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Community

Getting pizza in two suburban neighborhoods — one built for cars, the other for community

Definitive proof that "quaint and walkable" is totally doable in the suburbs.

Photo credit: Canva

Urban planning is a choice.

When you think of a "neighborhood," what do you picture? Block after block of houses? A variety of homes and businesses all within walking distance? A community of people in close proximity who see and interact with one another regularly?

Neighborhoods can look very different, and the rise of suburbs in the past century changed the way neighborhoods have traditionally functioned. Sprawling housing developments often lack the "walkability" factor that serves as a hallmark of urban life. But a comparison of two side-by-side suburban neighborhoods shows that design is not a given, but a choice.

- YouTube www.youtube.com

A video from Streetcraft Shorts shows two neighborhoods in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, that offer drastically different ways of living. One of them is built for people and community, the other built for privacy and cars. To showcase the differences, the video goes through the process of getting a pizza in each neighborhood.

The first neighborhood contains continuous tree-lined sidewalks and nary a driveway or garage in sight. Vehicle access to the homes is from alleyways behind the homes, so the streets don't feel like they are geared toward cars. The lack of driveways cutting into the sidewalks also makes it safer for kids to walk or ride bikes down the sidewalk. Many of the front porches open up to green space as well, with intertwining paths people can walk on as shortcuts through the neighborhood.

walkable neighborhood, walk paths, green spaces, walking, neighbors Paths through green spaces make walking more inviting.Photo credit: Canva

Perhaps most importantly, this neighborhood includes businesses. This is possible because the variety of home types—single-family, townhomes, and duplexes—creates enough population density to allow businesses to have a walkable customer base. The pizza place is right there in the neighborhood, so people can walk to it (though there's also parking behind the building, so they can drive if they prefer). Businesses are right there on the street, just like the homes, which creates a more cohesive sense of place compared to having a strip mall on the edge of a gigantic parking lot.

pizza, pizza place, eating together, community restaurant, neighborhood Want to walk down to your local pizza place? Photo credit: Canva

The other neighborhood is different. This one is all single-family homes with driveways and garages at the front of the houses. There are no businesses in this neighborhood, so you have to go to a pizza place a few blocks away. The distance isn't terrible, but there's no infrastructure in place to make it walkable. In fact, there are streets between the neighborhood and the pizza place that have no sidewalks and signs indicating you're not even supposed to walk.

To get to the pizza place, residents have no choice but to drive on a large suburban road and cross four lanes of traffic. The pizza place faces a parking lot—not exactly a community-based location to eat outdoors. The community appears to be built for cars, not for people.

suburb, suburban neighborhood, the burbs, urban sprawl, cars Some suburbs seem like they were solely designed for cars.Photo credit: Canva

Many people compared the first neighborhood to what's commonplace in Europe and other older places:

"In Europe, pretty much every neighborhood has a little coffee shop, a hair salon, some little stores, mini market.. it's easy to go out and grab something you need, by foot. Almost everything we need is available in walking distance, so it helps us being healthier and we breathe a little fresh air while we walk.. we only use the car for longer distances or big shopping."

"The Northeast (maybe the East Coast in general) is sort of a different beast to the rest of the country because a lot of it was built in an earlier time when walking was the primary mode of transportation. Or at least that's what I think. Out West where I grew up, the second neighborhood you see in the short is much more typical, with suburban neighborhoods centered around cars and no nearby businesses until you get to a commercial zone."

walkable neighborhood, tree-lined street, sidewalks, urban, city, neighborhood Not having driveways in front of homes makes sidewalks safer and more user-friendly.Photo credit: Canva

Zoning rules and regulations are partially why modern suburban neighborhoods are what they are, and automobile companies are partially to blame for those regulations. For decades, car makers have pushed car-dependent lifestyles and influenced city planning, which has altered what we view as normal.

While many feel that the first neighborhood is more desirable, not everyone agrees. Some people prefer not to interact with their neighbors, want their own backyard over communal green spaces, and wish to enjoy the greater sense of privacy that the second neighborhood affords. Whether that's a product of getting used to those kinds of developments or a genuine desire for less community, walkability is a legitimate question and everyone has their own preferences.

Either way, the contrast illustrates that urban planning is a choice. Neighborhood design must be intentional, and as this video shows, it's not actually all that difficult to create the kind of quaint, walkable, community-centered neighborhood so many people desire, even in the suburbs.

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communities

Health

I never realized how dumb our cities are until I saw what a smart one looks like.

There's community and there's commuting. Let's not confuse the two.

Image created from YouTube video.

A busy freeway.

With the population growing and most of it happening in cities, these Canadian journalists wanted to take a closer look at whether our sprawling modern villages are up to the task of housing more humans.

Over half of the world lives in urban areas.

That includes over 80% of people in the United States and 81% of folks in Canada, where this report was produced. Therein lies the problem.

The busy traffic in the cities.

GIF created from YouTube video.

A lot of modern cities are being described as obesogenic environments.

Dr. Karen Lee can tell you what that means:

Design of cities makes us sick.

Image created from YouTube video.

Lee says our living environment has shaped public health for the worse:

"The ways in which we've been designing our cities have been making us sick. ... We've inadvertently designed physical activity out of our lives."

A healthy diet and regular physical activity are some of the most important things we can do for our health as individuals, but flawed city design has restricted opportunities for people to make those choices, which has contributed greatly to what are essentially public health epidemics — ones that require public health solutions.

Most cities have been designed for cars, not for people.

Look out your window and see for yourself. Brent Toderian, former chief city planner for Vancouver, says it's a big problem:

Cities are designed around using cars.

Image created from YouTube video.

Toderian says city design that makes it easier for people to get around instead of cars is one way to make physical activity a more natural part of our lives. And a lot of major cities are beginning to look to Latin America for ideas about how to achieve that.

In the 1990s, Medellín, Colombia, was one of the most dangerous cities in the world.

The constant threat of drug-related violence made it a place people wanted to escape.

Looking over Medellín, Colombia.

Image from YouTube video.

But today, Medellín stands as a model of creative urban design.

The city was desperate for change. And they may not have had the resources of the world's richest city, but with a few smart infrastructure investments, like outdoor escalators, suspended gondolas, and public gathering spaces, Medellín has been transformed into a place where people are proud to live.

$escalator, Medell\u00edn, population$

A system of escalators

GIF created from YouTube video.

Gondolas moving people throughout the city.

GIF created from YouTube video.

Medellín's escalators cost only $6 million to build — "peanuts in the scheme of modern infrastructure projects.”

Architect Carlos Escobar sees these developments as much more than just infrastructure upgrades:

"The new transportation system in Medellín ... is not only a physical solution. It is not only transportation. It is also a social instrument that involves the community, that integrates the community in all the city."

Medellín is more connected than it's ever been, which makes it easier for workers to get to their jobs, and it brings more action to the local economy, strengthens the community, AND encourages people to be physically active.

If you'd rather spend more time in your community than in your car, give this post a share and help spark more people's imaginations. The solutions are out there. And they're not as costly or far-fetched as a lot of us might think.

This was a fantastic news report by CBC News (great job, Canada!). Here's just a snippet, but check out the whole video if you wanna nerd out a little more like I did:

This article originally appeared on 03.10.15

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Heroes

Eco-friendly concrete could make your morning commute a lot smoother.

Imagine a world with no more spilled coffee because of bumpy roads.

Road salt — nearly 1 million tons of it just in the state of Pennsylvania — is used to keep cars safe on the road.

In the aftermath, however, it means thousands of cracks, potholes, and other damages in roads that need to be repaired each year because the chemicals in the salt "dice up" asphalt and concrete when the salt causes the water in snow to stick around, freeze, and do some damage.

All images via iStock.

Fortunately, there may be a new type of concrete coming to town.

It's made from coal furnace leftovers and uses less calcium hydroxide — the ingredient that reacts with road salt and causes that frustratingly pore-like reaction in concrete — which means you'd be riding a bit smoother on it.

The concrete is even more durable than what we use now because it doesn’t react with road salt and is made from recycled materials.

"Many departments of transportation have reduced the amount of calcium chloride they use to melt ice and snow, even though it is very efficient at doing so — because it has also been found to be very destructive," said Dr. Yaghoob Farnam, assistant professor at Drexel University in Philadelphia and lead researcher on the team behind the new mixture.

By recycling power industry byproducts such as fly ash, silica fume, and slag that would normally get tossed and become harmful to the environment to make the concrete, Farnam's team came up with a solution to the thousands of road-related repairs caused by salt damage that is also environmentally friendly.

Not all roads are made of concrete, but many sidewalks and parking lots are.

This new concrete could be a relief to anyone who's ever broken a carton of eggs after guiding a shopping cart over a cracked parking lot or ended up with a lap full of joe while drinking a cup of coffee on a morning commute.

(Since so many people drink java and drive, this could be a major game changer when it comes to safety as well — although, you may want to rethink that when so many accidents are caused by distracted coffee-sippers behind the wheel.)

This may not be in your city tomorrow, but you can help move things along.

Safe, healthy, durable infrastructure takes time to build the right way, Farnam cautions, but it’s important for government leaders and local municipalities to consider infrastructure decisions as long-term plans and spend the time to come up with intelligent, sustainable solutions. That may include the need for this type of research to be done for other road-building materials like asphalt.

Try attending local municipal meetings and talking to decision-makers about how they gather information about infrastructure choices. You may also want write in to state legislators to suggest sustainable solutions like this one.

If you want to start at the source, you might even try asking those legislators to support funding for research on projects like this with your own local department of transportation.

"This would help scientists understand what are real challenges in our society, and it will also help the leadership and contractors to learn about the new technologies that they can use on a daily basis," Farnam says.

There's no bus, so these kids climb down a 2,600-foot ladder to school.

The small Chinese village of Atule'er sits upon a mountaintop a half-mile high.

It takes eight hours by car to reach the 200-year-old town from the provincial capital of Sichuan.

Of course, there aren't any actual paved roads in that remote rural area. But the 400 people who live there still try to make the most of the fertile soil, the scenic views among the clouds, and the half-mile climb down a sheer cliff mountainside that the school-age villagers must traverse to get to school.

All photos from Chinatopix via The Associated Press.

The perilous trek to the local Le’er Primary School, which serves the entire Zhaojue County, is the stuff of video game nightmares.

It puts every cliched older-relative anecdote about walking uphill both ways in the rain to shame. And it's the frightening reality of life in an isolated region with a literacy rate of 60%.

To aid in their descent, the children must rely on a haphazard system of 17 wicker ladders and, more recently, an adult chaperone-cum-belayer who secures them all with a rope harness around their waists. At least eight people have fallen to their deaths there, although they haven't seen that kind of tragedy since 2009.

Taking a break.

Children need their exercise, of course. But this is something else entirely.

Unfortunately, the costs of adding in the necessary infrastructure to these kinds of villages is far more than most governments are willing to spend. For example, a proper road into Atule'er would cost an estimated $8 million dollars, or $20,000 per person who lives there. So the government decided it was easier to just give $150,000 worth of sheep and let them fend for themselves.

If there's any silver lining in this hazardous trip, it's that the children remain at their boarding school for two weeks at a time before returning home for a five-day weekend — so at least they're not embarking on a twice-daily risk. That counts for something, right?

Atule'er is hardly the only place in China, or the world, where children face this kind of treacherous journey.

But their story was enough to catch some viral attention in spring 2016 that helped turn their circumstances around.

CNN, The Guardian, and many other publications reported on the kids' treacherous school journey in 2016, and this brief spike in awareness put some public pressure on the Chinese government. Eventually, official representatives were sent to the village to look into solutions.

In May 2016, they announced a plan to install a new steel ladder-staircase with railings down the side of the mountain. And in August of that same year, they actually delivered, with completion of the $150,000 project scheduled for completion in November.

Under construction.

This solution is far from perfect, but it's much better than what the people of Atule'er were forced to endure.

Most importantly, it means that they won't have to risk their lives for education anymore either.

The effects of poverty on remote rural regions is a serious problem across the globe. All too often, people in places like Atule'er are left to fend for themselves, which just perpetuates the cycle. Education is the easiest path to new opportunities, which can lead entire communities toward progress and prosperity.

Is that worth risking your life for? Absolutely. But no one should be forced to make that kind of choice.

Heroes

This glow-in-the-dark bike path shows what happens when you let imaginations run wild.

Poland just wrote a glow-in-the-dark love letter to bicycles.

Image from Gazeta Olsztyńska/YouTube.

And no, that's not what you see after you die. That's a bike path in Poland that's designed to glow in the dark. It was unveiled near the town of Lidzbark Warmiński in late September.

It glows blue because of special luminophores built into the pavement.

Image from Gazeta Olsztyńska/YouTube.

The synthetic materials absorb energy from the sun during the day and slowly release it at night. The company who built them says they can last for more than 10 hours at a time.

The company that built the path said they were inspired by the Netherland's "Starry Night" bike path but decided to take it a step further. While the "Starry Night" path uses electric LEDs, the new blue path needs no electricity whatsoever.

The path is a test run to see if the technology can be used on a wide scale all over the country.

Image from Gazeta Olsztyńska/YouTube.

Right now, the track is only 100 meters long. It's currently being tested to see if stands up to weather and traffic and whether they can build it more economically. Currently, the path seems to be more of a novelty than anything else — a way to beautify the biking experience — but if the results hold up, it's possible we could use this glow-in-the-dark technology to help improve road safety all over the world.

(By the way, the company that built this has also experimented with trying to impregnate asphalt with citrus, strawberry, and rose scents.)

Cycling is an awesome way to commute, get exercise, and clean up the environment.

Image from Gazeta Olsztyńska/YouTube.

A lot of European cities have embraced the bike, and many American cities are catching on as well.

While we still need to improve our biking infrastructures overall, this glow-in-the-dark road shows that infrastructure projects don't have to be boring. They can be imaginative, innovative, and beautiful, too.

Heroes

The weird, secret history of the electric car and why it disappeared.

Did you know the very first Porsche ever designed was electric?

Ferdinand Porsche might have founded his famous car company in 1948, but he designed his very first car all the way back in 1898, when he was just 22 years old.

Imagine this chassis with two racks of seats on top and you'll see Porsche's vision. Image from Porsche.

Officially the 1898 Egger-Lohner electric vehicle, C.2 Phaeton, Porsche's first car is more affectionately known as the P1. Incredibly, it didn't need a single drop of gas — the P1 was powered by a small electric motor.

Yep, that's right. It was an electric car.

So yeah, electric cars are actually super old. Like, as old as cars themselves.

An electric car in England, 1896. Photo from Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

The first practical electric car was invented in 1884, back when we as humans were still, you know, figuring out what the heck a car was.

In fact, by 1900, more than a third of all vehicles on the road were electric. (Gas-powered cars made up just 22%, and the rest were steam-powered.)

Just like today's electric cars, the electric cars of a century ago had some major advantages over early gas-powered vehicles.

Early gas cars were clunky, loud, and dirty. Worse, drivers had to physically wrestle with the car to get it to move — every gear shift or hand-cranked start-up involved essentially arm-wrestling an ornery, hateful robot.

Thomas Edison posing with an electric car, 1895. Photo by General Photographic Agency/Getty Images.

Electric cars, on the other hand, were easy to start, easy to drive, and quiet. They weren't exactly fast or long-range vehicles (they only went about 20 miles an hour), but this wasn't a problem in cities, where cars were primarily used. Plus the roads outside the city were pretty bad, and no one wanted to drive out there anyway.

These early electric cars had some major fans, too. The famous entrepreneur Thomas Edison backed electric cars, and even Henry Ford explored them as an option.

If electric cars had so many great benefits, why didn't they catch on? What went wrong?

Today, Texas is known for its gigantic crude oil production — but back around the turn of the century, we were just really starting to drill, baby, drill. Then, on Jan. 10, 1901, the Lucas No. 1 well in Spindletop blew its top, dramatically ushering in an era of cheap, readily available gasoline for America.

The Spindletop gusher, Jan. 10, 1901. Photo from John Trost/Wikimedia Commons.

In 1908, Henry Ford dealt a second blow to electric cars when he unveiled the gas-powered Ford Model T.

Largely thanks to Ford's use of an assembly line, the Model T was much cheaper than any other cars out there, costing only about a third as much as a comparable electric car.

A later model of the super-cheap Model T, the Model T Couplet, way back in 1914. Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

Plus, with the advent of the highway system, people wanted fast, cheap, powerful cars that they could use anywhere.

It's hard to imagine now, but at the time we also just didn't have the infrastructure to support electric cars. Today, you can get electricity pretty much anywhere. Before 1910, however, a lot of urban homes weren't wired for electricity, meaning people couldn't charge their cars at home. And electric cars certainly weren't an option for anyone living in a rural area where electricity wasn't even a thing.

Weirdly, sexism may have also played a role in the success of gas-guzzlers.

Electric cars were cleaner and easier to operate, and were therefore often marketed specifically toward women — gaining a reputation as being a woman's car.

I wish I were joking. Image from Rmherman/Wikimedia Commons.

This may have scared men away from purchasing them, driving them to buy gasoline-powered cars and, ugh, history, really?

Anyway, between weird marketing stigmatization, the low cost of crude oil, the much more affordable Model T, and the introduction of the highway system, by the 1930s, electric cars were pretty much gone.

Today, though, the advantages to electric cars are largely the same — and a lot of the disadvantages are a thing of the past.

Electric cars of today are still cleaner and quieter than gasoline-powered vehicles, and we're quickly solving a lot of the issues like cost and driving range.

Electric cars have historically been more expensive, but both Tesla and Chevy have announced they'll be producing electric cars in the actually-kind-of-affordable $30,000 range. Plus we've learned that while gasoline has been cheap, our exuberance for burning it and other fossil fuels has been writing the entire planet a massive bill — to the tune of over $1.9 trillion a year by 2100.

That just leaves infrastructure for charging electric cars, which, it turns out, has been growing up right under our noses.

We're still lacking a lot of the infrastructure we'll need to make electric cars truly ubiquitous, but it's slowly starting to appear.

A Tesla Supercharger in Fremont, California. Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images.

Tesla has been building a gigantic network of Superchargers, and ChargePoint claims to have more than 28,000 chargers ready for public use. Many non-car-related businesses like Walgreens are starting to provide charging stations in order to entice customers as well.

There are even services that let people with charging points at their homes rent them out to other electric car owners. One company, Fisker, even had an idea for a hybrid car that could charge via solar panels on the roof, meaning even needing to find a charging station may one day be a thing of the past.

To bring this story full circle, guess who's getting back into the electric car game?

That's right: Porsche.

A rendering of the Porsche Mission E concept car. Image from Porsche.

118 years after Ferdinand Porsche designed the P1, Porsche announced an electric car of its own: the Mission E. Originally just a concept car, Porsche has finally decided to put it into production.

Electric cars aren't a new fad — they're intimately tied to the very history of automobiles.

While there are some things they'll never do quite as well as gas-powered cars — like revving your engine before a big race — it's awesome to see that we might finally be entering an era where gas and electric cars are sharing the road again.

From Your Site Articles

How do you know when you've found your best bro?

You know, that special someone who truly makes your chill sessions complete? That bro who you don't even have to invite to anything because, obviously, dude, he'll be there.

The ancient rituals and traditions of dude-dude bonding are not only steeped in storied history, they're important. They're even healthy, according to science.

So how do you to know when you've found the Sam to your Frodo? The Finn to your Poe Dameron? The Ian McKellen to your Patrick Stewart? The Walt to your Jesse?

GIF via Television Academy/YouTube.

Or even ... dare I say ... the Trudeau to your Obama?

After pics of President Barack Obama palling around with newly elected Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau during his first official visit to The White House began surfacing online, the Internet fell in love with the way the two heads of state just seemed to click.

Here are the seven undeniable signs you've found your best bro, as demonstrated by "Trubama":

1. You both support the welcoming of Syrian refugees.

Photo by Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images.

A good sign you've found your bro-4-lyfe is that you both want to welcome Syrian refugees into your country. And sure, it's going to be an uphill battle for you in Congress, and you may have to make strong pleas to the country to shift public opinion, but it's about being on the right side of history, bro. You both understand that, and that's the making of a true bromance.

2. You're both super into the scientific consensus on climate change.

Photo by Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images.

Climate change is decidedly not dope. But you know what is? The scientific consensus that yes, it's a real thing. If you and your bro have acknowledged that and have made active steps to combat it through powerful initiatives, well, you may have just found yourself a best bro.

3. You can put your differences on the Keystone pipeline behind you and still bro-out.

Photo by Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images.

Sure, you think the Keystone pipeline is a regressive action that would create a small number of jobs and "undercut" America's leadership when it comes to taking serious action to fight climate change, and he supports it, but if you can put that all behind you and just chill together, that's a damn good bro.

4. You both want mad health care for everyone.

Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

You love health care so much that your last name is now semipermanently attached to the word "care." You love it so much that healthcare reform will surely go down in history as one of your biggest and most lasting accomplishments. If he does too, that's a solid bro.

5. You both think marijuana laws should be way less mega-harsh.

Photo by Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images.

Hey, he might even support the legalization of marijuana. You can't quite go that far, but you both can agree that locking up kids and individual users for long stretches of time is too harsh a punishment for the stuff. That's the kind of bro-greement that only best bros can come to.

6. You both want to invest in infrastructure.

Photo by Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images.

Both of you know you can't have crumbling highways and out-of-date bridges AND have people unemployed. That's just lame. So that's why you passed a $305 billion spending bill in 2015. Look into your bros eyes. If you see that he also wants to boost government spending to support public transit infrastructure, social infrastructure, and even green infrastructure, then that's a true bro.

7. You both want to raise taxes on the wealthy.

Photo by Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images.

You're two of the most powerful people in the world. But even you can clearly see that the income gap has gotten a little ridiculous. That's why you proposed a budget in 2015 with tax hikes on the wealthiest citizens, and your bro openly supports a tax hike on the rich. In fact both of you know that it's not class warfare. it's about paying your fair share. That's pretty chill.

If you and your bro share any of these beliefs, you may have found a best bro.

So raise up your glass...

Photo by Olivier Douliery-Pool/Getty Images.

And lets all toast to the besties in our life. The number 1 bro's. The got-your-back-no-matter-what bros.

Even if you have bros already, bro, you should probably get some more. There are endless hockey games to attend, video games to play, craft beers to drink, and Magic: The Gathering tournaments to win, and there's no one better to do those things with than with your best bros.

They complete us. They make us stronger. They lift us when we're down. And lets face it.

You look damn good together.

Photo by Jim Lo Scalzo-Pool/Getty Images.