In the age of ride sharing, there is no need for people to park a car downtown. It is a waste when compared with the cost per square foot resting such a huge hunk of steel on the side of the street.
I'm not going to rideshare 15 miles into downtown on any sort of regular basis. I took a Lyft home from downtown last night after drinking and it cost me $40
If I am from out of town, I'm not learning your mass transit system just to meet a friend for lunch. Path of least resistance. It's not worth the effort when I can instead ask them to meet me somewhere with parking.
You're not very good at traveling, sorry. It's considered an important and invaluable skill for travelers to be able to read subway/train/bus diagrams. Going to San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, London, or Munich, if you can't handle mass transit, you're only impeding yourself.
I'm not talking about traveling, just about living in the suburbs, something I do every day. Going into downtown is already a chore to be avoided because of how hard parking is to find. If there was no parking, other than the times there was a business need, I simply wouldn't.
Why would I do something remarkably inconvenient like taking a bus taking an hour plus when I can do the same thing directly in 5ish minutes? It's illogical. It's too much an ask. Life is too short to waste it all in transit.
If you remove parking, you remove the suburbanites. It's really that simple.
Public transit done right should be intuitive. I've visited Boston once or twice in my life and The T is easy enough to use, despite having never used it before.
I've flown on different airlines, but the process is still the same for arriving at the airport, checking in, boarding the plane, etc. That's because they all use the same "interface". The process is uniform across airlines. It doesn't matter if you fly United or Southwest, either way you know how to fly.
Likewise, transit systems in towns and cities need to do the same. If they focus on user-friendly design and even work with other municipalities to create a standard, they can arrive at a uniform experience no matter which system you are using.
We have this uniform experience with cars: we assume that no matter where we drive, there will always be a place to park. This is something that has become so ingrained, that the thought of removing these parking spaces is repulsive. But that's the uniform experience I'm talking about. You just assumed that parking will be available, without doing any research to actually prove it. See how natural we've made the process of driving a car? It will take effort, but we can do the same for public transit. This is a solvable problem!
Maybe you've had bad experience in the past with whatever mass transit system a town used, but there is an opportunity there for improvement. How can you make their system as intuitive as possible? How can you make these systems uniform across different cities?
I have used mass transit in San Francisco, Tokyo, Osaka, many other places, I know how to do it, but it's always a huge indirect waste of time I wouldn't want to do in my everyday life.
If I'm meeting a friend for drinks after work I wouldn't want to spend an hour on a bus to get there when I can just drive directly to the brewery in town in a matter of minutes, or hell a suburb on the other side of the metro in 15 minutes.
I can assure you almost all suburbanites feel the same way.
I agree with you that no one wants to spend an hour on a bus just to go grab a drink with a friend.
But why do you think the bus takes an hour in the first place? It's probably because we've dumped so much of society's time and money into making our car-system as efficient as possible. Therefore, the public transit is terrible in comparison.
Cars have encouraged so much sprawl in our suburbs. It allows buildings to be further away, because now you can travel greater distances. Massive parking lots then need to be constructed to facilitate the placing of our cars, which again, wastes huge swaths of land, further distancing buildings from one another.
In my mind, we can't make public transportation viable while continuing to massively subsidize private car use. The latter causes sprawl, drawing us into a feedback loop of even more private ownership, which then in turn causes even more sprawl, and so on. It's a strong reinforcement cycle.
We need to break free of this cycle, and I'm afraid the short-term efforts aren't going to be enjoyable, but it's all for what's best in the long run.
I disagree about mass transit being the way of the future. It's an outdated relic of the 1800s. It's a highly impersonal dehumanizing system that boxes everyone's lives into predefined routes.
I see automated electronic vehicles as the very near future solution.
My previous comment was heavily focused on public transit, but I don't mean to imply that the future should solely be based around public transit.
Like many things, the solution is a balance of various things: private cars, public transit, and as you mention, automated EVs. It's just that I think our current system is far too skewed toward private car usage, when a healthier balance exists. Compromise is key.
Another thing that helps is frequent service, so that it's faster to recover from problems like missing a bus/train, getting off at the wrong stop, or making a transfer where the other bus/train is scheduled to depart just before you arrive. The buses where I live are on an hourly schedule for all but a handful of high-volume routes, and it's pretty much a matter of luck whether you can efficiently transfer anywhere but the main terminal.
An app wouldn't suffice to tell you how to get from A to B? With some investment a mobile app for transit can make for an amazing experience.
Pull Kakao Metro from your device's respective app store to see what a simple a well made transit app can be like. The seoul metro is huge and at first blush unwieldly, but this app made getting around Seoul a breeze (though it was pretty easy as is). It's not hard to produce simple apps and get word out around town and cities. If you have a phone you can get the necessary information the same way you would have to look up directions on the map application anyway in an unfamiliar town. I don't see much of a difference in finding the transit app versus using maps app to find the place then struggling to find parking.
Exactly what is happening in my town currently. All serious business migrated to megacenters at the outskirts because city parking is expensive and scarce.
I would be interested in seeing some empirical numbers on this. I live in NYC and have driven a Zipcar here a handful of times for errands. The experience is . . . not great.
This has made me wonder: who are these people in cars? And parked up and down the street? What are their reasons for using the mode of transport they do? I ponder this regularly. Sometimes I have the most irrational urge to go around and knock on people's windows to ask. I never do, of course.
I know for most things I do, the car would be the worst possible way to accomplish them. Walking or subway are better, and biking is best. But maybe for others the story is different. There are some obvious good reasons: tradespeople, delivery trucks, taxis and ride-sharing services. But who are the rest?
That said, I don't think you can really expect people to buy this claim without providing evidence.
My anecdotal NYC experience has been that private cars are useful for leaving the city (upstate, Long island, Jersey shore, etc) and occasional off-peak trips.
The outer parts of the boroughs can also be far from transit, and cars don't seem such an inconvenience to deal with.
I have been regularly sick when i was using public transp. I know my hygiene and I know that when i switched to car only my sick leaves dramatically decreased. I would not trade car even if it would mean to get to the place slower.
Maybe that is the case when it comes to large towns in the US (particularly in the South or the Midwest). In cities, even North American ones, you would have to be totally insane to want to drive downtown. To a large extent, this is because parking is a nightmare to begin with in a downtown core. It is far more convenient to Park and Ride in places like San Francisco, New York, Toronto, etc... even somewhere like Boston or Seattle.
I went to San Francisco this last fall for a couple weeks and actually found it far far more drive/parkable than expected. We took the subway and bus a few times but mostly drove and parked, and it was honestly never. I was honestly reasonable surprised and relieved.
Do you have any empirical evidence this outcome would occur? Nearly everything I've read suggests the very opposite [1]. Further anecdote: I've been to many European cities with minimal cars, and many American cities ranging from super walkable to Robert Moses-esque highway-organized downtowns. The overwhelming trend is that car-unfriendly zones are the most bustling, and the car-streamlined zones turn to ghost towns after work hours.
I'm not opposed to limiting car space in favor of people space, but I also see EVs as a solution if the problem is emissions. No need to ban all cars, just gas-powered ones.
Directly, sure, but charging your car generates carbon dioxide, as do the manufacturing processes behind the components. Manufacturing an electric car is in some ways worse for the environment than a traditional car.
> > Manufacturing an electric car is in some ways worse for the environment than a traditional car.
> That's nonsense. Says Elon Musk and so do various studies (in contrast to a recent, widely quoted swedish one).
Well, how much better is an EV car, compared to an ICE car, in terms of emissions over its whole lifetime? If it's only 5% better, or even 20%, it's not enough. If we're judging a mode of transport by its emissions, then EVs don't have to compete with ICEs. They have to compete with bikes and walking where those modes of transport can reasonably displace cars.
> If we're judging a mode of transport by its emissions, then EVs don't have to compete with ICEs. They have to compete with bikes and walking where those modes of transport can reasonably displace cars.
Emissions somewhere else than the place where they're used are irrelevant for the question whether to allow them in cities or not. EV cars are 100% emission free in cities and if you're being pedantic, they compare favourably to cyclists and pedestrians because these emit more CO₂ than EV car + driver due to being physically more active and exhaling CO₂.
Evs are in the long run good but make no mistake that the batteries come with an ecological cost during their use and afterlife. Evs, autonomous cars, and ride sharing are all good but for a major ecological change to happen there has to be a societal one as well. The future with autonomous cars isn't most efficient with everyone having their own car, it's with summonable cars that services own instead of individuals. Much of the benefit of autonomous cars is lost if the vehicles continue to sit unoccupied for the majority of the day. Likely for some time, anything more than a city wide autonomous car network won't be possible as the reliance on networked machines to offload the heavy lifting onto seems too great, much less to get it to poorly connected rural areas.
Society needs to be willing to change how it uses cars in order for a major change to happen.
So only people who live downtown can go downtown unless they want to spend an hour in public transportation. Go it.
This is a terrible idea.
I live 40 minutes outside of Boston but sometimes I have meetings in downtown Boston. If I'm on time I'll park at the T (subway) station and take the T the rest of the way in but if I'm running late I'll usually drive directly in and park downtown. Sure it costs $20 for a couple hours but it is worth it when you are in a time crunch.
Making public transit the only way to get downtown is essentially saying you don't want people doing business in your downtown. Since taking public transit turns my 40 minute drive into two hours (each way).
Edit: of course I can park and take a taxi or Uber just like I can park and take the T but that adds a lot of time (and cost) to my trip. And that money is money I might spend at business downtown if I didn't just blow it on a taxi.
I think the whole idea is to add cost to bringing a car downtown, so fewer people will do it. The proposition is that the harm this does to suburbanites will be offset by making the city more livable for it's residents, and maybe by doing so encourage suburbanites to move inward at the margin.
What city (that would plausibly do this) doesn't have a rent crisis?
The people who get a more "livable" city (where livable apparently does not include navigable) are those who can pay the most. The people who get locked out of the city are those who can pay the least. Few suburbanites could afford a bedroom per child in the city center, yet this is standard in the suburbs. This is under current prices; think how much worse they'd get if every suburban resident was trying to move in.
The city is going to be less livable if people have to pay higher portions of their incomes for less space, and waste more of their lives in transit.
We should do this so some people paying $3500/mo rents don't suffer the indignity of looking at a parked car?
There's obviously a balance to be struck. But motorists kill a lot of people, make a lot of noise and pollution, and use a lot of infrastructure that city-dwellers must pay to maintain. So I think it is not out of bounds to consider reducing the footprint of a city that is dedicated to them. To the extent demand supports it, there will still be private parking and valet services.
I'm not worried about the housing costs issue. I think it is likely that any city council able to overcome the action-potential of banning cars will also be quite pro-housing.
Banning cars and banning new housing have precisely the same motivation: to protect and increase quality of life for existing urban residents at the expense of everyone else.
The kind of city council that imposes height limits and lot coverage maximums (tall apartment buildings and their residents are considered noise, shadow, and cultural pollution) is the most likely to ban cars.
The people we are taking from have less money (housing is cheaper far from center) and the people we're giving to have more. This is a regressive policy, not something we do often.
You took exactly the opposite away from my comment from what I was trying to say.
This is BAD for society. It is only good for people rich enough to actually live downtown. For someone who needs to go for a job interview or commute to work every day an extra 40 minutes each way is not a "little" inconvenient; it makes downtime completely inaccessible to them.
Your subway takes more than twice the time to get you to the city center than driving?
I have to say, I've never been to a city like that. I mean, unless your meetings are at 4am or something. Don't you have traffic? Is your subway pulled by horses?
All the extra time adds up: parking and walking to the train, waiting for it, a min. or so at each stop on the way; even more waiting if you have to switch lines.
As long as I could avoid peak time, I found it similar in Boston: 40 mins to drive in, 60-70 mins on the train.
And parking and taking the T wasn't even always an option as the garage on my route (Alewife) can fill up.
15 minutes - getting the ticket if you don't have one (moot if you have a pass or stored value / Charlie Card)
10 minutes - walking to the actual train platform and waiting for the next train to leave
30 minutes - to downtown crossing because it has to stop every stop along the way
10 minutes - to walk from the station to your meeting
And that is assuming you don't need to transfer to another line.
Granted the first and last one are time you'd spend either way (unless your lucky enough to have the garage attached to the building you need to be in)
One would hope that a car ban would be done alongside heavy reinvestment in public transit. Best of both worlds would be car-less city center with fast access from the suburbs.
To take it even further: they should make an individual parking spot held in reserve for you at every place where you might conceivably hold a meeting. That way if you are running late to a meeting in the center of the city you can always drive right up to the door from the suburbs.
And they shouldn't charge, because that would add a lot of cost to your trip.
That's called a leased parking space (except for the free part) and my point was that people who can't afford to live downtown are the ones inconvenienced not the people who live there. Effectively the rich are hoarding the downtown so that they can deal with a little less traffic and if you have to do business downtown, screw you, you should be rich enough to have a condo walking distance away.
You took exactly the opposite away from my comment from what I was trying to say.
Why does public transit have to be 2 hours? If you replaced every 30 cars with one bus, you could run one bus every minute, the bus could travel much faster because there are no cars clogging the lanes. It is simply more efficient and potentialy faster.
I don't understand this concept of banning cars, especially by removing parking spaces from cities under the pretext of a reduced environmental footprint. Norway is on the forefront of the EV revolution, so they can go "green" by just banning gasoline cars.
There seems to be a second movement hidden behind the climate debate and it's keen on removing private transport altogether (except bicycles, for now), apparently driven by people with a particular urban hipster lifestyle. This is a massive reduction of comfort, a burden for families with small children and people with disabilities, as well as businesses and logistics.
I don't understand why such a large fraction of our usable land in people-dense areas needs to be consumed by expanses of ugly, dead cement full of giant deadly "creatures" traveling at high speeds, nor why that state of affairs needs to be imposed everywhere on everyone.
> I don't understand why such a large fraction of our usable land in people-dense areas needs to be consumed by expanses of ugly, dead cement
What other useful space would you put between tall buildings? Pedestrians have plenty of space to walk, at least I don't hear much about pedestrian traffic jams.
Roads are very valuable and they're being used for many things that everybody needs: buses, ambulances, fire service vehicles. Do you really want them gone?
Building codes prohibit this in many places, i.e. the taller the buildings, the more free space is required between them (for light, safety etc.). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floor_area_ratio
See, that's what I mean by "urban hipster lifestyle".
Outdoor dining can be done in backyards (pretty much every 2nd tavern in Athens, a big, sprawling, dirty city) does this.
Retail displays - pardon me, how many more do you need and why do they need to be in everyone's faces in the middle of the street?
It seems that millennials don't really know what they want and aren't flexible enough to choose from available lifestyles in different cities, countries etc. - instead, they what everything together immediately right in the place they live, no matter how contradictory those things are. If you want trees, go to a park. Kids can play there safely, too, without being run over by an ambulance or biker. ;-)
The spirit of capitalism, condensed into one statement: If your kids want to breathe non-toxic air and play, they better be prepared to walk (or, rather, drive) half an hour to the park.
> If your kids want to breathe non-toxic air and play, they better be prepared to walk (or, rather, drive) half an hour to the park.
Wake up, "cars" is no longer synonymous with "pollution". I take offence at such ignorance as an EV owner.
As for kids who want everything while condemning capitalism: the problem isn't that they want clean air and play time, the problem is that they demand just as vigorously warm pizza delivered to their home in 10 minutes, furniture brought to their doorstep by whoever sells it on Amazon and the fire brigade to arrive quickly when they set their WLAN-enabled fridges on fire. Obviously, they don't understand how these things relate to each other, but they moan about it nevertheless.
Because for the majority of people, that ugly, dead cement is eminently useful. You essentially seem to be expressing confusion at why people who are different from you should be allowed to exist.
The entirety of your comment was about how much cars and their associated infrastructure suck and how you wish we didn't devote space to them. That's a hell of a lot more specific than "there might be a better way," and those specifics are entirely negative toward cars.
If you actually think something more nuanced, I'm glad to hear it, but I have no idea how anyone is supposed to glean that from the comment you actually wrote
The reason is very simple: dense urban cores are currently for everyone, not just those with enough disposable income to pay the premium rent.
As you get your way and the richest drivers lose their transport options, pressure on rents in walking distance from offices will skyrocket.
Middle and working class suburbanites, who don't have that option, are simply screwed. You propose to make cities exclusively for their urban residents, fuck anyone who needs a car to keep their travel time reasonable. Maybe some middle class people will be willing to suffer through on buses to visit occasionally.
(Good public transit like rail just becomes an extension of the city, and living near it becomes as unaffordable as living in the city center. Only shitty transit is accessible from affordable housing).
Raise height limits. We can address those who are drivers by choice (rather than economic necessity) once a below-median family can comfortably afford 3 bedrooms in a high-rise near transit.
I'm talking about bringing the same thing to American cities, as many in this thread advocate. Outside of a few, a building over 5-10 stories is seen as a big deal and neighbors will fight it tooth and nail.
I think we can learn some things from the way some French cities do things. Most days and most hours of the day, cars can drive on all streets, however, on weekends and some other times, in certain core commercial areas, only delivery vehicles are allowed and these streets become pedestrian-only. I'm okay with that. [as an aside, interestingly, people are in some areas, are allowed to park on the pavement (sidewalks) --which is a bit jarring at first].
Autonomous electric vehicles present the opportunity to keep a lot of the comfort you want and prevent the dead expanse of cement that so many people distaste.
> But don't expect a suburban lifestyle in the city center.
Since when is an urban lifestyle one devoid of cars? It's you who should move to a small village, where people used to walk everywhere. Large cities were always busy with horse carriages, cars and other means of private transport.
I still don't get why that's even a crime. I live in Germany, and I jaywalk 5-10 times on a normal working day, because it's stupid to wait at a red light when there's no traffic within sight.
Small villages have become more spread out with the automobile in the US. Cities are dense enough most kinds of destination are within walking distance. 50% of Manhattanites don't own cars. The question is what modes of transport should have priority and in suburbs the answer is cars.
You've got your history backward. Suburbs exist in America for two reasons: widespread car ownership and institutionalized racism in the form of redlining.
I don't think everywhere needs to look like or support the activities of dense urban cores. But I do think dense urban cores should look like and support the activities of dense urban cores.
In America even this is controversial and difficult to achieve.
That's great! How do they deal with Li-Ion batteries in the cold? I imagine it'd be similar to what you'd do before—turn on some lights and the radio to get some juice flowing before you try starting the engine.
I have a very small child, and living somewhere where we don’t need a car to get around is immeasurably nicer than living somewhere with car-centered planning. I can put my son on my shoulders or in a wagon and walk to the park, to the grocery store, to the library, to the post office, to the toy store, to cafés and restaurants, ... and we can smile and wave at all the other pedestrians as we walk along. Compare that to the annoyance of strapping him into and out of a carseat, not being able to interact with him while I’m driving and he’s sitting in the back by himself, and spending most of our outdoor time in parking lots.
Beyond that, the poor, disabled people, the elderly, and children between the ages of about 5–18 have a much better time living somewhere that they can be independently mobile instead of needing to rely on someone else driving them around.
One is easily manageable, but consider families or single parents with 2-3 small children and the amount of stuff they need to carry with them, buy when shopping etc. ...
Not everyone can afford to move to expensive suburbs or hire a nanny.
I live on the outskirts of a larger-sized european city with perfect public transport and still prefer my (electric) car, since it's so much faster, cleaner, safer and more comfortable. I'd use it much less if I lived in the city center, but it'd still be a reduction in living standards (carrying shopping bags 500m vs. perhaps 100m total etc.).
I have friends with multiple young children and no nannies who do just fine walking their whole brood around the (urban) neighborhood.
You can easily carry quite a lot of shopping bags for 2 or 3 kilometers in a wagon if you need to.
Or if you like, you can use a car occasionally for shopping trips (or even a taxi), and for a workday commute and the great majority of other trips, stick to walking/transit/bikes. Even if people just ditched their cars for 80% of their trips it would make the city overall much more pleasant.
Many people in larger cities do quite well without cars. In Manhattan, it's quite normal even for the hedge-fund-managing class to take the subway.
Knowing that it's possible to comfortably get around the city without a car, these citizen can't help but notice how much their quality of life is lessened by people insisting on cars.
- Emissions, known to cause premature death, and often exceeding the guidelines, especially in summer
- Traffic accidents
- About 2/3 of the area of public streets being required for cars (two pedestrian walkways, two lanes parking, two lanes traffic)
Even without completely eliminating cars and trucks, which you would probably still need for deliveries, emergency services and disabled people, you could reduce most roads to one lane, and get rid of traffic signals. That would:
- Greatly increase the speed of biking (currently, 1/2 of the time is spent waiting for signals or in traffic)
- Increase the speed of busses even more (they spend more time waiting in traffic that bikes can pass)
- More than double the available space for wider sidewalks, greenery etc.
Cars are a huge impediment to creating walkable downtowns, even if they're green. This is downtown Annapolis, looking down Main Street: https://www.google.com/maps/@38.9777543,-76.489652,3a,75y,10.... On a nice summer day (this picture is in October), the sidewalks are packed with tourists, but a handful of cars take up most of the space. Further down the street, you get to this giant expanse of pavement: https://www.google.com/maps/@38.9773508,-76.487682,3a,75y,67.... To get from the main drag to the water front (in the distance in the picture), you have to cross this expansive waste of space dedicated to cars.
All for what? The whole downtown area is walkable, and there is a perfectly good multi-level garage at the edge of Main Street for people to park in.
> This is a massive reduction of comfort, a burden for families with small children and people with disabilities, as well as businesses and logistics.
Parents don't need to drive up right to wherever they're going; their children could do with a little walk. I've got a four year old, and we go downtown every weekend. It's no problem to park in the garage and walk half a mile to where we're going. At the same time, it's a big worry to have kids running around with traffic zooming by.
Deliveries and disabled people can be accommodated by permitting busses, special vehicles for the disabled, and commercial deliveries during certain windows. You don't need to permit all vehicle traffic to accommodate those special cases.
It doesn't sound like you're talking about the same thing as anyone else. You're right that parking garages accommodate cars just fine, and nobody here is arguing against parking garages.
I don't get your response. OP said that bannning cars downtown would keep families, disabled people, etc. from enjoying downtowns. My point is that you can ban general vehicle traffic in the core downtown areas, but people with families can still get there by parking in a garage just outside the downtown.
You don't see any difference between banning cars and simply putting the parking spaces in a garage instead of on the street? The difference seems pretty stark to me — one implies that people cannot drive there and the other implies that people will drive there.
No, my point about the garage is that you could easily ban parking in the main pedestrian area (Main Street, the waterfront, and the circle in Annapolis) because most people already park in a garage outside the main pedestrian zone. Many plans for downtown car bans contemplate parking outside the car free zone.
In the US, cars are privileged forms of transport.
Just as we have shopping malls with outlying parking surrounding a pedestrian only area, you can engineer urban cores with appropriate pedestrian infrastructure, that are served with a network of transport modes outside of the core, including transit and garages.
Downtown? It's easy: they're noisy, annoying, polluting, take up space, and designing a city for them results in urban and suburban wastelands as opposed to vibrant, walkable city centers.
>This is a massive reduction of comfort
Well, comfort is not everything. And for obese car-obsessed sedentary people "a massive reduction of comfort" might just what the doctor ordered!
>a burden for families with small children and people with disabilities, as well as businesses and logistics.
And yet, families with small children and businesses have been doing just fine in more traditional and not car-oriented cities.
As for people with disabilities, they can always use mechanized wheelchairs and disability friendly public transport (something car and private-transport obsessed cities usually lack, only allowing the richer disabled people those "comforts").
EVs are still annoying. When I have to cross a road for cars, I have to wait for the traffic light. Also, I have to be attentive in the first place. That's something I don't have to do to the same same extent in a pedestrian area.
Also, EVs are still noisy because a significant part of the noise of a driving car is produced by the tires, unless driving very slowly.
EDIT: Also, judging from the tone of your last statement, I'm going to guess that you've never been in Europe.
I've been to Vienna once (3 years ago), and their public transit system was just as competent and reliable as most others that I've seen in central Europe. The car density was already much lower than what I've observed in the US.
That may also have to do with what you get for your money and local walkable access to schools causing families to avoid trying to live in the centres.
>- 32% population over 60 (highest in Vienna's districts), average age 46,3 (vs. 40,5 for all of Vienna)
Downtown can also be more expensive than peripheral districts, so older people are more likely to afford housing there. That's not because of less cars though.
But for our purposes, Vienna with all its districts, not just the center, is still far less car oriented than the traditional US city and its suburbs.
>2,3% of the city's population live there, but only 0,7% of its children
Just considering all as single-kid families would account for 2.3% "of the city's population" living there but only 1.5% of its children. And tons of families have only one kid (but of course 2 parents, divorced or not), lots have no kids, and tons of adults are not married yet. Add immigrants (who are more often than not male who come to seek work and don't bring children), and one would expect adult populations to be larger than children population in the same area.
As a parent of two young children, cities are stressful because of cars. You constantly have to be paying attention, holding hands, watching out at intersections. To me, no cars is more family friendly.
> Norway is on the forefront of the EV revolution, so they can go "green" by just banning gasoline cars.
That's assuming that you can "go green" in any meaningful way with a significant share of motorized private transport. Electric engines might emit fewer pollutants and CO2 than ICEs while operating, but it would take quite some advancements in battery tech to produce the required battery packs without CO2 emissions that are about as significant overall. See e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14608959
As far as the environmental impact goes, it's always much better to replace trips taken by car with trips taken by bike or by foot (or, to a certain extent, by public transit) than to just replace one type of car by another.
@lazyjones here's the "second" movement you're sensing. It's about concentrating the population in urban areas as well as curtailing personal movement. It's called UN Agenda 21 and it is being quietly implemented without voter approval through local zoning boards.
You can improve an area by seperating incompatible uses. When white flight was in full swing in the 1970s, cities removed pedestrian plazas, bulldozed marginal real estate and created parking lots in the name of urban renewal (and enriching speculators), etc.
In my area, a few cities have selectively closed streets for events or permanently closed streets to create pedestrian zones. It's largely been successful in attracting more visitors and creating a good environment.
My guess is that this works well if you have a workable public transit system (and since 61% of Oslo's carbon is apparently from public transit, they probably do).
When places like the SF Bay Area do stuff like this, it ends up being warped into NIMBYism where there is no meaningful investment in public transit or affordable downtown housing to counteract the reduction in car volume. It just increases discrepancies in housing costs, and increases the already punishing commute times of the middle class.
I guess eliminating parking would solve the "six figure salary and a trailer by the river" problem we're starting to have where young engineers just buy a motorhome and live out of that.
This is already like what many European cities do; the shops and restaurants all cluster in in a pedestrian only zone (in Germany they call it a fussgänger).
I've found these places quite pleasant; you can eat outside without fast loud cars passing by. You can cross the streets at will.
There's usually even a parking garage at the outset, though a metro system or ride sharing also works.
These are usually the most expensive parts of town, and of course there are offices and luxury apartments on the upper floors.
People are expected to walk two or three blocks, and that distance is kept down by the pedestrian-only zones usually being only two or three streets wide.
In my city - Columbia, SC - we have a magnificent Saturday farmers market that takes up three blocks of Main street. Thousands of people come to eat and hang out with hundreds of vendors for several hours.
And yet.
The cross streets between the blocks remain driveable. As a result, little kids cross the road as SUV's come barreling past. Last week I saw a driver speed through with his hands up in disgust, staring down an old couple crossing the street.
Walkable cities face very real opposition from the norms of society. Despite 10,000 people creating a hive of street life, we still keep cross streets open for the ~100 cars that will use them.
are there examples of American cities who do walkability well? And by well, I guess I mean to European levels.
Some idiots will never understand. If you have private cars in your town, it's because there are good reasons for people to come to your town. You'll never get to keep the latter without the former.
We are not saying opposite things. I'm stating that a town can either focus on itself, thus strictly limiting private transportation, or try and be the reference centre for the surroundings, which had many advantages but also a cost.
In other words, if you are annoyed by the cars parking in front of the regional agency of the national bank just below your windows, ask for the bank to be moved, not for the parking to be dismissed: public services are, by definition, public!
We are not saying opposite things. I'm stating that a town can either focus on itself, thus strictly limiting private transportation, or try and be the reference centre for the surroundings, which had many advantages but also a cost.
In other words, if you are annoyed by the cars parking in front of the regional agency of the national bank just below your windows, ask for the bank to be moved, not for the parking to be dismissed: public services are, by definition, public!
And public transport takes twice as long because we've been focused on improving car-life as much as possible.
This is a good example of "things have to get worse before they get better", because in order to provide a decent alternative, we must, for some time, bite the bullet and ween off cars.
It's no wonder that public transport takes longer than private car travel: when you spend tens of millions of dollars on roads, when you illegalize crossing a street (jaywalking), when you optimize traffic lights to the flow of traffic, when you provide free parking, when you guarantee a minimum number of parking spaces per development, (and so on...), you've basically given public-transport the middle finger.
Public-transport and private (car ownership) transportation is an opportunity cost, and we've disproportionately spent our time and money on the latter. If we want to improve the former, then we're going to have to make these tough decisions to dis-incentivize private transportation.
Public transport is not a valid alternative because cars create endless neighbourhoods.
You can't make an effective transportation system with low pop density because few people will be able to get to stations on foot, and you can't make a fast transportation system because low density means downtown is very far away.
On the other hand, in downtown, cars are a big nuisance: they take most of the public space, they pollute, they are dangerous, etc.
There's an even easier way to start: ban regulations requiring a set number of parking spaces in new developments. Removing these minimums returns parking to the market. Already dense areas would likely end up with fewer spaces that'd cost more, driving the desired result.
When I have travelled around the world, I enjoyed public transportation. Everything is new to me, and I have plenty of time to enjoy it. A couple hours to make it somewhere is no big deal.
But I have to wonder if it's still as nice when I have things to do and need to get somewhere further from the main transit lines. Or when I need to finish something at work and miss a train. Or when I just want to be home for dinner.
Why is there this assumption that everyone lives like some of you do in London, NYC, San Francisco, Boston and other large trend-setting cities where you can ride a bike to and from your pad and shit all over people driving cars? This article makes no sense to me having previously lived in a fairly large Midwestern city where a typical wait time for a bus is half an hour in the 'burbs with no other options but driving my own car. Public transport has to be a commonly efficient way of transportation everywhere before we even begin discussing taking parking away.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 172 ms ] threadCities have enough people - we don't need suburbanites clogging up our streets with ugly cars.
Why would I do something remarkably inconvenient like taking a bus taking an hour plus when I can do the same thing directly in 5ish minutes? It's illogical. It's too much an ask. Life is too short to waste it all in transit.
If you remove parking, you remove the suburbanites. It's really that simple.
In London you've just cut out almost everywhere worth visiting.
I've flown on different airlines, but the process is still the same for arriving at the airport, checking in, boarding the plane, etc. That's because they all use the same "interface". The process is uniform across airlines. It doesn't matter if you fly United or Southwest, either way you know how to fly.
Likewise, transit systems in towns and cities need to do the same. If they focus on user-friendly design and even work with other municipalities to create a standard, they can arrive at a uniform experience no matter which system you are using.
We have this uniform experience with cars: we assume that no matter where we drive, there will always be a place to park. This is something that has become so ingrained, that the thought of removing these parking spaces is repulsive. But that's the uniform experience I'm talking about. You just assumed that parking will be available, without doing any research to actually prove it. See how natural we've made the process of driving a car? It will take effort, but we can do the same for public transit. This is a solvable problem!
Maybe you've had bad experience in the past with whatever mass transit system a town used, but there is an opportunity there for improvement. How can you make their system as intuitive as possible? How can you make these systems uniform across different cities?
If I'm meeting a friend for drinks after work I wouldn't want to spend an hour on a bus to get there when I can just drive directly to the brewery in town in a matter of minutes, or hell a suburb on the other side of the metro in 15 minutes.
I can assure you almost all suburbanites feel the same way.
But why do you think the bus takes an hour in the first place? It's probably because we've dumped so much of society's time and money into making our car-system as efficient as possible. Therefore, the public transit is terrible in comparison.
Cars have encouraged so much sprawl in our suburbs. It allows buildings to be further away, because now you can travel greater distances. Massive parking lots then need to be constructed to facilitate the placing of our cars, which again, wastes huge swaths of land, further distancing buildings from one another.
In my mind, we can't make public transportation viable while continuing to massively subsidize private car use. The latter causes sprawl, drawing us into a feedback loop of even more private ownership, which then in turn causes even more sprawl, and so on. It's a strong reinforcement cycle.
We need to break free of this cycle, and I'm afraid the short-term efforts aren't going to be enjoyable, but it's all for what's best in the long run.
I see automated electronic vehicles as the very near future solution.
Like many things, the solution is a balance of various things: private cars, public transit, and as you mention, automated EVs. It's just that I think our current system is far too skewed toward private car usage, when a healthier balance exists. Compromise is key.
Pull Kakao Metro from your device's respective app store to see what a simple a well made transit app can be like. The seoul metro is huge and at first blush unwieldly, but this app made getting around Seoul a breeze (though it was pretty easy as is). It's not hard to produce simple apps and get word out around town and cities. If you have a phone you can get the necessary information the same way you would have to look up directions on the map application anyway in an unfamiliar town. I don't see much of a difference in finding the transit app versus using maps app to find the place then struggling to find parking.
This has made me wonder: who are these people in cars? And parked up and down the street? What are their reasons for using the mode of transport they do? I ponder this regularly. Sometimes I have the most irrational urge to go around and knock on people's windows to ask. I never do, of course.
I know for most things I do, the car would be the worst possible way to accomplish them. Walking or subway are better, and biking is best. But maybe for others the story is different. There are some obvious good reasons: tradespeople, delivery trucks, taxis and ride-sharing services. But who are the rest?
That said, I don't think you can really expect people to buy this claim without providing evidence.
The outer parts of the boroughs can also be far from transit, and cars don't seem such an inconvenience to deal with.
[1] https://www.citylab.com/solutions/2015/03/the-complete-busin...
Seconded. Especially since while riding a bicycle, people likely emit more CO₂ than an electric car. ;-)
Not if you charge from a PV array ...
> as do the manufacturing processes behind the components.
Same as every other manufacturing process, even for bicycles, your clothes etc. ...
> Manufacturing an electric car is in some ways worse for the environment than a traditional car.
That's nonsense. Says Elon Musk and so do various studies (in contrast to a recent, widely quoted swedish one).
> That's nonsense. Says Elon Musk and so do various studies (in contrast to a recent, widely quoted swedish one).
Well, how much better is an EV car, compared to an ICE car, in terms of emissions over its whole lifetime? If it's only 5% better, or even 20%, it's not enough. If we're judging a mode of transport by its emissions, then EVs don't have to compete with ICEs. They have to compete with bikes and walking where those modes of transport can reasonably displace cars.
Emissions somewhere else than the place where they're used are irrelevant for the question whether to allow them in cities or not. EV cars are 100% emission free in cities and if you're being pedantic, they compare favourably to cyclists and pedestrians because these emit more CO₂ than EV car + driver due to being physically more active and exhaling CO₂.
Society needs to be willing to change how it uses cars in order for a major change to happen.
This is a terrible idea.
I live 40 minutes outside of Boston but sometimes I have meetings in downtown Boston. If I'm on time I'll park at the T (subway) station and take the T the rest of the way in but if I'm running late I'll usually drive directly in and park downtown. Sure it costs $20 for a couple hours but it is worth it when you are in a time crunch.
Making public transit the only way to get downtown is essentially saying you don't want people doing business in your downtown. Since taking public transit turns my 40 minute drive into two hours (each way).
Edit: of course I can park and take a taxi or Uber just like I can park and take the T but that adds a lot of time (and cost) to my trip. And that money is money I might spend at business downtown if I didn't just blow it on a taxi.
The people who get a more "livable" city (where livable apparently does not include navigable) are those who can pay the most. The people who get locked out of the city are those who can pay the least. Few suburbanites could afford a bedroom per child in the city center, yet this is standard in the suburbs. This is under current prices; think how much worse they'd get if every suburban resident was trying to move in.
The city is going to be less livable if people have to pay higher portions of their incomes for less space, and waste more of their lives in transit.
We should do this so some people paying $3500/mo rents don't suffer the indignity of looking at a parked car?
I'm not worried about the housing costs issue. I think it is likely that any city council able to overcome the action-potential of banning cars will also be quite pro-housing.
The kind of city council that imposes height limits and lot coverage maximums (tall apartment buildings and their residents are considered noise, shadow, and cultural pollution) is the most likely to ban cars.
Life will be a little less convenient for you for those "sometimes" that you have meetings, and a lot better for a lot of people.
That kind of trade-off is something we call "society".
This is BAD for society. It is only good for people rich enough to actually live downtown. For someone who needs to go for a job interview or commute to work every day an extra 40 minutes each way is not a "little" inconvenient; it makes downtime completely inaccessible to them.
I have to say, I've never been to a city like that. I mean, unless your meetings are at 4am or something. Don't you have traffic? Is your subway pulled by horses?
As long as I could avoid peak time, I found it similar in Boston: 40 mins to drive in, 60-70 mins on the train.
And parking and taking the T wasn't even always an option as the garage on my route (Alewife) can fill up.
10 min - Finding a parking spot at Alewife
15 minutes - getting the ticket if you don't have one (moot if you have a pass or stored value / Charlie Card)
10 minutes - walking to the actual train platform and waiting for the next train to leave
30 minutes - to downtown crossing because it has to stop every stop along the way
10 minutes - to walk from the station to your meeting
And that is assuming you don't need to transfer to another line.
Granted the first and last one are time you'd spend either way (unless your lucky enough to have the garage attached to the building you need to be in)
Drive time for said trip... 20 minutes
And they shouldn't charge, because that would add a lot of cost to your trip.
You took exactly the opposite away from my comment from what I was trying to say.
There seems to be a second movement hidden behind the climate debate and it's keen on removing private transport altogether (except bicycles, for now), apparently driven by people with a particular urban hipster lifestyle. This is a massive reduction of comfort, a burden for families with small children and people with disabilities, as well as businesses and logistics.
It's all about balance...
What other useful space would you put between tall buildings? Pedestrians have plenty of space to walk, at least I don't hear much about pedestrian traffic jams.
Roads are very valuable and they're being used for many things that everybody needs: buses, ambulances, fire service vehicles. Do you really want them gone?
And, yes, pedestrian traffic jams do happen. There's also untold other costs of traffic, and potential uses for more space:
- Outdoor dining
- retail displays
- kids playing
- Trees, bushes, etc
- Bike lanes
Outdoor dining can be done in backyards (pretty much every 2nd tavern in Athens, a big, sprawling, dirty city) does this.
Retail displays - pardon me, how many more do you need and why do they need to be in everyone's faces in the middle of the street?
It seems that millennials don't really know what they want and aren't flexible enough to choose from available lifestyles in different cities, countries etc. - instead, they what everything together immediately right in the place they live, no matter how contradictory those things are. If you want trees, go to a park. Kids can play there safely, too, without being run over by an ambulance or biker. ;-)
Wake up, "cars" is no longer synonymous with "pollution". I take offence at such ignorance as an EV owner.
As for kids who want everything while condemning capitalism: the problem isn't that they want clean air and play time, the problem is that they demand just as vigorously warm pizza delivered to their home in 10 minutes, furniture brought to their doorstep by whoever sells it on Amazon and the fire brigade to arrive quickly when they set their WLAN-enabled fridges on fire. Obviously, they don't understand how these things relate to each other, but they moan about it nevertheless.
You could eliminate half of roads and still have ample room for emergency services.
Suggesting that there might be a better way than today's status quo is different than saying that certain people don't deserve to exist.
If you actually think something more nuanced, I'm glad to hear it, but I have no idea how anyone is supposed to glean that from the comment you actually wrote
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_city
As you get your way and the richest drivers lose their transport options, pressure on rents in walking distance from offices will skyrocket.
Middle and working class suburbanites, who don't have that option, are simply screwed. You propose to make cities exclusively for their urban residents, fuck anyone who needs a car to keep their travel time reasonable. Maybe some middle class people will be willing to suffer through on buses to visit occasionally.
(Good public transit like rail just becomes an extension of the city, and living near it becomes as unaffordable as living in the city center. Only shitty transit is accessible from affordable housing).
Raise height limits. We can address those who are drivers by choice (rather than economic necessity) once a below-median family can comfortably afford 3 bedrooms in a high-rise near transit.
Since when is an urban lifestyle one devoid of cars? It's you who should move to a small village, where people used to walk everywhere. Large cities were always busy with horse carriages, cars and other means of private transport.
I don't think everywhere needs to look like or support the activities of dense urban cores. But I do think dense urban cores should look like and support the activities of dense urban cores.
In America even this is controversial and difficult to achieve.
That's great! How do they deal with Li-Ion batteries in the cold? I imagine it'd be similar to what you'd do before—turn on some lights and the radio to get some juice flowing before you try starting the engine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWqumtF4Fq8
Beyond that, the poor, disabled people, the elderly, and children between the ages of about 5–18 have a much better time living somewhere that they can be independently mobile instead of needing to rely on someone else driving them around.
One is easily manageable, but consider families or single parents with 2-3 small children and the amount of stuff they need to carry with them, buy when shopping etc. ...
Not everyone can afford to move to expensive suburbs or hire a nanny.
I live on the outskirts of a larger-sized european city with perfect public transport and still prefer my (electric) car, since it's so much faster, cleaner, safer and more comfortable. I'd use it much less if I lived in the city center, but it'd still be a reduction in living standards (carrying shopping bags 500m vs. perhaps 100m total etc.).
You can easily carry quite a lot of shopping bags for 2 or 3 kilometers in a wagon if you need to.
Or if you like, you can use a car occasionally for shopping trips (or even a taxi), and for a workday commute and the great majority of other trips, stick to walking/transit/bikes. Even if people just ditched their cars for 80% of their trips it would make the city overall much more pleasant.
It wasn't that bad.
Knowing that it's possible to comfortably get around the city without a car, these citizen can't help but notice how much their quality of life is lessened by people insisting on cars.
- Emissions, known to cause premature death, and often exceeding the guidelines, especially in summer
- Traffic accidents
- About 2/3 of the area of public streets being required for cars (two pedestrian walkways, two lanes parking, two lanes traffic)
Even without completely eliminating cars and trucks, which you would probably still need for deliveries, emergency services and disabled people, you could reduce most roads to one lane, and get rid of traffic signals. That would:
- Greatly increase the speed of biking (currently, 1/2 of the time is spent waiting for signals or in traffic)
- Increase the speed of busses even more (they spend more time waiting in traffic that bikes can pass)
- More than double the available space for wider sidewalks, greenery etc.
All for what? The whole downtown area is walkable, and there is a perfectly good multi-level garage at the edge of Main Street for people to park in.
> This is a massive reduction of comfort, a burden for families with small children and people with disabilities, as well as businesses and logistics.
Parents don't need to drive up right to wherever they're going; their children could do with a little walk. I've got a four year old, and we go downtown every weekend. It's no problem to park in the garage and walk half a mile to where we're going. At the same time, it's a big worry to have kids running around with traffic zooming by.
Deliveries and disabled people can be accommodated by permitting busses, special vehicles for the disabled, and commercial deliveries during certain windows. You don't need to permit all vehicle traffic to accommodate those special cases.
Just as we have shopping malls with outlying parking surrounding a pedestrian only area, you can engineer urban cores with appropriate pedestrian infrastructure, that are served with a network of transport modes outside of the core, including transit and garages.
Downtown? It's easy: they're noisy, annoying, polluting, take up space, and designing a city for them results in urban and suburban wastelands as opposed to vibrant, walkable city centers.
>This is a massive reduction of comfort
Well, comfort is not everything. And for obese car-obsessed sedentary people "a massive reduction of comfort" might just what the doctor ordered!
>a burden for families with small children and people with disabilities, as well as businesses and logistics.
And yet, families with small children and businesses have been doing just fine in more traditional and not car-oriented cities.
As for people with disabilities, they can always use mechanized wheelchairs and disability friendly public transport (something car and private-transport obsessed cities usually lack, only allowing the richer disabled people those "comforts").
That's simply no longer true with EV.
> And yet, families with small children and businesses have been doing just fine in more traditional and not car-oriented cities.
In those fabulous city centers? Sure! Full of families with small children they are... ;-)
Also, EVs are still noisy because a significant part of the noise of a driving car is produced by the tires, unless driving very slowly.
EDIT: Also, judging from the tone of your last statement, I'm going to guess that you've never been in Europe.
Perhaps you live in a different Europe then, I've lived in Vienna for the past 27 years.
Which all of 5% of the population or less have.
>In those fabulous city centers? Sure! Full of families with small children they are... ;-)
Ever been to Europe?
Yes, pretty much all my life.
Check out who actually lives in city centers here. Elderly people, rich businesspeople without families etc. ...
In Vienna, where I live, the city center has the following demographics:
- 104m² average flat size, housing 1,89 people.
- 32% population over 60 (highest in Vienna's districts), average age 46,3 (vs. 40,5 for all of Vienna)
- 2,3% of the city's population live there, but only 0,7% of its children (and 2,5% of its cars)
Downtown can also be more expensive than peripheral districts, so older people are more likely to afford housing there. That's not because of less cars though.
But for our purposes, Vienna with all its districts, not just the center, is still far less car oriented than the traditional US city and its suburbs.
>2,3% of the city's population live there, but only 0,7% of its children
Just considering all as single-kid families would account for 2.3% "of the city's population" living there but only 1.5% of its children. And tons of families have only one kid (but of course 2 parents, divorced or not), lots have no kids, and tons of adults are not married yet. Add immigrants (who are more often than not male who come to seek work and don't bring children), and one would expect adult populations to be larger than children population in the same area.
That's assuming that you can "go green" in any meaningful way with a significant share of motorized private transport. Electric engines might emit fewer pollutants and CO2 than ICEs while operating, but it would take quite some advancements in battery tech to produce the required battery packs without CO2 emissions that are about as significant overall. See e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14608959
As far as the environmental impact goes, it's always much better to replace trips taken by car with trips taken by bike or by foot (or, to a certain extent, by public transit) than to just replace one type of car by another.
[link goes to UN website] https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/outcomedocuments/agend...
You can improve an area by seperating incompatible uses. When white flight was in full swing in the 1970s, cities removed pedestrian plazas, bulldozed marginal real estate and created parking lots in the name of urban renewal (and enriching speculators), etc.
In my area, a few cities have selectively closed streets for events or permanently closed streets to create pedestrian zones. It's largely been successful in attracting more visitors and creating a good environment.
When places like the SF Bay Area do stuff like this, it ends up being warped into NIMBYism where there is no meaningful investment in public transit or affordable downtown housing to counteract the reduction in car volume. It just increases discrepancies in housing costs, and increases the already punishing commute times of the middle class.
I guess eliminating parking would solve the "six figure salary and a trailer by the river" problem we're starting to have where young engineers just buy a motorhome and live out of that.
I've found these places quite pleasant; you can eat outside without fast loud cars passing by. You can cross the streets at will.
There's usually even a parking garage at the outset, though a metro system or ride sharing also works.
People are expected to walk two or three blocks, and that distance is kept down by the pedestrian-only zones usually being only two or three streets wide.
And yet.
The cross streets between the blocks remain driveable. As a result, little kids cross the road as SUV's come barreling past. Last week I saw a driver speed through with his hands up in disgust, staring down an old couple crossing the street.
Walkable cities face very real opposition from the norms of society. Despite 10,000 people creating a hive of street life, we still keep cross streets open for the ~100 cars that will use them.
are there examples of American cities who do walkability well? And by well, I guess I mean to European levels.
100 cars commuting daily is 4.1 cars an hour that is typical of a rural farm road not a busy city.
10,000 people is Prince George's Stadium[1] full to capacity.
[1]http://www.theballparkguide.com/graphics/bowie-baysox/prince...
I've been able to get easily get street parking in lower Manhattan on Saturday morning. People don't work in business districts on Saturday.
Public transport is not a valid alternative if it takes more than twice as long...
This is a good example of "things have to get worse before they get better", because in order to provide a decent alternative, we must, for some time, bite the bullet and ween off cars.
It's no wonder that public transport takes longer than private car travel: when you spend tens of millions of dollars on roads, when you illegalize crossing a street (jaywalking), when you optimize traffic lights to the flow of traffic, when you provide free parking, when you guarantee a minimum number of parking spaces per development, (and so on...), you've basically given public-transport the middle finger.
Public-transport and private (car ownership) transportation is an opportunity cost, and we've disproportionately spent our time and money on the latter. If we want to improve the former, then we're going to have to make these tough decisions to dis-incentivize private transportation.
You can't make an effective transportation system with low pop density because few people will be able to get to stations on foot, and you can't make a fast transportation system because low density means downtown is very far away.
On the other hand, in downtown, cars are a big nuisance: they take most of the public space, they pollute, they are dangerous, etc.
But I have to wonder if it's still as nice when I have things to do and need to get somewhere further from the main transit lines. Or when I need to finish something at work and miss a train. Or when I just want to be home for dinner.