Originally Posted by
cooker
Backtracking to this earlier post, I again disagree with the notion that a spread out population is environmentally better, because you haven’t factored in transportation and pavement. All those people are going to have to drive many miles to work every day and will likely shop at vast suburban mall with acres of paved parking lots. And each family member will want a car. The net pavement will be many times greater than the size of NewYork. It they stay in Manhattan especially, or anywhere in the city, a lot of those families won’t even bother to own a single car.
And you aren't factoring in the transportation and pavement needed to get supplies to those dense residents. Or the transportation and pavement to get those dense residents to those rings of green belts outside the urban area. Nothing about low density requires pavement. It is the nature of modern lifestyles that do so. Dense urban areas are not islands, they will still require the infrastructure to maintain the inter communication and exchanges.
Further the idea that urban areas can exist as islands in pristine land is not possible in free societies. Without something like a monarch who could declare it a crown protectorate maybe (assuming the monarch wasn't corrupted), but what you describe is precisely the situation that gave rise to the current layout of the cities. In short it is what we started with. And that urban sprawl was started by bicycles not cars. One of the impacts of the bicycle is that it allowed people to move to rural areas outside walking or transit areas and still work in the urban centers.
Originally Posted by
cooker
You also commented on how rural septic systems are environmentally better than old, outdated, urban sewage systems. I’m not qualified to dispute that, but at least the comparison going forward, if we’re discussing what our vision of the future should be, would be with modern updated urban sewage disposal, which of course will be periodically improved.
Septic is not simply better than outdated urban systems, but any current urban system. It is easier to naturally deal with the waste from one family on a half acre lot, then the 1,602,000 people in the 34 square miles of Manhattan for instance (an epitome of dense development). And that doesn't even address the other aspects of human waste, such as the trash disposal. That ideal of a dense city, New York, produces 36,000 tons of such waste a day. It would need to get landfilled in that wilderness protection zone outside the urban area you mentioned... When one adds that into the area dedicated (and not exactly environmentally friendly) to disposal, less dense solutions have another potential benefit. In less dense situations, letting individual homes compost their organic waste would greatly reduce the volume produced by a given population size that would need land fills or other means to deal with.
And those are only two of the potential waste/polution issues made better by lower densities.
One of the few things that higher densities make better is transit and as technology improves its environmental benefit is getting reduced continually.