The 3 Types of Cities (Perspective 1- Roads)

So in my experience, there are three types of cities (okay, there’s hundreds of millions of different types of cities, but for the sake of the context of this blog post, there’s three types of cities). And my home city of Sydney, Australia fits into all 3 categories.

The three types of cities are those cities in Europe and the east coast of the USA which were built before cars. As these cities pre-date cars (many of them by centuries). These cities have to be walkable from one end to the other (hence the huge population density) and thus they have narrow roads. Before the invention of the car, most people had to walk to perform all their daily duties (e.g. shopping). Similarly, larger cities with this layout tend to be more decentralised as the communities within these cities had to have all their needs met within their walking distances without necessarily needing to interact with other parts of the city (I think this tends to be more the case in Asia). These cities also have excellent public transport, as there is significant public transport to support it. Cities also had to be relatively close to each other so that if your city didn’t have a certain service, you could travel to the next city (albeit it would take you days to get there and back) so that you could receive that service

The second type of city is the city which was built after the invention of the railway and before the widespread usage of our cars. There aren’t many of these cities, this is more of a suburban thing, but these cities will have a huge concentration of people living in walking distance of train stations, but the stations are further from each other.

The third type of city is the city that was built after the invention and widespread ownership of the car. These are cities such as Los Angeles. It’s faster and more comfortable to travel by car than it is to walk, this pretty much gave birth to low density population development as people could realistically live far away and commute longer distances to downtown. Roads had to be wider to accommodate more cars, and parking to be taken into account, meaning that these places tend to have parking everywhere.

So where does my home city of Sydney, Australia, come into play? In Australia, suburbs are indisputably counted as part of the city. In the areas surrounding downtown (which we call the Central Business District or CBD), everything is fairly walkable and parking is a nightmare as well as traffic. The further you get from the CBD along the original train lines, you will notice a significant level of density within walking distance of the train station, where the roads are narrow and there is little parking (two of best of examples of this are Strathfield and Burwood). Because of the narrow roads and lack of purpose-built car parks makes it difficult for people who live near these stations but not within walking distance, due to lack of parking spots.

Then, when you go really far out west, away from the rail lines, or near newly built rail lines, there are nice, wide roads where even small, suburban streets can accommodate moderate traffic with plenty of on-street parking, and in addition to that, there are carparks everywhere and everyone has a driveway. The train stations in those parts of the city have giant car parks which can accommodate most commuters, no matter where they come from.

There are exceptions, such as the Parramatta CBD, but generally, in the east, roads are narrow, there are no driveways and parking is a commodity, the further west you go, this becomes true of the area surrounding train stations whilst roads further from train stations are wider, and the further west still, the wider the roads become and the better the parking is. As a freelance delivery driver, my job involves me driving all of Sydney, and the contrast between driving in the older eastern part of town vs the newer part of town is quite interesting, or would be, if the novelty didn’t ware off pretty quickly due to the traffic jams and lack of parking which make my job difficult, but what eastern Sydney lacks in parking is made up for in public toilets. Western Sydney’s lack of unlocked public toilets makes my job needlessly difficult. Choosing which part of Sydney you will drive in for a living is a game choosing between lack of public toilets vs lack of parking, (and in most places, you will get either one or the other, as there a few places where you get both or neither).

Anyways, sorry for the rant at the end, I really do hope you found this post interesting. And I still love my job nonetheless