-- Picard
Does every city in America have the rules you mention, or specific ones?
Misleading. American cities have lots of short buildings, but they also have more land to put stuff on, be it trees or buildings.
> The lower density means people are further away from the few parks that do exist too.
In some parts of the US, this is absolutely true. In others, it absolutely is not. Silicon Valley is easily the worst place I've ever lived in this regard. As a Midwesterner, I had never lived more than ~400m from a park, even in the suburbs. In Santa Clara, I'm more than 1.5km from the nearest public park.
Most Midwestern and Eastern cities do not match the "sprawl" archetype that most techies associate with America. Look up "Urbs in Horto."
> American zoning forbids taller ~6 story residential building
You're allowed to build up to 5 stories out of lumber. So a common archetype for American apartments is a first floor of retail space made of concrete, which serves as a base for 5 stick-built floors of apartments. That's where 6 floors comes from.
But the statement on its own is false. You're certainly allowed to build taller, permits permitting (heh), it's just that 5-over-1 is a local maxima for cost efficiency vs. likelihood of getting permits.
There are very few cities with laws on the books that prohibit building taller than 6 floors. The issue is that you have to get approval from the city to build things, and residents get angry when you try to build high-rises. So, permits get rejected.
This is an important distinction because the route to change is wildly different. We need community attitudes to change about dense housing developments, we don't need to change any law that's currently on the books.
Edit: for canada map since the article ignores the country entirely, check https://www.globalforestwatch.org/map/country/CAN/
Could have been 200 meters or 500 meters or 4 trees or 2 or flowers.
This is the kind of ideology that is ruining public policies instead of being grounded on concrete and scientific facts and goals.
> the 3-30-300 test — a standard that has become the go-to for solving a universal urban problem
> 3-30-300 is a catchy, straightforward test that sets a clear benchmark for measuring equal access to nature.
> I found that my closest park isn't 300 metres away, it's 400 metres. That's close, but a fail.
It's a standard. It's a benchmark. And a park at 400 metres is no good; it must be 300 metres or else it may as well be 4 kilometers away. This isn't treating the test as a useful guidance, but as a hard target. As Goodheart's law states: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
When you focus exclusively on satisfying such metrics, you can end up with ineffective policy. Missing the forest for the trees, if you will.
Parks are not nature. Parks are a sanitized parody of the natural world. They are a simulation meant to make us humans feel better about ourselves. They are gated grass farms, not wild areas, useful only to a select few animals (nothing bigger than a raccoon). Creating a park inside a urban area diverts land from actual nature. So, rather than build parks inside cities, we should develop that land and make our cities smaller.
We don't have to go all 40k hive world. Rather, if parks are kept at the urban periphery and/or are connected to each other, then they can thrive as actual natural space. We have modern transport technology. We can bring the people to the park rather than construct a park near the people and thereby deprive Bambi and all his friends of yet another acre of true wilderness.
Where if don't have a machete you ain't going nowhere. And while you're pitifully trying to make some way, a bear bites your ass off.