> Why are all the major cities in the western world seemingly hitting this limit at the same time, even though they all have different populations?
I can’t speak for Canada, but in America the answer is always cars. Car based transit is wildly land inefficient, and the main reason why all car based cities hit their limit at the same time.
In particular there are two huge shortcomings with cars in urban design:
1. Parking eats up a huge amount of space. Either you let that drive density way down (which means commutes get longer) or you build underground parking at exorbitant prices driving up rents. Even in the latter case the roads around housing ends up becoming an issue, limiting density far below what you’d expect in say, Paris on Chicago.
2. Car transit to a shared destination is almost comically inefficient, which is really noticeable when people try and commute via car to job centers. This wouldn’t be as bad if we restricted cars to what they’re good at, such as driving away from the city, but most American cities have the unique psychosis of demanding that transit into the city center be via car. This does not scale, and is why places with wildly different zoning laws can have equally hellish commutes.
The issue is not that we can’t build, we’re really good at adding more highway lanes, it’s more that we are monomaniacally focused on building the wrong things.
I can’t speak for Canada, but in America the answer is always cars. Car based transit is wildly land inefficient, and the main reason why all car based cities hit their limit at the same time.
In particular there are two huge shortcomings with cars in urban design:
1. Parking eats up a huge amount of space. Either you let that drive density way down (which means commutes get longer) or you build underground parking at exorbitant prices driving up rents. Even in the latter case the roads around housing ends up becoming an issue, limiting density far below what you’d expect in say, Paris on Chicago.
2. Car transit to a shared destination is almost comically inefficient, which is really noticeable when people try and commute via car to job centers. This wouldn’t be as bad if we restricted cars to what they’re good at, such as driving away from the city, but most American cities have the unique psychosis of demanding that transit into the city center be via car. This does not scale, and is why places with wildly different zoning laws can have equally hellish commutes.
The issue is not that we can’t build, we’re really good at adding more highway lanes, it’s more that we are monomaniacally focused on building the wrong things.