this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2023
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Suburban areas are usually not linked to urban ones with corridors that support (e-)bikes, so you'd often need to literally construct a completely new set of bike-friendly routes to support them.
People currently aren't commuting in from suburbs on 30mph residential roads, they're on 50-65mph highways. I live in the Bay Area, and there is not a good way to bike into the city currently from either the East Bay or from the North, both of which are where most of the actual suburban sprawl is. You'd literally have to get on BART if you're in the East Bay, because the Bay Bridge doesn't have bike or pedestrian pathways. And BART can't handle that many more riders; it's already a mess during rush hour.
If your solution requires completely restructuring the way we build cities (how are you planning to change the ones already built), it's not going to work in any meaningful timeframe. Our current model of city planning evolved over the past hundred years. We don't have that long to move people to electrics.
Cities are not being designed the way they are (highly compact downtown area with majority of jobs) in order to cater to cars, they're doing it to cater to businesses. Rather than trying to get people to commute in a better way, we should be focusing on what we've already seen deal the most damage to urban business: remote work. That has removed, and will continue to remove, far more cars from the road each day than e-bikes will.
Not a bike commute: no commute.
Our current model of urban planning has only existed since the middle of the 20th century. Only really got started in around 1960s.
I think it's important to point out that it is definitely under 100 years. On the scales of human urban policy it is the brand new experiment. And it is a disaster. And we're still throwing bad money after good on it in huge quantities.
Cities are already remodeling themselves, small bits at a time, to start fixing these issues. There is no choice in the matter here. They have to do it or else they're going to find themselves with roads full of potholes that they can't afford to fix and failing water systems and all those other modern signs of decay growing worse and worse until they basically aren't a town anymore. As someone in the Bay Area you should know this well, because that City both has some disastrous symptoms and is building policies to this effect.
No, our current model of city building stretches back to the early 1900s, and really took off around 1916 when the first modern zoning map was created, for NYC, that set the precedent for how we carve up land around urban areas. But the suburban sprawl that took off in the 20s and post-WW2 era was an imitation of the extra-urban residences of the old-money families.
The creation of HUD in 1965, which is what I assume you are referring to, long post-dates the commute-centric downtown+suburban-sprawl model.
(Have to run, will add more on cities changing/ etc in a bit).
Cities are definitely changing, but they're not all moving in better directions. We need solutions that don't rely on 10+ year infrastructure projects that may or may not ever even happen. City planning will cater to the demands of how people use the city, so the best way to get 2-wheel-friendly infrastructure is for people to use 2-wheel vehicles, so while e-bikes are great for people who are at short distances already, they don't help for people living at medium or long ones (i.e. the suburbs), and if only the short-range commuters change, that won't be enough to drive infra changes.
My personal preference is always trains, but unfortunately that has even less chance of happening anytime soon, and even worse is that in order to grow it requires reclaiming a LOT of land, and the land they eminent domain or low-ball mandatory-purchase ain't gonna be rich peoples' homes.
Ultimately though, they will only stop building centralized, dense downtowns when people stop working in high-density office buildings. Barring that, it's just a question of how we're mitigating the impact of the commute.
We should be pushing for divesting from urban centers entirely, in favor of smaller communities that are walkable and largely self-contained(as in, they each have all essential services within them, e.g. grocery, medical, leisure), with transit that connects them like rail and buses similar to towns in Europe, but that's definitely a LONG ways off.
The federal aid highway act.
The broken modern urban planing pattern did not predate it. Period. The suburban experiment is post war.
The rest of the 5000+ years of traditional urban design were overturned.
I'm not sure how you turned "post-war" into "post-1956" and just erased the 11 years in between, but the 1956 Federal Highway Act did not create suburbs. Suburbs existed pre- war, and exploded in the mid-to-late 40s as veterans returned with GI money and bought cars and suburban homes.
The groundwork for that explosion started much earlier, in the late 1890s and early 1900s as Federal agencies were created to establish guidelines for paved roads, such as the Office of Road Inquiry in 1893, and the Office of Public Roads, and the Federal Aid Road Act of 1916 that established both federal oversight and state agencies for public roads, including interstate roads, which had been declared the purview of the federal govt in 1907 by SCOTUS.
The Highway Act in '56 was a major boon to longer-distance suburbs, which otherwise shared no connection to existing city roads (i.e. rather than growing outwards from the city edge, they could be built at a distance from the get-go), but those were by no means the first suburbs.
Who's erasing anything? Christ man, I said 1960s and cited the 1956 law that represented the profound changes happening then. And yes, news flash, this is postwar. Cut this disingenuous shit.
And yes, it was the postwar era that heralded these changes, leading up to an explosion starting thanks in significant part to the construction of the Eisenhower system.
Stop pretending that the prewar streetcar suburbs have ANY similarities to postwar era "suburban experiment" development. They have no bearing on each other. After WW2, out of terrible fear of returning to a major recession, the entire country instead devoted itself to massive, massive, massive debt spending to build entire whole-cloth developments, to keep the wartime economic machine going. We expanded vast highway networks to encourage longer-distance commuting. We offered incredibly cheap, government-guaranteed, 30 year mortgages for single-family homes. We began the process of cinching down hard to "urban blight" (i.e., poor, productive neighborhoods). We updated building codes with completely unscientific mandatory parking minimums. We made it increasingly illegal to build anything but R1a residential or huge apartment developments. We changed our entire urban model to the one everyone grew up with -- suburbs and strip malls.
And it all happened within the last century. Well within it. Postwar, starting in earnest in the 1960s and only starting to slow down in the last decade or two as more and more cities had the bills start to come due and have realized the total insolvency it has left them with.
You can show me a picture of pretty much any neighborhood in any city and I call tell you whether it was a pre 1940 or post 1950. The difference is dramatic and obvious and I don't believe you if you claim otherwise.