US houses and apartments seem notoriously poorly insulated when it comes to sound. As you say, its a small extra cost, and it can allow for more people in an area (even having connected townhouses or apartments) without having to deal with neighbor noises. If you can fit 3x the number of houses into a lot and they have good sound insulation, you're producing a lot more revenue from the house sales as well as generating potentially much tax revenue for that area of land (depending on how property taxing is done there)
I think the trick to that is to get rid of sprawl. You have a lot of people thinly spread out but still emitting light pollution. Move people in closer to city/town/village centers, out of meandering suburbs, you move the light pollution to centralized locations, and are able to leave more surrounding land for rural uses with little to no light pollution.
I think you have this internal representation of what "going to the store" means which is based on the North American suburban lifestyle of doing everything by car. This is not the model most of the world uses, especially not in old European cities.
Right...I've lived in Vienna and Berlin for over a decade (including a wife and child) and we never owned a car, and generally popped into the nearest supermarket for fetching backpack-sized loot every couple of days.
I think that depends on what your trip from home to the store is. Is it a pleasant 10 minute trip on down a country road or in an exciting, bustling city, or is it a 10 minute trip along a despotic road with nothing going on and which screams "cars only! no humans allowed!"? I prefer getting smaller grocery loads more frequently when the store is nearby, but when the trip is an ordeal, you go fewer big trips to avoid that as much as possible. A pleasant 15-20 minute walk to a store is much nicer than a 10 minute drive through an oppressive roadscape.
See another of my posts about road vs street definitions. Note that a lot of suburban wide streets are built that way to meet fire codes written to accommodate overly-large trucks. A suburban town doesn't need giant trucks where smaller, cheaper, more maneuverable trucks can do the work. Combined with ubiquitous hydrants - which have disappeared from many US suburban subdivisions - they are more than enough fire safety for anything under 4 stories. Regulations to accommodate these huge trucks have helped ruin the human scale of streets in many places. Also note that existing old cities have become a lot more safe by using superior materials, installing sprinkler system, etc etc.
Absolutely. There is currently a trend in the US towards smaller emergency vehicles, and I expect that to continue.
US fire truck manufacturers are starting to look at their European brethren (companies like Metz out of Germany) for examples of how to accomplish the necessary tasks on much smaller platforms.
I think we're still a long ways from being able to do away with fire trucks entirely though. Firefighting is a very dynamic activity, with a lot of contingencies that need to be covered, and the 'big toolbox on wheels' model works very well.
See my bit elsewhere in this thread about Japan - small slow streets need less or even no use segregation. Part of the equation is that small streets discourage fast driving, but also when walking/biking on those small streets becomes the 'new normal', drivers will tend to be extra cautious, expecting slow bikes or walkers anywhere
Cars are also super space-wasters. They do nothing but sit for 80-90% of the time (which is one reason why car sharing is making more sense to people). In a lot of cities, especially newer ones built out since WW2, you will find a large percentage of space dedicated to parking lots. Not even necessarily parking structures (which cost a lot more per car) but just free to park flat lots, with nothing going on there.
It's a lovely picture, and it makes a great point. If 200 people want to get to the same place, it's far more efficient to pack them into the same vehicle going to that place.
Now what happens when those 177 cars are going to 100 different places?
I'm assuming you live in San Francisco? As a visitor, it seemed to me that this was more due to the insane car-bus road-sharing conflicts, the inability of Muni buses to accelerate up a hill, and the deluge of 4-way stops.
Nope. Chicago suburbs, actually. But that's how long the buses take out here in the suburbs, and how long it's taken me in downtown Chicago before. I don't go on the buses that often, and this is one reason why.
The buses can have 20-40 stops in those 4 miles, mind you. I don't mean it's all due to traffic.
Then it’s much more efficient to cluster those 100 different places into a few compact areas, so that most of the people can walk or bike, or take the subway.
The problem is when those 200 people want to go to 100 different places spread throughout hundreds of square miles of evenly low density suburban sprawl like a modern US metropolis.
> Then it’s much more efficient to cluster those 100 different places into a few compact areas, so that most of the people can walk or bike, or take the subway.
Absolutely. But there will always be people who want to get to locations spread all around even a metropolitan area (as well as further-flung locations around that area), and while it's possible to build a public transit network to get them there, with enough throughput to cover the volume of people, the latency will still be worse than a point-to-point trip directly from point A to point B.
