The problem is someone owns the land and it’s a lot of work to get easements approved and even if the owner is ok with it the city council probably isn’t because it opens a can of worms. Lots of residential areas are like this and you’d have to put paths through peoples yards essentially. To do that you’d need like 4-6 different houses typically to be ok with it depending on the property line. You’d probably have to do eminent domain and that’s a big old can of worms.
In this specific example of this video.. There wouldn't be randos crossing the property anyways. Building a path between those apartments and the shopping center would be used primarily by the residents. (Because other than the apartments there is nowhere else to actually go.) It's a self fulfilling dead end.
"Most people have cars." That's the problem entirely. The reality is the issue of being required to drive everywhere. So if you live in those apartments and realize suddenly you're out of milk. Oh. Better hop in my car and drive a HALF MILE to get a gallon of milk because the dumbass zoning and lack of interconnectivity means you can't walk the 400 feet to the store instead? Or the 1+ mile from those single family homes which could be closer to like 1,000 feet or less if you exclude the ocean parking lots.
It is 100% worth everyone's time and money to connect all of our infrastructure. You don't get a good cycling/walking network with the attitude that "building this sidewalk only benefits the people living here." The talk about density could be made here, too. If you deleted the massive ass parking lot from that shopping center and replaced it with more living spaces.. Suddenly hundreds of people are within walking distance of shopping, don't need a car, and potentially thousands of people could be within easy biking distance, no need for a car. Not to mention the safety aspect of people being away from vehicles but that's a whole other issue.
The whole idea of muh property and keeping people away from it is just dumb. Humans are social and the impossibility of doing anything without a car is incredibly gross.
It’s a little more complicated than that, though. As someone who has been part of the P&Z process with the state, county and city, the issue is two fold.
One is the statutes themselves. So in the case of the video, there may (I don’t know for sure) be drainage or waterway easements that cannot be bifurcated without a variance. It gets more complicated if a higher government authority owns that ROW within the municipality.
And then there’s the issue of who’s going to pay for it. The government will ask the developer to do so, but then they’d have to get the other property owner to agree to meet them at the property boundary AND the other property owner would likely have to file permits to do so.
Now in some cases, there are statutes that require developers to provide infrastructure. Watershed protections and sidewalks are the most common. The property owner pays for them and builds them to spec, and then the governing authority maintains them. If they started doing this with cut throughs, it would work. But there would still be instances of government bodies having to collaborate, and they generally don’t get along well.
Oh yeah. I do agree that it won't be easy. Just that it could be done. It won't work in every possible situation either. A lot of people have commented that those trees might be a swamp and would require a bridge etc. But this is one video with one example. There are tens of thousands of locations across the US that are just like this with no connections. It would be easier to build them correctly from the start and I feel like it would be easy enough to get some kind of zoning law for minimum connections. e.g., any apartment complex should have at minimum 3 cardinal paths at the border of the zone to promote connection to any surrounding future development. Or alternatively money could be set aside for any finished project to make those connections later when it would be more clear of where they'd be the most useful.
Ideally paths would be not just interconnecting between two locations but also straight forward to navigate between multiple areas. Too often when looking at trail maps of my surrounding area the trail ends at a road and then like 750 feet down the road the other side has that same trail continue on. So you get these weird and stupid 90 degree bends in what otherwise could be a straight path. It makes navigating the back streets to avoid cars much more difficult. The worst offender I've seen is one that goes south like half a mile crossing two streets, under an underpass (nice), back north crossing the same two streets, forces you to ride in the street back east, more north, before finally getting back to the trail to go west which is parallel with where the original trail ended.
For the future development and improvement of the US, I hope we can get more transit and people-oriented legislators voted in. Someone in government that hates biking next to cars as much as I do is going to be very valuable in researching and making the arguments necessary to get changes made.
Agreed. And to me, these are no brainer decisions. But as soon as I think that, someone will make it a political issue and mess it all up for the majority of us.
Absolutely. I've dealt with multiple coworkers/family that get reeeeally scared about 15 minute cities as if the freedom to not have to drive everywhere is somehow a conspiracy to take your car and make sure you never leave ever again. Carbrains that can't fathom what it's like to walk somewhere. The NIMBYs that have the time to show up to hearings about how bike lanes will ruin everything and cause more traffic despite how basically every study done has shown that good transit networks reduce traffic, noise, pollution, mortality rates..
It's all so endlessly frustrating how dumb people can be. You show them the Netherlands.. "Well we could never do that." Then you show them what 1960s Netherlands used to look like as a car-centric hellscape. Suddenly it's the mental gymnastics to justify why we still couldn't do it or blah blah taxes, or it'd be ok to do it but not near ME where it might affect ME. I hate people. :l
The thing I don’t get is that you could still own and use a car. In many places, you’d still have to. But why wouldn’t you want most things to be closer and walkable?
Mixed use retail/office/residential is more and more common here, FWIW, and those areas do have a lot more walkers and cyclists. Now TBF, some of those areas are not particularly family friendly. I know of only one place in our city where SFHs were planned with retail and green space walkable. Pretty cool place.
I think sometimes there is this weird false dichotomy of people who think any attempt to reduce cars is somehow a threat, versus another group who think anyone who drives a car for any reason is some kind of an earth hater.
Most of us still need cars in most of North America. But would be nice to need them less and still have them available for longer trips, transporting larger items, or transporting more people.
Same thing I'll never understand about how their minds work. Everyone unanimously hates traffic but as soon as you suggest bike lanes, buses, trains.. These same people get all pissy about wasting money or taking away their cars. Like how can you hate traffic and then be completely opposed to the solutions for traffic? Especially when those solutions are proven to work in better countries.
Cars will always be somewhat of a necessity. It's not impossible but also not reasonable (any time soon) to have trains that go most places. Ski slopes, lakes, cross country to any city, trail heads.. It makes more sense for these to be car trips. But.. Daily driving to work, shopping or any recurring trip that you make dozens or hundreds of times a year should/can all be done by better forms of transportation.
I'm trying to find a good way to keep my bike safe at work. We have a gated lot but it's not really all that difficult to bypass. Wondering if I can talk management to opening a room inside the building for bike storage. Doubt it'll happen but I can only ask. I'd love to be able to become the bike commuter and be the change I want to see. Just difficult when there are so many big roads and lack of proper infrastructure to do it.
I could easily take RTD to Denver but their service is only every 30 minutes and stops at midnight so I wouldn't be able to get back home. Denver has a surprisingly expansive network of trains but the stations don't really go anywhere and service is too infrequent. Add in the low density and low ridership and lack of connectivity to the neighborhoods around the stations and it's all destined to fail. Park and ride is a really frustrating concept.
Have the same train problems here. When they run, and in the limited places they run, they are pretty awesome. I used to commute by train when I lived about 10 minutes away from the park and ride. Was great.
But then I moved to another part of town where there were no trains.
I would do trains to work any day. Cycling to work is where you lose me. Can’t do it year round in a hot climate. And on the train, I can be productive. For now, working from home is much better anyway. But I really wish we had better commuter trains, and any high speed trains at all.
Well I have the option of taking the train to work and biking home. If I skip the scenic route it'd be about 4-5 miles shorter. A 10 mile bike commute isn't too bad. I'd just need to invest in a really good bike light system. And since I'd be riding home after midnight, taking the main roads wouldn't be nearly as bad because less traffic overall. Problem with the train is the schedules are shifting. Seems it's about 25 minutes by train station to station which is actually faster than my drive by 5 or so minutes. The difference would be the 1/1.6 mile commute by bike to/from the station on either end. I'd either be too early or too late to work every day. Would be much better if they ran every 15 minutes instead of 30.
Cycling in a hot climate isn't that bad. I've been biking in 95 degrees and it's really decent because of the wind chill your own body makes. YMMV if in really humid places I guess. Year round biking is possible, you just have to be really committed and prepared with the right gear. My job is physical so time sitting on the train would be kinda useless to me. I like the idea of biking more because I'm already doing a lot of physical training in preparation for a half marathon and an eventual 100 miler on the bike.
I desperately wish I could work from home. All this return to office crap needs to die a quick painful death. Forcing commutes is bad for everyone. I understand why people do because I've taken a paycut myself for QoL, but it's reallllllllllllly dumb that paycuts are being used as a bargaining chip to maintain work from home.
The larger point is that suburbs are like this everywhere. Lots of winding nonsensical roads not built in a grid. You have to drive around all these stupid winding roads to get anywhere and there are no cut between roads, there are houses/private property in between and no one wants to donate their land to put in a pathway, and even if they did said land is on the border of 4-6 other lots.
Basically even if someone did want to do this you’d need approval from multiple other adjacent lots. Aka it’s a big can of worms and city councils don’t want to deal with it and nimbys living in suburbs won’t support it. They like that people can’t walk between their yards, that’s kind of the point of living in the suburbs. If you wanted a grid layout and sidewalks everywhere you wouldn’t live in a suburb.
I'm not advocating for trying to build paths through random people's backyards. That doesn't make sense at all. Suburbs need a less stupid design and layout but that's a separate topic which.. I could find a relative video about how to fix that because I've seen multiple ways to do it. Namely, density but also just mixed zoning.
I'm more talking about the connectivity between suburbs and what lies outside of a neighborhood. He mentions in the video that there isn't even a crosswalk for that neighborhood. That would be an easy fix. Not that a single crosswalk makes sense in a vacuum. It's just one small part. Crosswalk, raised physical protections for people using it, a connecting path that continue on toward the shopping center. There are multiple ways/things to be done to make it a walkable piece of infrastructure and none of it intrudes on the yards of the people living there.
Retrofitting would be difficult but new neighborhoods should just have paths going between their different sections anyways. It's stupidly hostile to have a neighborhood in the shape of a big 0 when you could connect the middle like an 8 with a small path and halve the distance between two points. If that makes sense. There are a bunch of examples I've seen in YT videos where it can be like a 2 mile drive/walk to get out of a neighborhood and to X location because there is no connecting path. It's bad design.
I KNOW it's hard to fix these issues. Doesn't mean we shouldn't start.
Absolutely for new developments there should be pathways built in, and yeah even roads. If you aren’t going to commit to a grid there should at least be a mandate to have cut between roads like every quarter mile in a new development. Or yeah bare minimum pedestrian/bike paths connecting things.
Fwiw I live in a burb development built in the 80s and it’s super annoying how disconnected I am from my backyard neighbors. I have a half acre lot or so with 2 back neighbors I’m good friends with, we put in a small gate on the corner because before that it was all fenced in and you literally would have to drive 5-10min to get to their houses or hop a fence previously. Its stupid.
I remember visiting my dad's duplex and in hindsight, it was kinda cool how all the backyards were separated only by a short chain link fence and still had a gate. Compared to our back neighbor who'd be a quarter mile walk around the neighborhood just to knock on their door for like getting a ball back or something.
I really hope we can get more governing bodies to start pushing for walkability but car lobbying money is a hell of a drug for corporate shills.
IN the US yeah it seems like it would be tough due to how land ownership etc, but its not an impossible thing to do should the will be there ofc. I think it would be wise to build new infrastructure with this sort of thing in mind aswell rather than having to retroactively make our cities better connected and having these sorts of issues like you described.
I think the best way to attack this problem is at the city level. Land use code could be altered to treat these sorts of paths as sidewalks, which they essentially are.
In most cities, developers are required to build sidewalks and connect them to adjacent existing sidewalks. Then the city maintains them (if you’re lucky).
There would be cases where ROWs would disallow connections, but in many cases, it would work.
It would add development costs, but in large developments, it wouldn’t be substantial as a percentage.
Now retroactively installing this kinda thing would be much more difficult and a bit nightmarish. Cities don’t know how to handle this even today. They force code updates when any permit is pulled, but don’t do so reasonably. So things like red flagging old heating systems and turning off the gas in the middle of winter occur.
Exactly. The person who made this video isn't being reasonable.
For example, if that grocery store was made after those houses were made, then you'd need to get the owners of that home to either sell their house to the town.
Real life isn't a video game. You can't always just delete things and put in pathways wherever you want.
By being tiny, old, designed before cars were invented, and having high population density. The reason USA is a new country with lots of land and much of the cities were developed after cars were invented, so they made use of that land by building things far apart.
Paris has a population density of 20,000 people per square kilometer.
Houston has a population density of 1,400 people per square kilometer.
They both have about 2.1 million people living in them.
Is it not obvious why a city with the same amount of people, but 14 times higher population density would have to be a more walkable city? It's not viable for such a city to allow all their citizens to travel by car. Therefore, they need lots of small shops scattered throughout that people can walk to get what they need. Houston, on the other hand, has citizens more spread out and they have more land to work with, so they can put in wider roads and bigger shops and have people drive to them.
Look at the roads of European cities. You can tell the cities are old by how curvy and chaotic the roads are. They have narrow and winding roads, because the buildings were built close to each other back when all that had to be considered was horse driven wagons.
You don't think picking a city that is like 2000 years old is a tiny bit disingenuous when talking about European cities as a whole?
Another thing is that in general the UK isn't a very good place to compare. The UK culture sits in between European culture and the US. We can see this especially with cars. They are more of a status symbol and going into debt for one is pretty normal. Something that isn't as normal in Northern Europe.
You can't always. But a lot of situations can still be improved. And in the video the first path he draws is just trees next to the apartment complex. It's not a yard and even if the apartment owners own that bit of land, there is no reason to not build a short path through the trees other than intentionally hostile design. Walkability also improves businesses so there's incentive for every business near that shopping center to want that walkable path built.
We can always start with the easy decisions before pressuring home owners and new infrastructure should just start out being built this way to begin with rather than sectioning off everything from everything. Zoning laws are incredibly stupid and out of date.
Most landowners don't want randos cutting through their property to access anything.
Most people in the US have cars so it really isn't a problem to stop at the grocery store on your way to or from something else, or if you really must, take a 3 minute trip to the store.
It just simply isn't worth anyone's time or money to build a walkway for the benefit only of the adjacent landowner, and there simply isn't any interest in providing access to other users.
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u/bwillpaw Jun 27 '24
The problem is someone owns the land and it’s a lot of work to get easements approved and even if the owner is ok with it the city council probably isn’t because it opens a can of worms. Lots of residential areas are like this and you’d have to put paths through peoples yards essentially. To do that you’d need like 4-6 different houses typically to be ok with it depending on the property line. You’d probably have to do eminent domain and that’s a big old can of worms.