But how many lives are saved each year by the internal combustion engine (or it's electric successors)?
Not just emergency services - more mundane things like, getting food and care to the elderly, getting workers and tools where they need to be to maintain infrastructure, produce food, and much more.
You could say the same for the horse when the transition to cars happened. We can't just think of the advantages we have now, but what we could get in a more practical system. All of the things you describe could improve in an environment that not based on the car model, but because we live with the latter our outlook is dominated by it and we can't conceive of the alternative anymore than a regular non-Jules Verne citizen in the 1880s can visualize massive clover highway connectors
Exactly. All it's saying is that you can do whatever you want with your land, as long as you can afford to.
It forces landowners to account for the opportunity costs they impose on society by not utilizing the land optimally, even if (and especially if) those costs change over time.
If you want a deep deep dive into how parking has shaped our cities - I would recommend reading about the “high cost of free parking” and “parking minimums”.
Right but the cities are already there. We don't have the luxury of redefining the American lifestyle and dependence on cars with a single unit of new housing. There's no benefit for the developer - leaving out parking (aside from the mandate to include it) makes the property less desirable.
The fact that mandates and minimums exist suggests that this is not the case; if parking paid for itself, no mandates would be necessary and developers would already be incentivized to build it by the market. In jurisdictions that have relaxed parking requirements, however, developers generally build less parking after the rules change (and sometimes as little as none). This shouldn't be too surprising: in cities with decent transit, at least some residents don't drive and so don't need the parking, so a market exists for housing without it, and parking is expensive to build, especially if it's underground, which is typical for multifamily residential construction in dense urban areas. Underground parking in the US typically costs ~$50k per space to build.
Europe resolves the fire issue in other ways. Regulations that limit the number of units per floor (4 for Germany, 8 for Austria), regulations for maximum distance to stairwell, and often building height.
The building height one is significant as the balcony is often the second means of egress, via a fire truck ladder.
I don’t think the goal is to increase the apartment capacity of existing multi-stair buildings.
Allowing single stair buildings facilitates multi family dwellings to be built on much smaller lots - even those that currently contain single family homes.
Changing that regulation is the basis for why cities like Paris can’t maintain New York level postulation density without many buildings greater than 6 floors.
Good point: I'm in a suburban area where land is much easier to come by, so it's less of an issue. Although even then, 3-bedroom apartments are as rare as... Something very rare. (It's Christmas, metaphors fail me at the moment.)
Anyway, if they built floor plans like this then I would want to see some seriously bulked up building codes to deal with fires. Also it always strikes me as odd that sprinkler systems are used to help with the fire, but smoke is what mostly kills and I rarely hear of emergency ventilation systems tied to fire alarms. If anyone knowledgeable on that sort of thing could chime in, I always love to learn why my ideas are wrong/bad.
I’ve lived and worked in very earthquake prone cities (Wellington, NZ). One of the reasons given to stay inside is that in certain areas of the city, shattered glass falling from sky scrapers would fill the street up to a meter deep along Lambton Quay.
In the article, the architect spoke about how the goal of single stair buildings is to kill that hallway - one stairwell with the doors to each apartment on the stair itself, then narrower lots; similar to how it’s done in Europe.
He points out that the long corridor type of building you are describing is often caused by the need to make a Teo staircase build financially viable.
