Originally Posted by
Allister
As much as it's fun to ridicule people that make foolish choices, it's not entirely their fault. When residences are moving farther away from the city centres, but workplaces aren't moving with them, that's a serious fundamental flaw in city planning. Couple that with the fixation on the 9-5 work day (with some small leeway either side) resulting in heavy concentrations of traffic during limited times of the day and you can only conclude that we are a monumentally stupid society.
It is largely their fault. I noticed on my recent trip to Scotland just how much smaller the urban sprawl of those cities is than what we have here in Australia (a.k.a State 51). Glasgow, for example, uses roughly the same land are as Toowoomba to house 10 times the population.
The reason modern residences are moving further from the city centres is simply because it's what people want. They want this whole ideal of "living on an acreage", even if it's 10 miles from the truth. This whole idea that workplaces might somehow move with them is fine in theory, but what about the guy who has to leave the office to visit clients during the day? This happens quite often, and is the main reason so many workplaces choose a CBD location and happily pay the higher rents to do so. It probably works out cheaper than paying their employees to drive all over the city everytime they need something from another office. It's not city planning, it's just people making choices.
That said, my take on this issue is let them whine. There are far worse things that could be used to fill newspaper space, and as I've said before, the prospect of all of these people moving into my neighbourhood and cycling to work at the same time as I am doesn't really appeal to me.
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I am clinically insane. I am proud of it.
That is all.