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I have to say this is interesting. So many urbanists say they love the constant activity of the city, and criticize the suburbs for being too quiet. (Not necessarily you.)
This, exactly:
Quote:
Originally Posted by urbanlife78
I can't speak for other urbanists, but I like people activity, but also enjoy having quiet residential streets.
Quote:
Originally Posted by nei
I'm much more bothered by machine noises than other noises (note my complaints about yard tools and similar) While I like busy streets (because of people not because of traffic noise) I wouldn't want to live on a busystreet.
Living in the city in a residential neighborhood can be surprisingly quiet. I like living in cities because they're walkable, convenient and interesting, not because I like noise or being in the middle of everything. This is why I find highways to be so damaging.
Living in the city in a residential neighborhood can be surprisingly quiet. I like living in cities because they're walkable, convenient and interesting, not because I like noise or being in the middle of everything. This is why I find highways to be so damaging.
Northside of Chicago is a great example of mixing quiet and urban together. Their residential streets are all tree lined with grass between the buildings and the streets, and are very quiet streets because they aren't treated as main roads of any kind. But when you get to the main road the residential street connects to, the commercial buildings are all built to the sidewalk and are a bustling busy urban city feeling.
Northside of Chicago is a great example of mixing quiet and urban together. Their residential streets are all tree lined with grass between the buildings and the streets, and are very quiet streets because they aren't treated as main roads of any kind. But when you get to the main road the residential street connects to, the commercial buildings are all built to the sidewalk and are a bustling busy urban city feeling.
Yeah, it really is the best of both worlds IMO. Where I currently live isn't particularly dense but it is a city neighborhood with walkable amenities and it's extremely quiet.
This really is a strange tack for this forum to be taking. In the years I've been posting on Urban Planning, the general mantra has been the hustle, bustle, activity noise of the city-good; the relative quiet of the suburbs-bad. People have posted that they've lived above bars and loved it; they've lived on bus lines and loved seeing the buses go down the street, there are too many trees, parks, grass in some cities, and their kids don't know what to do in a grassy field. Now the urbanists are saying the city is quieter than the burbs, they love the sounds of nature and quiet residential streets! Anything to disagree with a suburbanite!
Maybe posters, even if they all prefer big cities, don't have the same view? And conflating as all having stereotypical view wont work well. I (and others) said their tastes, perhaps you could believe them rather than accuse them of making them up for the sak of disagreement. In any case preferring that the streets have some people isn't very similar to enjoying a constant rumble of traffic.
Northside of Chicago is a great example of mixing quiet and urban together. Their residential streets are all tree lined with grass between the buildings and the streets, and are very quiet streets because they aren't treated as main roads of any kind. But when you get to the main road the residential street connects to, the commercial buildings are all built to the sidewalk and are a bustling busy urban city feeling.
Yes, I remember the north side as rather attractive and green. Felt less busy in the amount of pedestrians than I'd expect considering how close I was to the skyscrapers of the loop, felt a lot sleepier than brownstone brooklyn but living-wise Chicago has an advantage in quieter streets. One of the reasons I'm not a big fan of grids is they encourage too much through traffic. An ungridded but interconnect street layout like London or Boston is preferable is a good compromise, allowing out of the way side streets easy to walk to.
Maybe posters, even if they all prefer big cities, don't have the same view? And conflating as all having stereotypical view wont work well. I (and others) said their tastes, perhaps you could believe them rather than accuse them of making them up for the sak of disagreement. In any case preferring that the streets have some people isn't very similar to enjoying a constant rumble of traffic.
I'm not disagreeing just to disagree. I'm shocked, really! I could "dredge up old posts" but my dredger isn't working. I specifically recall one of the few posters with kids saying her toddler son loved to watch the bus roll down their street. Now you cannot deny that a bus is noisier than a car. Working in pediatrics, this does not surprise me. Many little boys (and bigger ones too) seem to love noise, machines, and especially motor vehicles.
I didn't stereotype. I said "general" mantra, not that "everyone" feels that way. Certainly a LARGE majority of CD urbanist posters seem to feel that way, that is, they love the city for all the activity, and HATE the burbs b/c they're too quiet.
There was a study done on the workers, which were exposed to the constant noise of highway traf
I know an early advantage of highways and cars was that they were less noisy than trains (and they were at the time). With so much traffic nowadays, that's changed pretty dramatically. The constant sound of traffic can be terrible, depending on the situation.
well, in that BQE example, where a highway replaced rapid transit it would be a trade off between a really loud noise every few minutes (loud enough if you were close enough it could inturrept conversation) to a constant loud background rumble. For very close distances, id find an el more offensive, otherwise better. However, the train would create much less pollution issues locally.
As for subways, at least in NYC, I've felt them create a low frequency vibration in homes. Nothing irritating though
I'm not disagreeing just to disagree. I'm shocked, really! I could "dredge up old posts" but my dredger isn't working. I specifically recall one of the few posters with kids saying her toddler son loved to watch the bus roll down their street. Now you cannot deny that a bus is noisier than a car. Working in pediatrics, this does not surprise me. Many little boys (and bigger ones too) seem to love noise, machines, and especially motor vehicles.
I didn't stereotype. I said "general" mantra, not that "everyone" feels that way. Certainly a LARGE majority of CD urbanist posters seem to feel that way, that is, they love the city for all the activity, and HATE the burbs b/c they're too quiet.
My experience had been that you can have density and vibrancy without a lot of noise. If you live on a side street in a dense environment, people will be walking and passing through, but it's nothing like 5th Ave in Manhattan. It gets you close to lots of amenities, transit and cultural opportunities, but there's also a fair amount of quiet too.
I don't quite understand how it works. Outside of destroying the houses they are built on, why do interstates divide communities so deeply? It's not like there aren't streets and sidewalks that are still there on overpasses and underpasses; anyone who wants to cross can (in theory) cross the interstate without actually setting foot on the interstate itself. So why do they isolate so deeply, and devastate communities that are on the "wrong side" of them?
Driving across an Interstate bridge is not the same as being able to walk into that neighborhood THROUGH other neighborhoods that have been destroyed and displaced, thanks to an expressway or highway.
Interstates are more of a symptom than a cause. The real issue is our dependence on automobiles to begin with. Interstates only exacerbate the issue. If you look at an actual pedestrian bridge, where you can talk to the people you're passing by and spend time on that bridge, because you're not being pushed over to the other side, the social dynamic is completely different.
Interstates have also made those communities a lot smaller, and interstates fragment a city. Cities are a collection of neighborhoods, they aren't North Side vs. South Side or West Side vs. East Side. Cities aren't just boroughs or other political subdivisions. They are living, breathing, communities. If I ask you where you're from, you don't tell me what ward you live in; you might, but you have a stronger connection to the street you live on, or the name that community has chosen for itself. It would have been better (though not necessarily technically feasible) for Interstates to have tunneled underground, and communities to exist on top of them, than for them to take out large swaths of land, creating physical and psychological distance in between neighborhoods. No one goes across a bridge with the idea of connecting with the other side of the neighborhood.
So when one neighborhood is split into two, because of an interstate, high-rise housing project, or even if the same landlord turns several blocks into nothing but one Section 8 property after another the cultures change in both areas. Neighborhoods diversify and lose their working class ethos, but neighborhoods also become isolated and the quality of life might even be lowered, even though their transportation options are greater than before.
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I could "dredge up old posts" but my dredger isn't working. I specifically recall one of the few posters with kids saying her toddler son loved to watch the bus roll down their street. Now you cannot deny that a bus is noisier than a car. Working in pediatrics, this does not surprise me. Many little boys (and bigger ones too) seem to love noise, machines, and especially motor vehicles.
