People Who Live In Suburbs: Classy, Icky, or Dudes?

Despite the best intentions of ILXors and the "Gardening 2010" thread, which fills me with envy, almost 100% of that plantable space in the suburbs is planted with grass that requires heavy doses of chemicals and more water than the flood plains of Egypt in order to look properly golf-course-like.

And, in North Jersey, at least, whatever isn't planted with grass is planed with impatiens. I hate impatiens.

my parents have converted about half of our backyard into a vegetable garden. it's pretty great. we still have a front lawn though which yeah, uses a lot of water :(

gardening is pretty hard work though

my neighbors prob don't either, seeing as I live 200 yds from a train station

sounds like you're set

almost 100% of that plantable space in the suburbs is planted with grass that requires heavy doses of chemicals and more water than the flood plains of Egypt in order to look properly golf-course-like.

this is changing though! again i can only speak from personal experience, but i think trends towards gardening and non-invasive landscaping are significantly rising.

would be if my job were either in chicago or one of the downtowns along the metra rail. like i said, as much as i'm not down w/the "cars are evil!" mentality, structuring areas to be dependent on needing a car to do the basics of life (earn a living, buy food, get drunk communally) is the real problem as i see it.

xpost That's good to hear. I hate grass lawns on both an aesthetic and ecological level.

as much as i'm not down w/the "cars are evil!" mentality, structuring areas to be dependent on needing a car to do the basics of life (earn a living, buy food, get drunk communally) is the real problem as i see it.

yeah but once you've fixed that problem, a car is basically superfluous

When shopping for groceries for a family of 6, a car is never superfluous. It would be nice, though, if you didn't need it for EVERYTHING.

zipcar etc.

lots of things are superfluous, chairman!

i've always been curious about the amount of gas used by persons (whether for commuting or for recreational/leisure activities) vs amount used for commercial activities (transport of goods, work crews and equipment, etc.) anyone got any stats?

http://www.nrdc.org/air/energy/fensec.asp

'Passenger cars use more than 40 percent of the oil consumed in America'

Hmmm. That doesn't necessarily mean the other 60% is all used for commercial transportation, though. Inconclusive.

right, but the 40% isn't inconclusive

ok now give me the %'s in other countries!

Does "passenger cars" include taxicabs, airport shuttles, etc.? Or are they referring to privately-owned vehicles only?

could be higher than 40% - that particular stat depends on whether the rest of their economy is fueled by oil or not. per capita #s would be a better comparison, no? here's overall:

http://static.seekingalpha.com/uploads/2008/1/7/wsj_oil_chart.jpg

looking for passenger car numbers

right, but the 40% isn't inconclusive

― iatee, Thursday, June 10, 2010 10:27 AM Bookmark

Right, but that wasn't the question.

it was half of the question, and so I answered half of the question, because that's all I found

I don't get the right side of the most recent graph. Obviously it's showing change from 1996-2000 levels to 2001-2006 levels, but I don't understand the various baseline points, which don't seem to be correlated to anything.

they're correlated to rate of change from -2 to 10. in 1996-2000 america's rate of change of consumption per capita was ~1%, in 2001-2006 it fell to 0%. that doesn't mean that the use itself fell, it meant that the rate at which our per capita use was growing fell.

I get that, by why are the 1996-2000 baseline points all over the place, rather than being a 0 baseline or correlated to the amount of use you see on the left?

by = but

1996-2000 and 2001-2006 were + in some places and - in some places, so they have to be all over the place. there isn't a zero baseline because they're using two different periods of change and putting them on the same graph.

okay, here's "Transport sector gasoline fuel consumption per capita (liters)

Gasoline is light hydrocarbon oil use in internal combustion engine such as motor vehicles, excluding aircraft. Source: International Road Federation, World Road Statistics and electronic files, except where noted, and International Energy Agency.

Country name 2005 2006 2007
United States 1.25 1.24 1.22
Canada 0.92 0.91 0.91
Luxembourg 1.04 0.95 0.90
Kuwait 0.83 0.85 0.86
United Arab Emirates 0.79 0.80 0.82
Bahrain 0.66 0.68 0.70
Australia 0.71 0.67 0.66
Qatar 0.81 0.79 0.63
Saudi Arabia 0.55 0.57 0.61
New Zealand 0.56 0.56 0.56
Brunei 0.53 0.54 0.56
Netherlands Antilles 0.54 0.54 0.55
Iceland 0.50 0.53 0.51
Oman 0.40 0.44 0.49
Switzerland 0.48 0.47 0.46
Ireland 0.41 0.44 0.42
Venezuela, R.B. de 0.40 0.42 0.42
Cyprus 0.36 0.38 0.41
Sweden 0.43 0.41 0.39
Greece 0.35 0.35 0.37
Finland 0.35 0.34 0.34
Japan 0.35 0.34 0.34
Denmark 0.34 0.33 0.33
Trinidad and Tobago 0.32 0.30 0.32
Israel 0.30 0.30 0.31

(http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IS.ROD.SGAS.PC)

we're basically unique in being a rich industrialized country that's also physically huge in area. our gasoline use is probably always going to top the charts, but it doesn't have to be that bad.

of all my posts to quote. canada, incidently, fares pretty well by my standards - half their population lives in 3 urban areas.
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Would that still be the case if their population was 300 million instead of 33 million? Could it be the case? Does climate have anything to do with it? Those three urban areas are about as far south as it's possible to be in Canada.

I think it's more around 1/3 of the population.
Not sure about climate. Except for Vancouver, pretty much all major cities in Canada are susceptible to the sort of unpleasant cold that you'd think would drive people away. But Alberta and I think to a lesser extent Saskatchewan have both recently had big explosions in population and development, and they both have dreadful climates.

Sorry for the many xposts.

distance to american border is also a factor and it doesn't hurt that 'geographic closeness to closest trading partner' is positively correlated w/ warmer climate

Haha, I just realized, Laurel probably has me killfiled.

Certainly a lot of people who are able to do so will drive into the US to buy cars, TVs, other consumer goods etc (because they're cheaper and/or released earlier), but I don't think it's a dealbreaker for the average person to not be within driving distance of the border. The proximity is probably more beneficial to companies and governments and cities as a whole (for example, Toronto being able to ship its garbage to Michigan). Not sure it's a huge draw for individual people such as the suburb-dwellers who are the topic of this thread, though.

right but where people end up living is related to companies and governments and cities as a whole...

like I think you think that I was suggesting that people are like "hmmm I could live 70 miles from the US or 20 miles from the US - I'mna go w/ 20 - gotta get my walmart/nfl/etc. fix" - I'm sure nobody operates like this. rather, they're choosing between places are 70 miles and 20 miles from the US because those regions are developed for reasons that *are* related to the US.

yeah, I wasn't entirely sure—I didn't think you were suggesting that but wanted to discuss against it anyway.

the american economy is ~80% service sector. so yeah, good point, we can't bring coal mines to san francisco and I don't think we need to. but it's totally disingenuous to act like in 2010 the american suburban and rural population is a bunch of miners and farmers, that the rural/suburban population distribution are due to the 'needs' of the american economy rather than, well essentially a lot of political decisions. the set-up is inherently *uneconomic* - as the status quo has requires massive gov't subsidies.

― iatee, Thursday, June 10, 2010 5:10 AM (10 hours ago) Bookmark

i accept most of that, but you're mischaracterizing my argument, which largely concerned the origins of farming communities and manufacturing towns in the inland u.s. infrastructure (rail, roads, waterways) are initially built to support long distance travel and the transit of goods - not subsidized to facilitate suburban living. this basic network of roads and communities, however, provides a web in which the population simply will accumulate around certain nodes. those nodes grow into cities, and those cities sprout inner-ring suburbs. my point was never that "most people in iowa work in agriculture", it was that the relatively few who do wind up creating and even necessitating a vast network of low-density communities.

in the 50s, with explosive population growth, relative wealth and a willingness to spend money on massively expanding the federal highway system, you get a shift to "planned communities" like levittown (which are really what a lot of people mean when they say "suburbs"). you also get a tendency to subsidize such communities, both directly and indirectly. as a result, you get 60 years of explosive growth in such communities, often in the outer ring around existing suburbs, and a resulting ghosting of many towns and small cities. the largest town near my mom in maine now has a town center composed of a massive parking lot, serving a scattering of dying, old-fashioned urban businesses, all surrounded by a sprawling ring of insta-suburbs and new big-box retailers. this is what now constitutes the actual, viable community. the so-called town center is a memory, existing only because it is thought to exist. lots of american towns and small cities work the same way, though the pendulum seems to have been swinging back the other way for the last 20 years or so.

agree that this is a problem. suburban living is environmentally irresponsible. it takes much more energy to heat a small home than a large apartment, and most suburban lifestyles DO require a great deal of driving. roads and lawns and sewage systems are environmentally catastrophic, and the more widely dispersed they are, the more widely they can disperse their toxic effects. agree with all that. but politically speaking, how do we reverse this? we're not a top-down, autocratic state where decisions of the type that might be required can be easily made and enforced. you have to convince people that they want to deprive themselves of the subsidies in question. how do you do that?

plus, i'm not convinced that we can maintain a mostly service-based economy over the next 100 years, or that we should even try. suspect that 21st century america will be much more blue-collar than the late 20th, and that's much harder to centralize.

we're not a top-down, autocratic state where decisions of the type that might be required can be easily made and enforced. you have to convince people that they want to deprive themselves of the subsidies in question. how do you do that?

agree that the problem comes down to these two sentences. unfortunately I don't think there *is* an easy answer and if there were, somebody much smarter than me would have come up w/ it by now. the american public isn't prone to these kinda sacrifices. this is a country where health care reform - (one which didn't even require sacrifice! in fact quite the contrary!) - barely survived the onslaught of rumors that there would be *some* sacrifices.

so, my answer is 'pray that gas gets so expensive* that people start looking into alt transit options purely out of self-interest'?

*err maybe not in 2010 or 2011

I'm really having trouble believing that some of these are real.

really like the first one

I mean...aesthetically...

wtf mate

Or this! Totally wild.

http://nikolasschiller.com/posters/gershmanyquilt3D.jpg

http://nikolasschiller.com/posters/harborsidequilt2.jpg

this is the kind of shit that drives me up the wall. go go gadget building lobby.

xp: please tell me these last two are shops

http://www.nikolasschiller.com/blog/index.php/archives/category/renderings/fractal/

What's really freaky is that the real ones posted above are just as weird as the manipulated pictures.

Well, nearly.

the nevada one is is just ;_;

http://www.incatrail-peru.com/inka-trail/img_web/zoom/ica_nazca_lines_02.jpg