Ekdog

You don't want Us People to have a say in anything.

phoebeisis

I'm really not up for a fight today,but
Popular Cities-always "sprawled" in the sense that there was linear development along the transportation systems-
1)Rivers -needed places along the river to store load and unload goods and people to "do that work"and those people-had to live there
2)canals -same story
3)Coach roads(horse stops horse and people refreshments food)
4)railroads(needed fuel-wood coal-and water along the route and people to cut that wood and pump up that water tank)
5)Now highways

And those transportation systems were absolutely necessary to support the city-food building material energy


It would have been unthinkable after WW2 to NOT SPRAWL-which is why I was sooo curious why a huge affluent seemingly car loving country like Australia-didn't have the linear development like we did.
Machka answered that-but it wasn't a simple answer
1) Gas was is more expensive post war and now-frankly that would be MY bet as the -c#1 reason-$$-cars would have been expensive too
2) Geography mainly a coastal country and somewhat hemmed in by mountains-
3)Cultural-developed like England GB

My guesses
#1 expensive fuel
#2 cars relatively more expensive
#3 post war they-their middle class -weren't as affluent as USA middle class-so they couldn't really afford to move build a house etc drive farther to work
4)Heck their cities don't look as "dense" as our cities-so why move out??(pure guess on density of their cities)

Anyway-post WW2 linear development-would have been a surprise it it HADN'T happened.

It is only a direct problem if you want to "go" to the linear sprawl area without a car.
Simple solution-don't travel. Live in your city stay in your city shop in your city-
of course as we in the suburbs become "poorer" maintaining a car is more of a burden.

The real transportation problem might be CO2-but there is a big science solution to that.


PS Machka- I had no idea Australia had a HUGE HUGE aquifer-mainly artesian-so it doesn't even need pumps.
Apparently as big or bigger than our Ogalala(sic) aquifer(was)-yeah always wondered how they grew that grain and kept that livestock-

RPK79

Well, actually, you're in Spain. You can do whatever you want. I couldn't possibly care less.

Ekdog

What you think about me or where I live is irrelevant. The point is that you seem to be extremely intolerant of citizens of any democracy who might want to have things done that they believe will better their lifestyles. The way that is achieved in the United States and in Europe is by electing officials and relying on them to get things done. That is the way it is. You will have to deal with it. If you are unhappy with the current situation and think you can come up with a better system, I am sure the folks in P&R would be interested in hearing about it.

In the context of this thread, we should be discussing the proposals made by the OP and others about sprawl and its effect on car-free living, not whether or not it is the role of government to effect change.

RPK79

Since the main arterial highways in the US are decided on by the federal and state governments we have little local control when it comes to many decisions that would affect things like "sprawl". Recently in my small town of ~30,000 people the state government shut down a plan to build a new gas station (which had already begun to the extent of buying up the homes/business and razing them) because they would not okay access to the main road/highway from the parking lot.

In the context of this thread the proposals made by the OP for government intervention and it effect on the people have been shot down by myself and others in this thread because many of us believe that We the People should be able to decide upon the best use of the land that We own.

Ekdog

Need I remind you that state and federal government officials--not just local ones--are elected by the people? If you are unhappy about their decisions, you can ally yourself with your fellow citizens and elect others that are more to your liking. P&R might be a good place to carry on with your politicking. Who knows? Maybe you can stir up a groundswell revolt.

Roody

Often (as reflected in this thread) there are disputes involving both private and public land use. For example, Walmart might want to build a super center across the road from your peaceful farm in the country. You are saying that no government can prevent them from doing this. It follows that you have no legal recourse, even though walmart's right to put a store on its property interferes with your right to enjoyment of your own property. Who will settle this dispute, if not government?

Also, you claim a right to decide on your own use of your private property. I'll grant that for the sake of discussion. But highways are not built on private land. Who is empowered to decide how public land is used if not the government? Are you saying that government has no right to plan and build roads? If government doesn't do it, who will? And if citizens acting individually or in groups should stay out of these decisions regarding public land, who should make the decisions?

I-Like-To-Bike

Sure nothing sounds more ridiculous than an ex-pat casting negative aspersions on the reasons for anyone else who chooses to live elsewhere. Or more foolish than making assumptions that other people who choose to improve their living standards or lifestyle only have negative motivations, unlike starry eyed dreamers who would move to a different residence only for the most noble of reasons.

I-Like-To-Bike

Someone else might call it "white flight" or worse. And of course that would be no more intelligent than hanging the negative label "white flight" or racist on anybody who decides that a better lifestyle can be found for themselves and family elsewhere than where they live in current U.S. urban core areas.

I-Like-To-Bike

Too funny/ironic! Coming from a fellow so intolerant of anyone/everyone ("racist!" "white flight"!) in the U.S. who chooses to move out of a dense urban environment in order to better their lifestyle.

loky1179

Ekdog, you need to toe the line with these OPINIONS you keep expressing. You see, since you live on the other side of that ocean, you are not allowed to express NEGATIVE views regarding AMERICAN sprawl. I'd hate to have the bike forum border patrol haul you away in handcuffs, but it is just common sense. Unless your physical location is in the US, your opinions just don't count.

I'm sure it is in the bike forum rules that only US citizens are allowed to post on bike forums. Though I haven't actually read through all that fine print legalize. I promise I won't turn you in, but others may not be so generous.

Machka 

They don't grow grain in the middle of the country ... not in the main part of the outback. The soil in that area is just not conducive for grain growth ... it's a desert ... and it gets very hot.

This is a map of the wheat growing regions of Australia ... again, keep in mind that Australia is the size of mainland US, so that is still quite a large area.



Most of the grain growth takes place just west of the Great Dividing Range which runs next to the east coast, and a bit in the west near Perth.



You might also be interested in the Snowy Mountains Scheme which brought water over/through the Great Dividing Range from the coast to the wheat growing areas.

The Snowy Mountains Scheme | australia.gov.au


The main livestock would be sheep because they can graze on just about anything, but even they don't go right out into the desert. They are mainly over the Great Artesian Basin and Lake Eyre Basin ... and that is where they get their water.

l

As you can see there is a massive part of Australia where hardly anyone goes ... anything purple on the map above.

tandempower

They could just cut funding to states that create new sprawl and fail to take measures toward driving/transit/cycling parity. State governments would respond by implementing zoning restrictions on parking and ensuring transit and cycling access to commercial buildings was appropriate before permitting the construction. Employers with more than a certain number of employees could be required to provide transportation for their employees, just as they are required to provide health coverage.

What's the alternative? Letting automotive business interests own America?

tandempower

US citizens may be too brainwashed by Bob Dylan's claim that 'there's nothing more American than America' to resist subjugation to automotivist culture for the sake of boosting global GDP. Thank goodness SOMEONE is on OUR side considering how many of us aren't, regardless of his location.

Ekdog

My, what a vivid imagination you have! By linking to an article about white flight, I'm "making assumptions" about people? I'm sure people move to suburbs for any number of reasons, one of which is racism.

Ekdog

I wonder if they'll allow me to keep participating if I move somewhere else. Let's say....Australia?

Machka 

Try to find Man from Snowy River ... I've never actually seen it, but it is apparently a classic ... set in the area where we used to live north of Melbourne.

The Castle was also set in the area where we used to live.

And Bryce Courtney is a best selling author in Australia who wrote books set in various places, but especially Australia. I've read Jessica and I'm looking for Matthew Flinders' Cat.
Bryce Courtenay International Pty Ltd
Bryce Courtenay - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Regarding the Nullarbor ... Rowan cycled across the Nullarbor from Perth to Adelaide in 1997. And yes ... no trees. It's all low-lying scrub and desert.


According to this calculator, our fuel is about $6.35/US gallon for diesel ... which is what we use in our vehicle. Only $6.05 for regular petrol.
Online Calculator Converting the cost Cents Per Litre to dollars per gallon of gasoline in Canada and USA

Rowan tells me that some towns tried to do the linear sprawl thing a number of years ago, and built service stations at either end of the town, as you enter the town from either direction, but that just didn't take off. And one or the other or both closed. You've really got to keep your eyes open to find the service stations. They are around not particularly obvious.

Same with fast food places etc. If you want to stop in and grab a burger or something when you're travelling, it can be hit or miss whether you'll find a place to do that. More common than fast food places here are small individual take aways or bakeries. Most towns have both of those, and our bakeries are eat in places. We had lunch at one today ... I had a delicious cauliflower and cheese pie, Rowan had a couple mini meat pies (savoury pies are very popular here).

MickeyMaguire

The suburbs were created for two reasons... give people a bit of land surrounding their homes... escape the crime that is often found in heavily developed urban areas. If racism has anything to do with it, it would simply be a statistic that reflects lower education and lower economic strata.

Rural areas offer no public transportation. It is not profitable for buses to run from every little town in farm country. Buses are not efficient for most workers since hours are often varied and schedules are built around the 9 to 5 tradition in most business districts. I know lots of Americans who would love other options for their commute to and from work, but, they are locked into their cars because they don't have other reasonable options.

In my city, most people think bus stops and the buses themselves are not safe. Neither is walking much distance downtown. So shopping in the city has fallen way off and outlying malls get all the business.

tandempower

It's not really surprising or problematic that an extensive road network was developed for commerce. The problem is that post-industrialism ensued and driving became the basis for practically all personal locomotion. Sprawl-development became about facilitating growing populations of people getting around at a 1/1 person-car ratio. The result is sprawl that is nonetheless dense with traffic, because it is motor-traffic and therefore takes up more land area and road-distance per travel destination. In short, it might have looked promising as a utopia when the Jetsons first came out but it bloomed into a sprawling motor-traffic nightmare. Now people are defending it as 'American' (playing the patriotism card) simply because they would rather give up on the pursuit of freedom than commit to the effort required to achieve multi-modal transportation parity.

It's a direct problem because entire generations are now growing up with the assumption that driving is a prerequisite for free participation in society and the economy. It's a direct problem because natural lands are being overdeveloped and economic recessions take a sharper toll because of automotive dependency. It's a direct problem because people shouldn't have to emigrate or even move to another city to live car-free. Rural areas far from cities are one thing but what excuse should any city have for not facilitating car-free living? Such areas are unsustainable to the extent that they continue to grow in population. When they are overgrown, their population 'spills over' into new areas where the people, now accustomed to driving everywhere, begin living the same way in smaller cities, which causes those cities to begin developing into unsustainable sprawl. How many cities have to 'boil over' with sprawl like this before something can be done to ensure the ability for people to choose some other mode of transportation instead of escaping elsewhere when they can no longer take the traffic?

phoebeisis

What's the alternative? Letting automotive business interests own America?[/QUOTE]

The above quote was cut from tandenpower.

WTF ???!!! Automotive Business OWN America?
Big Business-as in Auto Steel Railroads various manufacturing even mining(oil coal ng ore)- businesses that ACTUALLY produce something tangible
DON'T RUN USA- haven't in many years.
Finance Banks "Investment Banks" BIG MONEY-folks who play both sides of the street like that POS from Goldmann Sachs who "helped" us get out of the 2008 crash-after being COMPLETELY RESPONSIBLE for the 2008 crash-
RUN THE USA-OWN THE USA-
They get a "piece" of almost EVERY TRANSACTION in the USA- yeah-every time you use a CC Check anything- even cash transactions.
Only pure barter is immune from these greedy POS!!

And BIG MONEY -makes money no matter where you live-they make $$ when you buy a crummy condo in one of your precious cities-or a pitiful little suburban ranch house like mine/
heck considering the prices of condos in "nice" cities San Fran Oakland -heck they make MUCH MORE on city "property"

So suggesting AUTOMOTIVE BUSINESS OWN AMERICA- is absurd-even if you "count" Big Oil as automotive business
BIG MONEY owns the USA- sit at the right hand of our presidents-parasites who brought us 2008

phoebeisis

Machka

Wow-took 25 years for the Snowy mountain project-and Snowy Mountains-not what I picture when I think Australia(I was aware you folks had snow and ski resorts-but not what I picture)

Didn't you folks have a HUGE HUGE flood-one of the big cities- NOT TOO FAR BACK??
So odd DRY PLACE big floods-
Parts of dry inland Texas have flooding problems-but mainly flash floods -last hours not days weeks

And you folks have an aquifer the envy of the rest of the world-barely tapped(but punched with what the links called something like un"contained" bores-for sheep and crops I guess)

But your cities WORRY about water-because they live on "rain/snow water" and you don't get lots of rain
One link mentioned you folks use some desalination(implication was it was for emergencies)-usually means SEVERE water concerns

Oh-big aside in respect to toilets-I measure one of the tanks on a 20 yo toilet of ours-fairly typical of older residential toilets- 9.4 liters

Water-most important thing for a city/country-no water no city (no food locally-gotta buy or steal it)

Machka 

We lived just south of the Snowy Mountains for several years. And that was the same reaction I got when I first started sending photos home ... it wasn't what anyone imagined.

Yes, the Brisbane area has been flooded badly lately. But that's how our weather systems/water systems work here. Several years of drought, a few years of flood. And annually we have dry seasons and rainy/monsoon seasons. So we try to store up water during the rainy seasons for the dry seasons, because they tend to be longer.

We lived right near Lake Eildon which is a man-made lake used for various purposes. It's a big lake (approx. 200 km around). When I first arrived in 2009, it was low (about 30% full) because Australia had been in a 15 year drought. They were getting a bit worried. But almost as soon as I arrived the drought broke and it started to rain, and rain, and rain, and rain, and flood, and flood, and by late 2011/early 2012, the lake was full. And that's how these reservoirs go ... even the aquifers (I think ... I'm not really sure about them ... no one talks about them very much).

They keep going back and forth on the desalination ... in 2009 when I arrived, it was full speed ahead with the desalination because they were still in drought conditions. A year later, after the drought ended, the work on that backed off quite a bit.



My photos of Australia ... mostly Victoria and Tasmania, where we've lived, but also some of the other States:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/machka...7602419256784/

phoebeisis

High-risk mortgage loans and lending/borrowing practices[edit]

In the years before the crisis, the behavior of lenders changed dramatically. Lenders offered more and more loans to higher-risk borrowers,[4][95] including undocumented immigrants.[96] Lending standards deteriorated particularly between 2004 and 2007, as the government-sponsored enterprise (GSE) mortgage market share (i.e. the share of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which specialized in conventional, conforming, non-subprime mortgages) declined and private securitizers share grew, rising to more than half of mortgage securitizations.[4]

Oh the above cut from Wikipedia I think
It is a response to those that claim
THE GOV FORCED BANKS TO MAKE LOANS TO PO FOLKS AND THAT CAUSED THE 2008 CRISIS.
Pretty sure that financial gibberish "private securitization" means that as things went on more and more "high risk loans" WEREN'T GOV guaranteed-and the GOV did not cause this crisis by "forcing banks" to make bad loans to "po folks"
Private securitization meant they could "insure" the loans more cheaply and the requirements were lower to get the loan.NOT THE GOV

BIG FINANCE brought on this crisis-Goldman Sachs etc-by PURE GREED
They made $$ 3 ways by encouraging piece of **** loans
1)Made money on the original loan-points etc
2)Made money bundling and SELLING these POS loans-claiming with laughable probability math trickery "too hard for you to understand but just trust us" -their "math" allowed them to claim bundling crap turned crap into gold. Sold these bundled crappy loans to valued customers-many foreign investment interests by plenty of USA based interests
3)MY FAVORITE- they then BET THAT THESE LOAN PACKAGES WOULD FAIL- and made $$ on the bet-since they new the truth-bundled crap was crap

GOV forcing poor Financial interests to loan $$ to poor folks causing 2008 is PURE BALONEY
Financial interests OWN most elected national representatives-hell probably PAID Black/WHITE/ASIAN/HISP representatives to push the banks to get this ball rolling-it was minting $$ for them

#3 is one of my all time favorite bet the crap they sold to "valued customers" would fail!!

It was all BIG MONEY PURE GREED!

phoebeisis

Pretty place!
So longish droughts-decade long-are pretty standard in Australia??
that takes some long term planning-
Politicians-that have to be re-elected in 2-4-6 year intervals-not big on long term planning-

Hey I will have to sic PETD on you (people for the ethical treatment of Dogs)
Nando-cat doing what cats do very well-sleeping
Mr Wisby- also doing a cat thing-staring at you wonder why you are taking his picture
are Named!
Poor Corgi- no name!!
Now our cats think it is completely appropriate Arty-recycled greyhound-suggested PETD

Oh-I think your enormous aquifer-is somewhat indifferent to rain-and it would take LARGE scale irrigation agriculture for many many years-to make -
a dent in it.
Oh-it can be done-we-USA have managed to put a HUGE dent in our similarly HUGE mid continent aquifer- but that took some doing-
I think one of your links said much of that water had been there for 1,000,000 years(from memory but it was a BIG number)

Cities and towns-in Louisiana -had actual bread/rolls bakeries where you could buy fresh french bread other bread products and sweets like donuts cookies when we moved to small town Louisiana in 1958
They are GONE-
There are still "mainly sweets" bakeries in NOLA and other big cities-
but the small town bakery is GONE
Folks that have visited Europe/France comment on the "actual bakeries" because they are gone from here.
Pretty sure dense affluent neighborhoods in NYNY probably west coast-still have bakeries
Hmmm fresh bread-MIGHT be one REALLY good reason to live in a BIG DENSE CITY-

Machka 

It is a pretty place.

And yes, the decade long droughts are quite normal here. I mentioned the Murray River earlier, there are photos of people standing in the dry riverbed of the Murray River in 1915 ... but then it would have rained and filled up again, and gone through several cycles of that. In 2009, it was almost dry again, but started to rain mid-2009.

The book I mentioned by Bryce Courtney, Jessica, is set in about the 1900s and talks about some of the early discussions and plans for water management through the drought periods. They had started thinking about it back then, and water management was an important enough issue that it survived the political changes. That said though, there are on-going issues that one political party will support and another won't etc. ...



Teg. His name is Teg and he is the largest Corgi I've ever seen!!


Rowan tells me that the water levels in the aquifer do depend somewhat on the monsoonal rains in the north, which can be quite significant rainfalls ... metres of rain.

Also the water quality in the aquifers isn't the best ... tends to be a bit salty and therefore really only good for the sheep. At this point anyway.


Incidentally, the pelicans return to Lake Eyre to breed when there has been enough rain that it floods ... somehow they know ...
LakeEyre



We loved the bakeries in France!! Mmmmm!! They're wonderful!!

But that's one nice feature of Australia ... we've got the bakeries too. Some are as good as the French ones, some not so much, but you get to know the good ones.

And when we cycle, we'll often cycle to the next town or maybe from town to town, and we'll stop in at the bakeries to find fuel for our endeavours.

We've been to Louisiana ... my brother and family live there ... and found it quite an interesting place. Ate boudin, saw alligators ...