i can already hear @kanyewest screaming " OMG you can’t be serious we can’t afford to build such things ! ! ! "
well according to Wikipedia entry above it cost $260 million to build. for reference this week Biden announced a Ukraine / Israel spending package worth $100 billion.
you can build THREE HUNDRED of such High-Five interchanges for the amount of money Biden spent in ONE DAY.
and yet Urbanists tell us that traffic problem isn’t solvable and that we can’t afford to have roads … or a border wall … ( but we can afford to police the entire planet )
the reality is traffic is artificially engineered by Urbanist City Planners who spend more money dismantling existing roads than building new ones because their ultimate goal is what you see in the opening image from Japan where young people walk and old people are euthanized.
i typically rode the bike at like 2AM in the morning and i would take the west side highway which has a massive bike path that was obviously empty at night
i only ever rode a bike for cardio never for transportation
well, i used it for transportation when i was 15 but never since getting a driver’s license
Malls are a good idea in theory. In practice they don’t work because they are too expensive to maintain and nobody wants to pay for it. Shop owners always get screwed.
They would be better if there were apartments in them and there were a broader variety of businesses that fulfill people’s basic needs like grocery stores, gyms, hardware stores, etc. People could live there and never have to leave. If you lived somewhere with crappy weather you could just stay indoors all the time and never have to deal with it.
As it stands most malls are vacant and falling apart. The mall concept doesn’t work and they aren’t beinf repurposed into anything else.
i wonder if you still feel the same about this older thread, in which you were clearly refusing to think:
yes i am all in favor of people having spaces to socialize etc. and where one can get around on foot. we can build those spaces in areas that are currently barely developed.
an ideal location would be a space between two or three existing cities where people from those cities can gradually migrate to without any major disruptions with the old cities eventually becoming abandoned, razed and turned into a forest.
but that isn’t what urbanists want. they wan to take existing cities and then literally just destroy roads and parking. that’s it. they don’t want to build anything. they want to put a concrete block in the middle of a road and say it is now a park. literally.
what to build specifically ? well one possibility i have already outlined in my entries in “Ecofascist Utopia” subforum:
but we can also go with a less radical idea that you have basically suggested here - namely mall-like structures repurposed for a wider range of uses.
we build a grid with 1 mile by 1 mile squares ( that we shall call hyperblocks ) and in every square there is a mall type singular air-conditioned structure that serves a particular rage of uses as follows:
potential types of hyperblocks:
education / university ( includes student housing )
hospital / medical center ( includes housing for nurses )
office space / downtown ( includes housing for interns and low income staff )
warehouse ( amazon fulfillment, includes housing for low paid workers )
residential retirement ( includes physicians, therapy pools etc )
residential family ( includes kindergartens, pediatricians )
residential young adults ( includes clubs, diners etc. )
all roofs will be converted into outdoor parks for those who don’t like air conditioned indoor space, thus there will be enough park space for the entire city population to use at once such as on holidays.
these hyperblocks are connected by a subway train grid as well as a highway grid. the train ride is 2 minutes for every 1-mile stop / hyperblock with the city being about 20 by 20 miles or hyperblocks. that means it takes about 20 minutes to an hour to get from any hyperblock to another by train and also about 10 - 20 minutes to traverse a hyperblock itself on foot.
most people will rarely need to go outside their hyberblocks
when traveling to other hyperblocks the train will suffice most of the time
highways will be used mostly for large items like furniture and by rich people
in other words we minimize travel time and energy required to travel just as what the Urbanists promise … but we don’t ask 90 year old grandmas to ride a bicycle on black ice and under freezing rain. instead they ride an electric mobility scooter in an air conditioned space.
we build new things instead of destroying things that were previously built.
because i’m actually all for reducing the need for cars ! that just simply isn’t what Urbanists are trying to do. they aren’t trying to reduce the need for cars. they are trying to make car use impossible or as painful as possible. this isn’t the same at all.
even when they add bike lanes the real reason is simply to destroy parking or remove car lanes. it isn’t like people weren’t biking before bike lanes ! nobody needed, wanted or asked for these bike lanes. these bike lanes are nothing more than an excuse to create obstacles for car use by reducing space available for driving and parking.
Urbanists are Communists who care about people about as much as Stalin did. Their goal is to eliminate cars and they only need to PRETEND that they are offering some viable alternative, even though it is obvious that it has no chance of working.
That idea of yours was you coming around to my way of thinking, not the other way around. You were arguing for urban sprawl wherein everyone has to get around using an automobile. I was arguing for more compact communities in which unnecessary driving is reduced. The livable mall is more akin to my way of thinking.
