this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2025
733 points (95.1% liked)
Greentext
7472 readers
1366 users here now
This is a place to share greentexts and witness the confounding life of Anon. If you're new to the Greentext community, think of it as a sort of zoo with Anon as the main attraction.
Be warned:
- Anon is often crazy.
- Anon is often depressed.
- Anon frequently shares thoughts that are immature, offensive, or incomprehensible.
If you find yourself getting angry (or god forbid, agreeing) with something Anon has said, you might be doing it wrong.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Isn't it weird how half the paycheck goes to rent? It's not like housing is a new invention, why's it so expensive?
IMO, it's some combination of ideologically-driven failures of town planning (the distance from buildings on one side of the street to the other is legally mandated to be ~20m wide, when it could be
collapsed inline media
I agree with you in general, but 2m isn't wide enough for fire truck access. Some regulations are based on the prevalence and nature of natural disasters in a given area.
I'm also not sure about your 20 meters figure because I can't find that there is a federal minimum. 20 feet is the minimum for fire trucks though.
2m isn't wide enough for fire truck access, sure. Why do you need to drive a giant fire truck down the alley? The standard response (besides "we need to carry water and I don't know what a fire hydrant is") is "we have a ladder on the top of the fire truck", which might be relevant in some contexts but the picture is of 2-storey buildings which could be easily handled with man-portable ladders.
My main concern here is that people demand wide roads for fire access to the tall buildings (that can only be fire-fought with trucks), then demand tall buildings because "it's the only way to build densely", ignoring the fact that narrow roads with shorter buildings are just as dense, cheaper to build, and have lower firefighting requirements. It's an idiotic catch-22 that people keep painting us into.
My 20 metres figure isn't a hard number, it's my eyeballing the 2 lanes + 2 ~~parking~~ vehicle storage lanes, plus a footpath plus a nature strip plus the required building setback/front yard.
Fire hydrants provide water, but you need to run the water through a pump to increase the pressure, and a fire truck acts as that pump. It also allows for the attachment of multiple hoses so that water can be sprayed in multiple locations.
And if all the roads are very narrow, how are you going to get a moving truck or other delivery vehicle in? What about a plumber's van? What about a small personal vehicle? Two meters isn't wide enough for any of those, especially not with outdoor seating. Six meters gives space for service vehicles to coexist with pedestrians, cyclists, and seating.
I don't agree with not having tall buildings either though. If the majority of housing is dense apartments above ground-floor businesses then there's much more open space left for nature preserves, parks, and gardens. I mean, they don't need to be skyscrapers, just 3-10 stories maybe. You can also save a lot of space with row houses.
US-Americans have an abundance of space. There is no need to build very densely. Atleast not in a midsized town that Anon describes.
There is so much wrong with the logic of that sentence. I'm going to start with basic economic/town planning theory:
The core function of a city is that everything is close to everywhere else - you live in a city because it's close to your job/a hospital/a nice lasertag place/whatever, which are located there because 1) you and lots of other people are located in the area, and 2) because other businesses they rely on are located closely. The other businesses are located closely for the exact same reasons 1 and 2 (if the Obscure Thingy repair shop is 2 minutes away instead of 3 days away, then you reduce downtime and save money, etc). The more densely you build, the more these virtuous cycles are amplified. Incidentally, this is why cities are roughly circular (which maximizes the number of places close to other places), and not a 170KMx200mx500m line in empty desert.
"A midsized town" is vague as heck but the logic of the previous paragraph applies just as well to small towns - if you keep stuff compact then you make it easy to walk to places, instead of needing to constantly drive everywhere (and waste even more space on roads and redundant parking at every single destination). In fact, if you have a town of, say, 30 000 people, and you maintain a density of 30 000 people per sqkm, then guess what: literally everything is within a km, which means everything is within a 10minute walk (and statistically, 5mins or less, since 10mins is the distance from one edge of town to the opposite edge, and a naive-average trip would be half of that).
You're technically correct that there's plenty of room on the edge of town to build low-density housing. In practice though, people want to live close to the centre of the city, rather than on the outskirts with a 3-hour commute. The USA having "an abundance of space" on the outskirts means jack shit. Cheap rent on the outskirts just means high mechanic/fuel costs and lots of unpaid hours spent driving to/from work (or literally anywhere else in the city that you want to go - I hope you don't have friends in the city centre that you want to see regularly).
I can't remember the video about it all that well, but wasn't 'the line' supposed to be using the concept of the 15 minute city? So, while, yes... there are very good reasons circles are city standards, if everything magically worked out and they built the thing it wouldn't matter whether it was a line or a circle.
So much fuck this. I have a friend who decided to go that exact route, because it put him 'halfway' between multiple family members and friends... and now he sees none of them because they're all ~an hour away. Suburbs fucking suck, and the car brained society we have is so fucking foolish.
Never going to happen in america :( I lived in a small city (2,500), and it was spread out enough that walking anywhere sucked, not even counting the horrible roads (it was a crossroads of two semi-important highways). I want to say it was 4km x 4km. The medium sized city (for the area, it's medium sized, we'd consider 30,000 to be large [and in fact, the closest large city was ~30,000, and that's where you had a real hospital, and all the services you would imagine a city having]) of ~9,000 was more like 10km x 10km.
Those are rural cities. Suburbs get so fucky so quickly... I think the town of 70,000 I lived in for a while was something like 9km x 18km, and that was a factory town. The not factory town suburb of 90,000 was around 15km x 20km. Just mind bogglingly spread out. The developers of an area are trying to maximize profit, and the car culture allows them to buy the cheapest land that's far away, sell the idiot housebuyers the idea of driving down a (currently, lol, not once everyone moves in) idyllic little road with no traffic to the center of the city and have everything they could want in a 15 minute drive.
The problem with 'The Line' is that travelling 170KM in 15 minutes requires an average speed of 680KM/h (I wrote out why that's insane lunacy from an engineering perspective, but I shoved it in a footnote), but you can achieve a 15-minute city of the same volume just by having an, IIRC, 13KM square with 100m-high buildings (and building 100m-high buildings is waaaay cheaper than building 500m-high buildings), built on a simple grid of normal 100KM/h trains - the Manhattan Distance of the maximum distance in a 13KM square is 26KM, which to be fair is still 36 seconds over the 15min mark even if your average speed is 100KM, but 1) it almost achieves the exact same thing as the trillion-dollar sci-fi tech, and 2) if you really care about the sharp 15-minute city premise then you can bump your trains up to run at 150KM/h (which is perfectly doable and only a little more expensive).
Anyway, point is that the only way The Line can fulfil its promises is by casually dropping a trillion dollars on a problem that may or may not be solvable, and will almost certainly be an order of magnitude or three more expensive than the bog-standard existing solution. A 680KM/h train is fucking expensive and while yes, it might be physically possible, most people want the cost of their commute to be lower than their daily wage earned from the job they commute to.
If The Line was ever built (and was cheap without subsidies somehow and became populated), then the first thing to happen after its populated would be a ton of building sideways, mostly around the midpoint/centre of The Line. Why? Because that's the prime land that's empty and therefore cheapest to build on, that's closest to everything (the midpoint of The Line should be ~7.5mins away from everything at most, and would also be the most accessible spot in the city and therefore have the most desirable business locations). And new buildings would be built around there, not at the ends of The Line. They'd add extensions to the train line that turn 90 degrees out, so that people further away from The Line could access the train system. This all would continue until The Line became The Circle.
The only way The Line stays a line is with economic antigravity. Metaphorical antigravity, to be clear. Not the sci-fi tech.,
...why? I'm not saying it'll be easy, but half the time I see that line it's used as a justification for why people shouldn't demand it happen. And frankly, "never" is too strong of a word.
680KM/h isn't even possible with a normal maglev, you'd need to either shove the maglev in a vacuum tube or build a rocket train or something equally insane just to have a maximum speed of 680KM/h. But you actually need a higher speed than 680KM/h since you start out at 0KM/h and 680KM/h is just the average - and since your acceleration is limited to speeds that won't kill the passenger, you really do have to factor it in, one way or another. See, your train has to either permit passengers to stand (which sharply limits safe acceleration without someone being knocked over and bashing their head open on a rail) or it has to give everyone time to board and then seat (all of which takes time for boarding), and you also need a way to ensure that random dickheads won't ignore the rules and stay standing. A boarding delay will kill your average speed just as much as low acceleration.
I think... you may need to look up the definition of a 15 minute city before expanding on this comment.