Pedestrianisation works well in European cities, especially small ones. It's quite common here in the UK, often there are strict time limits on when delivieries can be made, e.g. 6-8am when barriers are open to let vehicles in and out.
However this model just does not work in the US, outside of very few places. US cities are designed for cars, and without major redevelopment everything's just too far apart - even within the context of a single street - for this to make sense. If you had electric scooters or something though...
Internalize the cost of parking, drop mandatory parking minimums and change zoning to allows for reasonable density. Wait a few decades and cities probably won't be as car centric as they are now.
It took major redevelopment for many US cities to become car-centric, so I am not seeing why we could not do another redevelopment to create pedestrian-friendly cities.
The cycle of gentrification will change that. In 10, 20 years, a new neighborhood will be the hip place to be, all the rich propel will move there, and prices will drop. It'd be nice if the development could happen in the low-income areas from the beginning, but it's hot hopeless.
For now at least. As mentioned in other comments it's hard, and expensive, to redevelop entire cities. Politically it's also probably difficult because it's such a big change. Makes sense that those with money to afford making changes privately would have them first.
However, it's also likely they will want this nice life in more than just their area and will push for that over time.
> there are strict time limits on when delivieries can be made, e.g. 6-8am when barriers are open to let vehicles in and out.
That is nuts.
That means a plumber, electrician, home appliance deliveryman, mover, etc. can only handle one job requiring a vehicle per day. He will have to charge 3-4 times more for his services than someone working in an area where it's feasible to finish 3-4 jobs in a workday. The costs are of course passed on to the customers. Is their car-less life worth living in a pigsty that they can't fix up because laws force contractors to charge exorbitant fees?
That means any business will want a dedicated vehicle to haul what they need in the 6-8 am window. This is not just grossly economically inefficient (no outsourcing delivery to third parties), it results in more vehicles sitting idle during the day, using up parking space!
And that means moving is a nightmare. Moving a two-bedroom apartment worth of stuff into or out of a truck is, realistically, at least a four hour job. That means a cross-town move that could be done in one workday with sane laws will take at least four workdays (two to load the truck, two to unload) in your crazy UK town. Imagine the costs. How is it moral for you to shackle your people to the land by making relocation unaffordable?
I don't know of any residential areas that have these sorts of restrictions. Its generally in shopping areas. Businesses have to schedule deliveries for these time slots.
When you look into the details of these things you'll nearly always find that there are enough exemptions to make it work. If it was genuinely unliveable people wouldn't live there. People have managed to live in Venice for centuries despite it being physically impossible to get motor vehicles around the centre.
"In fact, in most streets there are no physical barriers to keep the cars out. Vehicles making deliveries or locals heading to private garages can still circulate in most places.
“What we did is to create loops to keep people from driving through the city,” Lores explains. “If you enter by the south, you leave by the south.”
The goal of this strategy, which is complemented by severe parking restrictions in all of the central area, is to get rid of what Pontevedra officials call “unnecessary traffic”.
The 6-8am window is for large deliveries. There is normally a retractable barrier for emergency usage (police/ambulance etc) and for minimal day access (I don't know how this is managed, but I have seen vehicles have to turn around and leave, where others, normally with a business inside get access).
Another common way is to have a central pedestrian only section, but with vehicle access through the 'back streets' behind. The pedestrian street is normally a great deal larger than the (often one way) back streets, and again has retractable bollards for maintenance, event vehicles and emergency vehicles. These back streets also give access to underground/aboveground parking for residents in flats. I would love to see this model used to some extent in residential areas. Some of my favorite times are when a street is closed to traffic for a street party.
In practice it works very well, at least in a large number of towns and cities in the UK. It's about finding the correct roads and spaces to limit and disallow motor vehicles on.
I live in a large apartment development in Manhattan that is pedestrian-friendly and decidedly vehicle-unfriendly. You can't drive a car to the front of my building. And yet it works, very well.
I moved in with my girlfriend recently. You know how that worked? The movers she hired drove as near as possible, and simply pushed her stuff on dollies the rest of the way to the building. No big deal. Yeah, it took a little bit longer, but nowhere near as bad as the 4-day move you're hyperbolically claiming. And that side of the move was actually better than the other side, since she was moving out of a fourth floor walkup. Even though the truck could park almost directly in front of that building, it turns out it's harder to carry stuff down many flights of stairs than it is to push it on wheels across a flat surface and then up an elevator.
I moved from another building within my complex, and I accomplished my entire move simply by pushing my stuff on a dolly, without even having to hire movers. I've never before had a vehicle-less move even be an option, but it was in this situation.
As for repairmen, you know how they work? They get around on bicycles. You can carry a surprising amount of stuff on a bicycle, including all the tools you'd need for >95% of repairs. The plumbers ride around on bikes with a toolbox, plungers, and a snake, for example. For appliance delivery, they use tiny little vehicles that are basically a pick-up truck version of a golf cart. These vehicles don't go fast and the drivers yield to pedestrians, and you see them on pedestrian paths (and don't feel unsafe about it).
Every problem that you're bringing up is already solved in the many different areas that are pedestrianized and prohibit vehicle traffic. It's a failure of imagination to think that these problems are unsolvable. When your city is dense enough, a plumber/electrician can easily support him/herself on just jobs that are within a 10 minute walking radius, with the tools that can be pushed on a handcart or fit on a bicycle. Vehicles aren't necessary. It's actually more efficient for these professions, because in the suburbs it's typical to drive for up to an hour to get to a jobsite! So much wasted time spent just getting somewhere!
This may be shocking to people with an American upbringing, but cars (especially privately owned ones) just do not make sense going forward.
Cities get bigger and denser, and wasting a big % of land on parking spaces, roads, intersections and accepting a horrible air quality (that reduces citizen life spans and health quality) and noise pollution just does not make any sense anymore. Carse are effective in less dense regions, but in modern cities other solutions have to be found. Mass transit, biking lanes, electro-scooters, (elevated)-footpaths are the way to go. Maybe even electric ridesharing.
But privately owned gasoline-guzzlers are an archaic solution to the transportation problem, and they are not effective in today's society.
I know european cities are much more pedestrian friendly & that US cities in general are more oriented towards the car lifestyle, but as said previously, this needs to change. It is a big cultural and infrastructure change over a longer timespan, but it is achievable.
Of course change always requires some sacrifice, and I imagine the car-drivers in above mentioned article must have been plenty pissed at the beginning. But they paved over the streets, made the inner city pedestrian only, and now they are better for it. Of course this is a very small town and these changes do not scale up as easily as one would like, and much more complex projects will have to be designed for bigger cities. But it is doable (see initiatives in e.g. Madrid, Munich & most of the netherlands) and "only" requires some long-term commitment. But we all know how good politicians are at that (what's global warming??).
I want to finish this comment with a call to engage in democracy. Make your opinion heard, loudly, go to the voting polls, participate in your local council, actually engage in politics. Because if you do not, no significant change will be made any time soon.
On top of other issues, most of Europe also enjoys a 4-season year - meaning that a bike or scooter is safely and comfortably usable around half of a year, definitely not more.
That's very subjective, quite a lot of people do that year round in a lot of European cities. Certainly it's viable in southern Europe where it rarely snows.
Even here in Minneapolis many people ride their bikes all year round, with fewer riding when it is extremely cold or snowy, but coming back out when it warms up just a little.
What’s interesting to me about Minneapolis and other northern cities where there are a lot of cyclists is that they very often have far more people riding to commute or do other practical tasks than any number of other cities with much milder climates. In the American south, where you never see snow, commuter cyclists are practically nonexistent. Obviously there is a climate challenge of a different sort, but not insurmountable ones and not all year round.
Citation needed, I know. There’s a relevant article about this phenomenon out there somewhere, if I can find it I’ll post a link.
Heat is way worse than cold. Many people can't do harder physical activities once it's around 30 degrees Celsius and/or humid because they would pass out (me included, when it's over 28, I just drive everywhere because I can't stand it outside). The idea that someone in their full health would force me to bike onto the steep hill where I live (and 18 km away from my workplace) is extremely unsettling to me. Public transport is not an option - it takes 50 minutes that way (while just 12 min by car) and the buses and trams are constantly overcrowded, late (or don't arrive at all) - and you definitely can't transport a server (or groceries for a 5-member family) that way.
Riding on the rare occasions there's snow on the ground in London is great. Assuming you can avoid snow in your chain (which causes it to skip the sprockets), the roads are empty - no cars, no busses, it's lovely.
You've got it bass-ackwards: biking becomes more difficult the closer you are to the equator. You can always add insulation to protect from cold, but you can't go much further than a singlet+shorts in case of heat.
I live in an European city 60 degrees northern latitude, and the bicycle season is more like 9 months out of the year. That can be extended to 10-11 months with a bit of clothing/gear and bicycling the whole year is not impossible either (but most people who do have a separate winter bike).
I used to do 15+15 km bike ride to work and back almost every day for 9 months out of the year. Sadly I can't do that any more as I moved farther away from work.
There might be days of bad weather where other means of transportation is more convenient, but that's the case all year around.
For motorcycles/scooters the season is shorter because you can't get (affordable) insurance.
Biking in autumn is perfectly comfortable. You are just wearing more clothes (which you would wear anyway if you're outside). It's not like people never leave their houses in USA, right?
Biking in the winter is fine too, as long as there's no snow (and the snow is usually only 1-2 months, depending on the location).
And some people do drive in the winter too (but that is harder and most don't).
Actually biking in snow is fine too as long as there isn’t too much of it. The real problems are around the melting point when everything melts a little bit during the day and three freezes over the night and thus you have to bike on ice. This can be fixed by studded tires but most don’t bother. Main issue for me for biking in the winter is the cold. Not really a problem anymore as I moved to Helsinki where it rarely is cold enough to be a problem.
I'm definitely not wrong, I'm just living in the other half of Europe. And that's my point - there is the other half, you can't do blanket statements like "cars should be banned". Cars need an update, but motorized 4-wheel individual transport has its place, maybe not in your city, but definitely in mine.
Cities in the Nordic countries have bike paths that are kept clear of snow and are used for commuting year-round. People know that there is a way to dress to be comfortable cycling even when winter comes.
Please send a note to the Dutch (and the Germans, the Danish, the French, the Belgians, …) to tell them to stop riding their bicycles in the midst of winter.
In the past five years there was one day when I couldn't cycle to work due to black ice covering most of the roads, and even that resolved itself in the afternoon. Snow just means you need a bit more dexterity than usual.
As for comfort; proper clothing means you are pretty much comfortable most of the time.
The ultimate irony of the point attempted to be made is that people don't drive when ice or snow cover on the road (or suck at it, take undue risks, fail to, and ram into curbs/cars/people).
Many people don't though (look at how attendance rates plummet at schools and businesses on heavy snow days), and of those who do drive anyway, the accident rate is highly elevated.
I cannot relate to what you write at all. In all my years in school, I did not witness a single day of attendance drop due to weather (the only weather-related exception was for the early years of elementary school, when you could choose not to go outside during breaks if the temperature was low enough, but that was rarely the case here near the coast).
What's more, in bad weather people (who have the option to choose between public transportation and their own vehicles) tend to choose cars more often because public transit has a habit of becoming increasingly unreliable, especially due to winter conditions, even though such conditions can be reasonably expected for 6 months a year.
Where are you from? Where I'm from, schools would be closed during heavy snowfall, so attendance would necessarily drop to zero. That's kind of necessary in a place where snowfall doesn't happen often enough for it to make sense to invest in a whole fleet of snow-clearing vehicles. It would take days to clear the streets from a heavy snowfall, but snowfalls like that happened less than once a year.
I grew in a mountain pass area where there (used to, times change...) be heavy snow 2 to 4 months per year, and learned to drive there. Now I live in a city where snow happens regularly but much less and typically goes away in a couple of days, and when there's snow there's much less people on the roads, and for those who are, only a fraction know how to handle it, or even have proper winter tyres even though temperatures dive below the freezing point every year. People routinely flat out skip work on such days because "snow", which coming from where I grew up, is unfathomable unless you got a meter of snow overnight. On the occasional trip to Paris I've witnessed a couple events where emergency services are scrambling to bring water, food, and clothes to people gridlocked for hours (it was winter and many couldn't be arsed to take even a jacket, oblivious to their environment, living in their air-conditioned bubbles from house to covered parking lot to car to workplace); the entirety of the city streets was in deadlock because of a couple of millimetres of snow (obviously {rail,sub}way was unaffected). Pure madness.
I live in the southwest of Germany, 500km from the coast as the crow flies. I cycle-commute year-round, around 5km each way. It's no problem if you have a good rain jacket and rain pants, and a down jacket, gloves and a hat (that fits below a helmet) against the cold in winter.
A few years back I took a trip to Sapporo over the New Year's holiday. It snowed ~3 inches per day the entire week I was there. I consider myself pretty comfortable with cold weather (I went up there so the girl I knew could teach me to snowboard). I'll be damned if I ever agree to give up a private auto in favor of biking in that sort of weather. I didn't even like her FWD Kei car, and wished I was in an AWD Lancer Evolution or Subaru WRX instead.
Here's a fact: Pontevedra and the area surrounding is famous in Spain for really rainy winters and springs. Pontevedra city is facing directly to the sea.
Around here (this site I mean), the majority opinion doesn't find any problem at all with sleet and snow and cycling.
The odd thing about this is how the biking paths around here (a city 60N) still remain relatively empty for a long time in the winter. It almost confuses me, but not really :-)
> Around here (this site I mean), the majority opinion doesn't find any problem at all with sleet and snow and cycling.
I know. I expected to get this kind of responses. It shows how little empathy this site has for other (older, overworked, with 3 kids, pregnant, ...) people that are just a little different than they are.
The people that don't just aren't typical HN users. There is a very limited subset of people biking during the other half of the year and that's what I'm talking about - the world isn't only composed of young healthy people that don't carry anything and/or anyone and don't drive long distances and don't live in a hilly region and don't have to wear suit/dress to work (or have showers at work).
Saying "countries" is funny. It's varying wildly within a country, even a small one. E.g. my home city of Hradec Králové is built on a completely flat area with mild weather, so of course everyone bikes almost the whole year, but Prague is built on a series of steep hills and enjoys rougher weather, so while you see people biking here, most people don't.
That really depends on the level of comfort you want to have when riding a bike. A lot of people do still use a
bike in winter (through I can't recommend it), through
even if you don't do so, using it for 5/8 of a year is quite doable.
I ride all year round in edmonton, I don't understand what the superstitions are against riding in winter. It's like walking, just a bit windier and you can't put your hands in your pockets. I'll take -20c over rain any day. The only thing I don't like doing in cold weather is being still. So long as I'm moving I'm fine.
You can't ride on ice and snow unless you have fancy bike and tires.
You will sweat unless you only drive plane roads.
Wind and snow make it much harder to ride.
Most people will just give up on riding in winter the first time they try it.
I've commuting year round for close to two decades, you don't need a fancy bike. You don't need fancy tires. For 90% of my winter commuting I'm on wet or dry pavement, in the coldest major city in North America. Four years ago the city began promoting winter commuting, along with a commitment to keep the bike paths clear, and the number of winter bicycle commuters has doubled annually. Enough of them are overweight middle aged ladies, the last type of person you'd suspect to be a hardcore winter commuter, but that's because it isn't actually hardcore. The barriers are psychological, there's a very easy learning curve to overcome, and it comes quite naturally if you just maintain a cycling through the fall. It's also a cure for seasonal affective disorder/cabin fever.
I ride a fixed gear In winter, with the same tires I use in summer. A lot of people are on mountain bikes. Some people are on fatbikes, but that's overkill for basic commuting.
I'd take some cold weather commuting over summer commutes here in the Midwest US... Those 100 degree days with 95% humidity are a killer unless you have a shower at work.
I ride a motorcycle year long in Paris, it's definitely not comfortable during the harshest winter days but with proper gear it's definitely doable. Spring and Autumn is fine, you just need waterproof gear for rainy days. At lower speeds and with exercise keeping you warm riding a bicycle is probably even less of an issue.
Sure, on rainy or super cold days it's not like it's as comfortable as a car but you'd have to pay me to drive a car around Paris or any big european city at rush hour.
Your post is how I can tell you've never been to Copenhagen during the winter. Bicycles are used year-round no matter the weather. There's a saying here that roughly translates to "there's no bad weather, only improper clothing".
One of the culture shocks from Europe to US (California) was that there are places where you can't do shit without a car. Like, no place place to walk along the street to get from point A to B.
It's because of the geography. Southern California and Arizona especially were impossible to live in until after Air Conditioning became cheap and widespread in the 1950s. At that time, modernism in architecture and city planning was at its peak: build it big, build it simple, and build it for cars.
Desalinization is expensive compared to pumping water out of the ground, but it's dirt cheap compared to ubiquitous air conditioning and/or depopulating cities.
The coming droughts will affect agriculture, but not the cities.
This thread is filled with strange ideas. I live in San Diego. I know people who don’t have air conditioning, and they’re fine. The weather is mild unless you get 15-20 miles off the coast, and then it’s still not that bad 90% of the time.
Southern California? There are tons of places in LA and San Diego where AC is entirely optional and often not installed. 72 and sunny is a stereotype for a reason...
I was visiting a customer site near Miami, some years ago. I opted for not renting a car, I could easily go to the customer's site by taxi. But then some components got stuck in customs, and I had to stay the weekend. It turned out that the hotel was its own enclave if you didn't have a car! I couldn't walk to the shopping mall, or a nearby restaurant, I tried everything. Just couldn't get there. It was like being in a Kafka novel. Nightmarish, and utterly unnecessary.
It is probably more than a few miles to get anywhere which makes what in EU would be a simple walk into an expedition.
Reminder: originally one (Roman) mile was a measure of thousand paces, while a Dutch, Russian and such miles were related to an hour of marching. (later rescaled in feet)
You definitely have areas that are not designed for walking at all. I've been in a situation where I could see a shopping mall and restaurants from my hotel across a busy multi-lane road and there was literally no way to get there on foot.
That said, it's not the US vs. everywhere else. For example, the UK has lots of charming little villages where you can walk to the pub and a few stores. Once you get out of the village though, some public footpaths notwithstanding, you're mostly talking very narrow roads with no shoulders, much less sidewalks, and no real way to walk off the road.
In Switzerland one of the things we'd learn in primary school age was to walk roads without sidewalks - always on the left side such that incoming cars are in front, and by paying lots of attention and walking in single file. Since cars expect at least cyclists anywhere they generally should be mindful of slow traffic.
I could see a shopping mall and restaurants from my hotel across a busy multi-lane road and there was literally no way to get there on foot.
This is almost exactly the situation described by Bill Bryson in I'm a Stranger Here Myself. I believe he wanted to visit the shops across the street while his wife was at a mall and there was effectively no way to get there without a car.
There were sidewalks, but only for a limited range around certain landmarks (malls, hotel, etc). I managed to cross an eight-lane street, but that section (with malls) was also closed off to the next 'island' (i.e. the sidewalk stopped. There were some car-only tunnels here and there also.) All those islands, and only cars could go between them. Yeah, quite similar to what poster @ghaff described in a post below.
That's just nuts. You'd think that there are at least state-level regulations to have sufficient sidewalks, car culture or not. I mean at some point it's a health and safety issue (when you can't even get to the doctor's office across the street).
Of course, that's why I've mentioned California explicitly. Mentioned Texas is similar, and is also notable for my only time when I saw a car tire explode due to the heat.
Seconded, Ghent in belgium is also pretty cool car-wise. It has so-called pedestrian-centric planning. For example, the city centre may not be entered with a car, only by foot, bicycle or public transport. It's great.
I enjoyed Musk's Boring Company's presentation, where they talk about some problems with transportation today and present some solutions, with emphasis on transportation within city borders [0].
Yeah, underground transportation is definitely one solution that can help solve the transportation problem. The Boring Company seems to be more US focused, so maybe it can help with the "bigger" challenges that the US is facing in de-caring their cities.
This isn't necessarily a transportation problem. The question is "what kind of transportation?". A full (electric) bus is vastly more efficient than 20-50 SUVs carrying nothing more than their driver regardless if you do it on the surface or underground. And you don't need tunnels or even most of today's infrastructure if most surface traffic is public transportation.
Musk's idea basically focuses on moving cars underground if I understood correctly. It should focus on moving most of the public transport underground and simply "decommissioning" some of the road infrastructure from the surface.
A large network of tunnels many levels deep would fix congestion in any city,
no matter how large it grew (just keep adding levels).
That's not the solution if still you plan on having every person and their car move around. Maintaining the infrastructure for cars on the surface is already expensive and inefficient. Suddenly we can do it better or cheaper by multiplying it underground? You won't get rid of any of today's problems except one: drivers will be able to move from one side of a city and create a traffic jam on the other in no time.
Tunnels are great if you plan on connecting a few hubs spread around a city. From there you can use the most efficient surface transportation available. A bike, a bus, a tram, even on foot.
One lesson that most city planners learned in time is that the more infrastructure you build for cars, the more cars you'll have clogging it. The solution is o discourage the reliance on cars in cities and it worked every time it was applied.
> That's not the solution if still you plan on having every person and their car move around. Maintaining the infrastructure for cars on the surface is already expensive and inefficient. Suddenly we can do it better or cheaper by multiplying it underground? You won't get rid of any of today's problems except one: drivers will be able to move from one side of a city and create a traffic jam on the other in no time.
That's not quite true: by completely splitting car traffic and pedestrian traffic on different levels, you can create a city which is much denser and easier to walk because you don't need large car streets, and at the bottom you don't need pedestrian affordances alongside car traffic. Plus by banning car traffic far away you disincensise car traffic within the city: it's usually easier to walk, bike or take public transport than go to the bottom, get into your car, drive, park over there and go back up.
Louvain la Neuve works on that model, the city is built on a huge concrete slab and entirely pedestrian, with car traffic and parkings underslab.
So the plan is to duplicate all needed infrastructure underground? Basically the equivalent of streets, parking lots, everything plus the added elevators to the surface) will now be moved on several levels of underground? The BC FAQ suggests it will have to accommodate current traffic. Isn't this an enormous waste that will only move traffic congestion underground? You can already reap most of the benefits without enormous investments in tunnels.
I will point out the fact that according to Wikipedia Louvain la Neuve has ~30.000 inhabitants and ~30 square Km (12.5 sq mi). It is also 2Km on the longest side. How do you see this applied to New York or London, cities that need it the most?
And why is it better to still spend billions moving infrastructure underground instead of shrinking what's already available to the point where pedestrians get the vast majority of space and the infrastructure only serves the needs of public services?
> banning car traffic far away you disincensise car traffic within the city
I don't know what "far away" means but in reality drivers still go out of their way to drive the car. Think about this: they are willing to spend hours in traffic jams. You think an elevator ride to level -4 will discourage them?
P.S. I'm using info from BC [0] and their vision on this looks a lot like "let have the same traffic as today but on many levels of tunnels". Only the company drilling the tunnels walks away happy. You just pay a crapload of money to hide some of the issues of urban traffic.
Speaking of abundant collections of beers, this bar in Ghent, Dulle Griet, boasts a choice of 500 beers. It has a great interior, and, I was surprised to learn just now, you can go inside via Street View [0]. It has these cool multi-liter (can't remember exact capacity) beer glasses that look like something out of a chemistry lab, because of their shape, and the fact that they come with a wooden frame for support. You can see an image of one on the wall right of the bar, near the winking cartoon man and the word "MAX" in big lettering [1]. And, if you look up at the ceiling, there's a curious looking basket there. Comes evening, it has a bunch of non-matching shoes in it, because when you order that big-beer-glass-with-frame they take one of your shoes, lower the basket, put it in, and raise it again. You get the shoe back when you return the glass intact!
Downside is that the bar is pricey and touristy, and most of the beers seem to be commercial. We were in this bar in Bruges last winter, it has 300 kinds of beer and all from small breweries. If a brewery is acquired by a big company, they don't serve it anymore. They also have almost no tourists there, which is refreshing for Bruges. I'll try and find what it's called.
Edit: The Bruges bar is called Le Trappiste [3]. Apparently, it's well advertised in touristic literature. They even have a website.
> Seconded, Ghent in belgium is also pretty cool car-wise. It has so-called pedestrian-centric planning. For example, the city centre may not be entered with a car, only by foot, bicycle or public transport. It's great.
Louvain La Neuve (in french-speaking belgium) has an interesting take on this: the entire city is on a concrete slab, topside is entirely pedestrian, and underslab hosts car streets and parkings.
In at least one smaller city I lived in the US, there weren't even sidewalks. The town was built for cars only. Even in bigger cities like NY where there are bike lanes at least in some places, there is some level of looking down on cyclists from drivers and cab drivers. It is going to take a massive mindset change to reduce dependence on cars.
I lived for a while in Berlin. Coming back to the U.S. the first thing I noticed were too many billboards and ugly parking lots. Each store has its own parking lot. Largely underused. No nice paths to traverse the bleak endless parking lot landscape. It’s ugly and wasteful. It’s hostile to pedestrians and discourages people from going outside to just wander. Even in relatively walkable communities like the one I live in have far fewer people out and about. An endless stream of cars going from one ugly parking lot to the another. I wish I could move to Europe permanently.
Berlin is the most car friendly city in Germany, both east and west (and the united city) spent a lot of money on car friendly streets - and still is.
It's funny that the German political party SPD which is responsible for most of this now wants to rebrand itself as bicycle friendly. But the largest sausage producer in Germany is now also the largesg vegan 'meat' producer. And soon pigs will fly.
To add to this: I wouldn't call it "most car friendly city in Germany", either - but driving there isn't "hell on earth" either: I felt it's neither better nor worse than e.g. Kaiserslautern or the 10k inhabitants "city" I went to school - the traffic is just on a different scale due to the city being huge (compared to most other German cities).
(Disclaimer: I'm a relaxed driver; my experience might not hold for those who enter the full-rage mode when starting the engine)
Berlin built a very expensive tunnel in the city center, still expands the inner Autobahn ring, has large east/west streets (Stalinallee and 17th June), parking was free in residential areas until very recently, tickets for parking in the wrong spots are a joke and cars parking on sidewalks or bicycle lanes are pracically never ticketed. Bicycle police which was introduced to ticket cars and bicycles practically in the same way never tickets car drivers [1]
Compare this with the pedestrian infrastructure (many bad sidewalks in the East) or bicycle with no or chaotic lanes [2]. Also when houses are build or roads are maintained, car driver concerns are always prioritized above cyclists and pedestrians [3].
Well, there are plenty of cars in Berlin, so unless they're all masochists they probably enjoy that more than the other options. That I personally can't see why doesn't change that.
Times change and mentalities with them. I think many European cities had a "cars everywhere" mentality during the post-WWII "renaissance" (maybe inspired by the USA) but then we realized that we hit a limit and started scaling things back starting sometime in the early 90's I'd say. Many projects from the 70's that were hailed as the future of transportation are now seen as huge warts we don't know how to replace now. Take the Boulevard Périphérique around Paris for instance: a nuisance for people living nearby, often gridlocked, super dangerous and atrociously ugly.
People realized that this approach wasn't sustainable and now more and more work is done to undo it, that's a good thing IMO. Ancient European cities simply were not built to accommodate cars, they don't fit.
> Take the Boulevard Périphérique around Paris for instance: a nuisance for people living nearby, often gridlocked, super dangerous and atrociously ugly. People realized that this approach wasn't sustainable and now more and more work is done to undo it, that's a good thing IMO.
Do not worry, we still go on building ring roads and bypasses around cities. Either where there were not yet any, or farther from the centre and the existing ones where there are already existing ones.
- But this time, they will be enough far away from the city, and they will make traffic jam disappear, we promise.
- Yeah, that's what you said 40 years ago about the first ones, and then urbanisation exploded around them and they quickly got swallowed by the city and its suburbs...
Bus yes, it is true that the fad of building expressways ending right inside city centres has stopped quite a long time ago.
Yes, but Berlin is car-friendly AND pedestrian-friendly. And getting close to bike-friendly as well. The thing is, Berlin has a huge area for a relatively modest amount of inhabitants.
This allows the city to "breath" a lot more and there is not so much competition for the space between cars, bikes and people.
Compare that to dense cities like London, Paris or Barcelona, and there is a lot more to fight for.
> It’s hostile to pedestrians and discourages people from going outside to just wander
This is a good point. The leisurely stroll is practically nonexistent in my city. I'm in a more rural setting, but there is still a well-defined city hub. It just feels awkward walking down the sidewalk when people are zooming by at 35mph+.
The result is sidewalk cut offs, which is inconvenient to me as a biker. There are frequently plants starting to take over because no one cares to use the walks.
Makes sense that people gradually prefer to spend their free time with Netflix, video games, or in a gym.
Where I grew up (Huntsville, Alabama), if you saw a pedestrian or cyclist around town you would assume they are homeless. After living in SF and Montreal and traveling in Europe, I can't see myself going back to a "car-first" city. Which sucks because that's pretty much all the US offers.
There was the author, Bill Bryson, moving back to the US after a few decades un the UK. He would take a stroll, and his neighbors would constantly offer a ride, thinking his car broke down or something.
New York, SF, Boston and San Diego are quite nice for walking IMO. But it's definitely more prevalent in Europe. My commute here in Copenhagen consists of a 10 minute bike ride and it makes me happy every day.
back in the UK I had a 40 minute bike ride to work, along the river and canal. Was perfect distance. Enough to be a decent workout, but not enough to dread how long it would take. Watching nature change through the year - mitigatory birds coming and go, the trees blossoming back to life and shutting down in the autumn / fall was beautiful.
Another major benefit was by the time I got home, the stress of the day was long gone. When I used to drive, the 45 minute journey of being mostly stuck in traffic meant I was more wound up when arrived home than when I left work
Oh please. Call spade a spade - you are talking about Manhattan, Dumbo or Williamsburg, Harlem and newly gentrified, serviced by subway places with white cafes and bars and restaurants loved by the lily white people working in tech or in finance. The thing is... it is a very small part of NYC. People in Queens take a car to get to a subway because it takes thirty to fourty minutes to get to it otherwise and after that it takes another hour and half to get to the place of work, but hey, who cares about Cinthia Lopez that cleans the desks on clowns working at Google that want to bike to work from their $6k/mo apartments.
You are not talking about Queens or Bronx or Bed-Stuy; you are not talking about Crown Heights or Inwood, or Washington Heights or Staten Island (it is also NYC even though people really like forgetting it).
Coincidentally, I recently came across an interesting quip while reading "the Fountainhead" recently:
[Peter Keating discussing whether or not he and his wife should build a country home away from the city]
"Will you like commuting?"
"No, I think it will be quite an awful nuisance. But you know, everybody that's anybody commutes nowadays. I always feel like a damn proletarian when I have to admit that I live in the city."
Even in Queens only a relatively small percentage of people own cars and even fewer use a car as part of their commute. Recent data indicate that less than 3% of low income workers commute by car. Your average outer borough janitorial worker is going to be taking a bus to the subway (though if citibike and some protected lanes were available I’m sure some would consider that option).
Washington Heights and Inwood are quite walkable and most people there commute by subway, without having to drive to it. The same goes for Crown Heights and Bed-Stuy.
I lived on a college campus for two years without a car, with on-campus amenities and a very walkable town right next to it. Now that I live elsewhere with a car, I can't see myself ever going to a pedestrian-only area. I just do not like having to walk everywhere. The closest on-campus food was a five minute or so walk away from my dorm room, which doesn't sound like a lot, but I didn't like having to walk even that distance. Classes could sometimes be a 10 minute walk apart. Town was only 10 minutes away but I never went there because I didn't want to do the walk. So, I largely didn't go around much. Not to mention how uncomfortable it could be outside during the coldest parts of the winter or hottest parts of summer. I'd settle for a freezer burned hot pocket instead of having to walk in the biting cold even with a good jacket and gloves.
Nowadays, with a car, I don't mind driving for 10 minutes somewhere - it's actually often enjoyable, whereas walking for ten minutes out of necessity feels like an annoyance and a burden. I don't mind walking when I want to, like on hikes, but I certainly don't miss it being a necessity. There is a fast food place about 1.5 miles from me, which many consider walking distance, but I always take the car there and use the drive-thru even though the way there is very walkable.
The place I'm at right now is a nice compromise of usability for pedestrians and motorists, but I personally plan to someday live in a more rural area and maybe have a small farm, and I'm not bothered at all by the fact that such a place is essentially car-only.
I felt similarly while at college.. until I got a bike. Urban bicycling has changed my life entirely. Did you ever try it? What used to be a 20 minute walk becomes a 5 minute glide. In SF and Montreal, google maps even acknowledges that most routes are fastest by bike.
Even here in TN where it's easy to drive without congestion, biking allows me to simultaneously save fuel, get blood pumping, and run errands. Feels practical
Just a side question: Did you also happen to found that you're more likely to going into a store when walk by it compare to drive by? (assuming you can park your car right at the spot and no charge)
I don't know the answer to this. In Berlin I had no car and walked everywhere near my flat. Just strolling around I would end up finding shops, cafes, whatnot. When I used public transportation I had a destination in mind. So it was more purposeful and I didn't normally casually find a store when I used public transportation.
Now that I'm in the U.S. except for one street I never casually go to a store. Everything is purposeful. In the U.S. I go to the store because I need to and it's not a chance encounter. I know where I'm going and what I want to get.
Though I hate the huge, ugly parking lots and what they represent. I tend to purchase stuff online and rarely go to a store these days. I do try to go for walks frequently but that is to get outside and I don't shop when I do this.
The fact that people walk around their neighborhood also has has an effect in local commerce. Most neighborhoods in European cities have bakeries, coffee shops, clothing stores, pharmacies, etc. Posher areas will have higher end ones, poorer areas will tend to have shittier ones, but in the end you always have your basic needs covered at no more than 10 minutes walk. I found that in the USA it was much more sparse and you'll normally find these things in the typical "strip malls" (which, the first time I heard the name, shocked me as I thought they were taking me to a strip tease show or something). Even bars in strip malls were shocking to me since they'd have to drive there, and drive back, sometimes drunk.
This is absolutely true for me. For me even cycling doesn't cut it. If the store is only moderately interesting, it doesn't hurt to spend a few seconds walking into its door. But it's already too much trouble locking my bike, removing my helmet and then walking in, let alone in a car.
The "hostile to pedestrians" is a feeling I get in many countries. When I'm walking somewhere I often have to walk at the side of the road where cars drive at least 50 km/hr and often honk at me or drive by dangerously close. It always makes me feel like I'm doing something illegal, or wrong.
This is the "Vote with your wallet" at the international civic level.
It may not have been very convenient or practical in the past but it seems to be becoming an increasingly accessible option, at least for first-world people.
Move to the places whose ideals align with yours, and help them develop those, if you can't convince your current home to adopt them.
It’s not as easy as it should be, yet, but if you can get a job somewhere they would help you relocate, or you can look for places that offer residence via investment.
The comment I left on how exactly to do this was marked off topic and detached (no idea why to be honest), but feel free to message me if you want some advice. There are a few ways to do it.
Also this whole idea is known as Exit, Voice, and Reason too.
In relation to the transportation-problem being discussed, autonomous vehicles are much better than normal privately owned cars because (in theory) they do not need any parking, at least not in premium inner city ground. They can just drive away and park somewhere where they aren't disturbing anyone, and come back when needed. Alternatively, if they are part of a car sharing service, the % of time the car is not being used and is therefore a wasted resource is going down. A normal car is only being used for what, 5-10% of the day? the rest of the time it is a completely wasted resource. If a car is not owned by an individual but by a group of consumers, a much smaller amount of cars is needed to satisfy transportation needs for the entire group.
Of course, even though they have these two advantages, they will still pollute(if not electric, and even so because they must transport more mass than say a scooter, and the electricity still needs to be generated at an external power plant) and create noise pollution and they also need to use traffic lanes and road-infrastructure.
100% wrong....autonomous vehicles will result in vastly more cars on urban roads, idling or driving around in circles waiting to do profitable work...it will shortly become an epidemic requiring congestion legislation
think about it....if you set up an autonomous ride sharing service, your path to profitability lies in having cars closer to prospective riders. so it makes total sense to put as many cars on the road as possible....it's not like there is a person driving who must be compensated or fed
There isn't really much political will to mitigate car dependency and curb sprawl, but if hypothetically there were, it would still take half a century of concerted effort to reshape our cities into something a little less dystopian, and in that meantime autonomous vehicles would be very effective for shuttling people between their homes and major transportation hubs, because busses on feeder routes just don't work very well out in the burbs.
This has been modeled and studied extensively by the car companies to understand market sizing in a fully autonomous world. Everything points to a rather dramatic reduction (integer factor) in the number of cars on the streets, which needless to say is a dire outlook for those businesses.
The Segway was banned from San Francisco sidewalks almost immediately upon release. You really think NIMBYs are going to sit quiet as the streets fill up with empty cars circling like sharks?
You have to account for reduced cost of driving. Not just in dollar cost, but the cost of stress and driving time. This could lead to increased demand for car trips.
People buy cars with their worst case transportation requirement in mind. By moving car ownership to an external fleet, people will be free to only use the extra transportation capacity as needed. Why are we spending all of this energy to accelerate giant metal boxes when most of the trips in cars are only to get a person from point A to point B? It's incredibly inefficient. Self-driving cars and electric bikes are going to completely change the transportation paradigm inside of dense cities.
I'm not very excited by autonomous cars, at least for short-trip personal transport, as I don't think they're solving the real problem which is to not need cars in the first place.
However it's far far easier for commercial companies to invest $billions in them than it is for governments to invest $billions in the infrastructure to make cars redundant. Look at the bitching and moaning that happens whenever a new train line is proposed.
I also think there's a cultural relativism (pardon the anecdotal neologism~) factor. 100 years ago, moving people with a loaded trunk 100miles an hour was heaven. It became an obvious axiom of modern life that "further faster" was always good. To an extent I even think high speed internet is related to that (you can be everywhere without even moving).
But I realized that going fast you forget what's near, and you forget what time can feel. Walking around you discover places you didn't know, you spend time in the forest, on a hill. You're not rushing to go from A to B. Maybe "time density" will have a come back.
It goes both ways, people do less things when they can't and their lifestyle / social structures goes accordingly. Say villages with things nearby/local.
Another point, I stopped looking for parking spots where I go. I park 1-2 miles before and walk the rest. It actually saves time.
A lot of the time these discussions seem to take place in a foreign language where you recognize the words but they just don't make sense.
Personally, it's hard for me to imagine not having a car, much less not having a driver's license, because so many things I do are utterly dependent on driving even if I both worked and lived in a city (neither of which is the case). I need a car to transport my boating equipment. I just booked a getaway that is utterly dependent on a rental car when I get there. I've had jobs that I would not have been able to do were I not able to drive to job sites, etc.
But you basically adapt to what you can do if you don't have a car. You do more stuff around the city and less out in the woods. Maybe you don't take vacations that require driving. Etc. For my part, there are places that require high-clearance 4WD and knowing how to use it. I just don't do those things.
For years people busted me to get my driver's license. I finally gave up and did it. I went from eww to meh to cool to meh again. It's really not in my blood, I feel bad every time I use it without having cargo in the trunk. Even some groceries .. I'd better have a backpack.
I don't really like driving and I actually do less of the drive for an hour at the end of the day for some evening activity than I used to.
But I do like being able to get away for weekends, go to national parks and wilderness areas on vacation, etc. (And I like living in at least the semi-country which wouldn't be possible without a car.)
I basically live in the country. I can walk in the woods from my front door but not to anywhere else.
However, knowing lots of urban folks, having to rent a car (when everyone else is also wanting to rent a car) for weekends can be a PITA, especially if said car requires special racks and the like for sport equipment.
Of course, when traveling by air for vacation, renting a car is perfectly normal which is what I do.
I don’t have a driver’s license. Almost none of my friends have one. I don’t understand the need to have one besides the occasional “I need to do something on holidays that requires a car” and even then I would say: rent one.
It's not "needed" to rent a car, it actually is needed. Buying/leasing a car versus combining traditional rentals, hourly rentals, and Uber/Lyft/taxis/etc. (plus other forms of transportation) is mostly an economic decision. But not having a license means that you don't have a lot of those options available to you. IOW, there's a big difference between not owning a car and not having the legal ability to drive a car.
I'm kinda curious, do rental rates change for people who own their own car versus people who just have a license? I mean, you definitely have to buy the insurance coverage then, but is that coverage itself more expensive because it's assumed you're not going to be quite as good a driver as someone who does it every day?
Edit: quick google search says some companies might refuse you, but you should be able to pay $15 or so extra per day to get full liability and comprehensive coverage if you have no insurance of your own already. And check your credit card because some of them have limited built-in coverage you can leverage.
Definitely agree with you, but doing the math in my case it’s just better not to spend the time and money getting a driver’s license. Unless you live in a city where you need to drive.
Until the 1950s most heavy things were moved by water.
I still can't believe how much I can pack into a canoe, probably as much as I can into a pick-up truck. Running down a lake or river, with a canoe, is even a smoother ride than a car on a regular road.
The first passenger trains were actually designed to move people from the city to the countryside. Once they achieved regular service people figured they can commute into the city, and started to live in the country.
I’m from Europe but I lived in Houston during my college years. I had to use my car to go almost anywhere. It was the opposite of freedom. No matter what whenever I left my apartment I had to get into my car, drive it and then park it somewhere. If it was rush hour I was at the mercy of traffic. At times (e.g. Sunday mornings) it was pleasant. But often it was suffocating.
Now I’m back in Europe and I feel free when I’m moving around a city. I might take public transportation one way and walk back to my apartment. I can get a call from my friend in the afternoon and go out for some whisky without having to drive back to my apartment and taking a cab.
I don’t know where I’ll live in the future but I’d be happy if I didn’t need to own a car.
Marketers for cigarettes [1], gogurt, lunchables, cell service, guns, etc. make similar claims. It doesn't make it true. Cars bring convenience, sure. But freedom? Not owning a car, I've never lost sleep worrying that someone was breaking into my car, I pay no car insurance, no gas, no car maintenance, never pay for toll roads, never get road rage, never sit in traffic. I feel significantly more free today than I ever did owning a car.
> One says to me, "I wonder that you do not lay up money; you love to travel; you might take the cars and go to Fitchburg today and see the country." But I am wiser than that. I have learned that the swiftest traveller is he that goes afoot. I say to my friend, Suppose we try who will get there first. The distance is thirty miles; the fare ninety cents. That is almost a day's wages. I remember when wages were sixty cents a day for laborers on this very road. Well, I start now on foot, and get there before night; I have travelled at that rate by the week together. You will in the meanwhile have earned your fare, and arrive there some time tomorrow, or possibly this evening, if you are lucky enough to get a job in season. Instead of going to Fitchburg, you will be working here the greater part of the day. And so, if the railroad reached round the world, I think that I should keep ahead of you.
> I feel significantly more free today than I ever did owning a car.
That works both ways though. I feel significantly more free today owning an EV hybrid car, then I did without a car.
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I have lost sleep worrying I would miss the only bus, or that it would be late, or that it would be full, or that it would never show, or that they could change the route without telling me, or that if the weather is bad I'll arrive soaked / freezing / dripping in sweat. Or if the other passengers are bad, I could arrived smelling bad or covered in bedbugs.
I have commuted by bus. It was a huge impact on personal freedom -- even if all conditions are ideal every trip still had to be delicately and precisely pre-planned, with exact arrival and departures, (that all stacked up, because even the shortest bus trips require one or more transfers) and they allowed travel only to specific places deemed worthy of it by other people. And of course, every trip required at least 2x to 3x longer trip times than driving.
Buses are like 70% of the stress of flying, with only 10% of the benefit.
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A car isn't limitless freedom, it comes with plenty of responsibilities and costs of it's own. But it certainly can be a form of freedom of mobility. One that currently isn't easily reproducible in any other way.
Constantly worrying about parking, insurance, traffic, how long you need to wait before you're sober enough to leave the pub does not seem like freedom to me.
Only being able to use a car to get around also does not seem like freedom.
Freedom is having good options - the option to use a car if that's what you have to, but also the option to bike, bus, or walk if you don't.
I've been to Houston recently - 'freedom' was about the last thing that I was feeling, as I traversed its freeway system.
In cities sure, but there’s plenty of us who do not want to live in cities. Heck, I don’t even want to live within eye sight of neighbors, stores, or really anything else except some pristine woods. That’s not possible without a car.
I think you’re underestimating the total acreage of “pristine” wilderness in the United States. Any realistic demand for a lifestyle like koolba‘s would find ample supply.
I’m not so sure. How much land would you need to be completely isolated, no other houses in sight? A square mile? More if you live high on a hill (which many people would like to do).
Wikipedia says the area of the USA is only 3,794,100 square miles, so there aren’t very many square-mile patches to hand out compared to the size of the population.
Pristine woods is probably a bit of a high bar but you can get plenty of separation from neighbors with a lot less land, especially if some of the land is shared conservation space such as near where I live. A square mile is 640 acres which is a lot of land. Between myself and a couple neighbors we're on about 75 acres much of which is orchard, a Christmas tree farm, and adjacent woodland. We can see each other but we're pretty separated.
Generally speaking, about 2-5 acres is enough. Most rural build to suit lots are in this range. A square mile is a ludicrous amount of land and not at all typical for rural living. If you have that much land, you're a farmer, have had it given to you, a significant portion is unuseable, there's a large pond/lake on the property, or you're just eccentric. Even out in the country, there's an amount that's practical and beyond that is just a waste. Once you get over 30 acres, it really starts to become silly.
If you were to distribute all people in the US uniformly, everybody would have about four soccer fields of space. If you distributed them over the forest area of the US everybody would have about one soccer field of space. In either case if you account for yards and access roads you wouldn't have what I'd call pristine woods anymore.
I feel like we should at least exclude people under 18. We can then, in addition, account for couples, and perhaps even prisoners/institutionalized, college kids, the military, and so on.
A square mile is way more than needed. it is 640 acres. My parents recently retired out to a small farm in Missouri with 60 acres. With even 1/5th of that you would not have to see or hear neighbors. And assuming everyone around you has an equal amount, that is quite a buffer.
To quote koolba: "That [lifestyle] is not possible without a car."
Living in a dense urban area, taking trains, walking, and biking. Goods delivered all in close vicinity. Large building with the opportunity to be more energy efficient than your single family home.
All that, I'm convinced makes the carbon footprint of the average urbanite much lower than someone who often drives miles for errands
I know this must feel contrary to the intuition to those who live very close to nature
Sure there are always going to be people like us who want an 'archaic' life style which require an archaic mode of transportation, but the world shouldn't be optimizing for these people, and I see nothing wrong with making these people pay extra for the externalizes their lifestyles impose.
But in the US, it is the (vast) minority who wants to live a pedestrian lifestyle.
If you look around the US you will see that even today, investment in suburbia far outpaces investment in "urbanism".
Trucks and SUVs are slowly cannibalizing sedan sales in the US. So not only do people like driving, the vehicles they tend to purchase are increasing in size.
If you are suggesting that society somehow prioritizes the 0.3% of young single males who want to live as pedestrians in urban cores...put it to a vote and watch what happens.
This entire thread is about optimizing cities for young single males. I can't wait until HN turns a median age of seventy...everyone will be in here screaming about a society that punishes the aged.
Society built around cars isn't too optimal for the elderly, quite the opposite.
I think the issue is that people don't know what they are missing until they get it. If your city is built around car, no proper public transport exists, why on earth wouldn't you want a car? For me the mind shift switched when I moved from a car city to a higher-density city (Toronto) for work reason. That's when I realized that I actually didn't want to use my car every day.
Well, that's the problem with the tyranny of the majority. The fact that people want unsustainable living doesn't mean unsustainable living should be encouraged. See also Hume's guillotine [1]
How exactly is it unsustainable? Are we running out of something? Are we running out of electricity?
The idea that cars are unsustainable is ridiculous. Just because they may not fit into sonmeone’s desire for increased government control of mobility doesn’t make them unsustainable.
Every generation seems to think their generation will be the last, unless we “do” something. They were likely debating horse carts in England a thousand years ago with equal fervor.
Yeah, money. In the US, new transportation projects are generally financed with federal help, while maintenance is left to the local government. This essentially creates a Ponzi scheme, where cities are going bankrupt due to depreciation on infrastructure, and not even realizing it. https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme/
In my opinion, roads are essentially underpriced. They're expensive to maintain and given out for free. (Similar arguments apply for parking, expressed humorously here: http://cityobservatory.org/parking-where-we-embrace-socialis...) This bothers me, as someone who doesn't own a car but lives with worse air quality and safety due to those who do.
Call me when all cars are electric and all that electricity – not to mention the batteries and everything else – is produced by sustainable means. Burying your head in the sand and figuring that someone is going to solve the problem at some point does not work. Never mind all the people who want to believe the problem doesn't exist in the first place, in order to maintain the belief that their lifestyle is fine.
Car centric life is not better for the elderly and the disabled, quite the opposite.
Elderly and disabled people are often can't safely drive due to either physical limitations (eyesight, reaction time, arthritis, seizures, limited movements, dizziness and fainting, etc., etc., etc.) or practical limitations (a car that accommodates a driver in a wheelchair with hand controls is a specialty item that costs $90,000+, I'm not making that number up, there was an article about it on HN a bit ago). Even if and individual has a ride it can be difficult to transport a motorized scooter in a standard sedan or compact car: going to the park with the grandkids is out without a folding wheelchair, which, depending on the individual's limitations, can make that person dependent on someone else to push them around.
Whereas electric scooters and wheelchairs can navigate easily and independently in pedestrian friendly zones when designed with accommodation in mind. And accommodation is now the law.
Also women and married people don't exactly, by definition, prefer driving over walking, dunno where you're getting that from. In fact, women drive less than men on average.
Trucks and SUVs are slowly cannibalizing sedan sales in the US. So not only do people like driving, the vehicles they tend to purchase are increasing in size.
I think this statement is misleading. The market has filled with SUVs that are adapted from compact and midsize sedans (e.g. Toyota RAV4, Highlander). The giant SUV market still exists, but I don't believe it's growing anything like it was in the 1990s and early 2000s. I probably see forty Rav4's for every Ford Expedition I see.
Google reports the population of the US at 325.7 million, and the population of New York City at 8.54 million. So, your "0.3%" is a tenth of the population of one urban core.
privately owned gasoline-guzzlers are an archaic solution to the transportation problem, and they are not effective in today's society
For people with a very limited lifestyle restricted to a few city blocks perhaps this is true. But the majority of people do not live that way and have use cases for cars that you have not considered in your analysis.
I don't have a car but my life is not restricted to a few city blocks. I either ride a bike or take public transport (or both!) to get where I want to go.
Yes, just wave a wand and instantly transform thousands of existing low-density cities and suburban neighborhoods into little European villages. I’m convinced, cars will be useless in short order.
I don't think anybody honestly suggests to get rid of cars in short order. As you noted changing cities is a multi-decade operation. So it's best to start sooner rather than later.
Is that urban planning or suburban planning? Are we talking about better planned (more walkable) inner cities, or are we talkingt about a long term shift in what people wants, such as people not wanting a private back yard?
Because outside of cities, as long as people have detatched homes on reasonably sized lots, getting around requires a car. There will simply not be the density needed for efficient public transportation.
While I might agree that the idea of large suburbs with detatched homes is probably not very sustainable, I don't see how they aren't here to stay (together with the cars required to live in them)
I don't see why it requires a car. A suburb neighborhood could have a bus stop somewhere, taking the people to and from a more connected (as in public transport) place/hub. Walking a few hundred meters must be doable?
Or maybe the hub (outside the city) could have parking, so you drive there but take public transport from there on?
> I don't see why it requires a car. A suburb neighborhood could have a bus stop somewhere, taking the people to and from a more connected (as in public transport) place/hub.
That's how it works. I walk 600m to my bus stop in my suburb neighborhood. So commuting from where I live is no problem. I don't need a car for that. But all the other transportation (driving kids to various sports practices, going to the forest, the lake, going to the school that isn't along a bus route with kids that can't walk very far etc) is harder. There will always be a gap between the transport I want/need and the transport that can be solved by public transport. So some kind of semi-private transport (e.g. shared autonomous cars) is probably required if the suburban lifestyle is going to be possible without cars.
Taxi prices would have to be substantially lower for taxi to be a viable alternative.
Perhaps for some of the use cases there could be better utilization (meaning cheaper) taxi, e.g. a taxi picking up my kids for school could also pick up a few more.
To everyone above wondering why people think self driving cars will help. This is why.
Eliminate the driver and taxis become way cheaper (probably cheaper than owning a car). That means people like alkonaut here will be far more interested in just not owning their own car that sits idle except when they are personally driving it. Which reduces the amount of space we are spending on car storage.
Why do you think they will be cheaper? Get ready for surge pricing being the norm. If you don’t have a vehicle of your own, you’ll have no choice but to pay. That’s why investors are willing to pour untold billions into this, they expect a massive payoff.
I'm sure that investors will extract a nice sum of money, but it's their ability to outcompete taxis on price that will allow them to do that. Or to put it another way they don't need to extract $30,000/car/year^1 and competition means they won't be able to.
^1 what ddg tells me the average US taxi driver salary is.
Indeed - in fact that is exactly what I do. Walk/train to work, drive to the hills or the coast at weekends. What I am responding to above is the assertion “I don’t need a car myself therefore no one should be allowed to have one”.
Interestingly, most people don't need to do anything to build a new building. So far, I've only seen immediate neighbors show up to complain about their "view", which isn't a sufficient reason to prevent hundreds of apartments. Otherwise, people who live out in the 'burbs have to do zero to support density for those of us who want it. So who are the other people who need to change?
> This may be shocking to people with an American upbringing, but cars (especially privately owned ones) just do not make sense going forward.
It's not limited to the US. Even in Europe (at least in France where I live), we have a lot of protests whenever there are measures against cars. A few days ago, there was a no-car day in Paris, you could see people on social medias extremely angry.
Cars are the ultimate tragedy of the commons. People want to use cars but at the same time don’t want the negative externalities caused by everyone else using cars too – congestion, noise, pollution, road surface erosion. Because that selfish individualistic viewpoint gets us nowhere, a coordinated approach is needed.
You have also a good public transportation system in New York. There are many big cities with much worse traffic than NYC but there are simply no alternatives to cars.
Do NYC subway stops all have functioning elevators yet?
If not, then it’s not a “good” system. It’s a good system for single adults carrying their Manhattan Portage bag. Not so good for kids in strollers, carrying groceries for a family, people in wheelchairs, elderly with difficulties on stairs. It’s not a “good” system at all.
I've never been in a NYC elevator that didn't smell like human waste. Even if all stations had elevators, the immense heat on the platforms seems dangerous for babies and seniors. I always bring a fan to keep the little one cool. Too bad we can't seem to elect someone that will fix our subways.
> I want to finish this comment with a call to engage in democracy. Make your opinion heard, loudly, go to the voting polls, participate in your local council, actually engage in politics
in the Bay Area, they tend to vote for more and better roads (but tend not to get them)
> cars (especially privately owned ones) just do not make sense going forward
Inside cities that is. One must remember that a lot of the people that move around in a city every day don't live in the city. And for many of them a car is a requirement anyway. For me the car is a sunk cost - I have it for the rare times I need it (I don't need it to go into the city), but buying/maintaining/insuring it is mostly a fixed cost, meaning that the marginal cost of each mile driven is very very small. I wouldn't mind if my city was made car free tomorrow - but I still wouldn't drive any less.
This is normal for people who work in London and live in the commuter belt around it. Most of these people have a car but walk to the station, or drive to the station, and then take a train into London. Once in London these people then take the tube, buses, bikes or walk to get around.
The car still gets used outside work to get groceries, pick up kids from schools and of course at the weekends.
Many suburbanites, however, have the entitled attitude that cities should accommodate their car trips to dense areas at the expense of people actually living there. Often their mindset is that cities are strictly where people go instead of where people live. In the US this mentality is exarcebated by the white flight and the decay of inner cities, but does also exist in Europe.
As one of these so called "white flight" people, I can't describe how much such statements frustrate me. I didn't move from the city because I'm a racist or don't want to be around people of color. I don't want to be around people period. Living in the city stresses me out. The constant noise, the issues with drunk people randomly knocking on my door at 2am, the couple of times I woke up to people fighting in the parking lot, the sirens, the random music festival 3 blocks over that I didn't know about, the fact I had 2 motorcycles stolen in 5 years, my kids not having a convenient place to play outside and more led to me leaving the city.
I didn't move because I'm white, I moved because I wanted peace and quiet. Most of the people I know who live around me moved away from the city for the same reason. Amazingly, non white people feel this way too...
There are good reasons to believe that highly urban environments are bad for your mental health (in ways that I think are worse than how bad they are for your physical health). Sometimes I feel like strong advocates of increasingly-dense construction feel that the denser your lifestyle, the more prosocial your behavior. Maybe these advocates are among the most extraverted people, and they have little experience with the stress it causes others.
And to what extent the hostility of urban environments is due to cars and car-centric planning hostile to human-scale activity? The whole point of new urbanism is creating livable, hospitable urban environments, and usually people-friendliness means car-unfriendliness.
Your generic suburbs have their own problems – massively artificial, claustrophobic rows and rows of almost identical houses, with zero character and nowhere to go without a car.
I agree wholeheartedly with you; like you I'm a proud suburbanite who can't tolerate cities, noise, and people, and to that I'll add one thing...
> Amazingly, non white people feel this way too...
On this note, almost the entire Asian population of the Dallas area lives in the suburbs, and those who can afford it are starting to move to the exurbs. Only people without the means to leave are staying in the city because the city sucks.
People make noise. People shouting in the streets, nearby festivals, etc. I don't like people, and there's no such thing as a dense city that doesn't suck for me.
traditional white flight (1970's style) mostly ended in the early 2000's when traffic got bad enough and baby boomers started to age out of power. It's an outdated term in most cities I think.
> Amazingly, non white people feel this way too...
Part of the reason the trend is called "white flight" is that for a long time and in many places non-white people were prevented by bank, municipal, real estate office and HOA policy from purchasing houses or even getting mortgages in the suburbs.
Calling it white flight isn't always an accusation of racism against the people who were fleeing, more against the people who openly prevented people of color from leaving as well.
That's not what "white flight" refers to. While the 1940s-1950s move to the suburbs consisted almost entirely of white people due to systematic racial discrimination preventing POC from moving, that is not "white flight".
The phrase "white flight" refers to a 1970s phenomenon where white people repeatedly moved from one suburb to another (often in circular patterns) in order to avoid POC after desegregation and civil rights legislation made suburbs accessible to POC for the first time. This was exacerbated by real estate agents engaging in a race-baiting, unscrupulous practice called "block busting".
No, the OP is actually correct. The origin of the term "white flight" was a phenomenon that that followed the "great migration" of people from the rural south during the war and immediate post war years in the US.[1][2]
>"The phrase "white flight" refers to a 1970s phenomenon ..."
No, the 1970s may have seen a recirculation of the original phrase but it is commonly understood that "white flight" refers to phenomenon around the war years.
I think you may be neglecting the extent to which you are describing the self-reenforcing downsides of "post white flight" urbanism. Given the age demographics of HN, it's more likely than not that the city life you (or any of us) experienced was well after white flight ran its course, with consequent effects on crime and noise in cities. If you imagine a world in which the people who wanted quiet never left, the picture of urbanism looks a bit different. If you read about American life in pre-war cities, or the late 19th century, urban areas were a place where all types of people lived, including families, the elderly, and people who seek calm and quiet.
I don't know how it is outside of Canada, but here in Toronto what drives me insane is that Cities are essentially completely beholden to the province and it makes everything worse.
Something simple like setting up a toll to use city streets to reduce congestion is completely off the table. We end up highly taxing corporate zoned housing to try to kinda indirectly tax the work place of the suburbanites that are making a mess of our city, but it's only a partial fix and it's distortionary.
Meanwhile, people that actually live in Toronto pay way more in income tax than people that live outside of it, and our taxes are indexed to inflation, unlike the petrol taxes. Add in the three way split of the left vote and the FPTP system and we end up with a vindictive moron in charge of the province fucking up representation by changing our riding map in the middle of a city election.
Cars have ruined so many things. The amount of times a car has honked at me for not putting my own life in danger because I need 5 seconds to get to a safer place to pull over with my bike is crazy. I'm not "taking a lane" I'm just keeping myself from getting doored.
Imagine if cars had never been invented and we could have stuck with trains for everything? Way more green space. Way healthier population. Way more 4 or 6 story buildings. Way more parks. Way less time wasted behind the wheel. Fewer deaths. No road rage.
And what would we have to give up?
3000 sqft suburban houses and their shitty pools that get used 5 times a year. Instead of watching TV at night alone at home people could walk over to their friends place or go out to a cute restaurant or well groomed park.
I left the city when we had kids, and the thing that drew me to suburbia is that kids can just roam around outside unattended, biking around, building tree houses etc.
Basically it's centered around 2 themes 1) As a parent I don't want my kids outdoor time to be limited to the times I can follow them, and 2) The idea that since my childhood was happy, I should give my kids the same experience.
I don't necessarily think suburbia is the culprit for traffic though. It probably is in North America where suburbs often means "not even public transport available to the city". They were planned for and built for cars! My suburb was not. People lived here before cars too.
I use public transport for most of my needs (including commuting) and drive very few miles per year - but I use my car many times for short distances, mostly things like picking up kids from daycare etc.
I understand the impulse to go to the suburbs now that we have cars everywhere, but it didn't need to be this way. Plenty of people walk to daycare or buy a bike with a cart to pick up their kids.
Also, speaking of daycare, that's another thing I really think is essentially stupid. Imagine two different situations.
First situation: Normal family sends 2 kids to daycare. About $50k here in Toronto. Cool. The daycare workers pay their taxes, the family pays theirs after claiming a $6k tax credit. At the end of the day the government gets around $30–40k more in income tax.
Second situation: Family A has two kids and so does Family B. They take turns watching each others kids, reducing each family's working hours by 25%. Assuming both parents earn the same base income in both families, but that only one of them wants to raise kids all day, the government loses about $11k in tax revenue per family, or $22k total.
The only thing that stops this practice from being widespread is that most employers want full-time workers.
Cart + bike is definitely an option, at least for 3/4 of the year.
In my case (Sweden) the daycare subsidy is much more significant, 2 kids is $3700 (Canadian) so the incentive to work full time is absolutely massive in comparison.
I use public transport for most of my needs (including commuting) and drive very few miles per year
As a city parent, every morning I walk with my kid to the daycare and have to cross traffic mostly from suburbanites whose kids are A-OK while they put my kid at risk on their way to work. Thank you for taking public transit!
"Instead of watching TV at night alone at home people could walk over to their friends place or go out to a cute restaurant or well groomed park."
No thank you. As much as I like my home town, I don't want to pay a fortune (that could buy a castle or another absurdly large property elsewhere) for a crappy house or condo in the densest part of Toronto and never enjoy personal peace and quiet again. Not everyone wants to live in miserable close quarters paying exorbitant rent for the freedom to walk to convenient overpriced services.
A home and a yard allows those who need it to live with a measure of dignity. It's pants and you're trying to argue that everyone would be fine with shorts.
Ironically I live in NYC right now which is even worse in most of those respects, but at least the pay/COL ratio is better. Public transportation is better too. In the end if I buy a home it isn't going to be in either city.
My point is that it is a lot easier to argue against cars when you make a good living and can afford the nicer parts of the city. When your choice is a crappy car commute or a nightmare commute via trains and public transit, and the places in your budget for you to live in don't have "cute restaurants" or "well groomed parks", things are not so cut and dry. Cars improve quality of life for many people and it's downright myopic and classist to say they ruin lives and cities.
You're confusing cause and effect. The effect of having cars everywhere is that we end up with cities where the downtown core is hyper dense and the extents are flat. What we want is the opposite. Six storey mid rises. And commutes via trains and mass transit are only nightmares when they're all trying to get to the same place and they're 3rd class citizens to cars and trucks.
To live within reasonable walking / public transport distance of my workplace in SF, I'd be paying about a thousand dollars a month more in rent. If you don't want me to commute in from the suburb, build more housing in the city and bring down market rent there.
Or encouraging people to take the train into SF. Of course, not everyone has a convenient train option because the patchwork of cities makes it incredibly difficult to drive a joint transit initiative.
Sure, that's exactly what urbanists are trying to do. But they're prevented by NIMBYs and car-centric regulations, like mandatory minimum parking spaces per inhabitant.
Many urbanites have the entitled attitude that cities should not accommodate people who are not rich enough to live within walkable distances of their job.
Many of the cities in the US that are dense enough to be reasonable walkable/bikable are also incredibly expensive in those areas.
I haven't met many urbanites who would deny that cheap and reliable public transport also is the backbone of any large urban area, precisely for this reason.
Locally (Portland, Oregon) the car2go rental rate is approximately equivalent at 1 hour versus my cost of owning a new car for a day. So if I could get by on less than an hour of car2go time per day it would be worthwhile.
My medium-sized city made its main retail street pedestrian-only in the 80s. It quickly died and nearly all stores went out of business. The road was re-opened to traffic and now the area is booming.
One size doesn't fit all. What is your personal preference may not be others' prefereces.
Making a blanket statement like cars "are not effective in today's society" is profoundly off base.
There is an "activation energy" to walkability. If you drop pedestrian-only development into a car-dependent area, nobody is going to visit.
Personal preference is largely a reflection of the status quo, and in the US the status quo heavily sculpted by federal policy that has favoured car-oriented development for 60+ years.
Interestingly enough, my medium-sized city made its main retail street pedestrian-only in the 80s and it is booming. There's no way they'd ever allow cars on it again. People love it. Our downtown is fairly dense and has three universities nearby. They built two parking garages next to it to give people a place to park and they seems to operate close to capacity most of the time. So it has these things going for it.
How do you do this with kids? Suppose you're taking three kids to an event or a climbing gym or whatever and it's further than walking distance. Can biking be made safe enough, or if it's further, is it reasonable for them to bring them on the metro? What if it's three kids ages 5 and under?
This is an honest question. I live in a city with public transport now and I much prefer it for myself, but when I think of how I was brought up it's hard to imagine that working without a car.
I have two kids (now 8 and 4 years old). I don't own a car. We never had any issue bringing them with us in public transport (bus, metro or train). We live in Barcelona.
I live in Poland and similar experiences have often surprised my friends in US. „How do you go to the gym, buy groceries and get to school/work without a car?”
Well there are six stores (from very small to a supermarket) within five minutes of walking from my apartment. There’s a gym 500 meters away and another 1 km away. Cinema is 10 minutes by metro. A huge park and a forest are also about 10 minutes away each. Density is convenient!
I took my kids around in a bike trailer for the first seven or so years of their life. I didn't do this exclusively---we had a car and often used it, but the majority of places I wanted to get to I could reach by bike and bike journeys were 100% to 5% depending on the location. Now they are old enough to ride their own bikes. This was in the fairly bike unfriendly city of Birmingham, UK. (Birmingham bought into car culture in 1960s and is slowly recovering.)
I don't own a car in Berlin and I either take public transport or a cargo bike. Any long-john style cargo bike can fit 2 kids at least, most three-wheeled models easily fit up to 4.
I find this question very bizarre, what's the hell is wrong with riding a bus with kids? Why is it "more difficult" or any different from just riding the metro yourself? I rode the bus regularly from birth until 7 or 8 when my parents bought a second car and still rode sporadically with family or baby sitters from 7 or 8 until I was a teenager. I started riding again by myself or with friends as a teenager to go places and also rode the bus to work until I bought a car at 17. Riding with children is exactly the same as riding by yourself, except you have children next to you. Children under five usually ride for free too, at least they did in my city.
As far as sticking kids on bikes, you got many options:
I don't think cars are going anywhere for a while, but I'm very interested to see all of the alternative fuel options that show up eventually (CNG, Hydrogen and Electric so far).
I currently drive a Volt...and it's wonderful. Chevy is really missing out on a lot of potential free press by not putting a bigger emphasis on it. I went from spending over $400 / month on gas to about $20 / month. You get the ability to cut such a huge amount of gas usage without the need for any additional infrastructure to support them like pure-electrics that are out there.
My guess is that when clean energy is used to produce fuel cells, a lot of the conversations around the negative impact of cars in general will dry up.
I've done that before, when the Yen:Dollar exchange rate was brutal, I think in 2012, Japanese premium fuel was pushing $7.50-$8/gallon. In 1990's sedans with turbocharged engines, city driving, and a heavy foot.....yeah you're getting <20mpg and spending $3-400 per month too.....totally worth it. Japanese sports sedans are awesome.
> This may be shocking to people with an American upbringing
This might be shocking to you, but I'd like to get to work in 15 minutes instead of in 45 minutes while suffering the bodily odeurs of a hundred co-travelers, overlaid with the subtle smell of my wagon having been used as a urinal for a decade, thank you very much.
> But privately owned gasoline-guzzlers are an archaic solution to the transportation problem, and they are not effective in today's society.
They pretty clearly weren't effective in the old cities, either, at least in the U.S., since we had to more or less raze them and move everybody to the suburbs to make cars work.
There ARE some great suggestions in the article, namely underground parking, roundabouts instead of stop lights, and banning street parking. Now, to YOUR points:
"Mass transit": Shared and claustrophobic space with other travelers.
"Biking lanes": Requires exposure to the elements. Depending on where you live this is already a non-starter if you don't want to arrive at your destination drenched in sweat.
"electro-scooters": I've been on one of these in Vietnam. Doesn't carry 2 adults well and has the same weather problems as the peddle-powered version.
"Elevated footpaths": I live in an urban conglomerate in Asia with ~1.1 million people. A typical day of running errands can easily rack up ~50+km of driving because of the distances between either people I know or businesses carrying niche products. There's no way in Hell I'm covering that ground on foot, in 34deg C weather with 90% humidity.
The city in the article is (1) miniscule at ~85,000 people and 15-20km across at its widest and (2) possesses a pretty mild climate. All of the transportation assets you propose as "solutions" are fine....if you live in California or a similar "Mediterranean climate". Most humans don't.
"But privately owned gasoline-guzzlers are an archaic solution to the transportation problem, and they are not effective in today's society."
Why so quick to jump to sweeping, society-altering prognostications based on conclusions which you yourself recognize as applicable to a small-scale and optimal use case?
Your suggested alternative transport means all severely restrict your freedom of movement compared to a private automobile as they come with range and/or comfort compromises. They would shrink the options of citizens for long-distance ground travel as well (say goodbye to road trips).
"Of course this is a very small town and these changes do not scale up as easily as one would like"
Yes, and given that 22% of humanity lives in urban areas of 1 million+ [1] and 40% of humanity in cities over 100,000 [2], it might be premature to call people to political action to hasten the death of the automobile when you don't have a solution that scales well.
Pontevedra mild climate? MediteWHAT? Please, take a map of Spain and comment again. Spain among Portugal is what you see when you cross over the Atlantic from the US.
Pontevedra is in Galicia, northern Spain. Here it rains like UK, and even worse. No Sun except a very few weeks a year.
Not all Spain is sunny, and not all the US is like California, Texas or Florida. You would freeze in Castille or Aragon in Winter. You would pray to see the sunlight in Asturias, Galicia or any region of the Bay of Biscay.
The last 10 years there are no longer rains, and the sun is here from late May to October, last year we have big wildfires in the last weekend of October, water restrictions from Sept due to the drought.
I remember when I was 10 years old rain a lot, nowadays no more than London ( I lived in London for a year).
That's due global warming. Also, the UK will have a shift too, soon :)
Recent years have been warmer in Bilbao, too. But... still gray skys and rainy days at least twice a week.
I know where Pontevedra is....because I looked at the Wiki article and read all the climate data before I posted. ^_^
And where I live on a tropical island in Asia has 25% more rainfall (2000mm annually), annual daily mean temp is 9deg Celsius higher (with 29deg C average highs June - September), and 25% fewer hours of sunshine.
So yeah, Pontevedra's climate may not technically be Mediterranean by Koppen classification but it sure as Hell is "mild" compared to where I live.
> It is a big cultural and infrastructure change over a longer timespan, but it is achievable.
Yes, but there's also a geographical difference. Countries in Europe are rather small, and a long history has restricted some land use. In many areas of the US land was almost a non-issue, so people settled more sparsely, and even cities became sprawls (e.g. Houston, LA).
Resources are optimized relative to their current values. Medieval construction was often labor intensive because it was the cheap part compared to materials. City housing got disrupted by a new technology, cars that made additional cheap real estate more available for use.
Central planning can theoretically avoid some growth pitfalls "skipping to the end" but in practice it has often had limited success beyond zoning promoting the obvious - high traffic areas are good for retail and often annoyance to residents. I am no expert but it seems predictive design performs best with planning.
Distances in a lot of the US (I live in Texas) are such that I don't see cars disappearing. What might happen is more short-term renting of cars.
But a lot of American cities were built around the automobile, so they would need a lot of changes to function in a post-automobile world. That makes such a transition much less likely. I think it would work better in older, East Coast and mid-western cities that largely predate the automobile.
I live in Chicago and I only NEED a car once or twice a year. I walk to work. I can walk to the blue or red line trains which will get me just about anywhere else I need. There are a few grocery stores on my walk home from work. There's great coffee shops and restaurants near me.
I uber home when it's late and I've been drinking but that's really the only time I'm in a car.
I know I've got a somewhat special situation as I chose my apartment based on it's walk ability. However I've lived in other parks of the city and I had similar a similar experience. It just took a little longer to get places sometimes.
I believe eventually cars will be a shared service. Automated cars that will arrive whenever I need one. That will be the day.
> Carse are effective in less dense regions, but in modern cities other solutions have to be found.
"In Scottish geography, a Carse (the modern form of older Scots kerse) is an area of fertile, low-lying (typically alluvial) land occupying certain Scottish river valleys,[1] such as that of the River Forth."
> This may be shocking to people with an American upbringing, but cars (especially privately owned ones) just do not make sense going forward.
You're really looking at this from a very narrow mindset. It isn't going into the city that a lot of Americans really want and need cars, it's heading out of the city.
This may be shocking to people with a European upbringing, but when you have a vast country with lots of open space and beautiful nature, it's super awesome and amazingly freeing to just go wherever you want to on a whim. Wake up Saturday morning - let's head up to that state park with the cool water falls and hike around for the day. 10 minutes later you're on the road and an hour or two later you're surrounded by nature. Real nature too, not some small 10 acre park somewhere.
There's real freedom in being able to go where you want, when you want. It's not just a "convenience" thing.
There are several European countries with a lower population density than the US, and places like Norway and Finland are _much_ more sparsely populated
That's not terribly significant. An average density for an entire nation says nothing about the spaces between population centers. There are national parks in the US that are bigger than entire European nations. Destinations that are more remote from American cities, than all of Europe.
There is no comparison to be made between european cities where you can walk for hours and hours and see a thousand things vs americans cities where you will mostly spend your time crossing large streets. If you really believe this you probably never have been to Europe.
I’ll re-iterate this here, because I got downvoted there. There is no comparison. Tell me one city in the US that can compare to London, Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, Rome, etc.
I mean, I live in Europe and I can do the same thing... or do you think Europeans don’t have national parks and never take car trips? OP was criticizing cars as a daily method of transportation inside cities.
"But privately owned gasoline-guzzlers are an archaic solution to the transportation problem, and they are not effective in today's society."
Don't assume that every place is like the place you know. Visit the US, particularly the Midwest, and you'll come to understand why privately owned gasoline-guzzlers are the only solution to this particular transportation problem. The major cities are too dispersed with countless small population centers between them for any kind other kind of transportation to provide a feasible solution. It's not a matter of "engaging in democracy."
It seems that the city in this article strikes a great balance - parking on the periphery for people who commute in, but the city center is car-free. The same could work for the US midwest. You drive to the edge of Chicago and then take an (improved) subway in, for example.
I agree with this wholeheartedly, but also know it would be an incredibly difficult uphill battle, culturally, to make such a thing work. Chicago residents not only love their cars but also seem to feel absolutely entitled to the idea that the roads are _only_ for cars.
I say this as a local who has gotten into countless arguments with friends and family on the subject. I probably believed it as well a few lifetimes ago before I moved to NYC for 13 years and have since been completely converted.
It would require an enormous investment in public transportation and real bike lanes - I mean protected bike lanes like they're doing in NYC, not two faded white arrows in the rightmost lane - and then a generational shift where we convince the younger generations that car-ownership is overrated, wasteful, and terrible for the local economy.
Or we could prosecute drivers who run over bicyclists (and motorcyclists) the way many states now do to protect road construction workers -- huge fines and jail time.
But Americans care too much about comfort and convenience to do that. SUVs rule here.
To use the Chicago example, The profiled city has a population of under 100,000. The Chicago-land area has nearly 10 million, if you look at just Chicago it's still nearly 3 million. The mayor mentions that you can walk from one end of the city to the other in under half an hour. In Chicago you could make a multi-day hike out of it.
In my head, Chicago seems like it could work if you subdivided it into smaller regions of no-car zones, and marked out specific high-volume streets to connect them on a grid with designated parking per-zone.
To use an example from a German city: Because going from the park+ride spaces at the edge of the city to the center takes > 45min by car, but 4min with the train. And parking at the edge of the city is free, but downtown you pay 8,50€/h.
Because parking is presumably cheaper on the periphery and the subway may actually be faster than driving all the way in. When I worked in Boston, that's how I sometimes did it. (Other times I took the commuter rail but that was more or less useless if I was doing anything in the evening.)
It actually makes a ton of sense. Imagine a scenario where parking downtown were actually impossible.
You would then want to drive as far as you can, park, and take the alternative in.
It's made for people that don't live walking distance from a train/bus line, but also don't want to deal with the traffic/cost/overall hassle of going by car end-to-end.
There are 80 Park‑n‑Rides throughout the my metro area.
The design and density of cities will change even in the Midwest. Inter-city transport can and will change.
From Wikipedia: "There was a dense system of inter-city railways in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but after the decline of passenger railroad in North America in the 1960s, the inter-city lines decreased greatly and today the system is far less dense."
There is a huge difference between cities that have done most of their growth after 1940, when cars have been common, and cities that developed their physical structures before the car. The car-oriented physical structure has to be retrofitted for walking -- streets narrowed or replaced with housing, shopping, and offices.
A lot of the traditional American lifestyle doesn't make much sense anymore. A large house with a lawn is incredibly wasteful, in terms of heating, water consumption and emissions. I can't even imagine the amount of water wasted to grow a rectangle of grass, regardless of temperature, aridity and general climate. Like it or not, the future for efficient living is cities.
I like the idea of large cities improving their public transportation systems and having parking lots on the outskirts but it doesn't make financial sense in the smaller size cities. There are lots of people like me that live in a small down and commute into a city (60k people). I'd love better public transportation but it only makes financial sense in the "downtown" areas.
"But privately owned gasoline-guzzlers are an archaic solution to the transportation problem, and they are not effective in today's society."
I live in a remote mountain town in the North Cascades mountains and am approximately 80 miles from the closest stoplight. Obviously we rely on cars and trucks. It is wonderful place, and an additional benefit is that sanctimonious city dwellers who make comments like this are nowhere to be found.
Why are you so hostile? It is eminently clear in OP's comment that we are talking about transportation in cities. Even if it wasn't, you could give OP the benefit of the doubt.
>But privately owned gasoline-guzzlers are an archaic solution to the transportation problem
Private vehicle ownership isn’t about solving society’s transportation issue. As far as consumers are concerned, a car is one of the most significant and life changing purchases they’ll ever make. It gives them far more than just a solution to a ‘transport problem’, it provides the freedom to pretty much go anywhere and do anything at any time. If your idea is ‘convince people they don’t actually want cars’, then your idea is going to fail.
> cars (especially privately owned ones) just do not make sense going forward.
Sure they do, just not in all situations. I'm all for walkable city centers, downtowns, parks and such, but I also very much love to drive my car. I'm happy to vote for more pedestrian/public-transport friendly metropolitan areas (and do), as long as there's also non-metro areas for me to live on my privately owned land and drive my privately owned car as I please.
It only occupies a small ephemeral spot in spacetime. Try lying in a single space for hours or days on end in a city and see how far your clever countering gets you. I'm sure there's many a vagrant who would rebut your thesis.
I wouldn't think of my body as private property. Leaving that aside, the answer to your question is that everybody has a body, so we're not talking about the same kind of privilege that car owners have. Nor do bodies occupy the same amount of space. Last but not least, they don't easily kill other people as they cross their way.
But unless you are totally naked, your body (not your private property) is covered by your private property and/or carries it.
It is clear that a car occupies a lot more space than your clothes and carry-on belongings, but as said earlier that is only quantitative and not qualitative.
And cars don't kill people (yet), their drivers may.
I feel like we should be charitable on the actual wording of the statement as the speaker is being quoted in their non native language.
I read this as more that we can't just default to subsidising private cars in a public space. Roads, parking and other infrastructure that de facto subsidize and encourage private car usage but which often are considered "free".
The problem isn't the wording, it's the hare-brained idea that public and private shouldn't mix and cooperate. Flip the statement, make it about education - "How can it be that private benefit – the education – is financed by the public money?" - to clearly see the implications.
We finance the baseline of education/transportation infrastructure from public funds because we believe that improves productivity, and performance of civic duties in a democracy across the board. Purely privately owned education/transportation is politically contentious for various reasons, right? Enclosure of the commons, economic inequality, limited avenues for upward mobility and all that, right?
Lastly, a pedestrian on city-founded sidewalks is "a private citizen occupying public space" just as well. There's no moral qualitative difference between an individual pedestrian, an individual on a bicycle, an individual in a car [1], or a group of individuals in a tram or bus. We can argue about occupancy and all that, but that's just quantitative difference of maybe an order of magnitude at worst. The use of public space should should primarily support the main activities of the general public.
[1] pollution from ICEs aside, but we're on track to fix that permanently.
Then as you say don’t simply ban "private property occupying public space" but require some degree of efficiency when doing so – people can occupy public space, but like with all resources, they must be considerate and efficient when doing so and not let it go to waste.
A simple requirement would be a strict upper limit of 1m²/passenger at all times for vehicles and pedestrians. Trivial to fulfil for considerate means of transportation and quite impossible if you want to lug two tonnes of steel around with you.
>A simple requirement would be a strict upper limit of 1m²/passenger
I beg to differ - this doesn't gracefully handles special cases. Both my disabled neighbor or my friend taken by ambulance to the hospital (made up examples) would fare far worse than in the current system.
We already have have a better system to divide that among people - those who care highly about particular issue can reserve more space or whatever with small green tokens.
>if you want to lug two tonnes of steel around with you
An easy snark, but this two tonnes[1] reliably brings home a week worth of groceries, drives me 2hrs to meet family, and occasionally delivers tools and materials to various points. All that on the cheap, and with easily calculable costs.
Prohibiting it by governmental fiat would surely give us various nice well understood savings, but would cause a lot of loss, both direct and via lost opportunities. I'd be much more reliant on service providers - typically large companies - that would provide the service at the time, cost and quality level I would have little to no control over.
Thanks, but no thanks; I don't want to be any more dependent on goodwill of businesses than I already am.
reliably brings home a week worth of groceries, drives me 2hrs to meet family, and occasionally delivers tools and materials to various points. All that on the cheap, and with easily calculable costs
All the talk of banning cars seems to come from people so privileged that other people invisibly provide all the services of the road network to them, delivering their stuff and so on. I mean if a person’s entire life is based on Netflix and Amazon and Uber Eats in an apartment full of stuff that just magically appeared sure they don’t need a car, and no one is forcing them to buy one. But they are so vocal that everyone who hasn’t chosen that lifestyle should be penalised, and they can’t even clearly articulate the alternatives. An hour outside London “public transport” is one bus in the morning and another in the afternoon. But yeah, let’s all get self-driving trams or something on every B-road...
Funny you should say that. Next step is people self-segregating into pedestrian cities and car cities or city districts; of high-paid knowledge-based jobs living in tranquil peace vs. of people in low-paid menial jobs, living in ever worsening conditions.
Right now I enjoy the perks of having everything near by in the city center, but if my city went pedestrian-first, I would move to the countryside and simply drive to customers when the need occasionally be. But that's feasible only because after all those years, only since I'm in senior technical position in knowledge based sector, and could easily work remotely, and also could work 20hrs-week and earn well enough.
But that's not possible for everybody right now.
No such luck for young people who are just launching their careers, or who are for whatever reason having local responsibilities like, for example, a sick parent.
Doubly no such luck for people in service economy "gigs", working for peanuts and by necessity having to perform labor at their workplaces.
You can be in favor for banning personal use vehicles without banning delivery and ambulances. And as you'll note the city in the article only banned cars in the city center, so talking about an hour outside of London is not relevant. If London banned cars in the city center you could drive to the closest rail station at the border of the exclusion zone and take public transport from there.
Roads, parking and other infrastructure that de facto subsidize and encourage private car usage but which often are considered "free".
Taxes on fuel raise £50Bn/year for the exchequer, which is double the amount spent by the government on all transportation of all kinds. No one considers it to be “free”, and in fact drivers subsidise everything else.
Given that the entire NHS budget is £125Bn I'm guessing... not much?
How many lives has the road system saved, by the way? What do ambulances drive on? Or even ordinary drivers taking sick or injured relatives to the hospital themselves?
Considering Paris is roughly 10 km across North-South, that's about 12 min/km at an average human walking speed.
So, this city is about 2 km across, which is very small, a village, considering smaller cities are more sparsely populated than an European metropolis.
For comparison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legionowo is the most densely populated city in Poland, it has about 50 000 people, and is about 3x5 km of low buildings. And still about 10% of the city is a forest :)
Cars waste so much space that people are used to bloated cities.
1/25th the size of Paris is not what I would call a "village". Paris is a huge metropolis. It is a small-medium sized city.
Additionally, Paris is not exactly a demonstration of how larger cities need cars considering that about 70% of its inhabitants commute without using a car at all.
There's actually only one street with no cars (Kaufinger Str.) and lots of traffic around on the Altstadtring and such. It's far from a city without cars, to the contrary. Also you'd need to be able to afford the rent.
Working in the center of Berlin, I wish Berlin would do the same. There is a hospital near, and a constant load noise level from ambulances. Without cars, those could be much much quieter, but traffic increased, cars got more soundproof and people hear loud music, so ambulances became loader all the time. Noise kills people.
First thing I noticed when moved to SF Bay Area from Europe was “God, Los Gatos would be so beautiful if the main street was a pedestrian area.” Then went actively searching for one and found a little stretch at Santana Row in San Jose, if you can call 30 meters of blocked off street pedestrian area.
But even dense populated cities like SF dont have a pedestrian zone. It is one of the rare things I miss quality of life wise.
In my city, Linz in Austria, only a small part is pedestrian, and even then the main-line of the 4 (actually 2+2) tram lines is cutting right through it. I wish they'd extend the pedestrian area and add that second tram line overground rather than underground as the current political fantasies look like.
Anyways, from that article, if you have a change in a city's government, change is a lot more likely to happen. If only there were some time-limitations on mayor posts and the council.
Population: 82.5k - obviously cars have no business driving through such a place.
I spend a good chunk of the year in Bologna, Italy. The city centre there is a roughly ~4km^2 Zona Traffico Limitato - an area in which only certain vehicles are allowed during certain hours. Pretty much every city in Italy has such a zone and 4km^2 to me seems to be the ideal size for it.
That being said I know a few people who live in the centre and judging by their experiences, I wouldn't want to move there. It's so densely packed that noise bounces off the walls effectively amplifying itself. Also there are no residential waste bins so if you miss trash day during the summer your organic waste turns into an unholy bag of stink.
Walkable cities are a nice concept, but one has to watch out for one perverse incentive that is created along the way: pack everything as densely as possible.
I thing "banning" cars in a Town/City work well for smaller cities, through you still might want to have some time frame in which e.g. trucks can bring new goods to super markets, fire fighter etc.
For larger cities I think it would still be possible to have many "no-car" isles, paired with good public
transportation available for anyone at "any" place (which can be done today by e.g. using this small and _slow_ self-driving mini buses to connect the home/side streets with the underground trains, regular trains and potentially normal sized buses,
you just need to deploy enough of them with a good
rout planing algorithm and a smartphone app, through it might be slightly expensive).
Forcing all deliveries to happen in the early morning sounds like a massive pain in the butt.
For example: Forcing a lunch/dinner restaurant to have people there early to deal with inventory or delivering inventory to a diner during breakfast rush are both far from ideal.
Any industry that routinely has to get materials (e.g. skilled trades) delivered will be inconvenienced by not being able to take delivery during mid-morning or after lunch, this can unnecessarily stretch out jobs (and cost more $$).
I guess if the only industries in your city are white collar or tourism it's fine.
Better to just not allow noncommercial vehicles during certain times.
>Forcing all deliveries to happen in the early morning sounds like a massive pain in the butt.
>For example: Forcing a lunch/dinner restaurant to have people there early to deal with inventory or delivering inventory to a diner during breakfast rush are both far from idea
TBH,restaurants the most happier with this changes. More people in the streets means more customers. If the van can get into the door, there is an entry zones, where delivery can be done with less than 5 min walk.
Disclaimer, my father is a deliveryman for restaurants.
> Any industry that routinely has to get materials (e.g. skilled trades) delivered will be inconvenienced by not being able to take delivery during mid-morning or after lunch, this can unnecessarily stretch out jobs (and cost more $$).
Nope, those industries are not in the pedestrian zone, in Galicia, there is a lot of industrial areas for that matter.
For white-collar, these entry areas, allow delivers to walk less than 5 min, so it's ok.
Is not walk/no-walk, the city did awesome to allow entry zones and make the walking culture for all of us.
>TBH,restaurants the most happier with this changes. More people in the streets means more customers. If the van can get into the door, there is an entry zones, where delivery can be done with less than 5 min walk.
I should have said industrial foodservice. Are there no schools, hotels, etc. in the city center? Do catering services not deliver lunches to the city center?
>Nope, those industries are not in the pedestrian zone, in Galicia, there is a lot of industrial areas for that matter.
Um, yes, you still have skilled trades. These are the people installing new light fixtures in office buildings and replacing the blower motor for a building's HVAC. Not being able to do diagnostic work and then send someone around later in the day to actually perform repairs is like getting shot in the foot to any business that does repair work.
I support not allowing commuter traffic in city centers but not allowing commercial vehicle traffic seems like needlessly cutting the clock cycle of every part of the economy that deals with physical goods by a factor two or three.
What about people who live inside city limits but work elsewhere? For example, I currently reside in Washington, DC but work about 30 min away. There is no public transportation to my work. At night, I park in a garage but there are others who park on the street and commute out of the city every morning.
This would solve itself if cars were banned. Either you would have to find a more practical place to live, the city add public transportation to the work, you find a new place to work, the work moving offices etc.
It's only a problem because you decide things has to be exactly like they are. But with other constraints the society would have landed on an other configuration.
Every solution in your second sentence either costs businesses money or costs your workforce money.
What is your solution for your economy when BOTH decide to relocate to an administrative region that DOESN'T ban cars?
I've considered other places to live in Asia, namely Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan. I found that used Japanese sports cars (I own several) were all prohibitively expensive to import/register in each. The crazy-low "total cost of ownership" for automobiles is one of several reasons that Japan is my primary base of operations/residence.
Your're right, I am looking at it through a self-centered perspective. But I think a lot of people would do the same. If you banned cars, considering how long it takes for decent public transportation to roll out in the US, you would be incentivizing people to live elsewhere. My job and work location are fixed so the only option would be to move out of the city or suffer through a miserable commute. I guess people like me would suffer and those that spend all or most of their time inside city limits would benefit.
If this actually happened, buses would be common. And companies would move to a location on a bus line. If not and you needed a car, here is what you would do. Metro, bike, or bus to the city limit. Then pick up your Zip Car or pick up your private car in a garage.
It's also possible to design cities for both people and cars. The trick is to separate them.
For example a shopping street where no cars are allowed could have parking lots at the back of the shops. So trucks can supply the shops and customers can pickup large goods with their car.
Another method is what we call in Dutch a 'Cauliflower-neighbourhood'. The closer a road comes to the place were people live, the smaller they become. And speed limits will go down as well. The limits most of the time go from 50km/h to 30km/h to 15 or even 5km/h.
1) There are a few types:
- Working in the city center --> Walking mainly.
- Working outside of the city --> Cars/bus
The city that has banned the cars is the city centre, but is a round island, so in 10-25 min walk, there are parking slots, where you can drive from.
2) Shopping trolley, instead of buying a lot one day, you ended that each day you pick up a few things. (And this is great, 15 min day walking)
3) All the emergency services can go to the city centre, so cars are banned, but if you have an event or emergency cars can get into, here is the common sense rule.
And there is a benefit here, kids are in the street, and due a lot of kids in the street, that moves the street from unsafe, to full of #know people, that make things super safe.
I recently saw a delivery service for that kind of stuff (kind of "Bier Taxi") using small electric vehicles in our 180k city.
Scaling this to a "local grocery mail order service" could be a nice business model for a car-free city: Supporting local businesses AND avoiding having to carry 5 crates of beverages for the next party.
I think Rewe (a supermarket chain) is doing something like this in (parts of) Germany; but I believe they use gas-driven cars.
Hey, I'm taking my family next year on a 10 day trip through Galicia, and was considering spending some time around Combarro, Pontevedra, etc. Can I get your thoughts and opinions on places to stay, things to do in that area? siegel dot darren at gmail
I walk to the grocery store most days. It seems to kill several birds with one stone:
- unwind after work
- get exercise
- get outside
- time to think
You would think it would be a lot more popular but it's not. It seems more like there must be something wrong with you if you walk on a daily basis lol. ... societal norms I guess.
70 year old people are exactly those who already walk to the next shop multiple times a week. You should keep in mind that this article is from Europe. Its walking short distances and even shorter shopping lists.
I am not sure you should be driving a car at seventy if you're not able to ride a bike anymore despite a livetime of experience. (and you can get bikes for various disabilities, yes)
Elderly people are often helped the most this type of change. People who can no longer drive can still get around by other means. My grandfather had a tricycle that he rode for many years after he became incapable of driving a car.
My mother is seventy one and rides a cargo tricycle to the supermarket. She can't drive so in an American city she would have to order her groceries, I guess.
Most cities in the Netherlands have a car-free inner city or shopping streets, no need to idolize this particular one. Going from a congested city to a car-free one is a good move though.
Interestingly, while Amsterdam's historic inner city is fully open to cars, you don't really see much of them - in part because it's just not practical, in part because parking is very expensive.
I love pedestrian districts in cities. Copenhagen comes to mind. However, pedestrian district plans need to be considered carefully, else they backfire.
I don't know the history of the mall in Raleigh but I suspect at least part of the issue was that, at the time, downtown Raleigh probably wasn't a place a lot of people wanted to walk around. As you say, there are a lot more people (and companies) downtown today and more upscale restaurants, bars, etc. Though, even today, like a lot of smaller cities that have had something of a renaissance, most of the places the average upscale professional would want to walk to are in a fairly small area.
I wasn't alive in 1977, but in the 90s, the perception was that downtown was busy during the day, but a ghost town after 5:00 PM. I don't believe that particular area was particularly unsafe or unwelcoming, it's just that the only reason people were there was daytime business.
The area was closed to vehicular traffic in 1977. The article about possibly replacing the pedestrian mall is 1997. Construction began in 2005. The area reopened to vehicular and pedestrian traffic in mid 2006. The article about the results and other cities considering the same is 2007.
All of which is in TFA[1] the person you're replying to linked
My city did this with bike lanes. Most of the housing isn't within easily walk able distance from downtown and the city is where a lot of people from surrounding towns go to buy things. All the downtown businesses that weathered the recession got rewarded with all their customers decided to spend their money at the businesses a mile away that had readily available parking. Grade A city planning right there. /s
Church st in Burlington VT partially closed to cars starting in 1980 (based on Stroget in Copenhagen) and ongoing into 2005 with more and more blocks carved out for pedestrians only. It has been very successful.
Why did it work, when Raleigh failed? What needs to be "considered carefully", exactly?
(The large college nearby definitely helps in VT's case. But what else?)
I don't know anything about the Raleigh project but some other thoughts on maybe why Church St works:
- Burlington is the biggest city in VT, and being on Lake Champlain and relatively close to the best ski areas in the state, it attracts a lot of tourists year round
- A ton of local businesses downtown, urban/residential neighborhoods are also very close
- A fair amount of parking (multiple parking garages, nearby on-street parking and parking lots)
- There's City Hall Park, and the town promotes the 'culture', e.g. allowing street vendors and performers, and with the recentish ban on smoking, it's pushed most of the bums into the alleys/side streets
I'd attribute a large portion of church street's success to zoning policies, the city has kept that street focused on small business to avoid that common american experience of walking by a walmart for twenty minutes... the north end of the street was more sparse in terms of doorways and always was more empty, but the center and southern end were vibrant.
So I think the key to trying to do this is to encourage small business to minimize the feet/door so that there is a reasonable variety of services available.
Just speculating, but looking at the photos from Fayetteville, it was totally car-scale. Sure, it was pedestrian-only, but just look at the pictures of the locale. Huge buildings, long distances, wide street.
This is not the best example but the first to pop to mind- compare to Pearl Street Mall, in Boulder, which seems to be doing well:
Among the differences are that the University of Colorado is right there and Boulder has been a fairly affluent town for a long time (even before the relatively recent immigration of Google, etc.)
Also, let's not overstate the differences. The actual pedestrian mall on Pearl is just a few blocks long. And Fayetteville in Raleigh these days, while not car-free, is part of a very walkable area of downtown Raleigh with lots of restaurants, a few hotels, some shops, new condo construction, some major businesses, the convention center, government offices, etc.
You could also make the argument that opening city centers to cars should be considered carefully, and that is also true. It just happens to be the current default almost everywhere.
They later reopened it, but put in roads that let cars through, but very slowly. Seems to be a good compromise.
Closing a road entirely is probably something you should do once you're at such a level of pedestrian traffic that the car lanes are impeding pedestrians, which isn't terribly common in US cities. However, making areas where people don't drive fast is absolutely a win.
There’s something to be said for joint car/pedestrian spaces as a permanent situation. Pike St outside of Pike Place market and Hanover St in the North End of Boston come to mind. Both are nominally streets, and cars attempt to drive them, but the speeds are slow enough, and there are enough pedestrians that both are on relatively equal footing. Cars are cautious of the pedestrians, and pedestrians weave around the cars, everyone has their choice of mode of transport.
Same thing happened in Kalamazoo, MI back about 1978.
The city center closed part of the main street to cars when a four story enclosed mall of boutique stores was built. Within five years most of the mall and nearby stores were dying.
This was partly due to the growth of a pair of large enclosed malls 5 miles away which sucked business elsewhere. But I think most of the problem was that shoppers don't wants to walk outdoors in the long Michigan Winter. They needed to somehow enclose the pedestrian piazza to minimize peoples' exposure to the elements, but that wasn't in the budget.
Heh, enclose the pedestrian piazza to minimize exposure to the weather, thereby creating what we usually call a 'shopping mall.' Ah the irony that would be.
Downtown pedestrian malls were tried in many US cities and mostly failed. They were an attempt to make downtown retail competitive with suburban mall retail, by the former emulating the latter, after the former was already failing. They only worked when other things were in place that made lots of people walking downtown utilitarian, like adjacent universities, tourist attractions, and dense connected residential. Few people wished to drive and park near downtown for a quasi-mall shopping experience, apparently. Lots has been written about this, but one overview: https://nacto.org/docs/usdg/revisiting_pedestrian_malls_scmi...
As a counter example, Vienna largely converted its second major shopping street, Mariahilfer Straße, to a mostly pedestrian + bike zone, with parts of it also shared space with cars, though they do not have priority over pedestrians. Gets very crowded during core shopping hours, so much that biking there is rather difficult.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/96/Wien_07_...
First one was Kärntner Straße / Graben, which is pedestrians only.
Actually you need people in the city to not depend on cars. Public transport, cycle lanes and a reason to stay in the city centre like good restaurants, cafes, some festivals. Just closing a street to cars might just make everyone drive around and miss it. Also don‘t let big shopping malls be build at the outside of the city with huge parking areas. Create parks instead.
Contrary to that anecdote, Jersey City (across the Hudson river from Manhattan), created a no-car zone near one of its busier subway stops and what was once a dead-zone after 8pm is now an extremely vibrant place filled with bars, restaurants and shops.
Proximity to mass transit and having density that already discourages driving helps.
It has nothing to do with car free streets and everything to do with the Jersey City being on the other side from Manhattan with rents being 50% or lower than the rents in Manhattan and Jersey city being accessible by PATH.
I don't think you understand. The mayor closed off a stretch of Newark Avenue, which leads right into the Grove St Path Station in late 2014. Prior to this, Newark Avenue was a strip of fairly grimy stores, a few restaurants, and some new promising places like Word Bookstore had been moving in since 2010 or so.
Still, this was a pretty dead place at night. In 2008, I would go to one of the two bars there and it would be a literal ghost town, with stores boarded up with metal gates and such- it looked almost post-apocalyptic. It was a little better from 2011-2014, but still it was a quiet area at night.
After the pedestrian plaza was put in, the amount of foot traffic increased ten fold, particularly during the day when it was a heavily traffic-ed street. This brought in a new wave of bars and restaurants to the area, and its now a destination on its own, filled with people nearly 24/7. In fact it has gotten so popular and become such a destination, the city is now trying to introduce ordinances to reduce noise at night.
The change was instantaneous after the pedestrian plaza was put in place.
People seem to forget these days how much Jersey City was shit on up until 2011 or so. It was "jersey" and it was absolutely not a definite that it would gentrify.
> People seem to forget these days how much Jersey City was shit on up until 2011 or so. It was "jersey" and it was absolutely not a definite that it would gentrify.
Bed-Stuy
Bushwick
Gowanus
East New York
Bronx
Inwood
>pedestrianised all 300,000 sq m of the medieval centre
It's a lot less impressive when you realize that they just banned cars from the area that was optimized for foot traffic anyway. Good on them for not trying to go to far and force people to walk/bike in areas designed for cars.
>"while people claim it as a right, in fact what they want are privileges."
Tangent: This is probably the most European quote ever. Roman senators, medieval lords, members of parliament, Napoleon, the Kaiser, etc, etc. could have all said this.
>And the same shopkeepers who complain are the ones who have survived in spite of the crisis
Surviving in spite of the crisis does not make the crisis fun or necessary. It took a lot of boarded up shops before my city took away the bike lanes and put back the on-street parking (no, the failed businesses did not coincide with the recession if anyone was wondering). You gotta do what works even if it's not what fits your political objectives. If an area of the city was designed for pedestrians that's probably what will work best there. If an area of the city was designed for cars then that's probably what will work best there. It's a disservice to taxpayers to use their money to jam a square peg in a round hole or vise-versa.
>The works were all financed locally and received no aid from regional or central government.
>"while people claim it as a right, in fact what they want are privileges."
There's nothing European about it, despite the fantasy of Europe being comfortable with dictatorships. Driving a car is also a privilege in the US - try driving one without your state-sanctioned license to do so and you will discover that.
By the way, Members of Parliament are democratically elected so I am not sure how they fit in with the rest of the motley crew.
One of the most interesting experiences in my life was visiting Tel Aviv on Yom Kippur. On that day all car traffic is prohibited (also TV stations are offline etc). It was absolutely amazing. Tel Aviv is a city with large roads and usually extremely busy. On that day, cyclists ride over the highway, kids play on the streets. I never felt that directly before how invasive the normal car situation is.
Just to clarify, there is no law that I know of prohibiting car traffic on yom kippur in Tel Aviv. However, since this is the most important holiday of the year, even many Israelis who don't celebrate other holidays will celebrate this one. I believe that virtually all businesses are closed that day, even those that don't close on other Jewish holidays (again, not illegal to operate, but customary). So in practice, few people will be driving that day/night.
Moral code or just social pressure - the discomfort of the thought of disobeying the tradition and everyone glaring at you as you drive down the road outweighs the benefits of doing so even if you don't believe in the tradition.
Sure, the Jewish Israelis celebrate and observe Yom Kippur. The Muslims in occupied Palestine? The military makes uses force to ensure they don't leave their ghettos. "Strong moral code".
Reminds me of walking the Bijlmermeer near HVA in Amsterdam on a Sunday morning. No cars, no people, no traffic, absolutely empty streets. The only sound was that of the wind streaming through steel canyons, and my footsteps. A positively divine experience
Kids can play anywhere else when cars are on the road. What's so attractive about playing on a big patch of hard material that gets so hot in the summer you can't touch it without burning yourself? What's wrong with parks and people's yards? I never understood the pining for the days of playing on streets.
When I played baseball growing up, the street was level and hard and so on. The backyard with grass had a steep hill and poor traction, etc. The street in front of my house made a much better baseball field than my steeply sloped, grassy and uneven backyard.
Yet, it was right in front of my house, so I could use the bathroom, get a snack and remained under the watchful eye of my mother, unlike, say, some distant park with a proper baseball field.
Its amazing how divided Israel culture is yet the idea of having no cars for one day is totally embraced by anyone. Gives me a feeling of how polluted my daily life is with noise and gas.
The main parts are well accessible. There are some districts which are very car-centric, but the "old" part is well walkable. Or you can rent a bike, as I did.
Many cities in the US have banned cars from a significant number of Downtown Streets. We call them skyways for the most part, though sometimes they are underground. It works well, keeps cars out of the way of people. It also makes for a nice environment to walk around.
Our zoning is such that those streets close at night, and I wouldn't recommend them in the late hours before they are officially closed.
There is a pedestrian city in my province (Córdoba, Argentina) called La Cumbrecita. You leave your car in the entrance to the city in a parking lot and you can walk the entire town.
First time I visit there made me wonder why not all towns aren't pedestrian like this. I mean most towns have nice sidewalks and are walkable but why not just banning cars. In addition to having less noise I can imagine plenty of other benefits.
> [La Cumbrecita] is completely pedestrian and reminiscent of the small German towns of the fifteenth century. One can hike up through the town (and then down) to the waterfall, a truly paradisiacal experience.
I have a fantasy that once a year a major US cities (think Manhattan) ban private cars for a day. Public Transit, and emergency vehicles pass as normal.
Cars have to some extent led us through part of the industrial revolution. However, it's my belief that cars, except from polluting the environment and destroying our cities - makes people unhappy and sad.
Visiting LA this summer, I knew I was in for a car heavy metropolis but this... I can't understand why people waste so much time of their precious life (usually alone which also greatly worsen the problem) - locked in a car.
Coming to the topic of the autonomous car revolution, which I frankly do not understand. Sometimes it feels like the ambition is to end up as the humans in WALL-E. What kind of life is that?
Ps. Coming from Europe, I crossed US by bicycle a few years ago, from NY to US. People say it's a country to be seen through a car, but I argue it's to be seen on a bike.
I was born in Europe and lived there for 14 years before moving to US. I went there recently.
I also recently visited LA.....
Most people I know from smaller cities in Poland own cars or would love to own a car but simply cannot afford it as gas is really expensive, so are cars compared to incomes. When I visited I rented a car which allowed me to see so many things all over the country. I would not able to visit so many locations without a car.
Same goes for LA, renting a car allowed me to travel from LA to San Diego on a relatively short trip.
In NY over 50% households are car-free. In Chicago about 30% of households are car-free. People travel to cities for various reasons, often they don't do it daily.
My wife traveled to school by train in city of chicago for one year, then she switched to driving her car, she saved a lot of time on her commute, and didn't have to deal with weirdos on the trains at night.
Cars are here to stay. Some people drive less by utilizing services like amazon but then amazon needs to deliver packages, but, I guess that still minimizes fuel consumption as things are delivered in a more efficient way.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 361 ms ] threadHowever this model just does not work in the US, outside of very few places. US cities are designed for cars, and without major redevelopment everything's just too far apart - even within the context of a single street - for this to make sense. If you had electric scooters or something though...
We have 2 local cities that made themselves bike friendly. Property values are going up in that area.
However, the people living there were already 10%ers.
Its cool to see lots of bike lanes and walkers, but they also managed to price the people that cant afford cars out.
However, it's also likely they will want this nice life in more than just their area and will push for that over time.
Americans tend to live in detached single family homes.
Americans tend to want space between themselves and their neighbors.
Americans do not see their cars as liabilities.
Most people don't live in SF/NYC and/or don't read StrongTowns
Replacing American suburbia would cost $100 Trillion dollars. More suburbia is being created every day, far outpacing investment in "New Urbanism".
In America, when your city/suburb becomes blighted, you can move.
That is nuts.
That means a plumber, electrician, home appliance deliveryman, mover, etc. can only handle one job requiring a vehicle per day. He will have to charge 3-4 times more for his services than someone working in an area where it's feasible to finish 3-4 jobs in a workday. The costs are of course passed on to the customers. Is their car-less life worth living in a pigsty that they can't fix up because laws force contractors to charge exorbitant fees?
That means any business will want a dedicated vehicle to haul what they need in the 6-8 am window. This is not just grossly economically inefficient (no outsourcing delivery to third parties), it results in more vehicles sitting idle during the day, using up parking space!
And that means moving is a nightmare. Moving a two-bedroom apartment worth of stuff into or out of a truck is, realistically, at least a four hour job. That means a cross-town move that could be done in one workday with sane laws will take at least four workdays (two to load the truck, two to unload) in your crazy UK town. Imagine the costs. How is it moral for you to shackle your people to the land by making relocation unaffordable?
https://www.eco-business.com/news/how-a-city-in-spain-got-ri...
"In fact, in most streets there are no physical barriers to keep the cars out. Vehicles making deliveries or locals heading to private garages can still circulate in most places.
“What we did is to create loops to keep people from driving through the city,” Lores explains. “If you enter by the south, you leave by the south.”
The goal of this strategy, which is complemented by severe parking restrictions in all of the central area, is to get rid of what Pontevedra officials call “unnecessary traffic”.
The 6-8am window is for large deliveries. There is normally a retractable barrier for emergency usage (police/ambulance etc) and for minimal day access (I don't know how this is managed, but I have seen vehicles have to turn around and leave, where others, normally with a business inside get access).
Another common way is to have a central pedestrian only section, but with vehicle access through the 'back streets' behind. The pedestrian street is normally a great deal larger than the (often one way) back streets, and again has retractable bollards for maintenance, event vehicles and emergency vehicles. These back streets also give access to underground/aboveground parking for residents in flats. I would love to see this model used to some extent in residential areas. Some of my favorite times are when a street is closed to traffic for a street party.
In practice it works very well, at least in a large number of towns and cities in the UK. It's about finding the correct roads and spaces to limit and disallow motor vehicles on.
I live in a large apartment development in Manhattan that is pedestrian-friendly and decidedly vehicle-unfriendly. You can't drive a car to the front of my building. And yet it works, very well.
I moved in with my girlfriend recently. You know how that worked? The movers she hired drove as near as possible, and simply pushed her stuff on dollies the rest of the way to the building. No big deal. Yeah, it took a little bit longer, but nowhere near as bad as the 4-day move you're hyperbolically claiming. And that side of the move was actually better than the other side, since she was moving out of a fourth floor walkup. Even though the truck could park almost directly in front of that building, it turns out it's harder to carry stuff down many flights of stairs than it is to push it on wheels across a flat surface and then up an elevator.
I moved from another building within my complex, and I accomplished my entire move simply by pushing my stuff on a dolly, without even having to hire movers. I've never before had a vehicle-less move even be an option, but it was in this situation.
As for repairmen, you know how they work? They get around on bicycles. You can carry a surprising amount of stuff on a bicycle, including all the tools you'd need for >95% of repairs. The plumbers ride around on bikes with a toolbox, plungers, and a snake, for example. For appliance delivery, they use tiny little vehicles that are basically a pick-up truck version of a golf cart. These vehicles don't go fast and the drivers yield to pedestrians, and you see them on pedestrian paths (and don't feel unsafe about it).
Every problem that you're bringing up is already solved in the many different areas that are pedestrianized and prohibit vehicle traffic. It's a failure of imagination to think that these problems are unsolvable. When your city is dense enough, a plumber/electrician can easily support him/herself on just jobs that are within a 10 minute walking radius, with the tools that can be pushed on a handcart or fit on a bicycle. Vehicles aren't necessary. It's actually more efficient for these professions, because in the suburbs it's typical to drive for up to an hour to get to a jobsite! So much wasted time spent just getting somewhere!
Cities get bigger and denser, and wasting a big % of land on parking spaces, roads, intersections and accepting a horrible air quality (that reduces citizen life spans and health quality) and noise pollution just does not make any sense anymore. Carse are effective in less dense regions, but in modern cities other solutions have to be found. Mass transit, biking lanes, electro-scooters, (elevated)-footpaths are the way to go. Maybe even electric ridesharing.
But privately owned gasoline-guzzlers are an archaic solution to the transportation problem, and they are not effective in today's society.
I know european cities are much more pedestrian friendly & that US cities in general are more oriented towards the car lifestyle, but as said previously, this needs to change. It is a big cultural and infrastructure change over a longer timespan, but it is achievable.
Of course change always requires some sacrifice, and I imagine the car-drivers in above mentioned article must have been plenty pissed at the beginning. But they paved over the streets, made the inner city pedestrian only, and now they are better for it. Of course this is a very small town and these changes do not scale up as easily as one would like, and much more complex projects will have to be designed for bigger cities. But it is doable (see initiatives in e.g. Madrid, Munich & most of the netherlands) and "only" requires some long-term commitment. But we all know how good politicians are at that (what's global warming??).
I want to finish this comment with a call to engage in democracy. Make your opinion heard, loudly, go to the voting polls, participate in your local council, actually engage in politics. Because if you do not, no significant change will be made any time soon.
Citation needed, I know. There’s a relevant article about this phenomenon out there somewhere, if I can find it I’ll post a link.
I used to do 15+15 km bike ride to work and back almost every day for 9 months out of the year. Sadly I can't do that any more as I moved farther away from work.
There might be days of bad weather where other means of transportation is more convenient, but that's the case all year around.
For motorcycles/scooters the season is shorter because you can't get (affordable) insurance.
Biking in the winter is fine too, as long as there's no snow (and the snow is usually only 1-2 months, depending on the location).
And some people do drive in the winter too (but that is harder and most don't).
Arguably many people seem to consider their car as a self-propelled living room, fully equipped with sofa and entertainment system.
In the past five years there was one day when I couldn't cycle to work due to black ice covering most of the roads, and even that resolved itself in the afternoon. Snow just means you need a bit more dexterity than usual.
As for comfort; proper clothing means you are pretty much comfortable most of the time.
The ultimate irony of the point attempted to be made is that people don't drive when ice or snow cover on the road (or suck at it, take undue risks, fail to, and ram into curbs/cars/people).
What's more, in bad weather people (who have the option to choose between public transportation and their own vehicles) tend to choose cars more often because public transit has a habit of becoming increasingly unreliable, especially due to winter conditions, even though such conditions can be reasonably expected for 6 months a year.
The odd thing about this is how the biking paths around here (a city 60N) still remain relatively empty for a long time in the winter. It almost confuses me, but not really :-)
I know. I expected to get this kind of responses. It shows how little empathy this site has for other (older, overworked, with 3 kids, pregnant, ...) people that are just a little different than they are.
Saying "countries" is funny. It's varying wildly within a country, even a small one. E.g. my home city of Hradec Králové is built on a completely flat area with mild weather, so of course everyone bikes almost the whole year, but Prague is built on a series of steep hills and enjoys rougher weather, so while you see people biking here, most people don't.
I ride a fixed gear In winter, with the same tires I use in summer. A lot of people are on mountain bikes. Some people are on fatbikes, but that's overkill for basic commuting.
Sure, on rainy or super cold days it's not like it's as comfortable as a car but you'd have to pay me to drive a car around Paris or any big european city at rush hour.
The coming droughts will affect agriculture, but not the cities.
Where did you get this idea?
Much of the this was spurred by the aerospace and oil industries.
Even in LA itself, the urban heat island effect is enough that many homes have A/C.
That's the thing, often in the US I felt very boxed into a place, simply because I couldn't just do a Cartman and 'go home' (or someplace else).
Reminder: originally one (Roman) mile was a measure of thousand paces, while a Dutch, Russian and such miles were related to an hour of marching. (later rescaled in feet)
That said, it's not the US vs. everywhere else. For example, the UK has lots of charming little villages where you can walk to the pub and a few stores. Once you get out of the village though, some public footpaths notwithstanding, you're mostly talking very narrow roads with no shoulders, much less sidewalks, and no real way to walk off the road.
This is almost exactly the situation described by Bill Bryson in I'm a Stranger Here Myself. I believe he wanted to visit the shops across the street while his wife was at a mall and there was effectively no way to get there without a car.
I enjoyed Musk's Boring Company's presentation, where they talk about some problems with transportation today and present some solutions, with emphasis on transportation within city borders [0].
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwX9G38vdCE
Musk's idea basically focuses on moving cars underground if I understood correctly. It should focus on moving most of the public transport underground and simply "decommissioning" some of the road infrastructure from the surface.
That's not the solution if still you plan on having every person and their car move around. Maintaining the infrastructure for cars on the surface is already expensive and inefficient. Suddenly we can do it better or cheaper by multiplying it underground? You won't get rid of any of today's problems except one: drivers will be able to move from one side of a city and create a traffic jam on the other in no time.Tunnels are great if you plan on connecting a few hubs spread around a city. From there you can use the most efficient surface transportation available. A bike, a bus, a tram, even on foot.
One lesson that most city planners learned in time is that the more infrastructure you build for cars, the more cars you'll have clogging it. The solution is o discourage the reliance on cars in cities and it worked every time it was applied.
That's not quite true: by completely splitting car traffic and pedestrian traffic on different levels, you can create a city which is much denser and easier to walk because you don't need large car streets, and at the bottom you don't need pedestrian affordances alongside car traffic. Plus by banning car traffic far away you disincensise car traffic within the city: it's usually easier to walk, bike or take public transport than go to the bottom, get into your car, drive, park over there and go back up.
Louvain la Neuve works on that model, the city is built on a huge concrete slab and entirely pedestrian, with car traffic and parkings underslab.
I will point out the fact that according to Wikipedia Louvain la Neuve has ~30.000 inhabitants and ~30 square Km (12.5 sq mi). It is also 2Km on the longest side. How do you see this applied to New York or London, cities that need it the most?
And why is it better to still spend billions moving infrastructure underground instead of shrinking what's already available to the point where pedestrians get the vast majority of space and the infrastructure only serves the needs of public services?
> banning car traffic far away you disincensise car traffic within the city
I don't know what "far away" means but in reality drivers still go out of their way to drive the car. Think about this: they are willing to spend hours in traffic jams. You think an elevator ride to level -4 will discourage them?
P.S. I'm using info from BC [0] and their vision on this looks a lot like "let have the same traffic as today but on many levels of tunnels". Only the company drilling the tunnels walks away happy. You just pay a crapload of money to hide some of the issues of urban traffic.
[0] https://www.boringcompany.com/faq/
Downside is that the bar is pricey and touristy, and most of the beers seem to be commercial. We were in this bar in Bruges last winter, it has 300 kinds of beer and all from small breweries. If a brewery is acquired by a big company, they don't serve it anymore. They also have almost no tourists there, which is refreshing for Bruges. I'll try and find what it's called.
Edit: The Bruges bar is called Le Trappiste [3]. Apparently, it's well advertised in touristic literature. They even have a website.
[0] https://www.google.com/maps/@51.056575,3.7252618,3a,75y,55.7... [1] https://www.google.com/maps/@51.056575,3.7252618,3a,28.6y,20... [2] https://www.google.com/maps/@51.056575,3.7252618,3a,51.1y,22... [3] https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g188671-d42950...
Louvain La Neuve (in french-speaking belgium) has an interesting take on this: the entire city is on a concrete slab, topside is entirely pedestrian, and underslab hosts car streets and parkings.
It's funny that the German political party SPD which is responsible for most of this now wants to rebrand itself as bicycle friendly. But the largest sausage producer in Germany is now also the largesg vegan 'meat' producer. And soon pigs will fly.
I don't know anyone enjoying taking the car in Berlin and one is often faster with public transport or the bike in the city center.
> rebrand itself as bicycle friendly Shocking! Political parties changing course to adapt to change in popular opinion.
(Disclaimer: I'm a relaxed driver; my experience might not hold for those who enter the full-rage mode when starting the engine)
Compare this with the pedestrian infrastructure (many bad sidewalks in the East) or bicycle with no or chaotic lanes [2]. Also when houses are build or roads are maintained, car driver concerns are always prioritized above cyclists and pedestrians [3].
[1] https://rad-spannerei.de/2015/07/14/berliner-fahrradstaffel-...
[2] https://www.tagesspiegel.de/mediacenter/fotostrecken/berlin/...
[3] https://www.tagesspiegel.de/images/schild-soeren-dumpf/22966...
People realized that this approach wasn't sustainable and now more and more work is done to undo it, that's a good thing IMO. Ancient European cities simply were not built to accommodate cars, they don't fit.
Do not worry, we still go on building ring roads and bypasses around cities. Either where there were not yet any, or farther from the centre and the existing ones where there are already existing ones.
- But this time, they will be enough far away from the city, and they will make traffic jam disappear, we promise.
- Yeah, that's what you said 40 years ago about the first ones, and then urbanisation exploded around them and they quickly got swallowed by the city and its suburbs...
Bus yes, it is true that the fad of building expressways ending right inside city centres has stopped quite a long time ago.
This allows the city to "breath" a lot more and there is not so much competition for the space between cars, bikes and people.
Compare that to dense cities like London, Paris or Barcelona, and there is a lot more to fight for.
This is a good point. The leisurely stroll is practically nonexistent in my city. I'm in a more rural setting, but there is still a well-defined city hub. It just feels awkward walking down the sidewalk when people are zooming by at 35mph+.
The result is sidewalk cut offs, which is inconvenient to me as a biker. There are frequently plants starting to take over because no one cares to use the walks.
Makes sense that people gradually prefer to spend their free time with Netflix, video games, or in a gym.
https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/duanes-depressed_larry-mcmurtr...
Or of course, Bradbury.
https://genius.com/Ray-bradbury-the-pedestrian-annotated
Another major benefit was by the time I got home, the stress of the day was long gone. When I used to drive, the 45 minute journey of being mostly stuck in traffic meant I was more wound up when arrived home than when I left work
Oh please. Call spade a spade - you are talking about Manhattan, Dumbo or Williamsburg, Harlem and newly gentrified, serviced by subway places with white cafes and bars and restaurants loved by the lily white people working in tech or in finance. The thing is... it is a very small part of NYC. People in Queens take a car to get to a subway because it takes thirty to fourty minutes to get to it otherwise and after that it takes another hour and half to get to the place of work, but hey, who cares about Cinthia Lopez that cleans the desks on clowns working at Google that want to bike to work from their $6k/mo apartments.
You are not talking about Queens or Bronx or Bed-Stuy; you are not talking about Crown Heights or Inwood, or Washington Heights or Staten Island (it is also NYC even though people really like forgetting it).
[Peter Keating discussing whether or not he and his wife should build a country home away from the city] "Will you like commuting?" "No, I think it will be quite an awful nuisance. But you know, everybody that's anybody commutes nowadays. I always feel like a damn proletarian when I have to admit that I live in the city."
Washington Heights and Inwood are quite walkable and most people there commute by subway, without having to drive to it. The same goes for Crown Heights and Bed-Stuy.
Nowadays, with a car, I don't mind driving for 10 minutes somewhere - it's actually often enjoyable, whereas walking for ten minutes out of necessity feels like an annoyance and a burden. I don't mind walking when I want to, like on hikes, but I certainly don't miss it being a necessity. There is a fast food place about 1.5 miles from me, which many consider walking distance, but I always take the car there and use the drive-thru even though the way there is very walkable.
The place I'm at right now is a nice compromise of usability for pedestrians and motorists, but I personally plan to someday live in a more rural area and maybe have a small farm, and I'm not bothered at all by the fact that such a place is essentially car-only.
Now that I'm in the U.S. except for one street I never casually go to a store. Everything is purposeful. In the U.S. I go to the store because I need to and it's not a chance encounter. I know where I'm going and what I want to get.
Though I hate the huge, ugly parking lots and what they represent. I tend to purchase stuff online and rarely go to a store these days. I do try to go for walks frequently but that is to get outside and I don't shop when I do this.
This is the "Vote with your wallet" at the international civic level.
It may not have been very convenient or practical in the past but it seems to be becoming an increasingly accessible option, at least for first-world people.
Move to the places whose ideals align with yours, and help them develop those, if you can't convince your current home to adopt them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot_voting
Interesting, I know that the Netherlands has such a program, might you know any other? Thanks.
Also this whole idea is known as Exit, Voice, and Reason too.
Of course, even though they have these two advantages, they will still pollute(if not electric, and even so because they must transport more mass than say a scooter, and the electricity still needs to be generated at an external power plant) and create noise pollution and they also need to use traffic lanes and road-infrastructure.
think about it....if you set up an autonomous ride sharing service, your path to profitability lies in having cars closer to prospective riders. so it makes total sense to put as many cars on the road as possible....it's not like there is a person driving who must be compensated or fed
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
However it's far far easier for commercial companies to invest $billions in them than it is for governments to invest $billions in the infrastructure to make cars redundant. Look at the bitching and moaning that happens whenever a new train line is proposed.
But I realized that going fast you forget what's near, and you forget what time can feel. Walking around you discover places you didn't know, you spend time in the forest, on a hill. You're not rushing to go from A to B. Maybe "time density" will have a come back.
Another point, I stopped looking for parking spots where I go. I park 1-2 miles before and walk the rest. It actually saves time.
Personally, it's hard for me to imagine not having a car, much less not having a driver's license, because so many things I do are utterly dependent on driving even if I both worked and lived in a city (neither of which is the case). I need a car to transport my boating equipment. I just booked a getaway that is utterly dependent on a rental car when I get there. I've had jobs that I would not have been able to do were I not able to drive to job sites, etc.
But you basically adapt to what you can do if you don't have a car. You do more stuff around the city and less out in the woods. Maybe you don't take vacations that require driving. Etc. For my part, there are places that require high-clearance 4WD and knowing how to use it. I just don't do those things.
But I do like being able to get away for weekends, go to national parks and wilderness areas on vacation, etc. (And I like living in at least the semi-country which wouldn't be possible without a car.)
However, knowing lots of urban folks, having to rent a car (when everyone else is also wanting to rent a car) for weekends can be a PITA, especially if said car requires special racks and the like for sport equipment.
Of course, when traveling by air for vacation, renting a car is perfectly normal which is what I do.
Not without a driver's license you won't... ;-)
Edit: quick google search says some companies might refuse you, but you should be able to pay $15 or so extra per day to get full liability and comprehensive coverage if you have no insurance of your own already. And check your credit card because some of them have limited built-in coverage you can leverage.
I still can't believe how much I can pack into a canoe, probably as much as I can into a pick-up truck. Running down a lake or river, with a canoe, is even a smoother ride than a car on a regular road.
The first passenger trains were actually designed to move people from the city to the countryside. Once they achieved regular service people figured they can commute into the city, and started to live in the country.
Now I’m back in Europe and I feel free when I’m moving around a city. I might take public transportation one way and walk back to my apartment. I can get a call from my friend in the afternoon and go out for some whisky without having to drive back to my apartment and taking a cab.
I don’t know where I’ll live in the future but I’d be happy if I didn’t need to own a car.
> One says to me, "I wonder that you do not lay up money; you love to travel; you might take the cars and go to Fitchburg today and see the country." But I am wiser than that. I have learned that the swiftest traveller is he that goes afoot. I say to my friend, Suppose we try who will get there first. The distance is thirty miles; the fare ninety cents. That is almost a day's wages. I remember when wages were sixty cents a day for laborers on this very road. Well, I start now on foot, and get there before night; I have travelled at that rate by the week together. You will in the meanwhile have earned your fare, and arrive there some time tomorrow, or possibly this evening, if you are lucky enough to get a job in season. Instead of going to Fitchburg, you will be working here the greater part of the day. And so, if the railroad reached round the world, I think that I should keep ahead of you.
- Henry David Thoreau in Walden
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torches_of_Freedom
That works both ways though. I feel significantly more free today owning an EV hybrid car, then I did without a car.
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I have lost sleep worrying I would miss the only bus, or that it would be late, or that it would be full, or that it would never show, or that they could change the route without telling me, or that if the weather is bad I'll arrive soaked / freezing / dripping in sweat. Or if the other passengers are bad, I could arrived smelling bad or covered in bedbugs.
I have commuted by bus. It was a huge impact on personal freedom -- even if all conditions are ideal every trip still had to be delicately and precisely pre-planned, with exact arrival and departures, (that all stacked up, because even the shortest bus trips require one or more transfers) and they allowed travel only to specific places deemed worthy of it by other people. And of course, every trip required at least 2x to 3x longer trip times than driving.
Buses are like 70% of the stress of flying, with only 10% of the benefit.
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A car isn't limitless freedom, it comes with plenty of responsibilities and costs of it's own. But it certainly can be a form of freedom of mobility. One that currently isn't easily reproducible in any other way.
Only being able to use a car to get around also does not seem like freedom.
Freedom is having good options - the option to use a car if that's what you have to, but also the option to bike, bus, or walk if you don't.
I've been to Houston recently - 'freedom' was about the last thing that I was feeling, as I traversed its freeway system.
Wikipedia says the area of the USA is only 3,794,100 square miles, so there aren’t very many square-mile patches to hand out compared to the size of the population.
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1+%2F+population+densi...
Living in a dense urban area, taking trains, walking, and biking. Goods delivered all in close vicinity. Large building with the opportunity to be more energy efficient than your single family home.
All that, I'm convinced makes the carbon footprint of the average urbanite much lower than someone who often drives miles for errands I know this must feel contrary to the intuition to those who live very close to nature
If you look around the US you will see that even today, investment in suburbia far outpaces investment in "urbanism".
Trucks and SUVs are slowly cannibalizing sedan sales in the US. So not only do people like driving, the vehicles they tend to purchase are increasing in size.
If you are suggesting that society somehow prioritizes the 0.3% of young single males who want to live as pedestrians in urban cores...put it to a vote and watch what happens.
This entire thread is about optimizing cities for young single males. I can't wait until HN turns a median age of seventy...everyone will be in here screaming about a society that punishes the aged.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem
The idea that cars are unsustainable is ridiculous. Just because they may not fit into sonmeone’s desire for increased government control of mobility doesn’t make them unsustainable.
Every generation seems to think their generation will be the last, unless we “do” something. They were likely debating horse carts in England a thousand years ago with equal fervor.
Yeah, money. In the US, new transportation projects are generally financed with federal help, while maintenance is left to the local government. This essentially creates a Ponzi scheme, where cities are going bankrupt due to depreciation on infrastructure, and not even realizing it. https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme/
In my opinion, roads are essentially underpriced. They're expensive to maintain and given out for free. (Similar arguments apply for parking, expressed humorously here: http://cityobservatory.org/parking-where-we-embrace-socialis...) This bothers me, as someone who doesn't own a car but lives with worse air quality and safety due to those who do.
Elderly and disabled people are often can't safely drive due to either physical limitations (eyesight, reaction time, arthritis, seizures, limited movements, dizziness and fainting, etc., etc., etc.) or practical limitations (a car that accommodates a driver in a wheelchair with hand controls is a specialty item that costs $90,000+, I'm not making that number up, there was an article about it on HN a bit ago). Even if and individual has a ride it can be difficult to transport a motorized scooter in a standard sedan or compact car: going to the park with the grandkids is out without a folding wheelchair, which, depending on the individual's limitations, can make that person dependent on someone else to push them around.
Whereas electric scooters and wheelchairs can navigate easily and independently in pedestrian friendly zones when designed with accommodation in mind. And accommodation is now the law.
Also women and married people don't exactly, by definition, prefer driving over walking, dunno where you're getting that from. In fact, women drive less than men on average.
I think this statement is misleading. The market has filled with SUVs that are adapted from compact and midsize sedans (e.g. Toyota RAV4, Highlander). The giant SUV market still exists, but I don't believe it's growing anything like it was in the 1990s and early 2000s. I probably see forty Rav4's for every Ford Expedition I see.
Google reports the population of the US at 325.7 million, and the population of New York City at 8.54 million. So, your "0.3%" is a tenth of the population of one urban core.
People managed without cars for the vast majority of human existence.
For people with a very limited lifestyle restricted to a few city blocks perhaps this is true. But the majority of people do not live that way and have use cases for cars that you have not considered in your analysis.
change always requires some sacrifice,
By other people, funnily enough
Because outside of cities, as long as people have detatched homes on reasonably sized lots, getting around requires a car. There will simply not be the density needed for efficient public transportation.
While I might agree that the idea of large suburbs with detatched homes is probably not very sustainable, I don't see how they aren't here to stay (together with the cars required to live in them)
Or maybe the hub (outside the city) could have parking, so you drive there but take public transport from there on?
That's how it works. I walk 600m to my bus stop in my suburb neighborhood. So commuting from where I live is no problem. I don't need a car for that. But all the other transportation (driving kids to various sports practices, going to the forest, the lake, going to the school that isn't along a bus route with kids that can't walk very far etc) is harder. There will always be a gap between the transport I want/need and the transport that can be solved by public transport. So some kind of semi-private transport (e.g. shared autonomous cars) is probably required if the suburban lifestyle is going to be possible without cars.
You can have the on-demand voice-activated self-driving car experience right now: it’s called a taxi. Is that viable for all your use cases?
Perhaps for some of the use cases there could be better utilization (meaning cheaper) taxi, e.g. a taxi picking up my kids for school could also pick up a few more.
Eliminate the driver and taxis become way cheaper (probably cheaper than owning a car). That means people like alkonaut here will be far more interested in just not owning their own car that sits idle except when they are personally driving it. Which reduces the amount of space we are spending on car storage.
Why do you think they will be cheaper? Get ready for surge pricing being the norm. If you don’t have a vehicle of your own, you’ll have no choice but to pay. That’s why investors are willing to pour untold billions into this, they expect a massive payoff.
I'm sure that investors will extract a nice sum of money, but it's their ability to outcompete taxis on price that will allow them to do that. Or to put it another way they don't need to extract $30,000/car/year^1 and competition means they won't be able to.
^1 what ddg tells me the average US taxi driver salary is.
It is not good to need a car and having to use it every day for several hours.
It's not limited to the US. Even in Europe (at least in France where I live), we have a lot of protests whenever there are measures against cars. A few days ago, there was a no-car day in Paris, you could see people on social medias extremely angry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yogi_Berra#%22Yogi-isms%22
>On why he no longer went to Rigazzi's, a St. Louis restaurant: "Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded."
[1] https://theinfosphere.org/Transcript:The_Lesser_of_Two_Evils
If not, then it’s not a “good” system. It’s a good system for single adults carrying their Manhattan Portage bag. Not so good for kids in strollers, carrying groceries for a family, people in wheelchairs, elderly with difficulties on stairs. It’s not a “good” system at all.
Zurich’s trams — now that is a good system.
in the Bay Area, they tend to vote for more and better roads (but tend not to get them)
Inside cities that is. One must remember that a lot of the people that move around in a city every day don't live in the city. And for many of them a car is a requirement anyway. For me the car is a sunk cost - I have it for the rare times I need it (I don't need it to go into the city), but buying/maintaining/insuring it is mostly a fixed cost, meaning that the marginal cost of each mile driven is very very small. I wouldn't mind if my city was made car free tomorrow - but I still wouldn't drive any less.
The car still gets used outside work to get groceries, pick up kids from schools and of course at the weekends.
I didn't move because I'm white, I moved because I wanted peace and quiet. Most of the people I know who live around me moved away from the city for the same reason. Amazingly, non white people feel this way too...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3230535/
Your generic suburbs have their own problems – massively artificial, claustrophobic rows and rows of almost identical houses, with zero character and nowhere to go without a car.
> Amazingly, non white people feel this way too...
On this note, almost the entire Asian population of the Dallas area lives in the suburbs, and those who can afford it are starting to move to the exurbs. Only people without the means to leave are staying in the city because the city sucks.
Part of the reason the trend is called "white flight" is that for a long time and in many places non-white people were prevented by bank, municipal, real estate office and HOA policy from purchasing houses or even getting mortgages in the suburbs.
Calling it white flight isn't always an accusation of racism against the people who were fleeing, more against the people who openly prevented people of color from leaving as well.
The phrase "white flight" refers to a 1970s phenomenon where white people repeatedly moved from one suburb to another (often in circular patterns) in order to avoid POC after desegregation and civil rights legislation made suburbs accessible to POC for the first time. This was exacerbated by real estate agents engaging in a race-baiting, unscrupulous practice called "block busting".
>"The phrase "white flight" refers to a 1970s phenomenon ..."
No, the 1970s may have seen a recirculation of the original phrase but it is commonly understood that "white flight" refers to phenomenon around the war years.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight
[2] https://priceonomics.com/the-great-migration-the-african-ame...
Something simple like setting up a toll to use city streets to reduce congestion is completely off the table. We end up highly taxing corporate zoned housing to try to kinda indirectly tax the work place of the suburbanites that are making a mess of our city, but it's only a partial fix and it's distortionary.
Meanwhile, people that actually live in Toronto pay way more in income tax than people that live outside of it, and our taxes are indexed to inflation, unlike the petrol taxes. Add in the three way split of the left vote and the FPTP system and we end up with a vindictive moron in charge of the province fucking up representation by changing our riding map in the middle of a city election.
Cars have ruined so many things. The amount of times a car has honked at me for not putting my own life in danger because I need 5 seconds to get to a safer place to pull over with my bike is crazy. I'm not "taking a lane" I'm just keeping myself from getting doored.
Imagine if cars had never been invented and we could have stuck with trains for everything? Way more green space. Way healthier population. Way more 4 or 6 story buildings. Way more parks. Way less time wasted behind the wheel. Fewer deaths. No road rage.
And what would we have to give up?
3000 sqft suburban houses and their shitty pools that get used 5 times a year. Instead of watching TV at night alone at home people could walk over to their friends place or go out to a cute restaurant or well groomed park.
I don't necessarily think suburbia is the culprit for traffic though. It probably is in North America where suburbs often means "not even public transport available to the city". They were planned for and built for cars! My suburb was not. People lived here before cars too.
I use public transport for most of my needs (including commuting) and drive very few miles per year - but I use my car many times for short distances, mostly things like picking up kids from daycare etc.
Also, speaking of daycare, that's another thing I really think is essentially stupid. Imagine two different situations.
First situation: Normal family sends 2 kids to daycare. About $50k here in Toronto. Cool. The daycare workers pay their taxes, the family pays theirs after claiming a $6k tax credit. At the end of the day the government gets around $30–40k more in income tax.
Second situation: Family A has two kids and so does Family B. They take turns watching each others kids, reducing each family's working hours by 25%. Assuming both parents earn the same base income in both families, but that only one of them wants to raise kids all day, the government loses about $11k in tax revenue per family, or $22k total.
The only thing that stops this practice from being widespread is that most employers want full-time workers.
In my case (Sweden) the daycare subsidy is much more significant, 2 kids is $3700 (Canadian) so the incentive to work full time is absolutely massive in comparison.
As a city parent, every morning I walk with my kid to the daycare and have to cross traffic mostly from suburbanites whose kids are A-OK while they put my kid at risk on their way to work. Thank you for taking public transit!
No thank you. As much as I like my home town, I don't want to pay a fortune (that could buy a castle or another absurdly large property elsewhere) for a crappy house or condo in the densest part of Toronto and never enjoy personal peace and quiet again. Not everyone wants to live in miserable close quarters paying exorbitant rent for the freedom to walk to convenient overpriced services.
A home and a yard allows those who need it to live with a measure of dignity. It's pants and you're trying to argue that everyone would be fine with shorts.
Ironically I live in NYC right now which is even worse in most of those respects, but at least the pay/COL ratio is better. Public transportation is better too. In the end if I buy a home it isn't going to be in either city.
A lot of freedom to travel.
Many of the cities in the US that are dense enough to be reasonable walkable/bikable are also incredibly expensive in those areas.
One size doesn't fit all. What is your personal preference may not be others' prefereces.
Making a blanket statement like cars "are not effective in today's society" is profoundly off base.
Personal preference is largely a reflection of the status quo, and in the US the status quo heavily sculpted by federal policy that has favoured car-oriented development for 60+ years.
The last thing I want to do is walk to a grocery store and carry home food for a family in the 95 degree heat and 95% humidity.
This is an honest question. I live in a city with public transport now and I much prefer it for myself, but when I think of how I was brought up it's hard to imagine that working without a car.
Well there are six stores (from very small to a supermarket) within five minutes of walking from my apartment. There’s a gym 500 meters away and another 1 km away. Cinema is 10 minutes by metro. A huge park and a forest are also about 10 minutes away each. Density is convenient!
Better to look at cities that are better adopters of bikes, such as Copenhagen. There just about everyone is on or in a bike, including many children. They love their cargo bikes over there. See https://triobike.com/ and http://denmark.dk/en/green-living/bicycle-culture/copenhagen...
As far as sticking kids on bikes, you got many options:
https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2011/01/oregon...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3SP1Y98KhQ
https://www.survivalistboards.com/showpost.php?p=3482606&pos...
I currently drive a Volt...and it's wonderful. Chevy is really missing out on a lot of potential free press by not putting a bigger emphasis on it. I went from spending over $400 / month on gas to about $20 / month. You get the ability to cut such a huge amount of gas usage without the need for any additional infrastructure to support them like pure-electrics that are out there.
My guess is that when clean energy is used to produce fuel cells, a lot of the conversations around the negative impact of cars in general will dry up.
This might be shocking to you, but I'd like to get to work in 15 minutes instead of in 45 minutes while suffering the bodily odeurs of a hundred co-travelers, overlaid with the subtle smell of my wagon having been used as a urinal for a decade, thank you very much.
They pretty clearly weren't effective in the old cities, either, at least in the U.S., since we had to more or less raze them and move everybody to the suburbs to make cars work.
"Mass transit": Shared and claustrophobic space with other travelers. "Biking lanes": Requires exposure to the elements. Depending on where you live this is already a non-starter if you don't want to arrive at your destination drenched in sweat. "electro-scooters": I've been on one of these in Vietnam. Doesn't carry 2 adults well and has the same weather problems as the peddle-powered version. "Elevated footpaths": I live in an urban conglomerate in Asia with ~1.1 million people. A typical day of running errands can easily rack up ~50+km of driving because of the distances between either people I know or businesses carrying niche products. There's no way in Hell I'm covering that ground on foot, in 34deg C weather with 90% humidity.
The city in the article is (1) miniscule at ~85,000 people and 15-20km across at its widest and (2) possesses a pretty mild climate. All of the transportation assets you propose as "solutions" are fine....if you live in California or a similar "Mediterranean climate". Most humans don't.
"But privately owned gasoline-guzzlers are an archaic solution to the transportation problem, and they are not effective in today's society."
Why so quick to jump to sweeping, society-altering prognostications based on conclusions which you yourself recognize as applicable to a small-scale and optimal use case?
Your suggested alternative transport means all severely restrict your freedom of movement compared to a private automobile as they come with range and/or comfort compromises. They would shrink the options of citizens for long-distance ground travel as well (say goodbye to road trips).
"Of course this is a very small town and these changes do not scale up as easily as one would like"
Yes, and given that 22% of humanity lives in urban areas of 1 million+ [1] and 40% of humanity in cities over 100,000 [2], it might be premature to call people to political action to hasten the death of the automobile when you don't have a solution that scales well.
[1]https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.URB.MCTY.TL.ZS?view=... <br> [2]http://www.newgeography.com/content/005933-world-urban-areas...
Pontevedra is in Galicia, northern Spain. Here it rains like UK, and even worse. No Sun except a very few weeks a year.
Not all Spain is sunny, and not all the US is like California, Texas or Florida. You would freeze in Castille or Aragon in Winter. You would pray to see the sunlight in Asturias, Galicia or any region of the Bay of Biscay.
The last 10 years there are no longer rains, and the sun is here from late May to October, last year we have big wildfires in the last weekend of October, water restrictions from Sept due to the drought.
I remember when I was 10 years old rain a lot, nowadays no more than London ( I lived in London for a year).
Regards
And where I live on a tropical island in Asia has 25% more rainfall (2000mm annually), annual daily mean temp is 9deg Celsius higher (with 29deg C average highs June - September), and 25% fewer hours of sunshine.
So yeah, Pontevedra's climate may not technically be Mediterranean by Koppen classification but it sure as Hell is "mild" compared to where I live.
Please, get your facts straight. This is ridiculously inaccurate
Yes, but there's also a geographical difference. Countries in Europe are rather small, and a long history has restricted some land use. In many areas of the US land was almost a non-issue, so people settled more sparsely, and even cities became sprawls (e.g. Houston, LA).
I get your point, but it is not a good reason why we cannot do things better.
Central planning can theoretically avoid some growth pitfalls "skipping to the end" but in practice it has often had limited success beyond zoning promoting the obvious - high traffic areas are good for retail and often annoyance to residents. I am no expert but it seems predictive design performs best with planning.
I see that as the problem. We have limited resources and don't care very much about the future of them. Current value vs long term value.
But a lot of American cities were built around the automobile, so they would need a lot of changes to function in a post-automobile world. That makes such a transition much less likely. I think it would work better in older, East Coast and mid-western cities that largely predate the automobile.
I uber home when it's late and I've been drinking but that's really the only time I'm in a car.
I know I've got a somewhat special situation as I chose my apartment based on it's walk ability. However I've lived in other parks of the city and I had similar a similar experience. It just took a little longer to get places sometimes.
I believe eventually cars will be a shared service. Automated cars that will arrive whenever I need one. That will be the day.
"In Scottish geography, a Carse (the modern form of older Scots kerse) is an area of fertile, low-lying (typically alluvial) land occupying certain Scottish river valleys,[1] such as that of the River Forth."
I am forced to agree.
You're really looking at this from a very narrow mindset. It isn't going into the city that a lot of Americans really want and need cars, it's heading out of the city.
This may be shocking to people with a European upbringing, but when you have a vast country with lots of open space and beautiful nature, it's super awesome and amazingly freeing to just go wherever you want to on a whim. Wake up Saturday morning - let's head up to that state park with the cool water falls and hike around for the day. 10 minutes later you're on the road and an hour or two later you're surrounded by nature. Real nature too, not some small 10 acre park somewhere.
There's real freedom in being able to go where you want, when you want. It's not just a "convenience" thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...
Doesn't sound so outlandish to me.
If you want to see the endgame for cars as a primary means of transportation check out San Francisco.
We tried to go to Tahoe one weekend and gave up after waiting in line to get on the bay bridge for 2 hours and moving only 2 blocks.
Another time it literally took 10 hours to return from a ski trip and it’s supposed to be a 3 hour drive.
We don’t go anywhere in California now. If we want to ski, we fly out of state.
The problem is cars don’t scale.
Don't assume that every place is like the place you know. Visit the US, particularly the Midwest, and you'll come to understand why privately owned gasoline-guzzlers are the only solution to this particular transportation problem. The major cities are too dispersed with countless small population centers between them for any kind other kind of transportation to provide a feasible solution. It's not a matter of "engaging in democracy."
I say this as a local who has gotten into countless arguments with friends and family on the subject. I probably believed it as well a few lifetimes ago before I moved to NYC for 13 years and have since been completely converted.
It would require an enormous investment in public transportation and real bike lanes - I mean protected bike lanes like they're doing in NYC, not two faded white arrows in the rightmost lane - and then a generational shift where we convince the younger generations that car-ownership is overrated, wasteful, and terrible for the local economy.
But Americans care too much about comfort and convenience to do that. SUVs rule here.
You would then want to drive as far as you can, park, and take the alternative in.
It's made for people that don't live walking distance from a train/bus line, but also don't want to deal with the traffic/cost/overall hassle of going by car end-to-end.
There are 80 Park‑n‑Rides throughout the my metro area.
From Wikipedia: "There was a dense system of inter-city railways in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but after the decline of passenger railroad in North America in the 1960s, the inter-city lines decreased greatly and today the system is far less dense."
Wisconsin used to have inter-city rail servicing most/all of its population centers and even many of the smaller towns: https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3701p.rr006200/?r=0.514,0.298,...
Yes, today cars are the default, but that took a long time. Things will continue to change and it's hard to predict exactly how.
Your overall point is correct about how car-centric cities are in the USA vs Europe, but just wanted to point this out.
Based on how people talk about the EU, I thought it would be different, but it looks about the same as the US to me.
https://www.bicycles.net.au/2012/09/cycling-promotion-fund-r...
I like the idea of large cities improving their public transportation systems and having parking lots on the outskirts but it doesn't make financial sense in the smaller size cities. There are lots of people like me that live in a small down and commute into a city (60k people). I'd love better public transportation but it only makes financial sense in the "downtown" areas.
Private vehicle ownership isn’t about solving society’s transportation issue. As far as consumers are concerned, a car is one of the most significant and life changing purchases they’ll ever make. It gives them far more than just a solution to a ‘transport problem’, it provides the freedom to pretty much go anywhere and do anything at any time. If your idea is ‘convince people they don’t actually want cars’, then your idea is going to fail.
Sure they do, just not in all situations. I'm all for walkable city centers, downtowns, parks and such, but I also very much love to drive my car. I'm happy to vote for more pedestrian/public-transport friendly metropolitan areas (and do), as long as there's also non-metro areas for me to live on my privately owned land and drive my privately owned car as I please.
Regardless of what you think of this policy, this is the level of reasoning of a 14 year old.
Which it is fine.
But unless you are totally naked, your body (not your private property) is covered by your private property and/or carries it.
It is clear that a car occupies a lot more space than your clothes and carry-on belongings, but as said earlier that is only quantitative and not qualitative.
And cars don't kill people (yet), their drivers may.
Of course, I would say that this is an excellent use of public space as opposed to infrastructure dedicated to cars.
I read this as more that we can't just default to subsidising private cars in a public space. Roads, parking and other infrastructure that de facto subsidize and encourage private car usage but which often are considered "free".
We finance the baseline of education/transportation infrastructure from public funds because we believe that improves productivity, and performance of civic duties in a democracy across the board. Purely privately owned education/transportation is politically contentious for various reasons, right? Enclosure of the commons, economic inequality, limited avenues for upward mobility and all that, right?
Lastly, a pedestrian on city-founded sidewalks is "a private citizen occupying public space" just as well. There's no moral qualitative difference between an individual pedestrian, an individual on a bicycle, an individual in a car [1], or a group of individuals in a tram or bus. We can argue about occupancy and all that, but that's just quantitative difference of maybe an order of magnitude at worst. The use of public space should should primarily support the main activities of the general public.
[1] pollution from ICEs aside, but we're on track to fix that permanently.
A simple requirement would be a strict upper limit of 1m²/passenger at all times for vehicles and pedestrians. Trivial to fulfil for considerate means of transportation and quite impossible if you want to lug two tonnes of steel around with you.
I beg to differ - this doesn't gracefully handles special cases. Both my disabled neighbor or my friend taken by ambulance to the hospital (made up examples) would fare far worse than in the current system.
We already have have a better system to divide that among people - those who care highly about particular issue can reserve more space or whatever with small green tokens.
>if you want to lug two tonnes of steel around with you
An easy snark, but this two tonnes[1] reliably brings home a week worth of groceries, drives me 2hrs to meet family, and occasionally delivers tools and materials to various points. All that on the cheap, and with easily calculable costs. Prohibiting it by governmental fiat would surely give us various nice well understood savings, but would cause a lot of loss, both direct and via lost opportunities. I'd be much more reliant on service providers - typically large companies - that would provide the service at the time, cost and quality level I would have little to no control over.
Thanks, but no thanks; I don't want to be any more dependent on goodwill of businesses than I already am.
[1] 1090kg in my case, to be exact.
All the talk of banning cars seems to come from people so privileged that other people invisibly provide all the services of the road network to them, delivering their stuff and so on. I mean if a person’s entire life is based on Netflix and Amazon and Uber Eats in an apartment full of stuff that just magically appeared sure they don’t need a car, and no one is forcing them to buy one. But they are so vocal that everyone who hasn’t chosen that lifestyle should be penalised, and they can’t even clearly articulate the alternatives. An hour outside London “public transport” is one bus in the morning and another in the afternoon. But yeah, let’s all get self-driving trams or something on every B-road...
Right now I enjoy the perks of having everything near by in the city center, but if my city went pedestrian-first, I would move to the countryside and simply drive to customers when the need occasionally be. But that's feasible only because after all those years, only since I'm in senior technical position in knowledge based sector, and could easily work remotely, and also could work 20hrs-week and earn well enough.
But that's not possible for everybody right now.
No such luck for young people who are just launching their careers, or who are for whatever reason having local responsibilities like, for example, a sick parent. Doubly no such luck for people in service economy "gigs", working for peanuts and by necessity having to perform labor at their workplaces.
Truly, a perspective of privilege.
Taxes on fuel raise £50Bn/year for the exchequer, which is double the amount spent by the government on all transportation of all kinds. No one considers it to be “free”, and in fact drivers subsidise everything else.
How many lives has the road system saved, by the way? What do ambulances drive on? Or even ordinary drivers taking sick or injured relatives to the hospital themselves?
This seems to be the key point why it works.
you can walk from side to side of Paris in a tad more than one hour with a good rhythm, and two hours if you take it normally.
So, this city is about 2 km across, which is very small, a village, considering smaller cities are more sparsely populated than an European metropolis.
Drop into street view in the city centre and have a look around. It's not a village.
In my country villages are very often https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_settlement , going on for kilometers along some road, with farming land on both sides.
Small to medium cities (< 100 000 people) are often very dense because they're mostly made out of commieblocks or old tenament houses.
It's much easier to live without a car in a city.
BTW: this village goes on for 20 km. It has 6000 people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zawoja
For comparison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legionowo is the most densely populated city in Poland, it has about 50 000 people, and is about 3x5 km of low buildings. And still about 10% of the city is a forest :)
Cars waste so much space that people are used to bloated cities.
Additionally, Paris is not exactly a demonstration of how larger cities need cars considering that about 70% of its inhabitants commute without using a car at all.
Maybe in tomorrow's edition?
But even dense populated cities like SF dont have a pedestrian zone. It is one of the rare things I miss quality of life wise.
Anyways, from that article, if you have a change in a city's government, change is a lot more likely to happen. If only there were some time-limitations on mayor posts and the council.
I spend a good chunk of the year in Bologna, Italy. The city centre there is a roughly ~4km^2 Zona Traffico Limitato - an area in which only certain vehicles are allowed during certain hours. Pretty much every city in Italy has such a zone and 4km^2 to me seems to be the ideal size for it.
That being said I know a few people who live in the centre and judging by their experiences, I wouldn't want to move there. It's so densely packed that noise bounces off the walls effectively amplifying itself. Also there are no residential waste bins so if you miss trash day during the summer your organic waste turns into an unholy bag of stink.
Walkable cities are a nice concept, but one has to watch out for one perverse incentive that is created along the way: pack everything as densely as possible.
For larger cities I think it would still be possible to have many "no-car" isles, paired with good public transportation available for anyone at "any" place (which can be done today by e.g. using this small and _slow_ self-driving mini buses to connect the home/side streets with the underground trains, regular trains and potentially normal sized buses, you just need to deploy enough of them with a good rout planing algorithm and a smartphone app, through it might be slightly expensive).
Van and trucks can enter the city the first time in the morning, so things are ok, and there are no problems for that.
The city itself is a "round island", so cars can go close to the estuary and be close to the city, so get into city center takes less than 15 minutes.
Forcing all deliveries to happen in the early morning sounds like a massive pain in the butt.
For example: Forcing a lunch/dinner restaurant to have people there early to deal with inventory or delivering inventory to a diner during breakfast rush are both far from ideal.
Any industry that routinely has to get materials (e.g. skilled trades) delivered will be inconvenienced by not being able to take delivery during mid-morning or after lunch, this can unnecessarily stretch out jobs (and cost more $$).
I guess if the only industries in your city are white collar or tourism it's fine.
Better to just not allow noncommercial vehicles during certain times.
>For example: Forcing a lunch/dinner restaurant to have people there early to deal with inventory or delivering inventory to a diner during breakfast rush are both far from idea
TBH,restaurants the most happier with this changes. More people in the streets means more customers. If the van can get into the door, there is an entry zones, where delivery can be done with less than 5 min walk.
Disclaimer, my father is a deliveryman for restaurants.
> Any industry that routinely has to get materials (e.g. skilled trades) delivered will be inconvenienced by not being able to take delivery during mid-morning or after lunch, this can unnecessarily stretch out jobs (and cost more $$).
Nope, those industries are not in the pedestrian zone, in Galicia, there is a lot of industrial areas for that matter.
For white-collar, these entry areas, allow delivers to walk less than 5 min, so it's ok.
Is not walk/no-walk, the city did awesome to allow entry zones and make the walking culture for all of us.
I should have said industrial foodservice. Are there no schools, hotels, etc. in the city center? Do catering services not deliver lunches to the city center?
>Nope, those industries are not in the pedestrian zone, in Galicia, there is a lot of industrial areas for that matter.
Um, yes, you still have skilled trades. These are the people installing new light fixtures in office buildings and replacing the blower motor for a building's HVAC. Not being able to do diagnostic work and then send someone around later in the day to actually perform repairs is like getting shot in the foot to any business that does repair work.
I support not allowing commuter traffic in city centers but not allowing commercial vehicle traffic seems like needlessly cutting the clock cycle of every part of the economy that deals with physical goods by a factor two or three.
It's only a problem because you decide things has to be exactly like they are. But with other constraints the society would have landed on an other configuration.
What is your solution for your economy when BOTH decide to relocate to an administrative region that DOESN'T ban cars?
I've considered other places to live in Asia, namely Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan. I found that used Japanese sports cars (I own several) were all prohibitively expensive to import/register in each. The crazy-low "total cost of ownership" for automobiles is one of several reasons that Japan is my primary base of operations/residence.
For example a shopping street where no cars are allowed could have parking lots at the back of the shops. So trucks can supply the shops and customers can pickup large goods with their car.
Another method is what we call in Dutch a 'Cauliflower-neighbourhood'. The closer a road comes to the place were people live, the smaller they become. And speed limits will go down as well. The limits most of the time go from 50km/h to 30km/h to 15 or even 5km/h.
I'm living in one of the closes villages around Pontevedra, I'm heabilly use the city, and I'm doing some remote job for an SF startup.
If you have questions, I'm happy to help and provide feedback.
What do you do when you have to buy a few boxes of beer for a party that are too heavy to carry?
How do emergency services work?
The city that has banned the cars is the city centre, but is a round island, so in 10-25 min walk, there are parking slots, where you can drive from.
2) Shopping trolley, instead of buying a lot one day, you ended that each day you pick up a few things. (And this is great, 15 min day walking)
3) All the emergency services can go to the city centre, so cars are banned, but if you have an event or emergency cars can get into, here is the common sense rule.
And there is a benefit here, kids are in the street, and due a lot of kids in the street, that moves the street from unsafe, to full of #know people, that make things super safe.
I think Rewe (a supermarket chain) is doing something like this in (parts of) Germany; but I believe they use gas-driven cars.
Is there something like that in your city?
- unwind after work
- get exercise
- get outside
- time to think
You would think it would be a lot more popular but it's not. It seems more like there must be something wrong with you if you walk on a daily basis lol. ... societal norms I guess.
This entire thread is predicated on building cities for young single men
Interestingly, while Amsterdam's historic inner city is fully open to cars, you don't really see much of them - in part because it's just not practical, in part because parking is very expensive.
https://www.wral.com/news/local/story/163829/
The city reopened it to traffic, however, and "revitalized" the area, resulting in a booming downtown economy:
https://www.metrojacksonville.com/article/2007-may-learning-...
I love pedestrian districts in cities. Copenhagen comes to mind. However, pedestrian district plans need to be considered carefully, else they backfire.
When I go downtown, I usually don’t park on Fayetteville, I usually park a few blocks away and walk.
All of which is in TFA[1] the person you're replying to linked
[1] https://www.metrojacksonville.com/article/2007-may-learning-...
I'm not sure if it's what you intended but implying the whole thing is from 1977 is misleading.
Why did it work, when Raleigh failed? What needs to be "considered carefully", exactly?
(The large college nearby definitely helps in VT's case. But what else?)
https://www.churchstmarketplace.com/
https://www.churchstmarketplace.com/about/history
- Burlington is the biggest city in VT, and being on Lake Champlain and relatively close to the best ski areas in the state, it attracts a lot of tourists year round
- A ton of local businesses downtown, urban/residential neighborhoods are also very close
- A fair amount of parking (multiple parking garages, nearby on-street parking and parking lots)
- There's City Hall Park, and the town promotes the 'culture', e.g. allowing street vendors and performers, and with the recentish ban on smoking, it's pushed most of the bums into the alleys/side streets
So I think the key to trying to do this is to encourage small business to minimize the feet/door so that there is a reasonable variety of services available.
This is not the best example but the first to pop to mind- compare to Pearl Street Mall, in Boulder, which seems to be doing well:
https://www.google.com/maps/@40.0180565,-105.2792529,3a,75y,...
Which, just skimming, looks to be laid out similar to Church Street.
Also, let's not overstate the differences. The actual pedestrian mall on Pearl is just a few blocks long. And Fayetteville in Raleigh these days, while not car-free, is part of a very walkable area of downtown Raleigh with lots of restaurants, a few hotels, some shops, new condo construction, some major businesses, the convention center, government offices, etc.
They later reopened it, but put in roads that let cars through, but very slowly. Seems to be a good compromise.
Closing a road entirely is probably something you should do once you're at such a level of pedestrian traffic that the car lanes are impeding pedestrians, which isn't terribly common in US cities. However, making areas where people don't drive fast is absolutely a win.
The city center closed part of the main street to cars when a four story enclosed mall of boutique stores was built. Within five years most of the mall and nearby stores were dying.
This was partly due to the growth of a pair of large enclosed malls 5 miles away which sucked business elsewhere. But I think most of the problem was that shoppers don't wants to walk outdoors in the long Michigan Winter. They needed to somehow enclose the pedestrian piazza to minimize peoples' exposure to the elements, but that wasn't in the budget.
First one was Kärntner Straße / Graben, which is pedestrians only.
https://www.streifzugmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/AM...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/82/Vienna%2...
I'm looking forward to more streets getting closed off to cars. Way too much space is reserved for cars already.
Proximity to mass transit and having density that already discourages driving helps.
Still, this was a pretty dead place at night. In 2008, I would go to one of the two bars there and it would be a literal ghost town, with stores boarded up with metal gates and such- it looked almost post-apocalyptic. It was a little better from 2011-2014, but still it was a quiet area at night.
After the pedestrian plaza was put in, the amount of foot traffic increased ten fold, particularly during the day when it was a heavily traffic-ed street. This brought in a new wave of bars and restaurants to the area, and its now a destination on its own, filled with people nearly 24/7. In fact it has gotten so popular and become such a destination, the city is now trying to introduce ordinances to reduce noise at night.
The change was instantaneous after the pedestrian plaza was put in place.
People seem to forget these days how much Jersey City was shit on up until 2011 or so. It was "jersey" and it was absolutely not a definite that it would gentrify.
Bed-Stuy Bushwick Gowanus East New York Bronx Inwood
It's a lot less impressive when you realize that they just banned cars from the area that was optimized for foot traffic anyway. Good on them for not trying to go to far and force people to walk/bike in areas designed for cars.
>"while people claim it as a right, in fact what they want are privileges."
Tangent: This is probably the most European quote ever. Roman senators, medieval lords, members of parliament, Napoleon, the Kaiser, etc, etc. could have all said this.
>And the same shopkeepers who complain are the ones who have survived in spite of the crisis
Surviving in spite of the crisis does not make the crisis fun or necessary. It took a lot of boarded up shops before my city took away the bike lanes and put back the on-street parking (no, the failed businesses did not coincide with the recession if anyone was wondering). You gotta do what works even if it's not what fits your political objectives. If an area of the city was designed for pedestrians that's probably what will work best there. If an area of the city was designed for cars then that's probably what will work best there. It's a disservice to taxpayers to use their money to jam a square peg in a round hole or vise-versa.
>The works were all financed locally and received no aid from regional or central government.
Good on them for not asking for a handout.
There's nothing European about it, despite the fantasy of Europe being comfortable with dictatorships. Driving a car is also a privilege in the US - try driving one without your state-sanctioned license to do so and you will discover that.
By the way, Members of Parliament are democratically elected so I am not sure how they fit in with the rest of the motley crew.
Here's a photo https://static.timesofisrael.com/www/uploads/2015/09/F141003...
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-to-close-of-west-bank-g...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2018/sep/16/car-fr... https://www.brussels.be/mobility-week-and-car-free-sunday-20...
"Outside" has become synonymous with car traffic, which is why children playing on the road feels so refreshing
That's why I wore shoes or rode a bike when I played in the streets.
I grew up in places with small yards and no parks nearby. The street is where we'd ride our bikes, have water balloon fights, play roller hockey, etc.
Yet, it was right in front of my house, so I could use the bathroom, get a snack and remained under the watchful eye of my mother, unlike, say, some distant park with a proper baseball field.
Fun fact: today is Yom Kippur.
Our zoning is such that those streets close at night, and I wouldn't recommend them in the late hours before they are officially closed.
First time I visit there made me wonder why not all towns aren't pedestrian like this. I mean most towns have nice sidewalks and are walkable but why not just banning cars. In addition to having less noise I can imagine plenty of other benefits.
> [La Cumbrecita] is completely pedestrian and reminiscent of the small German towns of the fifteenth century. One can hike up through the town (and then down) to the waterfall, a truly paradisiacal experience.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Cumbrecita
Visiting LA this summer, I knew I was in for a car heavy metropolis but this... I can't understand why people waste so much time of their precious life (usually alone which also greatly worsen the problem) - locked in a car.
Coming to the topic of the autonomous car revolution, which I frankly do not understand. Sometimes it feels like the ambition is to end up as the humans in WALL-E. What kind of life is that?
Ps. Coming from Europe, I crossed US by bicycle a few years ago, from NY to US. People say it's a country to be seen through a car, but I argue it's to be seen on a bike.
I also recently visited LA.....
Most people I know from smaller cities in Poland own cars or would love to own a car but simply cannot afford it as gas is really expensive, so are cars compared to incomes. When I visited I rented a car which allowed me to see so many things all over the country. I would not able to visit so many locations without a car.
Same goes for LA, renting a car allowed me to travel from LA to San Diego on a relatively short trip.
In NY over 50% households are car-free. In Chicago about 30% of households are car-free. People travel to cities for various reasons, often they don't do it daily.
My wife traveled to school by train in city of chicago for one year, then she switched to driving her car, she saved a lot of time on her commute, and didn't have to deal with weirdos on the trains at night.
Cars are here to stay. Some people drive less by utilizing services like amazon but then amazon needs to deliver packages, but, I guess that still minimizes fuel consumption as things are delivered in a more efficient way.