Image source: https://www.reddit.com/r/Urbanism/comments/1xgvrr5/how_much_density_does_the_average_person/

Every time I look at Korea, it seems—despite its large population—as if there are remarkably few people or vehicles around. Seoul, in particular, is so sparsely in appearance that it’s hard to believe it actually has such a high population density.

The chart above reveals a rather ironic reality.

So, why is this the case? The reasons are quite complex.

Take the United Kingdom as an example. The common complaint among the British—that the country is "overpopulated"—is directly linked to the intense level of crowding experienced on weekends.

Foreigners, travelers, and those who analyze statistical data often share a common observation: the disparity in perceived crowding between weekdays and weekends is far more extreme in the UK than in many other countries.

While it is not the case that the British do nothing during the week and save all their activity for the weekend, there is a notably sharp divide: weekdays are typically defined by home-centered routines and frugal spending, whereas weekends are characterized by a concentrated surge in dining out, leisure activities, and experiential consumption.

However, the debate over overpopulation in the UK is less about the simple ratio of population to land area, and more a consequence of "poor infrastructure combined with a socio-structural bottleneck"—where people and activities converge on specific places at specific times.

The overall population density of Great Britain is approximately 275 people per square kilometer—one of the highest in Europe, trailing only the Netherlands and Belgium.

If we look specifically at England—home to 84% of the British population—the density reaches about 434 people per square kilometer, a figure significantly higher than that of most major nations on the European continent.

Nevertheless, compared to places like South Korea or Singapore, the UK is not so densely packed that its population-to-land-area ratio reaches a physical breaking point. In the United Kingdom, the root cause of many issues is a "bottleneck" effect, stemming from factors such as aging infrastructure and a bifurcated approach to land use.

When the British people complain that there are "too many people," what they are actually expressing is frustration with an imbalance: the failure to modernize urban infrastructure and social structures to accommodate a growing population.

In short, these issues create severe physical bottlenecks in everyday life.

What about South Korea?

At first glance, Seoul may appear to have a population similar to that of London. However, this comparison is limited by how administrative boundaries are defined.

If we look at the population within a 30-kilometer radius, Seoul’s figure exceeds 21 million, whereas London’s is only around 11 million.

In reality, the scale of Seoul’s population is significantly larger.

Why, then, does this difference manifest the way it does? For one, Seoul absorbs tens of millions of people—its massive "floating population"—by utilizing space in three dimensions: through vast underground shopping complexes connected to subway stations, towering mixed-use shopping malls, and commercial spaces stacked floor-by-floor within buildings.

London, by contrast, is characterized by numerous protected zones that restrict high-rise development, consisting primarily of historic, three- to four-story buildings. Its underground spaces are also extremely cramped.

Furthermore, unlike the Seoul Metro—which is designed with generous spatial dimensions—London’s "Tube" network, built in the 19th century, features narrow platforms and low ceilings, resulting in a very limited capacity for passengers. In other words, the disparity arises because, despite the UK enjoying far more favorable physical conditions—such as a higher proportion of flat land and a different pattern of population concentration—its urban systems and infrastructure are significantly less efficient than those of South Korea.

While South Korea manages to accommodate a massive population despite its challenging, rugged terrain, the UK—blessed with much better geographical conditions—nonetheless suffers from a persistent sense of overpopulation.

Interestingly, when British people—who often perceive their own country as overpopulated—learn about the data for South Korea and experience the country firsthand, they come to realize that the UK’s struggles are not simply a matter of having "too many people."

In fact, British individuals who familiarize themselves with the data on South Korea and visit the country—as well as experts in urban planning and economics—invariably arrive at this profound realization.

When presented with objective statistics, British visitors to South Korea are often initially skeptical or resistant to the facts: that South Korea has a higher population density than England; that the Seoul metropolitan area—home to roughly 26 million people, or 50% of the national population—exhibits a level of concentration that dwarfs that of Greater London; and that, given that 60–70% of South Korea’s land is mountainous, the density in the areas actually habitable for humans is vastly higher than in the UK.

Because the notion that "our country is too crowded" is treated almost as an established truth in the UK—appearing frequently in the media and everyday conversation—these visitors are left to wonder how a nation with far more demanding physical conditions could possibly function this way.

Once British visitors spend a weekend in South Korea and navigate the country using its public transportation, their illusions about their own nation are shattered, and they come to tangibly grasp the stark gap in the efficiency of urban systems between the two countries. Ultimately, one comes to realize that the issue is not overpopulation, but rather a matter of systems and infrastructure.

This is evident not only in physical bottlenecks but also in the speed at which public services are delivered. In the UK, people might wait months to see a doctor—often blaming the collapse of the National Health Service (NHS) on "too many people"—whereas in South Korea, it is possible to receive medical consultations or undergo tests on the very same day. This clearly demonstrates that the core problem is not the size of the population, but the processing capacity and efficiency of the system.

Ever since I visited Switzerland, I've been on a tear trying to tell everyone about Peri-Urbanism, or the strategy of taking rural areas and collecting the population into walkable punctae centered around train stations, such that you can justify frequent train service and car-free living even in places which auspiciously have low population density (because what population there is is artificially densified around the train stations). Think more Iowa and Minnesota (small towns everywhere where you can live near a train track and bicycle a mile or few to your farm fields) than the Dakotas or CA Central Valley (where it's a similar number of houses, but all spread out onto the farms themselves instead of in villages, and then you have to own a car to get to town for errands).

One of the best examples I've found like this in the states is SMART in the North Bay, across the Golden Gate (railroad-)bridge(-in-waiting) from San Francisco. Yes, there are still park-and-rides, no, it's nowhere near as good as the trains in Europe, and yes, it serves a fairly high population in comparison to, say, rural Missouri, but it nonetheless is an exquisite example of how stations in dense, walkable villages make it possible to live car-free conveniently even in small towns.

I strongly believe that we should push for car-free transportation everywhere, not just in big cities. Of course it's equitable to help free usually less-well-off small-town residents from the financial and health scourge that is automobile ownership, but I think there's more to it than just that:

For one, a major source of tension at the moment is car-driving suburbanites colonizing the streets with their four-wheeled murder weapons, even against the wishes of the residents of the city they're driving through. As such, so as long as there's any nearby source of automobile travelers, even dense downtowns are still at risk of criminal/innocent victim (being synonymous with driver/pedestrian) violence.

For another, not everyone lives exclusively in cities all the time; many people prefer to take trips into the wilderness for hiking, camping, agri-tourism, or any other nature- or small-town-related getaway. Nowadays, with everyone recognizing traffic sucks everywhere, nonetheless a huge portion of automobile ownership is motivated by the desire to get out of cities for vacation. Probably the best worst example of this is Denver: even though it has lots of historic walkability (well, it should, in the unlikely event they missed a spot to bulldoze) and has one of the largest light rail systems in the country, because everyone who lives in Denver does so because they want to go into the mountains every weekend, and because transit access into said mountains is, politely, utter shit, everyone owns a car, drives everywhere, the traffic is insane, and the transit ridership is abominably low. Contrast this with Austria and Switzerland, which intentionally have train and even tram stations that serve zero residents, because they are trailhead stations.

Ergo, nature should be transit-accessible, car dependency does not end unless it ends for everyone, and a major way you do both of these is to build high-quality rail-based transit to even small towns and make work to make everywhere overtly hostile to cars and drivers as much as possible, no matter how rural.

I'm on the right and fairly far to the right for an American. I mention this because so much of the opposition to the concept comes from the Right.

I was recently watching some walk-throughs (on youtube) of some Chinese neighborhoods in China. In some areas, you couldn't walk 50 feet without passing a store or business. There was also a TON and I mean TON of greenery. In these neighborhoods, all the streets were tiny, maybe even just alleys in American terms. This all seems very convenient and nice to look at, at least all the greenery. Given the density of everything, one assumes they are effectively living in 15 minute cities.

I compare this to my own area. Everything is in a grid, all fairly wide car friendly streets (in one of the oldest cities in America, Philadelphia) and at best, a small corner store every few blocks. You really need a car in most cases to live in America, even in the city. Though I personally bike commute, I have to plan everything and thank God my local-ish supermarket delivers.

I would love to live somewhere that has better urbanism. Even the term urbanism is a turn off to most Americans and usually invokes a different idea than it does in other countries. As I was viewing that footage of China (and I'm aware not all of china looks like those did), I was thinking nothing even remotely like this exists in America. How convenient these areas must be to live in.

Of course, the people pushing the 15 minute city ideas are presenting it as living in ze podz and eating ze bugs and this will be forced on you. I don't want to live in ze pod and I'll starve before eating ze bugs. I would never want to be "assigned" to live in a 15 minute city as these droids pretending to be human push them. But it sounds just like it's bad marketing. Like there would be a lot of advantages to living in a 15 minute area, where everything I would need is easy and friendly walking or cycling short distance away. Work might be a different story. I happen to be blessed with work-at-home, so that's not really an issue for me.

Almost nothing is an easy walk from my house, even living in an urban environment (12k people per mile square). The nearest movie theater, for example, is like a 20-30 minute drive from my house. There is one baker within easy biking distance. etc. There is far too much I have to ride quite a distance to get to. 40 years ago, there was much, much more you could walk to. I used to live in easy walking distance of 2 movie theaters, one a discount theater that played the last week the movie was available in any theater. That was great for a teenager (which I was), 1 dollar movies. At this time, renting a movie was usually more than a Dollar (early to mid 80s). There were 2 bowling allies in easy walking distance. Several restaurants. Dance halls. Many other of those types of things.

Is it just bad marketing or do people (particularly right wingers) despise the idea? If so, why? Of course, I also want a car to be an option. Just because I don't need a car now doesn't mean I won't ever need one again (I've driven many years). There are things I miss doing with a car.

Of course, being America, you cannot have good transit. That's just against the law or something.

I am planning to develop location-based AR mobile game(like Pokemon Go). My first data collection aim is infrastructure for people with disabilities(ramps, lifts, wheelchair-signs and etc)
What do you think on my idea?(any suggestions what I should consider)
P.S. I also provide survey on it hehe

I’m an architect and urban planner, and I’m trying to narrow down a potential PhD research topic. I have a broad sense of my interests, but I’m struggling to turn them into a focused, manageable research question.

My main interests are:

• Urban planning through a gender-sensitive or feminist lens.
• Research grounded in the context of Indian cities.
• Practical outcomes that could inform planning policy, guidelines, or implementation frameworks- not just remain a theoretical discussion.
• How civic sense, public awareness, and the attitudes of planners, designers, and citizens affect whether these policies actually work.

I’m particularly interested in the gap between how cities are planned and how women experience and use them. However, I haven’t yet figured out which specific issue, scale, or planning process to focus on. I also want to avoid choosing something so broad that it becomes difficult to research meaningfully.

Any suggestions for readings, researchers, or ways to narrow the scope would be really helpful! Also do suggest universities which would get me a fully funded PhD- preferrably in India. Thanks!

I’m noticing more major developments are branding themselves as Urban villages but from their design alone they seem to be designed to limit and control general public access despite its flowery description of being community oriented, pedestrian friendly etc.

Such as LA urban village projects, all liminal spaces are in tight corridors that don’t want to connect it self to existing grids or neighboring spaces.

https://planning.lacity.gov/odocument/65fcb15f-8f99-48e7-8841-9b72af3a2a5c

It’s like it wants to behave like a giant gated community that just happens to be near a metropolitan.

Would appreciate if you could check it out!

Members of r/Urbanism have been quite vocal about the need to a greater variety of things in quicker amounts of time. The celebrations of up-zoning legislation, deregulation of home construction, SB79 in California, Austin's construction boom, and the success of Chinese high speed rail indicate that this subreddit broadly likes the idea of a society where things can be built at larger scale and faster.

The big question is this: how does a philosophy of looser construction approval work when construction is used in ways that feel wrong? If the legal framework for a bullet train can be constructed quickly, there is the same framework for a disruptive highway to be created. If the legal framework exists to minimize the restraints on land use, than what happens when a data center gets built near residential areas, or a skyscraper blocks out the sun of a residential home?

The solution seems to allow the "good" construction, and disallow the "bad" construction, such that only the high speed railways get built and the highways do not. Over the course of a society, it appears that every form of construction can be labeled bad. Highways are disruptive in a certain context, a train lines are disruptive in a certain context, high rise residential towers are disruptive in a certain context. A society that accepts that government should prevent "bad" construction will find itself labeling nearly all forms of construction as suspect. There will always be a case where a train line was too disruptive, a highway too noisy, and a high rise too out of place. The rock that forms from the sediments of each construction blunder is one where everything needs endless permits, studies, and local hearings to avoid the mistakes of the past. Many people come to this subreddit to discuss a society without such regulation on human construction (as it prevents "good" construction from happening).

Such a question about the validity of a system even if it produces mistakes is an ancient one. It was Thomas Hobbes who justified the absolute sovereign after a terrible English monarch not because he though a monarch was always in the right, but that, even in error, an absolute sovereign could become better and achieve greater than if there was no sovereign. The overall political philosophy is to not compare A with !A, but that A is replaced with B, and that B has its own issues and a holistic view must be taken to see if A should still exist.

This ties back to the desire to "building things". Lets say that r/Urbanism gets its way. Few limits on land use, governments wield near absolute power to construct any infrastructure with local opposition being crushed. This can produce high speed rail lines, subways, wind turbines and Haussmann inspired urbanism at scale, but the lack of oversight on construction could bring in a highway that cuts through the city as the government no longer has to listen to local objections.

Relevant example: A data center gets build near a community, the locals are upset, should the government intervene and regulate data center construction? Our current trajectory says yes. Data centers have proven to cause harm in a local incident, a mandatory local hearing would allow locals to raise objections, and the locals can halt the project (for a better society). We could say society has improved. A society that allows a data center to be blocked is also one that can block construction of California's high speed rail program. As voters in the past wanted controls over construction for the same reasons people want data center construction controls to exist. If we became more open to more construction, we might live with a disruptive data center and a beneficial high speed rail line. Are you willing to accept in error in data center construction for a society that allows a benefit in rail construction?

Conclusion: I am not an advocate for the U.S. Interstate's method of highway construction in cities, I do not want noisy data centers near people's homes, I do want people to be able to live with greater density, I am also not keen on utopian thinking. We can not only allow "good" construction in our lives, as "good" construction is a fad like anything else, but to allow the good we must be comfortable letting in the bad. the only way we get the urbanism and public transport we want is to accept that the reforms also let in other forms of construction that we dislike in certain contexts. Seeing a bad piece of infrastructure can get a new meaning. Instead of "this is bad, get rid of all of it", a nuance of "this is bad in this context, but the laws that allowed it to be built quickly are the same ones that will create the infrastructure of the future, once we get our way, we will be able to build quickly and it will benefit society" should be needed. The question becomes, how much bad are we willing to accept if there is good to be found?

P.S. I am in a Philosophy class and Hobbes is being discussed. I thought his ideas could be useful in an urbanism context.

I understand that many buildings were destroyed during the war and people desperately needed shelter, but they could have at least attempted to design something visually appealing. I won't even go into the social housing projects built after World War II.

This project uses e-scooter sensor data to map street-surface quality for better wheelchair navigation. The information is added to OpenStreetMap, where cities and map developers can use them to improve urban/digital infrastructure. E-scooters don’t always have the best reputation when it comes to accessibility, so I think this is an interesting use of the data. Do you agree?

As of last weekend, cars can no longer drive on the Jamsu bridge over the Han River. It came to be known that the bridge would need repairs to continue to support the weight of vehicle traffic, and Seoul made the sane decision of just removing the vehicle traffic and making it a dedicated pedestrian facility.

Here is the official press release:

https://mediahub.seoul.go.kr/archives/2019683

This video has auto-generated English subtitles with more info:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eayRpY3bWDA

They're going to completely remodel it as a park space for relaxation and events. Construction is expected to wrap up around next August, but the bridge will remain open when possible until then.

For most of our evolutionary history, we lived in spaces in which everyone was either directly involved in shaping their immediate environment or else knew the people who were responsible for shaping them; whether through building, various forms of craftsmanship or through management of local resources.

Until recently, all cultures were place based cultures. (Nomadic groups still set up camp for a period of time.) As long distance trade got cheaper, specifically, with the introduction of fossil fuels which reduced the cost of long distance shipping, we suddenly find ourselves in a situation where we know almost nothing about the places where the materials we depend on comes from. Moreover, our spaces are largely planned and designed for us rather than by us.

Being exiled from your land is perhaps the greatest trauma that any people can undergo. Look at the stories of Native Americans, aboriginal Australians, Jews, Palestinians and countless other people who have been torn away from an intimate relationship with a place which they shaped over many generations and which shaped them. Most of us are effectively exiled from a certain kind of relationship with place, though for most of us, that happened through a gradual process.

The reverse is also true. Our sense of well-being is greatly improved when we feel supported and held by an environment which we take care of and which takes care of us. ​When you get to do that as part of a tribe you're experiencing a (the?) primary motivator that drove our ancestors to innovate, commune, and build a culture and way of life - together.

https://sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/09/100907104035.htm

Studies like this one point towards the underlying principle. I'd be shocked if the same principle didn't extend to neighborhoods.

An antidote:

https://mendelyaf-spec.github.io/prophets-fingers/city-country-fingers/

Does anyone else feel like LA has the population, wealth, and influence of a megacity, but somehow lacks the atmosphere you’d expect from one?
Where is that feeling of intellectual energy—people exchanging ideas, lively public spaces, culture you can stumble into just walking around? I know LA has brilliant people and major universities, but why does that energy feel so disconnected from everyday life here?
And why do so many parts feel so neglected and rough? Sometimes “ghetto” is honestly the word that comes to mind: trash, broken sidewalks, rundown storefronts, and public spaces that feel abandoned. How can a city with this much money feel so poorly maintained?
Is it the sprawl and car dependence? The inequality? Does everything interesting happen in isolated pockets or private circles you have to seek out?
Am I missing something, or does LA feel more like a collection of disconnected neighborhoods than a cohesive world city? What areas make you feel otherwise?

There are two opposing sides I’ve been seeing lately: people who say this investment is corrupt and pointless, and that the monorail is a relic of the past on par with Elon Musk’s pod cars, and the other side, which says that Europeans and Americans are stuck in the past, and that YouTubers are spreading misinformation and hate about monorail.

What do you personally think about it? Is it good, or are there simply better and cheaper options aka train/elevated metro/tram/LRT/Bus Rapid etc?

The modern world would benefit tremendously from breaking the mental stranglehold of the dualism that characterizes our discussions about spaces.

That dualism assumes that a shared resource must be managed by the state, or managed by private enterprise, or else it's unmanageable. Historically, people have effectively managed spaces, referred to as commons, which existed (and continue to exist) outside of the state-market dualism.

Examples abound and the relevant knowledge is very much out there. Elinor Ostrom documented these cases extensively and won a Nobel prize for it.

Or we can just continue to bury our heads in the sand and pretend that the disappearance of the commons isn't a primary force responsible for the growing mental health crisis.

Hot take: At its core, the mental health crisis is a direct outgrowth and expression of an environmental crisis defined by the disappearance of common spaces stewarded by self-governing communities.

Our environments suck so our internal experiences suck. That's how it's always worked.

Edit:

Some resources that go into more detail into the theory and practice of common pool resources (CPRs)

Elinor Ostrom's Nobel prize in economics lecture

https://mendelyaf-spec.github.io/prophets-fingers/

Great video discussing the importance of having a cohesive social fabric and the interactions that cities create. Touches on a lot of different urbanist issues.

Thank god for beg buttons, which put pedestrians in their rightful place. They already get soooooo much space on the sidewalk, parks, even their own homes. Now they think they’re entitled to roam freely on our precious roads? Rogue vigilantes have gone so far as to paint crosswalks on our god fearing streets, with no concern for who it might effect. Not everyone can walk, you know. Some people DON’T HAVE LEGS. Enough. Cities are meant for one thing and one thing only: cars. This article is about how we protect our precious driving space

(In case you missed it—satire! Go donate to Peoples’ Vision Zero here, they’re doing the lord’s work)

Feeling a bit allergic to PIA. Anyone else?

Paid for the degree, have the experience and still do the work just fine. Most of what we do isn’t hard.

Not needed for Land and Environment Court work in New South Wales, or any approval for that matter.

If membership delivers value for you, awesome. For me, it doesn’t provide a professional return of investment.

Me job be town planner. Me read BIG legislation on broken website portal. Me balance pros and cons. Me not h8 PIA. 🤭

Since the start of the year, I've become a frequent user of the Gawler Line for my commute. The more I have traveled around the northern suburbs and commuted through it, the more resentful I become. I think the matter of Adelaide Urbanism warrants considerable discussion, so I've written a considerable post.

1) Adelaide Urbanism:

1.1 To begin, let's just acknowledge the sheer stupidity of Adelaide's suburban sprawl. Black roofs? With no trees either, really?
It's not just confined to Adelaide, the town of Mallala (close to where I live) seems to be going down the same path as Riverlea and other so called "development areas:" A mass of detached houses in a vaguely connected plot of land. It's not even properly connected to the Town, it's just off to the side, down the road.
Don't even get me started on the backyards smaller than a linen-cupboard, and the houses being mere centimetres apart; at that point what's even the point of having detached houses (which are less efficient to heat/cool btw) when at that point you may be better off building multi-storey apartments? It'd certainly be more space effective, afterall.

1.2 And tell me where are the corner shops and little cafés? Where are the playgrounds for children? Where are the places of worship? Where are the trees for shade, or provision for future PT? I sure can't see anything. We are not building communities at all, we are building a vaguely connected tumor of urban sprawl, eating up the Adelaide Plains when we really ought to be building up the density in pre-established suburbs. They're always advertised as communities, too, when that could not be further from truth. I'll also point out that, designing these places as car centric from the get-go, is going to make it hard to develop meaningful public transport in those places, we're literally setting these "communities" (if you can call them that) up to fail.

1.3 Community-oriented things are not something you should have to retrofit, they are really something that should be planned alongside the development from the onset. Cafés, little shops, places of worship, walkable streets and tree cover should be integrated and considered in urban planning at every stage. We seem to be building a lot of houses, but not a lot of homes. That needs to change now, and it should never have gotten to the point it has.

1.4 I'm also not saying we should have Hong-Kong levels of density in places like Salisbury, but a little more in the inner suburbs could go along way in housing supply, and perhaps justify the return of trams. Don't build housing for the sake of it, build walkable, community oriented developments, and redevelop existing places to be more considerate. Because tbh, I'm sick beyond death of car-centric Adelaide.

And transit...

2) Adelaide refuses to back 'on track':

2.1 Why are we so backwards? Don't get me wrong, I love the Adelaide metro, I use it very often and it's the only way I can get into the city. It still takes me forever because I must first get to Gawler. That aside, the Adelaide metro is, out of all the other major cities' metros, the sickly old man. We are so unimaginative when it comes to rail. We are happy to spend billions on a tunnel for cars, yet when it comes to heavy rail it's chirping crickets. You'd think we'd be a little more proactive regarding a line to Virginia/Riverlea? But no. We've got a rail corridor preserved, but there's no initiative for actually building the line at the moment. This is a lapse in judgement, there will be people living there that will need it in 2-3 years maybe, start building now!

2.2 I'd like to bring up the trams: we used to have such optimism and vision for new tram lines, they never matched the 1950s network, but it was still great to see proposals from all different parties. But it's been what, well over a decade? And sweet piss-all has come of it. Realistically, we should've had a line from the Airport to the CBD, and a line into North Adelaide years ago by this point. Even when we do throw money towards trams, it's not even to improve the trams: it's to improve cars, as we saw with the Glenelg line overpass. I could continue...

3) Adelaide & her connection (or lack thereof) to the regions:

3.1 As a country person: Our railways? where are they? Oh, sold off to the federal gov in the '70s and slowly poisoned, then no services by the mid '80s. Talk about dropping the ball of transit. To this day there's no rail connection between regional towns, and none to Adelaide. This greatly exacerbated the challenges the regions were facing at the time, and has stunted any substantial growth or recovery even today. It also forces us to be reliant on cars, and makes accessing services such as specialised health more difficult. I can't really see a doctor, or get mental health support very easily because of this.

3.2 I was walking in Hamley Bridge last week along the derelict tracks, and I came towards the old viaduct. Even until the '70s/'80s, we had a connection to Adelaide. We had the infrastructure, and at some point we had the political willpower to build it, so why not now? This is so perplexing to me, policymakers and urban planners just seem so spineless. (forgive my uncharitable judgement)

3.3 I say all this to point out that South Australia is very Adelaide-centric. That's understandable, >70% of the population lives there, but we as people in the regions deserve more consideration. The old regional railroads gave us a practical and genuinely useful service, it connected our communities too, and it connected us to Adelaide. When I travel to Adelaide I feel like I'm in a different state entirely, there's a strange disconnect because we're cut off.

4) The Freedom of Movement:

4.1 It was a genuine race against the clock, and very expensive endeavour to get my driver's license just so I could attend University, on top of my year 12 studies. I have friends who couldn't attend Uni because they had no car, because it's too expensive. Don't they also deserve the choice of higher education? Those are just people I know, I cannot think of how many more are robbed of employment or education... just because of where they live and their income level. PS: That's what public transit liberates you from. We need an alternative to cars, not just so we can ditch cars but also to provide independence and service to: The elderly, disabled people, poor families, children who maybe want to see their friend the next town over? Communities are always worth investing in.

4.2 There really ought to be trains to Victor Harbour and the Riverland, and into the Yorke Peninsula. A train to Pt Pirie > Pt Augusta > Whyalla >? Pt Lincoln would be great. Lines into the Mid North too, Balaklava, Burra, Owen, Hamley, Clare, etc. We deserve to be connected to Adelaide too. South Australia is the only mainland state to have no regional rail. This should be a great source of shame.
And perhaps the pressure on Adelaide housing wouldn't be as much had regional centres not been abandoned, and didn't experience population collapse/brain drain? They could have grown and been a vent for growth. Just a thought.

4.3 "Just move to the city?" - one might say to me, as many have. Now, if I had a huge stack of cash under my bed, I might just do that. However, I don't find myself in a financially privileged position, as many others do. Nor will I ever at this rate, with how much I pay for fuel at the moment... just so I can go to work to pay for that fuel, or go to the city for study - so I can (hopefully) get a job that pays more money... that I can also spend on car expenses. What a delightful system?

Conclusion;

I suppose my core frustration is how Adelaide planning (and South Australian planning more broadly) is not forward looking at all. It's more of the same. Nothing of substance has progressed, things have just gotten worse because what was sufficient 20 years ago is not sufficient now. It's the repeated spineless, half-baked proposals that do not address the needs that will be 50 years down the line. There's no willpower and the excuse always seems to be "well it's expensive," well, I tell you now, it's going to be a hell of a lot more expensive in the future... y'know... when we really need it.

That goes for transit; however, regarding housing, we actually need to consider if we're building cohesive communities where people know their neighbours, are able to walk a couple minutes to a café, children can walk to school and play in a park, and you can walk to Sunday Mass in the shade of trees. Because at the moment, I don't see that as being possible, especially in the new developments around Roseworthy, Riverlea, and Mallala. We can't build developments that fail to function as a community. But that's exactly what we seem to be doing. Adelaide shouldn't be a group of buildings where people work, eat and sleep, but rather a city that cultivates the human person in a community. Nor should we in the regions be a peripheral, distant appendage to the metropole. This is fundamentally a question of the dignity of the human person. How will Adelaide answer it?

Note;
I'm interested to see if anyone else shares my feelings, or has anything to add. Just know, I'm so ruthlessly critical of Adelaide urbanism precisely because I love Adelaide so much, it has so much potential, and my dream is for the countryside and Adelaide to be connected, as one big family :)

Rent burden falls harder on families: Families with children are more likely to be rent-burdened than nonfamily households — a gap driven not by income, but by the higher cost of the larger homes families need.

Family-size rentals are scarce: Thirty-seven percent of rentals offered two bedrooms, and only 24% offered three or more as of July 2026, limiting options for the more than one-third of renters who have children.