@anna_lillith Yes, yes, not so much. "If it wasn't for the cars, everything would be closer to each other"? The distance between London and Birmingham is fixed.
@fishidwardrobe @anna_lillith I think that line is more referring to places where new suburbs are being built without schools or shops, because "you can just drive to them"
But yeah, the generalisation of it makes it seem silly
@SuperTaliaDX @anna_lillith Well, yes, but that only works if you are building on a featureless plane with weird zoning laws. It's probably true in parts of the US? But here in the UK it would be "no, you can't build the houses closer to the city. There's a 14th century church / river / gas plant / protected woodland / Saxon burial mound / 'not really a mountain but certainly a famous hill' there, and anyway, don't the existing houses have shops you can walk to?"
@fishidwardrobe @anna_lillith yeah, things that already exist are gonna be a fixed distance away.
But yeah I'm sure it's an issue in the US, and I know it's an issue in Australia. Some suburbs going in are done thoughtfully, but most of them are just copy-paste houses as far as the eye can see, with no doctors, no schools, no shops, and maybe one park if you're lucky.
Excellent point. In my experience, new Dutch neighbourhoods always come with a shopping center and a set of schools. This has always seemed to me like such an obvious way to do it, that I sometimes forget the US doesn't do it that way. People need to be forced into their cars.
@fishidwardrobe @anna_lillith The distance between housing and businesses, for example, would be a lot less. So you could feasibly walk to the convenience store.
@blake @anna_lillith I *can* walk to a convenience store, and I live in the suburbs. That's not cars, it's weird US zoning laws. Sorry.
Yeah, I think that one is mostly about American cities where beautiful dense city centers have been bulldozed to make space for endless car lots and now you can't get anywhere on foot anymore.