The Worst type of Urban Sprawl
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 9 มิ.ย. 2024
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It's almost universally agreed upon in the urban planning community that suburban sprawl is bad for cities, transit, and the people in them. But there's something much worst than good ole suburban sprawl - let's find out in today's video.
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Ever wondered why your city's transit just doesn't seem quite up to snuff? RMTransit is here to answer that, and help you open your eyes to all of the different public transportation systems around the world!
Reece (the RM in RMTransit) is an urbanist and public transport critic residing in Toronto, Canada, with the goal of helping the world become more connected through metros, trams, buses, high-speed trains, and all other transport modes.
Job sprawl is Canberra in a nutshell. People often haven't even heard of the place or know that it's the Australian capital, but the whole city is basically one giant job sprawling monster.
It's a shame because the plan for Canberra is amazing but they just built a suburban version of it instead
Pretty similar here. I'm in the SF Bay's tri-valley area. The seas of parking between office parks is absolutely insane. I would love, love, love to have our little residential neighborhoods made walkable and connected by transit but it is going to require a ton of retrofitting. And each small town pits itself as a barrier. And each little HOA fiefdom within those towns amplifies the effect
Ive been following the development of canberra over the last few years and the extremely slow pace of change and some of the decision making has been excruciatingly painful. Its crazy because Australia has tons of great cities and Canberra will be another one they just need to be allowed to build and get the damn nimbys out of the way.
Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes made of...😊
Canberra is like: “hey let’s build the suburbs and satellite towns without building a CBD”
This is why I think American cities allowing their downtowns to have visible signs of decay is a terrible thing. It drives people away from downtown, increasing demand for suburban jobs
Yeah, Portland here is a good example. The Mayor recently proposed his "plan" which is basically "hey businesses, you need to mandate return to office for your workers at least half-time, the more people around, the more people will want to come here." This clown literally created the entire problem, and has the audacity to demand workers venture into this perilous hellscape. I'll also note, people routinely call 911 for EMS and can't get help.
Urbanist reddit types refuse to acknowledge the fact that soft-on-crime policies are a primary driver of suburbanization.
People don’t want to live or work in dangerous places.
what do you mean "allowing"? No one can "allow" it to decay. American downtowns are just bad places to live and people don't have money to keep them up. It's just a natural process.
@@GhostZodick a “natural” process that didn’t manifest in other developed countries, weird.
@@alaskanbullworm5500 Yes it does. Decay exists everywhere. It varies how much there is and where it happens. But it's definitely there.
You can want things to look nice, but if there's no money for it, things will start to decay. Forcing people and small businesses to upgrade the looks just means they'll leave altogether and make the problem worse.
It used to be the case that massive industrial sites had their own bus service that picked up workers around town coinciding with the shifts. It's how my grandfather used to commute to work.
I've thought about this on a smaller scale, working at a industrial park adjacent to a smaller airport. Having some major transit lines run by the airport would be great, but the park is big enough to justify having some kind of shuttle service to drive through so you could step off the bus, into a shuttle, and only have to walk a minute or two. Then maybe they could shrink these massive parking lots between each building and add more buildings and jobs. There's a major shopping center right at the edge of it as well, but I basically only ever seen people walking around for exercise on their breaks.
the modern day version of that is the silicon Valley shuttles for Facebook, Google, Apple, etc.
They even built housing for their employees
In Bolivia the Labor Code states that when the workers live more 2 km from the workplace the employer shall provide transport. This is however not enforced. I believe that this was enforced in the 40s and 50s
As mentioned in the video this still exists in many places - concentrating industries can help such services - sometimes even rail, pencil out
This actually reminds me of the situation my mom had to go through living and working in Madrid, we lived in the suburbs and she'd commute to central Madrid by train to work at one of the largest banks in the country: BBVA. Sadly, this company, along with many others, have bought massive swathes of land in the outskirts of the city (especially in the district of Las Tablas), and built huge offices to centralize all of their workers in just one building. For my mom (and I'd guess many others) this meant that she had to start commuting by car for the first time in her life, since it was incredibly inconvenient to do it with public transport. And sadly it seems like it's a trend, and there's giant office buildings outside Madrid for all the biggest companies like Santander, Movistar, Iberdrola, and a long etc. Such a shame that Madrid's amazing public transport is being completely ignored by these companies...
Exactly, this is precisely what you want to avoid, it removes a huge trip generator that so often undergirds transit systems - even in great transit cities like Madrid
Public transit never occurs to people who make these kinds of decisions. They see a highway near and assume that that makes it a convenient location.
Also prices of rent or buying property in the center is expensive- so companies relocate outside.
The money is always forgotten in these discussions
Yep, corporate suburban campuses have been with us for generations. And they've shown that companies don't have to locate downtown to be able to fill those specialized roles.
To be honest I would rather commute by car than be in a cramped metro or cercanías train at 7am. Commuting in public transport sucks.
as someone who majored in Chemistry, I hate it that virtually no Chemistry jobs are acessible via some kind of transit and require driving. I don’t even have my own car and it’s sad
As a guy who had to work at test mines I feel your pain 😅
This is very common with jobs in labour too. With the abundance of labour shortage everywhere, you’d think governments would want to station public transport near industrial sites to make people more inclined to work there
@@unsolicitedditkapics9722I was able to manage without a car until mid twenties, but the industry moved production to Germany, where it seemed from photos that they treat the Turkish workers like second class.
I had to buy a car to get to work and soon was traveling up and down from Yorkshire to Hastings by car as I progressed in my job.
I changed job, but still needed a car to get round sites in Yorkshire.
In the real world, this is what people outside huge cities do. Projecting the idea of urban life onto everyone does not fit.
Sprawl allows access to cities but car travel to areas elsewhere by car, which people need to get to work. Most of my friends from my twenties left the city after riots meant they did not feel their kids were safe.
Come to Czechia. One of the largest oil refineries in Central Europe, located between the towns of Most and Litvínov, has an interurban tramway running right through it with about four or five stops within the compound itself.
Well duh, people don't want to live next to a Chemical plant.
I did my MBA on plant relocation. The number one deciding factor is , no surprise here , how close to the bosses home. So Mississaga exists because the bosses moved to Oakville and moved their factories and office to Huronatio and Dundas.
If anyone should commute far, it should be the CEO and employees with large shares.
Its very unfortunate indeed - and it seems to show the type of person who cares more about their personal commute than company performance
@@RMTransit yes, many were willing to lose the entire workforce. Mississaga reenforced it by having higher residential taxes and lower commercial land taxes than Etobicoke and liberty Village
Ontario built the 401 for commuters to bypass heavy city traffic, tons of industrial districts seem to be located nearby, north Scarborough, Etobicoke, Mississauga, and yet transit users don't have any sort of ring system that allows them to connect to those locations. The best they have is infrequent heavy rail systems on a hub and spoke model. You can't expect every specialized job to fit into a CBD, and your celebration of factories that are built on transit lines and celebrate that seems to conflict with your earlier claim about how moving away from the CBD even on a transit line will it more convenient to drive even because of the hub and spoke model. The hub is most of these cases is financial and government districts. All the other industries basically exist on a spoke. So nobody is going to commute to them in a hub and spoke model.
decent cities just have ring lines which remove the need to enter the city centers when making the transit to work or schools ... supporting a much more flexible sprawl of the city and avoiding bottlenecks in public transportation.
or tangential lines in general
@@RTSRafnex2 Or a high frequency transit grid.
Look at Laue Diffraction Patterns. You will see rings, arcs, and lines of points that span the continuum from poly-circumferential to poly-radial. This better than a scatterplot of random locations and allows for true polycentrism (unlike a spider web which still heavily favors the center). That’s good for jobs which are not specialized enough to justify concentrating them in one place in the city.
Yeah. I'm very, very disappointed with this video.
Building transit to just serve downtown commuters is one of the things that has continued to handicap US transit for decades. The fact that Reece is advocating for this again is insane to me. London, Paris, and just about every other successful transit system worldwide has transitioned to trying to build radial connections to avoid forcing people to all go downtown, and London even charges extra for passing through zone 1 at certain times. Designing your transit system in 2023 to force everyone to transfer downtown is utterly insane, as is equating jobs being spread throughout cities to destructive suburban sprawl.
All the major European cities have jobs spread throughout them which is objectively a good thing; trips on transit still contribute to climate change and so shorter trips are better for the environment. People are more likely to use transit if their trips on it are short, and if you force everyone to ride transit a long ways then you're decreasing capacity. If someone rides a train 3 stops then someone else can sit in that seat on the train after they get off, and that one seat can move a lot of people throughout the train's journey. If you force people to all ride into downtown then transfer then that seat is going to be taken up by a single person for most of the route and you have to run many more trains to move the same number of people. Plus a shorter commute significantly improves your quality of life. Living close to where you work is a very good thing, and advocating for people to commute longer distances and have all the jobs clustered in a single location is idiotic. That's how you end up with a transit system that's pretty much useless for anything other than white collar office workers commuting to work and back.
Going to and from work is two transit trips a day and if you want people to switch from cars to transit you need to be able to provide for all the other trips as well. Building a system which forces you to transfer downtown is shooting yourself in the foot (and Wendover actually talked about this some in his recent video on the MBTA). We've seen time and time again that if you build a radial transit network that just goes downtown and back then it's going to be hard to attract ridership. Even if someone does work downtown they're likely to still drive in order to take trips to friends' places, stores, or other destinations around the edge of cities. Once they own a car they're much more likely to use it, even for trips that could be made via transit, and boom, you've created the classic North American car dependent city. Clustering all the jobs a long distance from where people live is one of the big drivers of car dependency.
Not every city has the right kind of geography for that. River cities like London, Calgary, etc. can build them, and even a lake city like Toronto is flat enough to just be a semi-circle that can build outwards with little consequences. Plus, they can also easily build bridge and tunnel crossings to interconnect their neighbourhoods. Therefore ring roads (or ring tracks) would be an easier sort of project. Vancouver, Seattle, New York, Sydney are all ocean / harbour cities. People have tried to do something like perimeter roads in such places, but in the end there are just choke points over broad or deep bodies of water that are not easily overcome. In the case of Vancouver and some similar places, in addition to a harbour, there's also mountainous terrain which naturally confines development/constrains sprawl. It creates just a different sort of city.
Perhaps the worst "job sprawl" in the US is in Atlanta. They used to have everything clustered around downtown and then built Interstate 285 around the city hoping to attract more businesses. The good news is that lots of businesses moved out to the I-285 ring. The bad news is that they weren't new businesses, but ones that came from downtown. So now Atlanta traffic is a mess and their metro system was built around the idea that everyone wanted to go downtown, so it's not very helpful and there's no great solution to it.
The top end of the perimeter was the first thing I thought of when I watched this video. The King and Queen buildings are the tallest suburban skyscrapers in the country, but they're part of an isolated office park that's a 20-minute walk from the perimeter MARTA station.
I blame the evil tyrant named Kevin Leonpacher.
I thought the photo was cities skylines 2!
I really thought this was a CS2 tutorial
I question this. Paris seemed very decentralized, but worked very well as a city, with great transit, long arcs that covered everywhere, and intersected every other line two places, for easy connections. Bringing everyone into a center just creates congestion, and honestly an unpleasant place people have to be, rather than want to be. The Borg cube is the wrong model of urbanism. There are more pleasant middle density ways, which still support plentiful metros.
I mean I think Paris just has a very big core!
@RMTransit I was trying to put words to that idea! They have a “spaghetti mess” model in the large core but they still have lines going out to the suburbs
That's the reason why Paris is getting the Grand Paris Express, a new loop route for the Paris Metro that operates like the Yamanote Line in Tokyo or the Osaka Loop Line in Osaka. That way, people can travel around Paris without having to go to the center of the city to change trains (with all the attendant overcrowding problems in the center city).
Paris does not have as much suburban sprawl between work areas.
@@Sacto1654The Osaka Loop Line isn't a bad comparison, but the Yamanote line isn't really a circumferential line that bypasses the city centre at all. It started as one that went through the city centre and linked the suburbs (that would eventually develop) and now it's one that links multiple city centres, but still isn't a city bypass at all.
100% this is a huge problem in the Bay. I had a recruiter contact me about a job yesterday and he couldn't understand why I wasn't interested in a job that was hybrid with three days in office that was over an hour commute. So many tech jobs especially are in random office parks next to a highway exit somewhere.
I believe concentrating office/commercial space into one or two downtowns is a good model for small cities. But bigger cities can have a sizeable amount of medium-scale businesses and industries that cannot afford to be in the city centre, both due to sky high prices in the downtown as well as worse competition. A multi-centred city served by loop as well as branch lines is a better model imo to accomodate more kinds of business without a job sprawl.
In a larger city, concentrating all your businesses in a relative small area can cause transit overcrowding. Look at the overcrowding you get on Tokyo's commuter rail and subway lines because of the over-concentration of businesses in a relatively small area.
Yes, but this is still "centralization" just around more centres! Some of these centres being at the intersection between orbital and radial transit. Of course though what remains centralized tends to depend on what businesses are the most specialized
@@RMTransit I agree. I was just trying to point out that there are areas with established or key businesses - regardless of size - that shape the characteristics of the urban spaces and localities around them and moving them all to a common downtown may not be feasible when planning for an urban agglomeration, which is what large cities tend to be (unlike New towns). Though again, I speak from more of an Asian perspective, where we try to build transit to connect the older areas, including prominent historical neighbourhoods, to newer ones. I'm not sure if there's any perspective I'm missing here. Thanks for the comment btw, Reece! I really enjoy watching your videos.
Like NYC for example
This was well underway before Covid in the SF Bay area and is an underrated cause of the SF Downtown's slow recovery. Insane demand for office space in Downtown SF led to Big investment in new office space on the penninsula and in the East Bay. This is on top of many of the region's biggest employers being located in Silicon Valley in Sunnyvale, Mountainview, Cupertino etc. Even before the Pandemic the tech companies (including biotech like Genentech) would operate private busses from residences in the City to offices in the Suburbs.
When the pandemic ended newer, cheaper Suburban office space ate up a lot of the return in demand. Downtown businesses are struggling and transit ridership is way down
A big part of the problem is that the suburban offices are rarely near the surprisingly large number of suburban train stations in the Bay area - if this wasn't the case things would be a lot better!
Yes, and you look at the spread of those job centers. Financial and professional services in downtown, the biotech cluster in south San Fransisco built around Genentech, and then the tech center in Silicon Valley.
I was told when working there that the private Genenbus system that serves Genentech from various public transit station endpoints was a requirement to get planning permission to expand their campus. Which is a solution if a bit of an exclusive and mediocre one.
A lot of european cities are basically a sea of 4-7 story rowhouse type buildings and have job centers spattered and distributed all over and have high quality transit. basically everyone lives in a 15 min city then therefore only nonlocal trips which tend to be work school are typically end up being served by mass transit since most people will walk, bike or take a local street car or bus
Yeah. But from what I see in many cities, there are '15 minute' areas all around... Maybe only the not so affordable ones, but generally speaking they're more common in America, for example, than many would think. However, the issue is that for professional jobs in a major metropolitan area, many would not live (understandably) within a 15-minute walk of their job site, as mentioned. This is when you really want people to be able to commute by transit.
Now, here in America, a big part of the reason is how insufficient our transit has been. And our transit project are usually unnecessarily slow, inefficient, and limited. This channel probably provided more than enough decent examples. However, in some cities, Philadelphia for example, the issue is that the offices are really sprawling, in a way that it's nearly impossible to effectively serve by transit. And effective I mean being better (take less time, more convenient, etc.) than parking...
I have a love-hate relationship with Latin American sprawl. From Mexico City, to Bogata, to Lima, to Buenos Aries, Latin American cities sprawl for miles on end. However, nearly all of that sprawl made is up of high density mixed use development. When you have Latin American sprawls served by amazing public transit like in Mexico City, Santiago, or Sao Paulo, then you have the emergence of truly great metropolises with something to do on every corner as far out as the fringes. It's a far cry from the dull Euclidian sprawl of North America.
Don’t forget that some outer suburbs were built to be car-centric because cars are still a status symbol in those countries unfortunately.
@@trainsandmore2319 You're explaining the #1 reason why the Central Valley in Costa Rica is such an absolute mess. San Jose, Cartago, and Alajuela actually have some really nice walkable areas, but they're surrounded by an endless sea of mixed use sprawl with very little planning or thought given to the metropolitan fabric as a whole. In San Jose, you'll go from a nice walkable neighborhood, to the worst stroad imaginable, to a lovely park, to car oriented skyscrapers within a twenty minute walk, with an abrupt, awkward transition to each area. The whole time you're forced to navigate a sea of crazy Latino drivers on roads with no crossings anywhere. The whole region is like this, but connected by highways and stroads with little in the way of rail. There are pretty good buses, but next to no wayfinding or infrastructure to improve them. The issue is that the Central Valley is growing like crazy, with job sprawl everywhere - it's 2 million people in an area smaller than the Fraser valley without much in the way of regional cohesion.
@@RoboJules I’ve never even heard that San Jose had skyscrapers so I don’t know what you mean by that.
@@trainsandmore2319 I meant high-rises more than Skyscrapers. They're being built rapidly around La Sabana Park, and what's weird is they have similar architecture to the high-rises built around Metrotown - same modern square looking design.
Mexico is in North America. Also, you shouldn't confuse the US for all of North America. Canadian and Caribbean and as you mentioned, Mexico and other Central American urban areas are fairly dense.
Also, Latin America doesn't have urban sprawl, it's just that some of the most populated capitals in the world are in South and North America. They're fairly comparable to London in size which has a similar population to them.
They use space efficiently which many American cities don't do leading to them unnecessarily paving over animal habitats and useful farming land.
Im glad you're talking about this. As a Sauga resident, theres this massive office park in the northwestern side of the city (around Derry/Mississauga Rd area) and it drives me absolutely crazy every time i see it. Its nowhere near downtown Toronto or downtown Mississauga for that matter, every office tower is surrounded by a parking crater, its in a super inconvenient location for transit (there is a close-ish commuter rail station, Meadowvale GO, but its at the fringes of the area, not the centre of it), and was very obviously built for proximity to highway 401 and absolutely no other reason. Supposedly the city of Mississauga wants to move these offices to Square One (which, ehhh, but better than its current location at least), but RBC and the other corporations that own offices there are resistant to it, as are supposedly the workers themselves.
It's easy to explain. The offices in that area are most likely much cheaper to rent/buy than anything near Square One. Why would any business want to increase their costs for no real benefit to them. As for the workers, I bet most of them live in the surrounding areas and have an easy relatively traffic free 10-15 drive to work. If you're further away being next to the 401 makes access easier as this area is out of the way from Toronto so the 401 isn't as packed anyway. You also get all the people who live in southwest Brampton who get easy access to the area. This area also has (relatively) affordable housing for people. And not everyone wants to live in a sardine can condo near Construction One.
There's a new neighbourhood of old fashioned townhouses at Mississauga Rd and Mayfield hemmed in on two sides by cornfields. It's built very dense and the streets and parks are full of people. But after everyone has seemingly gone to bed cars are still coming at you from every angle on every crescent and cul-de-sac. I finally realized; there are no stores or commercial strips on the avenues. Everyone who needs a quart of milk still has to drive to some little strip mall on Creditview. Or take the bus during the day
Vancouver is worse - nobody but the elite can live or work near downtown; people are forced to move or forced to work in places like Aldergrove (i.e. farming communities around 30-50 km away being increasingly paved over, thus destroying our food supply too). Then once city life has become an increasingly expensive & dangerous hassle, the customer base of all the retail businesses falls away, and nobody with any sense starts to prefer the suburbs. This is where Metro Vancouver is now; for all the building of housing and infrastructure, the urban core is declining under the sheer weight of how expensive it is (costs versus actual income). Downtown is a VIP-only experience for the elite up above, and an impossible hellscape of despair down below.
Indeed, and these offices are basically inaccessible to anyone without a car from much of a reason - seriously degrading the talent that the businesses can attract!~
@@RCLapCar You're in the comment section youtube channel thats explicitly dedicated to public transit and who's audience are a bunch of transitbrained urbanists. So saying that the location of the park was picked because its convenient for drivers, while true, isn't going to be particularly persuasive for most of us. Like yeah, i know its convenient for drivers. The problem is that its only convenient for drivers.
Thank you for pointing out another problem of transportation design. One, that is not talked about often. It sucks, that new job spaces are built near highway intersections. I guess it is logical, due to land value being lower there. The problem really should be solved by requiring developers to plan, and (partly) finance, transit infrastructure.
This might not work everywhere, but Japan (and HK) do the inverse. The railway companies become developers themselves
@@illiiilli24601 Certainly either the rail or the government getting the windfalls from the land value increases from building the infrastructure helps fund the infrastructure.
Like at Canary Wharf. When developers began redeveloping the derelict dock lands of the isle of dogs, they wanted a mass rapid transit connection. Initially they proposed a dedicated line from Waterloo to Greenwich via Canary Wharf, but by luck the underground was considering extending the jubilee line and were looking at options when the developers made their proposal. This proposal was folded into the jubilee line extension and the developers (Olympia and York) contributed £400 million to the construction. Initially the project was budgeted at about £2.1 billion, meaning the developers would have contributed a bit less than 20% of the total cost, that £400 million figure being the estimated cost of the dedicated line the developers wanted to construct (the Waterloo and Greenwich railway). However due to cost overruns the figure actually turned out to be £3.5 billion, meaning the actual contribution was less than 5% of the total cost.
Alongside this is the new northern line battersea power station branch, cost about £1 billion, with £270 million being paid by the developers of the regenerated area, around 25% of the total cost. Again this was an extension wanted by the developers, and they contributed to the overall cost of the construction. So atleast London is somewhat getting it right
@@illiiilli24601 This holds true for switzerland, too. They even build offices right on top of existing train stations sometimes. They already own the land, and the location more than makes up for the added construction costs.
still, rumor is, DB (german railway) basically fleeced the the tax payer in Stuttgart. Using public money to "upgrade" the main station and the lines, which did help the transit network, but also allowed them to redevelop the old above ground train station into high value office / commercial spaces.
based on what job sprawl is described as, i would perceive that the quickest transit fix, if your would call it that, would be building a circle line to connect the "suburban" working disctricts, such that the circle line does not exactly serve the downtown area. If your downtown area is geographically not in the center of your urban sprawl, the circle line would make sense to pass through the city center.
Case in point: Singapore, whose currently "C-ring" but going to be full circle Circle Line has one section passing through the city center - Dhoby Ghaut, Bras Basah, Esplanade, Promenade, Cantonment (U/C) and Prince Edward Road (U/C), and sections passing through "suburban" (if you would call it that) industrial centers of Paya Lebar (commercial), Tai Seng (more industrial) and Pasir Panjang (maritime trade), to name several.
A few years ago, the Rhode Island government subsidized the development of a major office space for Citizens Bank in Johnston, a suburban town west of Providence, not close to any sort of frequent transit but next to a highway interchange with a spur RIDOT specifically built for Citizens Bank and I'm still so bitter and ashamed my state government did that.
Surely a multi-centre city with a grid-based transit network could work.
Theoretically, but it just seems a bit... inhuman.
I know CityNerd and his followers love to hate Dallas with a burning passion, but i really think this city is a good example of what you described.
@@kjh23gk Ah yes, the inhumanity of Paris.
What makes a grid metro network more inhuman than a radial one?
I'm really glad you made this video. This is a really important topic in urbanism that is poorly understood in online urbanist spaces. Many people think that spreading out jobs would make for good urbanism since it could make commutes shorter but in fact it makes it more difficult to serve jobs with transit and promotes car dependency.
Hence why in other countries, multiple solutions have been done, sometimes all functioning at once - suburban loop lines like in Melbourne and Moscow, microtransit like in most of Southeast Asia, motorcycle hailing services like GoJek, and massive bike parking like in Utrecht.
Having offices close by is great until you change jobs and your new job is on the other side of the city. Do you uproot your entire life or deal with a cross-city commute?
@@lachlanmcgowan5712 Or you just don't apply for jobs that are too far. But then it is hard to think about that as a single city anymore.
@@petrhajduk9955 Tell me you've never worked for the Australian Public Service...
Melbourne is just startiing on its suburban loop line and at astronomical costs, not something to emulate@@ianhomerpura8937
In Berlin, people often cannot afford to live near many of the spread-out service jobs (retail, hairdressers, doctor's nurses, florists...) when they work at those jobs (some of which don't pay well). I think half the staff in my default grocery store lives in Brandenburg and commutes into fairly but not completely central Berlin (Friedenau) every day, or they live in less expensive districts in eastern Berlin. What I wanted to say is: for that clientele you need good or at least acceptable transit options everywhere in the whole area. In such cities there are considerable transit streams from the sticks into the boondocks, not just from the sticks to a few centers.
Meanwhile HK has suggested neighbouring Shenzhen city in mainland China as a cheaper housing location, but I can imagine that politcally it may not be the most palatable. While in Singapore many workers live in neighbouring Malaysia where its cheaper & commute into the former daily, causing long queues at the border crossings (~150 million people cross them annually, 2.5x the no. of people that pass through our main airport!)
"And since they are relatively compact, they are sort of an early 15 minute city". Weren't most towns/cities "15 minute cities" before the car? Certainly before the train all were.
Most cities in the World are. OK, I am in London and it takes 21-24 minutes to get to work (a tube train every 3 minutes), but within a 5 minute walk I have 3 pubs, a park, cinema, 7 cafes, 5 restaurants, numerous shops etc, and I am in a fairly typical inner suburb. We have a car, and maybe 90% of households in my road do; a couple even have 2, but these are only typically used at weekends to get to places out of town.
I've just got my first job in Toronto after moving from Wellington NZ (would love a video on that!), and this precisely describes my situation. The lack of an east-west rail/metro link along the 401 makes driving the only serious option. My employer's office lease is up and hopefully there is a small chance they'll move to somewhere close to a metro or rail link... luckily I can work remotely, but I prefer the office interaction.
Having lived in T. O. my entire life, take some advice, GET OUT!
Yeah pretty interesting that the Shepard Line never got extended the last 20 years, but watching from afar, I know the local politics and transit planning must have frustrated the hell out of you... In saying that, still seems like there is a lot of potential if the pace of transit development can be kept up for another decade or two.
I'm in a similar situation. I live in North York with good transit options nearby, and commute to Etobicoke every day to a job that has a TTC bus stop right in front of it. Even the worst days of congestion on the 401 still beat a perfect ride on public transit to my job just because there's no good east/west transit corridors north of Bloor.
@@Sushi227 I'm in North York too near Sheppard and Vic Park, and I'll have offices to spend time in on the far side (ass-end) of Mississauga and Guelph. Also frustrating that there is no regular GO train to Guelph (only awkward offpeak times). Car it is until the city figures out transit is the only way to take pressure off the highways....
@@towgod7985My relatives moved from Windsor to Vancouver. I went to find them when I visited North America from UK. It was beautiful, but I missed them. Whilst I was touring they moved up the BC coast and I did not have time. Also beautiful was Thunder Bay, where my friend's brother lived with his Canadian wife. I remember she was outside the car taking photos of a huge bear, whilst we British were just shouting "Bear!" from in the car. She just said that huge animals were common on the family farm as kids.
Good video overall, you summarized a lot of thoughts I've been struggling to put together about why many suburbs are so hard to serve!
One thing to add - it might be worth making a video about some of the more "inherently" low density land/job uses and how they can be served by transit. For example, warehouses, manufacturing, and other more industrial uses that are much harder to build with density.
It depends on what you mean by "sprawl". The counterexample is Taipei: it has a central business district, but it's small and there are office "centers" spread all over the city. An extensive metro and bus network covers all the urban area so few people need to drive and most dwellers are renting, so one is expected to move close to work, which is generally pretty easy due to the density and mixed-use development.
Overconcentration of jobs is how you get the wildly out-of-control housing market in NYC.
This is a pretty big problem with government offices in Ottawa. Even if you live pretty centrally a lot of the transit routes end up taking over an hour to get to the offices.
Job sprawl is a concept that I've thought of but never actually had words to describe it, thanks
A single circle line might help. Such a line will intersect all the radial lines and many offices could be along that circle line. Especially at the intersection points. A circle line of course is not possible if the city center is at the coast like in many major cities around the world.
As a Munich resident, I can attest that a circular rail line like Berlin would basically make our job sprawl a non-issue. Traveling to any office park here is possible, because they mostly developed where an S-Bahn station already was, but it necessitates a long winded route into the city to change to another branch of the star-shaped network.
The worst part? We already have a north and south ring of tracks. They're just already over capacity with industrial (north ring, 1 track) and regional (south ring, 2 tracks) trains. And building additional tracks is expensive and will bring out everyone's least favorite conservative NIMBYs. (edit: tbf, the rail circle is a little too far into the city to provide a really great circular route. IMO it should be around where the 3/4 circular freeway A99 is.)
A "circle" like for those coastal cities would just be an arc. The goal is to connect the radial lines to each other, it's not like you need the ability to ride it all the way around
Doesn't have to be a full circle line, a half circle line interconnecting the radial lines would still work. doesn't necessarily need to be rail either, for a small to mid sized city BRT might work for that circle/half circle line.
Dallas is building the Silver Line, directly connecting DFW Airport to the North Suburbs, with Transit Oriented Development at each of the radials connecting to Downtown Dallas. This should be a major improvement to our transit system.
@@yaziyo That'd be like Singapore's Cross Island Line or Tokyo's Musashino Line (with both cities' downtowns hugging along the coastline along their south-eastern corner), but both cities also have a more inner Circle & Yamanote Lines respectively which will be/are complete circles, just that the southeastern quadrant will cut straight through instead of bypassing downtown. On the other hand, HK's downtown (Kowloon & the northern coast of HK island) is surrounded by sea on the west & east, so its suburbs can only be north or south of its downtown, so there isn't much point having an orbital line there to bypass downtown when travelling from suburb to suburb
The end goal shouldn't be transit ridership; transit is a solution for getting where we need to go. The best office is no office at all...eliminating all those trips (and accompanying surges) entirely. Almost all office jobs can be done just fine from home, or from spaces near your home.
Uh oh Reese is wearing his bad hair day hat again!
You mean he's NOT plugging something by wearing their merch? 😄
It's completely natural that bigger cities at some point will grow a new center of activities. And it doesn't happen of a span of a single year it takes time before people from other districts will start to come more and more there. So if city can't make this decision on their own and more or less move to a place that will be easier to connect to other parts and is lazy about it, it only show how sleepy they are in city council.
I'm not convinced, there's companies that design and make products in the same building. Difficult to put them in the city center.
One counter to the idea of keeping offices all in a central location: if the city is REALLY big, then even a straight trip from the edge of the city to the center can be really long, and you likely will need to change lines at least once too. So in a case like that, having multiple centers would actually be better.
Tokyo has this issue imo. It's almost impossible to find an apartment that isn't a 40+ minute commute by train, and it can easily go over an hour for something more affordable.
I've watched RMTransit for two years or more now. I was initially attracted by the good information and pleasant video style, but over time I started to get used to the arguments presented (and footage and other things) and have mostly just been watching the videos passively, knowing what points will be made and what the conclusions will usually be. But I have to say, this video felt genuinely new to me, with new content and arguments that I had not seen on this channel before, and I was watching it much more actively and with more focus. It made me feel nostalgic for when I first discovered your channel and was learning so much new information about transit ;)
Thanks for all that you have done, and greetings from Israel.
Another name for "job sprawl" and "new towns" is "Worker Dormatories", the situation where the worker is so fully disconnected from capital that they're reduced to mobile working units that can be moved around freely like one of organising them based off an RTS or factory strategy game.
Sydney did the right thing by giving a dedicated transit stop to two of its unis - UNSW and Macquarie. The only thing I don’t like about it is that I still have to commute halfway into the city centre to take another branch back up and away from the CBD to reach my destination, so I’ve been experimenting with cycling the direct route.
For New Year’s Eve, I’m heading to a suburb (Hornsby Heights) that has abysmal suburban sprawl. I’ll be trying to prove that a transit+bike model works by taking a train to Hornsby Station first, then cycling in.
Struggle for last mile is the biggest deterrent to use transit. My previous job was half mile from subway station and there are no buses to there so I have to drive
This makes a great case for an orbital GO line in Toronto. It makes no sense for someone who lives in Pickering or Milton who wants to work in Markham or Vaughan to be forced to go to Union Station first or be jammed into one of the busy 400 series highways.
GO tries to do this by buses on the 407. There is a bus that goes from Richmond Hill to Hamilton with 20-60 min frequencies throughout the day. Since they use 407, it is fast too
I’m glad you bring this up. I live east of Toronto Ontario (in Durham Region). My old office job was in Brampton. The best transit time I could work out was 2 hours and 20 minutes each way. Add to that office hours of 8 to 5 and the decision to take a car was easy.
Another friend of mine had her office move from downtown to Newmarket. She went from a Go Train ride to a highway commute.
I wish planners would think about this more. But ultimately each town/city wants its own share of jobs thus adding to the overall challenge. No region wants to say “ why don’t you set up your corporation in downtown Toronto instead of here”
Meanwhile in Singapore I saw some job listings at Tuas Megaport in the country's SW corner that started work as early as 0715h. If I stayed at the other end of the city, I might need a ~20min walk & bus ride to the nearest train station, then a ~1.5h train ride, followed by another ~40min bus ride. With the 1st public bus of the day departing @ ~0530h, even if I boarded that, I'd still be late for work
After dealing with spending over an hour each way everyday commuting to Manhattan from Queens, I find this unconvincing. NYC is an example of how far you can scale mass transit before it becomes impractical. Hub and spoke also won't stop job sprawl because the concentrated commercial area will send the price of office space through the roof.
The problem is central business districts are incredibly expensive. Businesses move to the suburbs for the same reason people do -- rent in dense areas is just too high.
I wonder how this will change with ever growing demand of home office.
In the Bay Area, projections are that in the future there will be more jobs in San Francisco than the geographically larger and more populated San Jose. Now I know why.
If only SF would build housing, too.
This is making me realize the city I live in is built with this type of sprawl. No central hub, rather, it's smaller sized business centres. Car traffic goes in all directions at the same volume. I think the local government would be more keen on improving the bus system here if there was a more common destination, but as is, the routes are covering about 4 low-density business areas, so it's more costly to maintain an actual good transit system. The relative small surface area and low-density of the city makes it great for cars, but if you don't have a car, a 10-minute car ride is an 1 hr long walk and bus ride.
Like everything else, balance needs to be kept in perspective. A cluster of office towers is typically 'dead' in the evenings or on weekends. One could even make the argument that its an inefficient use of valuable land, ie single purpose. Services in these areas only employ people during 'office hours'. I've been in downtowns like Dallas that just, 'suck', and are in fact considered 'dangerous' in off peak use periods. Balance is key to sustainability.
It would help to also have some housing downtown. A lot of US downtowns became basically _nothing_ but office jobs and old department stores. Less true elsewhere.
This is a really good and under-discussed point that I'm seeing be increasingly ignored in some urbanist spaces I frequent online. And it's an enormous problem in my city of Atlanta Georgia! Our central business district has high vacancy in part from issues the city of Atlanta could control and is messing up badly and in part because we're a highly politically fragmented region (more than almost any other large North American city besides maybe Dallas-Fort Worth) which itself creates perverse incentives for where offices are placed.
For the parts under Atlanta's control, a lot of tax incentives have gone to placing offices along the Beltline, a ring of multi-use paths being built around the central city with no car traffic and a future light rail plan to supplement. The Beltline is generally a good idea, but it currently lacks any direct connections to our metro network. One connection is in the design stages and has secured funding but it's also pretty distant from where the incentives for offices are going. So offices that will pull in people from as broad as possible, such as for the finance firm Blackrock, are going up in areas with neither easy freeway access nor transit access (not even good bus access). These get substantial tax breaks while effectively abandoned areas of south downtown next to metro stations are allowed to be largely empty parking lots with a few decaying building (with trees growing in some buildings they've been abandoned that long). Multi-use paths are great urban amenities, but they should be focused on housing and businesses serving locals given the inherently slow nature of transport, not big office complexes!
The other factor though is the relatively small jurisdiction of City of Atlanta, and no strong regional planning over the metro as a whole. So outlying jurisdictions try to promote office parks in their area, mostly on the north side of the city where wealthier, whiter, and better educated people tend to live, though also some close to the airport for understandable reasons (logistics companies in particular get a lot of benefit being next to the world's busiest airport). Places like Alpharetta, Marietta, and Norcross that have no connections to the rail network and in some of those cases don't even run on the buses for MARTA (some outlying counties have their own bus systems that are incredibly awful with worse frequencies and few routes) but build lots of office parks. Others like Sandy Springs and north DeKalb county suburbs like Chamblee and Doraville do have metro connections, but those connections go south into the central city while they draw much of their workforce from further north creating zero incentive to use the most expensive to build and highest capacity part of our transit network. Those outlying jurisdictions have no incentive to care about this though since they often aren't directly supporting the transit system but do get the tax income benefits of these offices.
All this comes into the current big drive for office-to-residential conversions. In Atlanta that's happening with a particular office tower right by Five Points station, the literal center of the rail transit network. While housing, including dense housing, is definitely needed in the region as is the case in most of North America, office-to-residential conversions are focusing on downtown office buildings and not suburban office parks! This to me seems like a recipe for long term disaster as people come to the central city to live, and then find their jobs are all out in the suburbs requiring driving, undermining the biggest benefit to central city living (going car light/free), which will logically cause people to leave the central city. After all, if you find yourself spending 40+ hours a week away from all the city amenities anyways, why not just get a bigger home that's actually a shorter commute? Especially when prices in city centers tend to be higher since people can afford to spend more on the housing given that they normally spend less on the 2nd biggest household expense, transportation. No transport savings, smaller home, worse commute, I wouldn't want to live like that despite loving urban environments!
So I'm real glad you made this video and let Atlanta be a warning to other places. Allowing job sprawl to happen can undermine otherwise quite good (if in Atlanta's case mostly quite old now) infrastructure investments. And decentralization of offices is in fact worse than decentralization of housing.
And here I am, staring at the "urban planners" in my hometown of Ottawa, who keep building residential expensive condo towers next to a barely functioning rail line operating on an outdated model of jobs being downtown. It's gonna be so infuriating in a decade when they inevitably ask "why aren't people riding our transit line downtown?"
I live in the DMV (DC, Maryland and Virginia=Washington, DC metropolitan area) and this is a serious and accelerating problem. The job centers are generally moving further away into Northern Virginia, especially around and past Dulles International Airport, which is almost 25 miles away from downtown DC. DC suffers from lack of congressional representation and competes with Maryland and Virginia for everything, including jobs. Virginia generally comes out on top with most employers because their taxes are the lowest (except for Virginia's "car tax" ironically) and the defense industry is centered around the Pentagon and STEM industries are centered around Edge Cities like Tysons and Reston and companies lined up along the Dulles Toll Road and data centers in outer suburbs like Loudoun County. Most of Northern Virginia's companies are based around federal contracting and need a lot of secure space, prohibiting density and accessibility. Traffic patterns are crushing because the inequity of job centers and where people live are wildly imbalanced. Having an hour plus long commute each way by car alone is not unusual as housing prices are extravagantly expensive and people need to "drive 'til you qualify" further and further out into the Virginia and Maryland countryside, constantly exacerbating sprawl. Meanwhile, federal employees in Downtown DC have largely been working remotely since the pandemic and efforts to get them to return to offices full-time have been met with fierce resistance, gutting the downtown and contributing to a vast increase in crime, which in turn has made more people afraid of downtown DC. Washington, DC, which has seen a good 20-25 years of nearly uninterrupted overheated citywide gentrification, is finally seeing some degree of blowback as crime (or the perception of crime) has made the city less attractive for residents and employers, especially crime on the metro system which largely goes unenforced and makes many riders feel like they're on their own. People are less willing to go into DC to live and work than before and the regional transit authority, WMATA (Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority) is notoriously disorganized, ineffective and even corrupt and mismanaged and has little faith or trust of local residents and employers.
All this to say that while CONCEPTUALLY it's preferable to locate jobs near the urban core, most metropolitan areas in the United States at least have very complex and intractable reasons why employers sprawl outwards.
How do you feel about the idea to let Maryland annex all of the residential regions of DC, so that DC's population can be represented by Maryland's representatives and senators?
Currently planning to move and deciding between Chicago and New York. One of the things making me hesitant to choose Chicago is there's way more job sprawl, and a ton of it not really accessible by transit.
The major problem is not offices but price. The drive till you can buy moto. Thats why people are ready to be stuck 4h a day in the traffic. They have no choice.
I think its more a case for building new lines and extensions (of existing lines) in a non-radial (or circular) manner. Cities are more likely to be circular anyway and it would allow for more uniform density across the city especially if the aim is to build higher density along transit corridors. Starting a rapid transit system in a radial manner is fine, but the expansions/later phases because that's pretty much the only way to build unless you a train going to the middle of nowhere in a radial direction.
Iirc Delhi (and many cities in asia) did this.
I live in Greater Stockholm, it also has this "finger" style suburbanisation and I don't really like it. Maybe it works well in terms of transport statistics, but in terms of socialising or looking for work it really limits your options if you live in one of those suburbs. The other "fingers" are geographically close, but to get to them without a car you usually have to go to the city centre, switch to a different line, and then go back in a similar direction that you came from, which takes a lot of time and frankly just feels stupid. This has literally stopped me from visiting friends and applying for jobs (and I'm not even an office worker, I work in education and schools are needed everywhere).
Great timing and great points raised - because our old landlord priced us out to try getting new tenants, my job recently relocated from Arlington, Virginia (just across the Potomac from Washington DC) to a block west of Tysons Corner with lots of suburban office parks, car dealerships, strip malls, etc. There is a metro station but it serves only one line instead of three, and the bus connections aren’t as good so it’s much faster for me to drive (from another suburb in Virginia) to work while it used to be almost a toss-up between driving and transit.
This is a tough fight in America. There is a lot of pride in having a home with a lawn. It's ingrained in the culture, and personally I love it. I think the sprawl is going to happen until we run out of space. The city fingers idea is interesting, but the immediate downside I see is that you still have to get to the train station, and that isn't walkable in a suburb, and who wants to take multiple transportation types to get to work?
I really like the red cap and green shirt. Great video as well, thank you.
This reminds me of a discussion on a transportation fans forum a few years ago where a student in economy said that the only viable way to organize a city was to recentrailize all jobs.
I, on the other hand think that if a job sprawl could be beneficial to an urban area, it should be strictly ruled to prevent uncontrolled sprawl in unreachable regions. Job sprawl should be limited in size of buldings and above all, limited to places accessible by both radial and orbital transit routes, those junctions are the ideal point for that.
On an other perspective, there is the Norwegian model. Job sprawl is limited to buildings that are not company specific, they are office buildings with spaces on rent by companies. Renting a floor or just a few spaces given the needs from the perspective of the local employement. You don't need to travel 60 km to another badly served suburbian job sprawl cluster. This way of doing things can be very flexible for companies as well as employees. It's basically the best of both worlds. And specially adapted for harsh climate conditions as we will all face sooner than later.
Completely integrated clusters on a given job specialty is a bad thing, it creates uncessary traffic that forces the construction of roads or transit for just a few hundred peoples per day, especially with the Web 2.0 or even 3.0 era and the Norwegian model that makes the cluster model nearly obsolete.
The problem is of tax designation and thus the authorities level.
Building dedicated company buildings or clusters of buildings is, imo, obsolete. The economics of the Grand Paris project (cluster job wise) is an obsolete concept from the 80s.
I the job sprawl is regulated, undedicated and done at the right places served by orbital routes as well as radial, it should be manageable.
I think this conception could use another pass or two.
For one I'm not sure many people's idea of 'sprawl' involves middle density of towers, it's kinda smearing ( or sprawling! ) the definition out such that it doesn't mean anything more then just 'development' which isn't something that really helps the discourse. Sprawl is inherently low density in most understandings of the world 'sprawl'.
For another and in part because of the above it makes it pretty unclear what job sprawl is something like Glouchester Industrial Park in Langley or the densification of the Lougheed area in Burnaby that includes office space components. These are two radically different proposals but neither are building in the core area of Metro Vancouver. Additionally while from a transit organization point of view it may be easier for all the jobs to occupy one location I think you could just as easily see multiple well connected nodes as a better model as it increases the chance that people can align their housing and job location to have some proximity to one and other, which additionally unlocks biking/walking possibilities. Lougheed would certainly fit into that model where Glouchester Industrial Park does not. Finally there's going to be business needs that take jobs away from a downtown core, either to support more local service or to co-locate with critical infrastructure. I'm certainly amenable to disincentivising the sort of things that make Glouchester Industrial Park become a thing but I also think we have to be seriously considering how to make transit serve cities of all sorts of shapes not just how the city can serve transit.
When they opened the subway extension in Toronto in '17 I rode it and jumped off at Downsview Park for a bit to visit an instrument repair guy at Chesswood and Sheppard from Russia who right away remarked, "if this was Moscow subway would be right there," as he pointed to Chesswood Dr. Well there are a lot of jobs up Chesswood, with all kinds of manufacturing. There are offices and restaurants right across the street on one side and a hotel surrounded by countless commercial firms on the other. They might've at least put the east end of the platform there. Instead it seems to be more for the birdwatchers for part of the season. And the footpath seems to meander away from everything that is there. There is another employment node at Sheppard and Consumers Rd but the subway stops short at Fairview Mall. Quite a walk! Probably one of the busier intersections along the Sheppard corridor would be Willowdale Ave in old Willowdale; but no station. They have one at the four barren and windswept corners at Leslie and Sheppard though. And finally well...at least they used to have a rail link to the Scarborough Town Centre with everything that goes on there but that's been mothballed. And to think, I would go to a ball game in Montreal and the platform was right under the stadium near the ticket office and the scalpers were right on the platform
London’s sprawl works due to the amount of old villages where they just was sprawling out villages with tiny (and I mean tiny) amount of local shops and mainly houses.
Nah, this is utter madness. Having a main job location gets you all kinds of bad transit situations too, as the traffic of public transport itself becomes completely one-directional: Everyone goes downtown at the same time, and leaves downtown at the same time, leading to need for centralized storage in the most expensive locations. It's also similarly silly with cars, where one direction has traffic jams, and the other is empty. There are downstream effects in services too, as eventually a city center basically stops having housing. A multi-node network where the central point is found by coincidence, and not by people flows, is far more resilient to all kinds of shocks, covid being the easiest example. Increase in telecommuting is a long term shock, as the jobs that cannot telecommute at all are the kinds not allowed in city centers.
Ultimately we should look at urbanism from the lens of resource efficiency. Cities are massively more efficient than the worst sprawl. Putting things that are alike closer together only gains us efficiency when we do something like Shenzen, and industry really gains by shortening supply lines. But today's typical office center has relatively few of those gains in comparison. A better approach to sprawl is the typical Spanish way, where it's not as if it's illegal, but upzoning to urban is relatively easy. You'll find towns that go from 10stories to cows in about a mile. That's what we should be doing, instead of putting London, the pinnacle of failing to upzone as a positive example of anything.
Thank you Reece for yet another very-well presented and thought-provoking video. Almost everything you say is applicable to the situation here in Britain.
The fact that car factories in Germany have railway stations is wonderful. On a point of personal detail, as long ago as 1990 I was amazed when the Mainz-Frankfurt S-Bahn train I was on stopped at a station serving an Opel car factory - and a lot of workers got on!
Even better is the new Tesla factory 30 kms. east of Berlin. It has a new short branch line for both freight and passengers! (Sorry that i have not got any more detail.)
How did you post this 6hrs early?
@@LeZylox Likely a channel member.
The same could've used to be said about Australia but stations such as General Motors got closed 😢
Yeah, that's Rüsselsheim Opelwerk station, a very cool station that handles both freight and passengers!
In a kind of tragic coincidence, the year you were there (1990) saw the deadliest accident in the history of the Frankfurt S-Bahn happen just a few meters east at Rüsselsheim station. The driver had forgotten that the distant signal at Opelwerk station had indicated a halt.
To @@LeZylox (and others). I am a 'Patron' of RMtransit. That is sometimes referred to as channel membership. One of the benefits of being a Patron is that I get early access to a lot of Reece's videos. I live in Britain, and all times quoted are British times. At about 06 45 this morning I saw an e-mail from Patreon timed 05 46 telling me that I had early access to an RMtransit video. At about 07 20 I watched the video. This took about about twenty minutes as I stopped it at certain key points, especially when Reece talked about German car factories. I needed to check a couple of points, and at 07 45 I wrote my comment. The video was published to the world at 14 00.
2:11 Finger Plan development supports urban sprawl in it's worst form. People are well connected into the city centre but have no way to reach other districts without changing at central. This further promotes centralisation of workplaces in the city centre while creating a sea of neverending housing estates in urban surroundings.
We're really talking about land use here and how it links to transit. From the video I get what you're saying - spreading business parks all over suburban neighbourhoods isn't efficient. I agree, but it's also important to recognise that the opposite isn't necessarily the solution either. Creating business cores or sections of a city that are entirely dedicated to office space also has a negative impact on the city. They are deadzones after a certain time and on weekends, and typically residential spaces nearby are unaffordable catering to what is perceived as highly paid workers in the CBD. Most people can't afford those units and eventually gravitate away from city centres, hollowing out the very place you are trying to serve and make. Dublin had a big reckoning with this during the pandemic, as it seems a lot of North American cities did too. We (well some people!) recognised the need to bring people back into the city as residents not just as workers (or as tourists). The cities that get it right have offices mixed with residential, mixed with retail, throughout their inner cities , not just in one spot, and have transit that manages to serve most of the city.
this chicagos biggest problem with their public transport. all lines go thru the loop but if ur trying to go from any neighborhood that isnt going towards downtown...its either take a bus or drive. sucks so much.
10:07 ohhhhh that mention of "that's just geometry" is fire!
While I don't disagree with anything said in this video, I do sort of wonder if navel-gazing about offices and employment centers is a bit outdated in the year 2023-almost-2024. Most of the jobs that we do these days don't require an office, or even a place to go at all - we can do them from our homes. (I say this as I'm taking a break from my 100% fully remote job while I write this)
Certainly not *all* jobs can be done remotely, but many if not most can, particularly those that would have been in a physical office only a few years ago. Efficient transit patterns/modes are all well and good to reduce emissions and waste, but what if people didn't have to travel *at all* for work? What if the problem to be solved isn't getting masses of people to work via mass transit, but to create communities which serve the needs of remote workers and encourage companies to transform into remote-first/remote-only workplaces (either through subsidies or tax breaks, etc.) so that people drastically reduce their need for transit, as they did during the pandemic? If we had walkable communities where we could work in our homes, then run down the street to get groceries or to the hardware store or whatever, and didn't have to travel for work every day, isn't that better for everyone involved?
Yes, I fully admit this is not in the scope of a channel focused on transit like RMTransit, but questioning the underlying reasons why we need transit in the first place is important I think, so our society can make better overall choices.
I think it’s important to consider this topic not only from a pure transit planning perspective. In urban planning, the thoughts you mentioned of distributing jobs throughout a city, is as far as I understand mostly to prevent the standard new business-only areas from forming, as these places are usually not considered good urban environments and their nature of being non mixed zoning or only having little mixture makes them quite inhospitable. Even though the model of bringing Jobs and housing closer together is probably partially unrealistic given the points you mentioned about specialized jobs (and also just the current state of the housing market not really making it possible to choose where you live), I feel like your conclusions in this important topic seem to miss some important perspectives.
I have to strongly disagree with you here... One of the biggest factors on cost of transit infrastructure is the total commuter hours required. That means that someone who takes 1 hour to commute to work requires at least 6x more infrastructure than someone who commutes 10 minutes to work. This is actually a bit simplified, and in general the longer commutes on average require much more infrastructure - i.e. a 10 minute bike ride to work is a lot cheaper than a 1 hour train ride. By centrally locating all jobs in a single "downtown core" you end up putting intense stress on transit infrastructure getting everyone in and out of that central location from the bedroom communities that stretch out further and further from the core.
See Toronto - pre-pandemic, you literally could not get on a train going south during rush hour at Yonge-Eglinton because trains were already full by the time they got to this station. Line 1 was operating at full capacity, and even ATC upgrades can only do so much. Now we are planning to build condos for hundreds of thousands more people north of Steeles, installing limited parking capacity and expecting them to commute downtown using the Yonge Line 1 extension that isn't even built yet. This will only displace even more commuters from mid town and put more stress in terms of commuter hours on our transit infrastructure. We need to use zoning and construction of additional transit infrastructure to create additional job centers or cores in other prime locations that can pull from a large talent pool. Shorter trips need to be prioritized, both for the mental health of the work force and for cost savings reasons.
Toronto is particularly bad for centralization because the existing core is right by the lake, effectively cutting potential sprawl and feeders into the core from an entire direction. This makes it even more important for us to decentralize jobs away from this location. We need to identify, re-zone and build out transit infrastructure for 3-4 more core locations in the coming decades. More importantly, zoning for new commercial office buildings needs to be restricted in the core to force businesses to consider relocation to other areas that have been re-zoned and incentivized for new office infrastructure.
On a completely different topic, the best transit trip is a trip that never happened. For this reason government should be doing more to incentivize work from home as well. Instead the government and corporations are actively encouraging return to office, as if nothing happened in 2020.
look man in america, for every Boston there is six Raleighs. Go to nyc, chi, philly, dc were trying okay😭
When you were talking about Denmark you showed some very weird clips
When you were talking about new towns you the clip showed a local train arriving at Hillerød station despite the fact that the station was built in 1864. A better choose would have been either Ørestad or Nordhavn as they’re both less than 20 years old and built around the metro
Another thing is that when you were talking about the finger plan and radial lines you showed the F line at Flintholm station which Is literally the city’s ring line
I experienced this firsthand in the early 2000s. The problem with having a relatively short car commute to your suburban job is that you don't keep the same job in the same building forever--you might have a 20-minute commute now, but your next one is probably going to be further away and it'll suddenly expand to 90 or 120 minutes of crawling through bumper-to-bumper suburban traffic. Unless you move every time you change jobs (and your spouse doesn't work somewhere quite different).
It seemed like the real-estate crash that culminated in the 2008 economic crisis undid a lot of this and drove re-centralization.
These days, my job is in the city center and my main problem is just that Boston's transit system is so broken. It could be fast getting in there.
Everywhere I worked on the railway the office was on top of the network. Cities and towns were built next to the rails. It's now hard for the railway to escape urbania. I do see railway vehicles parked at houses now in suburbia.
Yep, my small semi-rural city was built as a company mining/mill town next to the rails. The mill is gone, but the mine remains and trains stop there once a day or every few days to load up at the mine. It prevents other rail traffic from coming through when it stops. It sometimes also causes vehicle traffic from getting through too. Sine the rail line cuts my city in half (homes on one side and shops/businesses on the other, including the hospital), the trains have caused ambulances to have to divert a few miles around.
In Melbourne historically the suburban railways were electrified in between 1919 and 1926 (plus Glen Waverley as a new line in 1930), early for a city that didn't reach 1 million until 1934. At the time Frankston, Dandenong, Ferntree Gully, Lilydale, Hurstbridge, Broadmeadows, St Albans, etc. were well out of suburbia despite being included in the scheme and most trains terminated at places like Mordialloc, Oakleigh, Box Hill, Heidelberg, Essendon and Sunshine.
In the post war years, the rail lines provided the very corridors for urban sprawl to occur all served by electric trains increasingly running to the end of the wires. Later we ended up with infill suburbs between these that are no so well served by transport and continue to do so to this day.
I live blocks away from my city's downtown, in a fairly nice rental apartment. I'm told by my coworkers how lucky I am that my "commute" to my office is only a 10-15 minute walk. As my career progresses, I *might* move to another place one day, but I'd want to stay in my neighbourhood. It's just too nicely walkable and convenient to leave. My husband has a car -- a 10 year old, fully paid off, economical Honda Civic which is mostly a grocery getter (only the expensive grocery stores deliver, unfortunately) and relative visitor.
This is the exact issue that plagues Metro Detroit.
All the jobs are in places like Troy, Madison Heights, Livonia, and Auburn Hills. If there was transit, it would be hardly used since Downtown Detroit only has a fraction of the area's white-collar jobs. The result is you have this economic desert surrounded by auto-dependent suburban office towers, and the city itself almost has no reason to exist.
I think this is definitely the main reason MARTA in Atlanta has been increasingly struggling. More people are moving into the central city but transit ridership is still decreasing since more and more jobs are moving into the northern suburbs.
Alternative perspective: assuming one's place of residence is permanent is a disservice to job sprawl as a positive thing.
People complain so often about how unaffordable it is to live and work in the city (Canadian perspective here), and how if their company moved to somewhere smaller and more affordable, they would happily go. In your opening example, the easiest solution is for our example person to move to the suburb where that job is. Then they can avoid the high cost downtown and a big commute.
The randstad in the Netherlands is also a job sprawl, people live in Utrecht work in Amsterdam, people live in Leiden work in Rotterdam, etc. Traffic on the highway at rush hour is not nice... Although we do have quite a good transit system
I must disagree. Locating all the jobs downtown creates lots of issues - from overcrowding, making rush hours worse (even on transit, where you can suddenly hardly fit into train/tram/bus), turning downtown into souless district that empties after work hours, making commutes longer etc.
Also, focusing on getting people to and from work ends up in creating star-shaped transit model where getting to the center is easy but as soon as you need to get anywhere else it becomes a nightmare. Building transit in a spiderweb shape is much better as it alows you to get everywhere you need on transint and job decentralisation works great with that model.
Also, I lived in the cities that had very decentralised work location. Instead of huge business parks it was usually few office buildings located between normal housing. When looking for the new job, for many people location was very important (why commute for an hour when there's office 15 minutes away?). And companies adapted - instead of having one big office in the city, they would instead have multiple small offices in different locations (so in those three office buildings near your house, 10 floors each, there would be like 20 different companies to choose from, and there would be another set of buildings a little further away with even more companies and so on). Worked great.
What cities then?
@@trainsandmore2319Generally cities not in new world Anglo countries
I live on the abslute edge of a large metro. Why because this was the only house I could afford. Lots of factors create sprawl but in my case it was finding affordable housing that I can own.
In Switzerland you have a lot of companies that set up shop in tax havens and then force their employees to commute hours on end to a tiny farm town. The "best case" outcome is that the farm town gets so overrun by commuters that it gets gentrified and eventually decent transit gets built.
If anyone is interested in factory train stations, check out the Port Kembla branch line in Sydney. Runs through a large steel mill with a few stops, one of which is totally unused nowadays.
Job sprawl does not have to be a problem when you have naturally grown cities, which you don’t find outside of Old Europe. Here you have always had multiple centers and spaces that all house various jobs who have then influenced the kind of Transit necessary to fulfill the demand. End and starting distances under a kilometer are easy to walk and don’t require transit so most people have transit close to where they need to work, but maybe there are examples where you need more infrastructure for it, which may not be necessary, if you plan adequately and if you consider the larger cost of singular big projects compared to smaller scale solutions, that have further reach and more adjustable throughput, think Trains, trams, Busses, Bikelanes.
You may only need one or two trainstations, then 50 60 tramstops along 3 or 4 routes, the rest can either be taken by bike or via scheduled busses.
Many cities already have ringroads, why not a ringtram?
In fact the urban model found in new world Anglo countries like US, Canada and Australia with a downtown surrounded by low density residential suburbs is the exception rather than norm around the world. Outside those regions, cities tend to be decentralized, with neighborhoods being dense and mixed use throughout the city without a specific concentrated location for jobs
There’s been a lot of new office parks built near highway interchanges in the Chicago suburbs and now I’m anxious of job sprawl happening here too.
Woah repping the San Diego Trolley in the background!
If landlords keep trying to jack up rates to $60+ a square foot a month like WFH never happened will continue to push offices out of city centres.
Offices are moving due to price and lack of use post covid.
Yeah, I don't know... job sprawl seems to be the kind of problem that's only a problem if your transit system is already bad. And what's the alternative? No new jobs?
One alternative: zone so that new jobs go in existing transit centers, rather than in greenfield.
I work at one of these randomly plopped down suburban business parks and it is just so clear there was no thoughtful planning put into transportation to this employment center. There is a bus stop and train station "nearby" (as in 35 min and 47 min walk respectfully) which to realistically use, you need to bring micromobility with you. It is just poor planning.
This video is relevant to my life. I wish my office was downtown so I could take transit there. But it's in a suburb and the only way to get there is by freeway. So for that reason, I work from home.
The best model is a transit network like a spider web, with radial lines running into a central core and 1-3 orbital lines at well spaced distances out from the centre. Then build your density around where the nodes intersect. I also think the finder model of Copenhagen is great, so long as you still have orbital lines so you don't have to go in and out again.
In London the Excel Exhibition Centre was built on the DLR (it's got a station at each end) and then Earl's Court Exhibition Centre, which is served by the District and Picadilly Line at Earl's Court Station and by London Overground and National Rail at West Brompton closed down.
So, now when people living north or south of London want to go to exhibitions, instead of being able to get to West Brompton on the West London Line, they have to navigate through London Underground and find a station that connects to the correct branch of the DLR to get to Excel. (This isn't helped by the DLR not having specific line names for the individual routes.)
Will you do a new Edmonton LRT video? Found out the two Edmonton ones are private now and they have the Valley Line open with further extensions in the coming years
Concentrating jobs in a downtown area to such a degree that its impractical to house all of the workers nearby is what is creating the need for sprawl in the first place. The rush of workers into the downtown core each morning and out each evening is exactly what causes most traffic and transportation issues. The rise of remote work for office workers during the pandemic showed how much better off people are having flexibility about where they work, which cascaded into reduced demand for roads and transit... That of course is slowly coming to an end as people are freaking out about the drop in value of downtown office buildings and businesses are responding by demanding employees return to the office. The fix is not to redensify jobs, its to convert downtown office space into housing to equalize the job/housing demand, and to double down on job sprawl so that people can actually live closer to where they work, and have options for high paying specialized office jobs that do not require commuting to the downtown core daily.
Yep, the old world urban model of dense, mixed communities, arguably much better than the urban model used in new world Anglo countries of dense downtown commercial hub surrounded by low density residential suburbs
It's kind of a weird catch 22, office blocks popping up next to a train station, is that Job Sprawl or TOD? There's also a new post-COVID factor that you haven't really touched on, the abandonment of office buildings as more and more people are choosing to work from home (and when companies try to force them back to the office they just jump ship to a company that is WFH friendly). Here in Denver over 30% of the commercial office space in the city is currently sitting vacant, in both the downtown hi rises and in the job sprawl office blocks out in the suburbs. There is a big push here to convert a lot of that empty office space into residential units. It's bad enough here that about 1/2mi from where I live there is a good sized 6 story office building (definitely a job sprawl type building), that is fairly new (built within the last 20 years) and only has one tenant in it that I'm aware of, and that is the security company that provides security for the building.
This is why Melbourne is building the suburban rail loop
that feeling when you post a splattering of urban design channels 5 seconds into the video and your subbed to every one of them lmao. Awesome video as usual Reece, keep on fighting for the betterment of our city planning.
kchoze had a blog post years about about how commercial density would reduce trips/distance more than residential density (if you have to pick just one) You drive/bus/bike to one place, do your shopping/errands by walking around, then return home.
OTOH the video does have a strong assumption of radial transit, with or without 'orbits'. If you imagine a grid of metro lines or at least BRT, 'job sprawl' wouldn't be so bad, and e.g. doing from the southwest to the northwest wouldn't need a long trip through the center.
Learning about Copenhagen's "finger plan" was neat!
Your Blue Line sign behind you is very ironic given the description you gave describes 12th&Impl and the Santa Fe Depot lol. The streets in SD may be not as wide but the Ace parking lots are aplenty