People Who Live In Suburbs: Classy, Icky, or Dudes?

fwiw there are better ways to calculate density that help to get rid of the 'empty space in connecticut' pointlessness and the 'LA is denser than NY!' challops:
http://www.austincontrarian.com/austincontrarian/2008/03/weighted-densit.html
http://www.uctc.net/access/37/access37_sprawl.shtml

but I don't think anyone has ever worked out the math for paris

so me and my math-y friend who's into this were talking about it and actually decided to ~crunch the numbers~...sorta interesting cause afaik nobody's done weighted density for paris. didn't just do this to prove myself right, we're into this and were curious. (fwiw pretty sure he thought paris would win.)

again, weighted density = density experienced by average resident. regular density = density experienced by average tract of land (which thus gives equal weight to the center of paris and a farm 25 miles away)

instead of census tracts, we used the 1280 communes and 20 arrondissements that make up the greater paris region, got the individual density for each, multiplied that by (% of total region population) and did a sum of those:

http://www.intercarto.com/cms/produits/1473/136/carte-de-l-ile-de-france-en-communes.html

^1300 communes/arrondissements

result:

3 state new york metro area - 36,369 /mi^2
paris metro area (ile de france) - 25,323 /mi^2

others, for reference:
5 County SF Bay Area - 11,956 /mi^2
11 County SF Bay Area - 10,188 /mi^2
5 County LA - 10,200 /mi^2
LA+OC - 12,208/mi^2.
manhattan - 113,534/mi^2
bronx - 69,164/mi^2
brooklyn - 57,181 /mi^2
queens - 44,446/mi^2
SI - 13,000 /mi^2

basically ile de france (paris and the 7 departments that surround it) is 'more dense' than the NYC metro area in the same way that LA is more dense than NYC - the total built up area is more evenly distributed. looking at the density numbers like that isn't completely pointless - it tells you something about the sprawl/land-use. but it doesn't really tell you anything about what it's like there, which is why 'LA is the densest city in america seems like an absurdist statement'. the average 'francilien' (resident of the paris metropolitan area) lives in a considerably less dense environment than the average NYC resident. and paris is 'more dense' in the city-boundary calculation (which is pretty pointless w/ paris...in 2011 the city's political boundary doesn't even cover the central business district. that was my only real point at the start of this argument.)

but as a whole the 'average citizen' lives in an area less dense than the average metro new yorker (but way, way denser than the average bay area resident.) the experienced density gap is similar to the gap between brooklyn and queens.

paris' banlieue is a lot more complicated than a lot of people (esp. french people) give it credit for - includes super dense urban regions, castles, la haine-style gigantic housing projects, boring american sprawl, tiny medieval towns, super rural areas, etc...so there are limits to comparing it to LA sprawl. it's crazy dense. way more dense than any region in the united states.

except nyc.

er, http://www.intercarto.com/produits_image/image_1473_image_idf-communes.jpg

anyway http://thegurglingcod.typepad.com/thegurglingcod/images/2008/02/12/the_more_you_know2.jpg

'LA is the densest city in america seems like an absurdist statement'. should be 'LA is the densest city in america' seems like an absurdist statement.

londoners:

w/r/t greater london, what's the smallest unit for which area + population data would exist? is there a division smaller than borough?

yeah, there are also "wards", about a dozen per borough.

greater london data super easy to find and use wtg uk

20569.71061 in miles

iatee or other mass transit bros, what is your opinion of rapid bus transit as an alternative to rail? My backward ass burg is getting one of these next year and I'm wondering if this is a worthy venture to be cheerleading on a bigger scale.

iatee is better on this stuff than i am but one of the nice things about bus transit is that it doesnt require a lot of expensive new infrastructure

(though it obv does require some new infrastructure)

generally it's a worthy venture to be cheerleading...but it depends on the cost and the location and the ridership projections etc. if it's a 'good project' then it's worth cheerleading for - and but that depends on the specifics, like where the stops will be, what kind of BRT it is (whether there will be timed lights, prepaid fares, dedicated bus lane etc.) a super well-planned rapid bus system is better than a light-rail system w/ stops in the middle of nowhere. but it's a bummer to get BRT as a light-rail consolation prize. still, dedicated bus lanes can be converted to light-rail in the future (is what people say.)

there's definitely a psychological comfort margin for lots of people w/r/t buses vs. trains and building actual transit infrastructure is always better than painting a bus but in the end it's all in the details.

m bise is your burg getting something like this

http://www.geekosystem.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/china-giant-bus-550x205.jpg

haha I said 'and but'

I think I was trying to decide which one to go w/

http://www.viabrt.net/Content/BRTMain.aspx

def the best corridor in sa to try it on...connects our biggest public university, downtown, and medical center

They put a BRT in on the most traveled non-freeway corridor in my suburban county with dedicated lanes for about half the length, prioritized signals, fares paid at station, stops every mile or so, and 10-minute headways. It's great. King County, the next county over and home of Seattle, is building BRT in several corridors that by all accounts is laughable compared to the one in my county. But they are getting light rail online that will take another 15 years to reach up here so I'm still envious.

yeah tbh light-rail would be nice (and would prob improve your life substantially) until enough people *want* light-rail in san antonio and until the city is ready to develop around it, it would likely be really underperforming like dallas'. I don't know a lot about san antonio but transit people seem to think that the brt route is good. xp

light rail is boss imo, I love spending an afternoon just riding the light rail, looking out the window and thinking baout things

http://www.mtr.com.hk/images/LR_routemap.jpg

that's a really pretty map

yah if you go to the original image its like 2400 pix long, it's greeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaattttttt

light rail is boss imo

otm

I think it's interesting that the people on this thread are all 'men of a certain age'...sometimes I wonder if our generation really is a bit different or whether I just live in a bubble.

def a bubble

nah but theres def a generational embrace of transit among young folx in urban enclaves and shit.

makes it easier to ride around on our fixies and shit

BRT is actually just a poor substitute for fixie rapid transit w/ dedicated fixie lanes

not a big hipster community in sa, fixie rapid transit may be a fair compromise

fixie rapid transit has been known to increase hipster density but it depends on the hipster zoning laws

whiney to thread

re: buses vs rail

http://www.humantransit.org/2011/02/sorting-out-rail-bus-differences.html

glaeser can kinda be a clown but it seems like he's becoming the public face of this type of thinking:

http://portlandtransport.com/archives/2011/02/on_market_urban.html
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1969/12/how-skyscrapers-can-save-the-city/8387/1/#/

I don't recommend his book, I couldn't get past a few chapters. article is okay.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/23/business/economy/23housing.html?hp

Sales of new single-family homes in February were down more than 80 percent from the 2005 peak, far exceeding the 28 percent drop in existing home sales. New single-family sales are now lower than at any point since the data was first collected in 1963, when the nation had 120 million fewer residents.

But people are still buying houses, even houses in the suburbs -- it's just that there's so much extra stock that there's no need to buy NEW houses.

also maybe people's taste has gotten better and they've collectively admitted that American architecture has gone completely to shit until you get to ridiculously unaffordable prices, where it's only gone 75% to shit

My architect friends have said something to the effect that they wouldn't live in many houses built after 1970.

yeah people's taste hasn't gotten better, they're just buying shit built in 2005 instead of 2011. but at the very least the construction spree (which lasted half a century!) is on its last legs.

pretty amazing how much the american landscape can change in two decades:

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_payZfX5rZ08/SZT8yMcoJJI/AAAAAAAAADA/gOrL2s-FVus/s1600-h/nat-geo-sprawl-map-2001.jpg

(looking for a graph 2001-2011)

er
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_payZfX5rZ08/SZT8yMcoJJI/AAAAAAAAADA/gOrL2s-FVus/s1600-h/nat-geo-sprawl-map-2001.jpg

really digging my new suburban house

piedmont sprawl on that map is kind of amazing.

cant believe how much shit iatee was getting in this thread 10 mo. ago. him & goole & laurel otm

hahaha u crazy.

like i am generally super down w/all of the people you mentioned, but that back and forth 10 months ago was so stupid strawmen level suburbs full of cakeeating treefuckers/suburbs full of true grit community holdthereowns that i cant even look back at it without going ugggghhhhh

note - i am guilty as well obv

excited to have this argument again but iatee and goole and laurel werent making cultural arguments about cake or whatever!

yeah iirc I tried to avoid making cultural and/or racial arguments and mostly just repeated 'this is economically and environmentally unsustainable and it's not as 'free market' as one might think, the government has always promoted it through various subsidies/laws/taxes' - I don't think people in cities are all cultured motherfuckers, in fact I have good evidence for that not being true. I think people remember me saying things that they think I secretly must believe.

I mean I am actually eating cake *right now*

I must have had ahold of something extremely dank and sticky to have resisted the urge to argue with iatee about this shit back then

dank bag RIP

haha you wanted to argue that suburbs are sustainable?