and fuel by razing their forests and despoiling the rest of their environment." This is actually just a summary of what you can find in any ecological textbook for undergrads, but is reprinted in "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight" by Thom Hartmann, copyright (c) 1998, 1999, 2004 by Mythical Research, Inc. Used by permission of Harmony Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

      Another:

      ". . .Fertile Crescent and eastern Mediterranean societies had the misfortune to arise in an ecologically fragile environment," writes Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. "They committed ecological suicide by destroying their own resource base."

      Jared is referring to the fact that the societies in the Fertile Crescent cut down their forests for agricultural use and wood burning, which ultimately altered the climate and destroyed the land they were cultivating.

      Another:

      "A cautionary tale comes from the arc of land through parts of Jordan, Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and Iran -- the cradle of civilization known as the Fertile Crescent. In ancient times much of this land was forest. The area became a leader in food production as trees were cleared for agriculture, and cut for timber, firewood, and manufacturing plaster. Now the expression "Fertile Crescent" is absurd, because the land is largely desert, semi-desert, steppe-eroded and salinized terrain, unsuitable for agriculture." A summarization of another textbook article by Ann Hancock, who simplified it for a magazine article.

      I can go on here. Any undergrad in ecological science will be able to confirm what I've said. It isn't an area of dispute where scientists are concerned.

      I can't argue you this point, because it's simply not correct.

      You can't argue with it because you've apparently never bothered to do a whit of research on the topic. But I suppose you're more learned than Jared Diamond, or just about any other ecological scientist on the planet?

      Max

      --
      My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
  5. Peak Oil by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I guess China is preparing for the peak oil event. We should be doing that same in North America.

    1. Re:Peak Oil by SQL+Error · · Score: 3, Insightful

      There's good reason to believe that "Peak Oil" is already here. This is it. These are the painfully high gas prices we were warned about. (Historically speaking, gas prices today are horrifying. Ask your parents.)

      The question each of us must ask is:

      What will you do when gas reaches $5 per gallon?

      Move to Alberta and get rich?

      As of now Japan, China, and the EU are dumping tons of resources into this, but I've yet to hear anything about the US government acting on it.

      There's one big problem: There is no viable alternative to oil, even at current prices. But if the price keeps going up, there will be. Gas will never hit $10 per gallon, because even without subsidies biofuels cost less than that to produce. We don't need to dump tons of resources into it, because the situation will correct itself automatically. From the perspective of biofuel producers, Peak Oil is just a business opportunity.

      When we run out of oil, it doesn't mean we run out of fuel, it means we run out of cheap fuel. We use oil because it's cheap. When it's cheaper to use alcohol produced from corn, we'll use that instead.

      This will slow economic growth, of course, but there's not going to be any economic collapse outside of Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. In the big picture, oil doesn't really matter that much.

    2. Re:Peak Oil by WazzTheWizz · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It simply amazes me when Americans talk of gas (petrol) being expensive at $2.20. You guys are practically getting the stuff for free. Try comparing your price with the UK ($7.00 a gallon, pretty much anywhere in Europe or even Australia (where driving distances are also very large). At the ridicuolously cheap US prices, it's no wonder the stuff is wasted in big gas guzzlers.

    3. Re:Peak Oil by ArmorFiend · · Score: 3, Informative
      There's good reason to believe that "Peak Oil" is already here. This is it. These are the painfully high gas prices we were warned about. (Historically speaking, gas prices today are horrifying. Ask your parents.)


      In 1981 the cost of a gallon of gas was $3 in 2005 dollars. See "The Oil Uproar that Isn't."

      So we pretty much know that the threshold for economic shit hitting the fan is between $2 and $3 per gallon in 2005 dollars, eh?
    4. Re:Peak Oil by dabigpaybackski · · Score: 3, Insightful
      It simply amazes me when Americans talk of gas (petrol) being expensive at $2.20. You guys are practically getting the stuff for free.

      Sure, if you don't consider the 400-plus billion we spend annually on "defense." It's a collossal subsidy.

      --
      "OH SHIT, THERE'S A HORSE IN THE HOSPITAL!"
  6. Re:IP Laws will keep the idea from gaining tractio by Scoria · · Score: 4, Insightful

    But the innovation will continue, as China is both influential and strong. They will simply move to disregard both American and European claims of intellectual ownership.

    --
    Do you like German cars?
  7. Boil water first... by HockeyPuck · · Score: 5, Informative

    I recently came back from China on a business trip... I stayed in a expensive hotel... and they warned me at the front desk that I should use bottled water for everything. Not just drinking, but brushing my teeth, washing my face etc..

    If I needed more water for such activities all I had to do was call the front desk and they provide it free of charge.

    1. Re:Boil water first... by Feyr · · Score: 4, Interesting

      not to say that some sources are not contaminated with whatever, but that's not the reason most of the time.

      that advice is usually given to all foreigners going anywhere but the most developped countries. the fact is, the water is not cleaned (if it is) the same way as what your system is used to.

      locals can drink and abuse it without getting sick because they're used to it. your system, weakened by years of overtreated water, simply can't cope with it.

    2. Re:Boil water first... by jag2k · · Score: 3, Funny

      Did you shower in bottled water too?

  8. Separation? by millennial · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Would such a society benefit from being separated from the outside world? Obviously a city can't be self-sustainable if its citizens wants things from outside the city. It seems to me that this concept just isn't practical, mainly because of the level of interdependence and globalization we've developed in the more modern nations.

    --
    I am scientifically inaccurate.
    1. Re:Separation? by Jeremi · · Score: 3, Insightful
      Obviously a city can't be self-sustainable if its citizens wants things from outside the city.


      It's not about what citizens want, it's about what they need. A city can sustain itself with or without access to neat gadgets from Japan. A city cannot sustain itself without water and food.


      It seems to me that this concept just isn't practical, mainly because of the level of interdependence and globalization we've developed in the more modern nations.


      Practical compared to what? Compared to the status quo, where there is plenty of fossil fuel to go around? Probably not. Compared to starving to death because you didn't plan ahead for clearly forseeable problems? Very practical.

      --


      I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
  9. Re:Living by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    As a bank robber, I take offense. I much prefer well-crafted wines to crude street drugs.

  10. Re:IP Laws will keep the idea from gaining tractio by Jeremi · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Yup, you're a cynic. A realist would know that it's the vested interests (real estate developers, big box retailers, and purblind NIMBYism) that will keep this from happening in the U.S.

    --


    I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
  11. Re:IP Laws will keep the idea from gaining tractio by greg_barton · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Profits drive innovation sadly.

    In the case of sustainibility, survival drives innovation, not profit. Or, in the immortal words of Plato, "Necessity, who is the mother of invention."

  12. Re:Sustainable City After Nuclear War? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    China, peaceful? Perhaps you've never heard of the Chinese EMPIRE. They've had several of them. China was a brutal conqueror long before Japan took their own shot in WW2. What always shocks me about the mindset of people coming out of China is that they don't seem to care about truth, or human rights, or even justice really, they have been so brainwashed by their government. Mostly, they're just afraid to stick their necks out, while their leaders bluster on threatening people right and left while they work on assimilating or exterminating ethnic minorities in order to make room for more Chinese people. (For example, look at what happened to Manchuria, as well as China's policies in Tibet.) Lucky for the Vietnamese, they drove out the Chinese while they had the chance. (Vietnam was actually a quasi-province of China for a long period of its history, in fact.)

    For all the criticism of Americans, it is the Chinese who really take the cake for cultural insensitivity, imperialism (in the old-fashioned sense, not neo-colonialism because they're not rich enough for that yet), and disregard for the rights of all people, both within and outside their country. Oh yeah, they're also way more racist than we are, too.

    If China is peaceful now, it's because they know that they will lose if it comes down to a confrontation with the USA. They don't actually have the capability to nuke the USA (they still lack the long-range missiles), they could hit Taiwan but that would be self-defeating; meanwhile they would risk having everything that they've built up in the past 100 years completely destroyed.

    No doubt their space program largely aims at developing ICBM technology, so perhaps a greater threat is on the horizon. One might think that the value of trade would restrain China, but that didn't rein in Germany or Japan, and the Chinese seem quite capable of the kinds of abuses perpetrated by those powers back in the 1940's.

  13. It's a beginning... by userlame · · Score: 3, Informative

    This is the first time I've seen anyone really discussing this. I'm glad to see it. This is going to be an extrememly important issue in our lifetimes.

    Good reading: http://www.ishmael.com/Education/Writings/The_New_ Renaissance.shtml

    And some great books: http://www.newtribalventures.com/ntv/market/catego ry.cfm?Category=11#72

  14. Re:What if sustainability isn't efficient? by bani · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'm with P&T on most of their "Bullshit" episodes, but P&T missed some of the most important points of recycling. You really don't want to be dumping used motor oil, mercury thermometers, and lead-acid car batteries into landfills.

    For the biodegradable stuff, fine. Dump it and let it rot. Or burn it as fuel. Whatever. But a lot of stuff isn't biodegradable -- plastics and glass for example.

  15. Peanuts, soybeans, corn aren't renewable? by jmichaelg · · Score: 4, Informative
    I don't claim to be an expert, but plastic is a by-product of oil. When the oil runs out, no more plastic.

    Plastic can be made from lots of different oils, not just petroleum. George Washington Carver managed to convert peanut oil to plastic.

  16. Ages by Boronx · · Score: 4, Funny

    The Stone Age did not end because humans ran out of stones.

    No, but the Age of Democracy might.

    --
    Play Command HQ online
  17. Re:What if sustainability isn't efficient? by greg_barton · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Penn Jillette and Raymond Teller's (Penn & Teller) great show Bullshit did a great show last season on recycling.

    You know, I really wish Penn and Teller would do an episode of Bullshit about themselves. Seriously doubt it, though. One common characteristic I see in self proclaimed skeptics is that they rarely apply their craft to themselves.

    Sometimes I think they just have run out of ideas and just need to make filler shows. In the case of that particular episode, they were attacking a strawman the entire time. A ten year old could refute their argument. They constantly harped on the "recycling takes more energy" argument, while completely ignoring that lower energy usage is not the point of recycling. Not to mention that it's painfully obvious that, if you put effort into reusing a nonrenewable resource, you will expend energy in that effort. Duh.

  18. Re:IP Laws will keep the idea from gaining tractio by mboverload · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Survival drives nothing currently.

    People are too apathetic and see our extinction as too far off to warrant changing their lives.

  19. Re:What if sustainability isn't efficient? by glaucopis · · Score: 3, Interesting

    And one nice thing about upcycling (McDonough & Braungart strongly object to current recycling models) plastic is that it frees companies from the variability of the oil market. Having a ready supply of pure and perpetually reusable plastics will help keep product costs down -- the grandparent can't possibly be suggesting that pumping from deep oceans or making bacteria produce plastic will be more efficient than melting and remolding pure, ready to use existing plastics. The key is just ceasing to churn out tainted plastics like PVC and turning instead to a model using purer technological ingredients from the start.

    I had the opportunity to talk with McDonough at a design conference last year, and he pointed out that plastic futures were steadily rising. I don't know if that's still true, and I'm too lazy to check now, but regardless companies are going to be looking for steady plastics supplies, and upcycling makes the most economic sense.

  20. Re:Inevitable by SQL+Error · · Score: 3, Interesting

    That could be easiler utilized by small farms...

    No.

    No no no no no no no no no.

    This is a really, really, really stupid idea.

    Small farms suck. We had small farms for about 8000 years, and they sucked. 90% of the population was trapped in back-breaking labour and poverty.

    Now we have big farms. Big farms allow us to use big machinery, which makes farming roughly one hundred times more efficient. The result of that is that I can get paid (by comparison) a small fortune to sit at a desk and fiddle with databases, and never have to look at the rear end of an ox. Food is good, cheap and plentiful because we don't have small farms.

    The reason people throughout the third world are heading to the city (even if they end up in shanty towns) is that small farms suck. Living in a slum on the outskirts of Bombay or Mexico City may suck, but living on a small farm is even worse.

  21. Re:What if sustainability isn't efficient? by patternjuggler · · Score: 4, Insightful

    in my area if you want to recycle plastic bottles you need to take off the lids, remove the labels and make sure they are empty. What am I, the milk lady?... Who the hell has glass bottles? Can I put jars in here? Oh, only if I remove the lid and the label and clean out the jar. To hell with that.

    Wasn't it you that said something in a grandparent post like: "People with no imagination see any change to the status quo as the end of the world. Thank god there's people who see change as an opportunity and a challenge." ?

  22. Re:These kind of initiatives are pointless by interstellar_donkey · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I think it's that kind of reasoning that has kept the bulk of American city development going in the wrong direction. People don't just make decisions based on total cost. If that were the case, nobody would buy steak when a perfectly acceptable and much cheaper soy based meal is available.

    People make decisions based a lot on perceived value, as opposed to outright cost. Many Americans live in a city with mass transit available to carry them wherever they need or want to go, yet they'll still choose cars. The cost of monthly transit passes is significantly lower then the cost of purchasing a car, buying insurance for it, filling it with expensive fuel and having routine maintenance performed on it.

    Despite being cheaper, the perception most Americans have is that mass transit is something beneath them (only poor people take the bus, right?). They see the automobile as a symbol of freedom and independence, and in their minds auto ownership has a much better value despite the higher costs of a car compared with utilizing transit systems.

    It's because of this perception that American city expansion and development is done almost exclusively to accommodate the automobile, leaving alternative means of transport like walking (which is both cheaper and better for you then driving) forgotten or a cursory afterthought.

    New housing developments are laid out in such a way that it becomes very easy to quickly and efficiently take your car to the market to pick up milk, but incredibly difficult to walk or bicycle to the very same store. Is it any wonder why Americans are so fat?

    If we started building cities with pedestrians and mass transit in mind, ultimately the cost savings would be huge for the typical household. But it would fail unless work was done to modify the popular perception that traveling by a car is better then walking or taking the bus.

    So when someone says "People will never switch to environmentally friendly hybrid cars because they're too expensive, so we're going to stick with the internal combustion engine for a long time", they would be better off saying "owning any automobile is too expensive. Let's start building our cities with non-car owners in mind".

    --
    The Internet is generally stupid
  23. Re:IP Laws will keep the idea from gaining tractio by greg_barton · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Survival drives nothing currently.

    I suspect that the average Chinese villager is a bit closer to survival mode than you.

  24. Re:These kind of initiatives are pointless by Zibblsnrt · · Score: 4, Insightful
    (If that's not good enough for you, then freedom really isn't your thing. You're more into tyranny -- making peoples' choices for them, because you've decided you're better than them.)

    Actually, yeah. When it comes to people who see the idea of any obligations to anything other than themselves as evil, I do consider myself better than them.

    Most of those people seem to have trouble realizing that there is such a thing as cost aside from what they pull out of their wallet. And yet they continue to make their glorious, "free" decisions, despite happily fettering themselves in their own ignorance, something which seems to be the rage these days.

    'Cause, see, thinking of anything other than yourself (like, for example, the neighbors, or your grandchildren's ability to hit middle age in their forties rather than their twenties) must be tyrannical communistic doom, false dichotomies also being the rage these days. If it involves any sense of non-personal responsibility, it's bad bad bad!

    Do I have contempt for that attitude? Yes, I do. Am I better than people who trumpet it? Yes, I am.

    -PS

    --
    "All that is necessary for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke
  25. Re:The most important step: by Chris+Burke · · Score: 3, Funny

    Then who was it who told me to kill my family?

    Damnit...

    --

    The enemies of Democracy are
  26. Re:Ramp-up time is key for energy infrastructure by maxpublic · · Score: 3, Informative

    Ethanol is a fool's fuel. It takes nearly a gallon of oil to produce a gallon of ethanol. How exactly does that help anyone, other than farmers in the Midwest who're take government subsidies to produce the appropriate crops?

    Ethanol has been a sham from the get-go.

    Max

    --
    My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
  27. Re:The most important step: by sillybilly · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This is one point that I utterly disagree on. When the chinese prime minister was here, during the Clinton years, and was asked about human rights violations in China, you know what his answer was? He said, yes, freedom and liberty are important, but he believes, to a chinese person, even before he gets his full freedom, he'd rather have an education. That sentence struck me very much, at the core of my belief system, which was freedom above all. But he's right - after all, what is freedom good for without wisdom, what is freedom good for if you don't know what to do with it? I personally witnessed the fall of communism in the eastern block countries, and the fingerpointing, blaming and lynching of each other that starts whenever people free suddenly "free" and run rampant without self control, because there is no longer a secret service that's watching and comes takes you away. Remember the french revolution and guillotines? A temporary fix could be freedom+religion, fear of God, God is watching instead of the secret service, but the Chinese don't have Gods. Yet their culture is the most outspoken preacher of self control - wax on, wax off - remember? Wouldn't inner self control be a much more dignified way to be a human being, than an external self control, such as secret service or God?

    Don't write off the Chinese so easily - they somehow put a stop to the explosive population growth, in a culture that values huge families. As far as sustainability goes, they hold the record - they have maintained a continuous existence for almost longer than any other culture - though heavily violent at first, the philosophies of Confucius and Lao Tzu from millenia ago, that still dominate today, sound very nonviolent and sustainable, even if not perfect - e.g. father as an absolute "tyrant." The Chinese were also not perfect in the sense that they too had an emperor until very recently, corruption, etc., but still, it's worth paying attention to what they are saying. They are not convinced the Taiwanese system that we pump so full of cash and resources to showcase it to them as bait, will lead to good. After all, they know what kind of opium-plague the free market can lead to, that scar in their memory is still very recent. When I see internet censoring stories about them, I'm not fully convinced that it's done simply out of a need to maintain corrupt power, or to keep China from succumbing to the inflow of miseducation and sex-opium-n-rocknroll that you get from the liberated, freemarket, human-rights promoting Clearchannel-RIAA western media.

  28. This is All Wrong by tjstork · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The reason China's economy is growing really fast is because they stopped centrally planning it. Yes they do have a lot of state sponsored works but the real dynamo of China's economy is that a lot of a generals in the Chinese army took their military contract funds and opened up factories to produce goods bound for America. Chinese banks now underwrite this production dramatically, so that, anyone in China can get a loan to start a factory if they can convince the bank they have a buyer in America for the goods that it produces.

    --
    This is my sig.
  29. Re:These kind of initiatives are pointless by vidarh · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Funny. I prefer my one hour commute by walking or bus to the station + train + walking the last distance over the one and a half hour (at best) drive that would end up costing me more. That's what it's like here in London.

    The very reason it is faster for you is exactly that US city planners almost exclusively focus on making it convenient to get around by car vs. public transport.

    Mass transit works well even in countries like Norway (average population density: 13 per square kilometer) - they just don't work everywhere. I don't think anybody suggests that someone living in a rural area should rely entirely on public transport. But vast areas of major population centres in the US consists of out of control sprawl because public transport hasn't been given priority.

    The times I've visited the parts of Virginia near D.C. for instance, I've constantly been shocked at how hard it was to get around even by foot. I stayed in a hotel what should have been a 15 minute walk away from a restaurant, and we were faced with having to cross several 4-6 lane roads and several sections where there was no proper sidewalk.

    This was an area with a population density far higher than anywhere in Norway (where I'm originally from), yet so pedestrian unfriendly and with such a useless public transport system that the typical 5000-10.000 inhabitant village in Norway would have more people using public transport on a daily basis.

    I've never owned a car or gotten a drivers license, because I've never had a reason to. Perhaps I'll get one whenever I get kids, but for now public transport serves 95%+ of my transport needs, and the rest is solved with cabs, and I end up saving both time and money that way. However it always makes it interesting whenever I visit the US (going again this weekend, and will be staying in Palo Alto).

    To be fair, some areas are quite good - the D.C metro was quite nice when I went there, and SF has a reasonable transport system, though it's still slow and inefficient if you want to go out to any of the smaller towns that don't have rail links.

    But to claim that you need "very high population densities" for mass transit to work is bullshit, as anyone who has visited some of the European countries with lower population densities can tell you. Once density drops down you may need to have access to a car now and again, but there's a huge difference between having a transport system you can easily use for 80% of your journeys and not having one at all.

    I also find it interesting that in Europe, most families will own a car, but will still take train/buses/undeground etc. into account when deciding how to get somewhere, while in large parts of the US (outside some of the major metro areas like NYC) it seems that the assumption is that if you have a car it will be your sole mode of transport apart from planes, regardless of whether a particular trip might be just as convenient or faster or cheaper with public transport.

    That unwillingness in many areas to consider public transport unless you are forced to by not having a car fascinates me - it's very clear that there is a social status consideration in what mode of transport you consider in the US, which is much less pronounced in Europe, and that is more important than whether or not public transport is convenient, cheap or fast.