I wonder if the author has ever tried to walk across a stroad. It is a horrible experience: 5 lanes of traffic with no crosswalks or traffic lights. Left turns over 4 lanes are similarly irksome. There is no need for this apologism for stroads: certainly the author is not arguing we build more of them. He says something has to give: let it be the cars.
Interesting piece. I'd quibble with one point though:
> The same situation occurs on railroads: all uses want the same piece of infrastructure, leading to the usual problems of mixing trains of different speed classes on the same tracks. Freight bypasses are possible, but passenger bypasses are rare
France has built thousands of miles of what are effectively passenger bypasses: their LGVs (Lignes a Grand Vitesse).
The same approach would be useful for dealing with the ubiquitous electric scooters. The real danger of them lies not within the technology (or their use) itself, but in infrastructure that was designed to support cars instead.
Well, after Lime had to recall their scooters from the Swiss market due to their nasty habit of spontaneously engaging their front brakes while in full swing I, for one, wouldn't be so sure.
I read Jane Jacobs in grad school (surprisingly relevant even after five decades), and I think she would question whether all of that traffic needs to exist in the first place. The article mentions "micromanaged" zoning in North America, one element of which seems to be that no residential window should ever face a commercial enterprise. Allowing small shops and restaurants to exist within residential areas (as they do in Europe and elsewhere) would eliminate some amount of the car traffic we current accept as normal. When every destination requires a car, every street becomes a stroad.
I think that's a fair assessment of Jane Jacobs' view. At the same time, a lot of people read Jacobs somewhat selectively. She may not have wanted multi-lane traffic to go through Washington Square Park and [have wanted] mixed-use organic growth. However, she was also in general very much not in favor of bulldozing swaths of low-rise housing to build large apartment blocks as many seem to feel is the antidote to high housing prices in the city of their choice.
ADDED: I expect a lot of folks here would absolutely characterize Jabobs as a NIMBY in a lot of ways given that I think it's fair to say she was far more concerned with the livability of cities for their residents than enabling a large population influx.
Low-rise housing isn't really the problem. Take Barcelona, for example, which has nearly twice the population density as New York City—the U.S.'s densest city. Barcelona does have high-rises, but much of its density can be attributed to its narrow streets.
So, while bulldozing low-rise buildings in poor neighborhoods to build highrise apartment buildings would increase density, it's a very costly and inequitable way of doing it, especially when SO much area of NYC (and all U.S. cities) is designated exclusively for personal automobiles.
Highrise apartments ("bulk housing") is the obvious outcome of where ridiculous zoning has taken us. If cities were allowed to organically build upwards in duplexes and triplexes, we'd have naturally higher density/capacity without the need for adrenaline shots of highrise apartment buildings.
>If cities were allowed to organically build upwards
Zoning is no doubt sometimes the issue. But there's a lot of evidence that, given availability of land at the time of initial construction, the organic behavior tends toward detached single-family homes and duplexes.
initial construction is not an end state though. Towns change over time. Some locations are desirable and rich will always keep them like that because they are willing to pay for it. Some locations become less desirable and the rich move out leaving a poorer class to move in, this class is willing for an apartment because it is cheaper for them.
Indeed, they do. And I'm not defending all resistance to zoning changes, etc. But, if you have a large swath of 1-2 story housing, even in the absence of significant zoning and permitting restrictions, it's probably going to be a very slow process for that to densify into 3-5 story housing organically.
That New York City number is for all 5 boroughs though including Staten Island, which is almost suburban. Manhattan is about twice as dense as Barcelona.
(Density numbers are always tricky. The figures change a lot depending upon which boundaries you use.)
Livable streets, which are a joy to walk down, are essential. And the author of this piece is correct that you can't just use a top-down plan to segregate roads and streets.
It seems to me that the key is to find ways to make automobiles less mandatory in general. So instead of needing two or three lanes for automobiles in each direction, you only need one. And, ideally, a reduction in the need for curbside parking.
This can be accomplished through tax policies, zoning, and ordinances that promote walkability and transit-oriented development. Shift taxes off buildings and onto land value. Allow mixed-use development. End mandatory minimum parking requirements. Implement congestion pricing and smart parking meters. Use pigouvian penalties for pollution, in proportion to the harm caused.
All of those could be implemented without requiring top-down planning or accumulating more municipal debts.
I'm all for spending money on parks, libraries, bike trails, and public transit, but you can't just drop those into a community where all the economic incentives incline us towards the McLifestyle with big box stores, strip malls, and drive-thru.
If you live in a walkable area, handicapped accessibility means ramps and elevators, and handicapped-accessible public transit.
Even in our current largely non-walkable cities, there's neighborhoods with high walkability scores. Doesn't make sense for planners to hand out edicts from on high, which force these places to spend money on parking that they don't want. Which, by the way, causes sprawl since more land is devoted to cars rather than people.
It makes sense to mandate that a certain ratio of parking be allotted to the handicapped. But if the total parking is zero, then the ratio would net out to zero.
I know this is well-intended, but "what about the disabled?" has become almost a canard for suggesting the status-quo is ideal for disabled people. It's absolutely not.
Virtually every suggestion this author made would benefit disabled people. Denser/walkable cities aren't just good for walkers. They're easier to traverse in wheelchairs, crutches, etc, too. A 2+-ton, 100+hp vehicle capable of going 150+mph is not the best way to transport a disabled person. It's just what we have available, given our current city layouts. We can do better.
When you look at busy streets where all of the houses have turned their backs on the noise, pollution and general filth that comes with regular traffic think how different it would be if every one of those vehicles 'sat in traffic' and inching forward was an electric vehicle.
People could have clean windows and open their front doors to the street. They could even grow a few plants. Crossing the road even in solid traffic would be safer just because you could hear.
If individual communities could vote if their street was electric only then there would be an incentive for people to get their street essentially car free. Imaginably the lamp posts would be charging points too.
Streets designed a century or more ago and where community once thrived would come back to life. House price values would be vastly more for 'electric' streets just because the standard of living is better. So you could buy an electric car and offset that against the higher valuation of the house - assuming you are owning and not renting.
As for old fashioned cars blazing through and creating pollution, there are license plate reading cameras and fines. As for the folks from the countryside that still have their old ICE vehicle, they just have to park a street or two away when visiting their friends on 'electric' streets. This will obviously stress out the parking in neighbouring streets incentivising them to go electric too. Eventually everyone can have a livable street even if there is lots of slow moving traffic moving at a snails pace. It just won't be noisy traffic with killer fumes.
I think the combination of ideas that Silicon Valley is inching us towards is essentially what Personal Rapid Transit has always been.
Electric cars are about eliminating the issue of pollution. The idea of ridesharing is to eliminate the maintenance, debt, and storage costs of owning a car. Self-driving cars are about eliminating the accidents and wasted time spent driving. Hyperloop is about using up less valuable surface space just for transportation, and hiding the ugliness of roads underground.
Personal Rapid Transit has been able to accomplish literally all those goals since its inception. Each pod is autonomous, on-demand, driverless, and electric. It can be either on a hanging monorail, or undergound, to avoid wasting valuable surface space. And it doesn't require miles of ugly gray asphalt.
That's why I mentioned smart parking meters. They would set prices so that there's always spots available for those willing to pay more. The end result being less congestion and shorter commuting times for everyone, by avoiding the need to circle the block.
At highway speeds yes, at city speeds no. At highway speeds most noise is from wind and tires, so electric vehicles don't help too much.
Electric vehicles still don't help cities too much, they still sit unused for 95% of the time time, and occupy a large amount of space compared to bicycles, pedestrians, or public transit.
This all sounds great, and you're not wrong, but like many on HN you come across as someone who's living in a bit of a bubble.
Electric vehicles simply are not on the table for a massive swathe of the population who are driving $2000 clunkers that they need in order to be able to get to/from work every day. Until we can get electric cars on the used market for that kind of price range, that still have the effectively-unlimited range of a gas car, this entire idea is a pipe dream.
Penalizing people for doing what they have to do in order to go about their lives is a recipe for a populist uprising that undoes all of your changes and sets the effort back a decade. Spending millions on expensive, privacy-invading license plate cameras to charge people a fine for going through the motions of their life is dystopian and horrible - and doesn't make good financial sense. Far better to directly incentivize people to get the electric car you want them driving, rather than punishing them.
If gas prices had continued to rise like they were doing a decade ago, then we might be in a situation now where it would make financial sense for more people to convert to an electric car. This didn't happen, and so right now for most people it makes no sense to do. Put an artificial barrier like your penalty in place, and they'll elect Doug Ford in order to stop you. It has to actually make real economic sense, not artificial, or it will fall apart.
>Penalizing people for doing what they have to do in order to go about their lives is a recipe for a populist uprising that undoes all of your changes and sets the effort back a decade
True. The yellow vest riots in France were ignited by a gas tax. Of course, probably anything would've set them off since they have a completely different political climate.
A city designed around cars is still a miserable place to be, no matter the type of drivetrain. Needing 4000 lbs of steel and batteries to get a bag of groceries is a horribly inefficient way of life.
Cities should be designed so that walking/biking/buses provide 90% of your transit needs with SOVs as the exception, not the rule.
So what, my wife is supposed to push a shopping cart in one hand and a baby carriage in the other a kilometer or two in order to go shopping? Spending two hours in the process instead of 20 minutes?
I really question whether the average HN poster considers the normal person's use case. Nobody _wants_ to drive all over the damned place, we do it because it's the only thing that makes sense for a dynamic lifestyle.
Baby carriages usually have some cargo space. Put the groceries there.
Also, we don't have to completely design cities around cars to support the single digit percentage of population that has infants at any given time. Some people can still drive even in pedestrian focused cities.
Also, if the environment is not soul-crushing and polluted, then it might actually be pleasant to go for a short walk.
If you have to push a baby carriage 2 kilometers just to go to the store, then that is, by definition, not a very walkable neighborhood.
Neighborhoods with the highest walkability scores have good stores within a couple blocks radius. Or, in other words, about the same distance that it takes to traverse a Wal-Mart parking lot.
I have never lived in a city--and that includes Manhattan and Cambridge--that had a "good" grocery store within a couple of blocks. I've had small markets but that's not a grocery store. Though, yes, you can get grocery delivery these days.
Within a couple of blocks?? Traveling up to a mile to grocery stores is totally reasonable, it doesn't need to be a couple blocks. I've lived in multiple places in the U.S. that had real grocery stores reasonably walkable to a large portion of residents. Stuff like Trader Joes, Safeway, Kroger… I'm not talking small markets.
>If you have to push a baby carriage 2 kilometers just to go to the store, then that is, by definition, not a very walkable neighborhood.
>Neighborhoods with the highest walkability scores have good stores within a couple blocks radius. Or, in other words, about the same distance that it takes to traverse a Wal-Mart parking lot.
Well, that parent is just totally misguided. The idea that walkable means no more walking than you'd do when you drive to a Walmart… real nonsense.
People who actually live in walkable neighborhoods walk all the time with babies and groceries and can go 1-2km easily.
As others mentioned, lots of baby carriages exist that have extra room for stuff like groceries. I tended to wear the baby in a sling while pushing a larger shopping cart in order to get groceries at the multiple places in around a 1.5 mile radius from my home at the time that I had an infant. Americans way overuse strollers and carriages.
What makes for walkability is quiet-enough streets that were safe as opposed to having to walk by overly-fast heavy traffic or cross at dangerous intersections.
I'm rather shocked at how complacent everyone in this thread seems. Why is it ok to settle for neighborhoods that are built around cars and not suited to the tasks of every day living, outside of them.
In cold conditions, walking a mile is terrible. You shouldn't be needing to cross many intersections just to go shopping.
The car infrastructure is half of what makes everything spread out in the first place. The other half being zoning and underdeveloped land, often held that way for speculation purposes.
It is totally conceivable to live somewhere that has good shopping within two blocks radius. I've lived in multiple apartments where this was true. This should not be some kind of crazy unattainable thing, this should be the default.
I am strongly opposed to neighborhoods built around cars. And I definitely think it's far better if basic needs are closer than one mile but…
> In cold conditions, walking a mile is terrible.
Or you can just be decently prepared and have warm clothing. If you go faster, you stay warmer. That said, I'll admit that I go on less mile+ walks when the weather is rougher (although I do have Raynaud syndrome).
> You shouldn't be needing to cross many intersections just to go shopping
What we want is to avoid crossing traffic. The number of intersections isn't really the issue. In places like Portland where the street grid makes for tiny blocks, it's not a big deal that you may cross 10 intersections when you go just a half mile, as long as it's the tiny streets where cars have to pull over just to let another car go the other way and traffic is really slow.
I otherwise really agree with all the gist of your comment. Car-focused living is the source of probably the majority of all the ills in our modern life. It's anti-social (people don't see neighbors and run into friends on the street), it's dangerous, it creates unsustainable development patterns, and it's destroyed huge portions of our natural environment even leaving aside all the pollution and the costs of SO much paved roads and parking lots…
In Brooklyn, I have several large and quite reasonable grocery stores within 3-5 blocks, easily walkable.
On Manhattan it's different because the land is so expensive. There are very few grocery stores around Times Square or Bryant Park: those who afford to live there don't to grocery-shopping themselves, and just won't notice the expense of food delivered right to their door.
> if the environment is not soul-crushing and polluted
It's not. It's very nice. But you're asking for a lot of time out of the day, to do something unrealistic, when a quick car ride will sort it all out in a much simpler fashion.
I'll buy an electric car when I can. But here I am, another privileged HN poster. I don't think most people are going to be able to do that.
You're clearly not a parent if you think for a second that the tiny cargo space available at the bottom of a carriage is going to work for shopping for a family. C'mon now. Unless she's going to literally go to the store every day, which is a logistical nightmare - we live in a world where big-box Costco shopping is the only cost effective method.
> we don't have to completely design cities around cars to support the single digit percentage of population that has infants at any given time
Natalistic policies are going to be needed if we want to keep our birth rate high enough to replace ourselves.
Even that is overly car oriented, because community infrastructure accounting for electric bikes or scooters might handle an even better quality of life than cars.
Speaking of parking, I think a lot of the need for street parking would go away if underground parking became more ubiquitous (and less expensive relative to street parking). Make street parking (if it exists at all) for loading/unloading only (maybe max 5 minutes), and basically build the city atop a bunch of underground parking structures.
Obviously this wouldn't be easy to pull off for existing buildings, but for new construction it'd make life a lot easier for everyone (drivers have an easier time parking, pedestrians/cyclists have more room for dedicated sidewalks and bicycle lanes, etc.).
Underground parking is sometimes put in as a requirement for new development. But even with new construction where you start by digging a hole in the ground, it's relatively expensive. It's sometimes a necessity when there simply isn't room in the area for e.g. commuters driving in to park, but it doesn't come cheap.
Underground parking will always be expensive. It is expensive to build and engineers need to check on it once in a while. (walls aren't collapsing, water isn't filling it up, there is enough ventilation). While it can work, it isn't cheap. A parking lot is as cheap as you can get parking (just parking cost, ignoring externals)
The trick is to avoid the need for parking in the first place. A small town can get by with on street parking. As the town grows it can get by with one parking lot on the edge of town if the growth goes up as well as out. Allow tearing down old historic buildings for something more modern. Allow houses to turn into duplex to turn into 5 floor apartments. (I stopped at 5 floors for a reason: for engineering reasons more than 5 tends to not be cost effective though in some locations the rich may be say who cares about cost and build higher anyway) More radically allow someone to turn their first floor into a shop and live upstairs.
All of this allows people to live, work, and shop withing walking distance. Once you actually walk most places not having a car is something to think about. When you have to drive to work like most people do (because there are zero houses/apartments within walking distance of the office park their job is in) buying a car is the most cost effective way to have a car and then the incremental cost of using the car for other things is nearly zero.
I don't see.why above-ground parking is not considered. 5-7 levels of parking are about as many times as dense as a one-level traditional parking lot. It must cost much cheaper to build, though, especially if you can't dig a lot, due to financial or environmental constraints.
Above-ground parking would be okay, too, but those tend to be dedicated buildings specifically for parking, whereas I'm advocating more for building everything on top of the parking.
I suppose it'd be possible to do that even with above-ground parking, though. First level would be storefronts + the garage entrance, second through Nth levels would be parking, then (N+1)th through (N+M)th levels would be offices and/or residential and/or more retail and/or whatever else.
IIRC a city of two in the Emirate states (Masdar?) are /we’re going to be like this. Most parking is underground or at perimeter (though given the climate, unless they ventilate or condition it must be like an oven).
> Bicyclists prefer riding on major streets as well, which is why Copenhagen prioritizes bike infrastructure on major streets rather than on side streets – on side streets car traffic is so light and slow that mixed traffic is not so bad, but the desirable through-routes remain the major streets.
I've never really understood the appeal of major roads for bicyclsts. I much prefer sidestreets when bicycling and don't mind cutting over a block to have to deal with less traffic. I think this demand along with a general blowback against cars due to American culture treating non-vehicle traffic as second class leads to bad outcomes.
In my town, a six-lane arterial connects neighborhoods with a major N-S arterial, downtown, and past downtown is a US highway. The town has taken that six lane road and turned it into a two lane road with center turn lane, bicycle lanes, and parking. What should be a 40+ mph speed limit is now a 25 mph speed limit.
This has bad outcomes for drivers and bicyclists.
Effectively, from the perspective of a driver, this road is now equivalent to any of a dozen parallel roads: single lane in each direction and 25 mph. This disincentivizes drivers from cutting over to the arterial, effectively spreading out the traffic onto parallel roads (many of which lack traffic lights when they hit the major N-S artery). However, it remains the busiest road for vehicle traffic, and because it is so wide, speed significantly faster than 25 mph feel safe, so speed variance can be higher, with traffic typically traveling between 20-40 mph. It's particularly sketchy for traffic turning on from side streets. Drivers expect traffic to be going the posted 25 mph, but are sometimes surprised by the person going 40 mph. So, drivers generally get where they are going more slowly, but at increased danger due to increase in speed variance.
But it also increases danger for bicyclists in two ways. First, it encourages the bicyclists to use the still relatively busy arterial. It's not clear why anyone would want to incentivize this. For a bicyclist, any of the parallel streets were already attractive options and would get the bicyclist where he was going. Second, because of the changed incentives, those parallel roads are now busier than before (making the bicycle lane on the busier road more attractive). Whatever a bicyclist decides, there is an increase in vehicle/bicycle interactions.
A much better solution would have been to keep the arterial an arterial and make dedicated bicycle lanes on some of the parallel roads. This would encourage a separation of vehicle and bycicle traffic that wouldn't really inconvenience either one of them.
> In my town, a six-lane arterial connects neighborhoods with a major N-S arterial, downtown, and past downtown is a US highway. The town has taken that six lane road and turned it into a two lane road with center turn lane, bicycle lanes, and parking. What should be a 40+ mph speed limit is now a 25 mph speed limit.
This is a description of a heavily car-oriented urban plan.
Ideally no urban street should have 40+ mph driving; it’s grossly unsafe for pedestrians/cyclists. Save those speeds for the highway. In my opinion cities should not have 6 lane streets. Such wide bands of pavement break up the neighborhood and are very unfriendly to everything but cars. Unfortunately, once you have built your city on such a plan with a 100 foot gap between buildings, figuring out what better to do with the space gets tricky.
> Ideally no urban street should have 40+ mph driving; it’s grossly unsafe. Save those speeds for the highway.
A six lane, 40+ mph urban arterial street is a (significant) highway, though it may not be a controlled-access freeway (in practice, they have more controlled access than less significant urban streets, though often less than freeways, which also have higher speed limits; it's a continuum.)
Yes, and we shouldn’t put at-grade highways through the middle of city neighborhoods with housing/small businesses/etc. along the sides, no grade-separated pedestrian crossings, etc.
I grew up in Southern CA, and the way cities there are crisscrossed by super-wide 6-lane roads (and every destination is surrounded by parking lots) is very disruptive to anything but a car-dominated lifestyle/culture. In many cities people almost exclusively travel by car, even though the weather is pleasant throughout the year. As a consequence lives are heavily scheduled and people spend little time talking to their neighbors.
I also spent significant time growing up in a colonial city in southern Mexico, designed around narrow streets with little available parking. The cultural difference was stark: in the Mexican city people walked everywhere and it was impossible to go anywhere without running into multiple friends in the street.
> Yes, and we shouldn’t put at-grade highways through the middle of city neighborhoods
We generally don't. Arterial roads—what was being discussed—are typically between neighborhoods forming a widely-spaced network, from which a dense network of smaller roads branch off which are the roads “through the middle of city neighborhoods”.
I've never really understood the appeal of major roads for bicyclsts. I much prefer sidestreets when bicycling and don't mind cutting over a block to have to deal with less traffic
If side streets are available, they're great. But many places simply have none. And especially on bikes, most people prefer to get where they're going via the most expeditious route possible.
I've never really understood the appeal of major roads for bicyclsts.
I enjoy the calm of side streets, but any route that is low in traffic is frequently (maybe even axiomatically) much longer or full of stop signs, both of which can be rather burdensome to a cyclist. E.g. I can bike to work 5 miles down the main road, or I can avoid cars almost entirely but it's 9 miles.
In my town, a six-lane arterial [...] turned it into a two lane road with center turn lane, bicycle lanes, and parking
A 40mph+ thoroughfare with parking added on both sides? That's so crazy I feel like we're missing something here. Does this road go right through the heart of downtown? High speeds are not really compatible with a downtown replete with bars, shopping, nightlife, & pedestrians.
A missing piece of information here may be that bicycle lanes on major streets in Copenhagen are physically separated from the roadway by a curb, so the only vehicle/bicycle interactions are at intersections.
> I've never really understood the appeal of major roads for bicyclsts. I much prefer sidestreets when bicycling and don't mind cutting over a block to have to deal with less traffic. I think this demand along with a general blowback against cars due to American culture treating non-vehicle traffic as second class leads to bad outcomes.
It's about not getting lost when you travel someplace where you don't go often, at least for me.
An avenue is not a stroad; while it can have multiple lanes and less of an expectation of mixed use of the asphalt than a residential street, it's not designed for high speeds, and will often contain many speed-inhibition mechanisms (crossroads, traffic lights, curves, etc).
A good approach is to split the lanes - instead of 3+3 as in a high-speed road, they have 2+2 in the middle for thru-traffic, sandwiched by strip of sidewalk, plus another lane on each side for local traffic, and finally another sidewalk next to the buildings.
Queens Boulevard[0] is like that, with through-traffic lanes and local lanes divided by a barrier, and it's very much not a pleasant experience to walk or bike near it. It's just so wide, loud, and dangerous[1], though there have been some recent fixes to improve safety.
A large stretch of Queens Boulevard has a bike lane alongside of its local lanes now. I just biked the length of it the other day, it's actually quite a pleasant urban biking experience in terms of safety (though not in terms of scenery). The lane is wide, separated from traffic, and the intersections with cars are sensibly designed[0].
(In the map view below, the bike lane is the green lane, where the tan painted area is designated for pedestrians. But almost no pedestrians are going to be walking parallel with the road between the local and through lanes. And if they are, they're likely going to be on the actual median instead of in the painted area. So it's safe to bike in the tan paint, and leave the entire green bike lane as a buffer area. This may sound disrespectful to pedestrians, but when I biked the entire length of the bike lane the other day, I didn't see a single pedestrian walking in this area or even on the median.)
I think ideally you would have at least three separate but interconnected ground transport networks: one for pedestrians, one for bikes, and one for motor vehicles.
I think this piece takes too long to arrive at a underwhelming point, seemingly that prime transportation and activity corridors all want to co-locate because of interrelated and natural, rational reasons. This finding isn't obvious but is easily revealed, and though it's worth talking about, there's deeper insights if we continue the examination further.
Early road bypasses failed precisely because of the lack of development restrictions: they increased traffic and cheap land value drew businesses seeking to capitalize on it, so now the bypasses of yesteryear are of the urban fabric. The classic way to armor against this is to make the roadway limited access, and then you have development concentrating only at intersection nodes. Or the jurisdictions at play can always place additional restrictions on development.
But underneath all the SimCity we can play with roads and zoning, the transportation geography will always remain constrained to edges and nodes, corridors and chokepoints. It's these chokepoints that truly define the way people will get around, because getting to a point beyond them will require crossing it, and there's only ever a handful of time-effective paths to take between you and it. Bridges and mountain passes are the obvious chokepoints, but in a car-oriented world so are motorway interchanges and meetings of big arterials. Much criticism is levelled at US suburban development where single-family homes are plopped onto winding streets that only discharge to big avenues at subdivision entrances, so everyone has to take the big roads to get anywhere, but most European cities aren't that different: the lesser streets aren't passable at a pace that motorists have come to expect, and rarely does an uninterrupted network of them exist to get into a different part of the city using only small streets. Although the planning forces, commercial forces, and histories are different, they both arrive at the same result, of cars being channeled to a small number of higher-capacity paths, instead of distributed more evenly throughout.
There's cities that have leveraged the grid to great effect to arrive at a less crushing result. Las Vegas is a good example: attractions are located along a narrow corridor with heavy traffic that locals have learned to avoid. The rest of the urban area forms a large grid with dozens of avenues at regular intervals, and amenities and retail are sprinkled among housing. You have many options of traversing the urban area from one side to another.
There's other urbanized areas that have the same basic form, but they're imbalanced by a nearby node that draws traffic and upsets the network. Plano, TX looks really similar, but is a surburb to much larger Dallas. Other times, there's far too little commercial in a sea of residential, like much of South Florida or Inland Empire or Oklahoma City, or the desired directions of travel don't match the grid, like in Orange County, CA. Sometimes the grid is limited by natural obstructions that create chokepoints, significantly impairing the utility of the grid, like in Seattle, Minneapolis, or the connections of Manhattan to elsewhere.
One of the goals of railroads, motorways, subways, etc. is to "warp" and cheat the natural network and create connections among nodes that previously didn't exist, or weren't even nodes. This requires clever and thoughtful design that goes beyond simply putting transit along every avenue, or putting in more lanes.
The fundamental failing is that the ownership of 'stroads' (including those in city centres) is typically with a government entity that is charged almost solely with vehicular traffic concerns.
The design solutions are there and obvious for prioritising pedestrians, cyclists, etc. But its impossible to enact these when road authorities are separate to planning authorities. The overarching solution is a structural change in governing these spaces.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 118 ms ] thread> The same situation occurs on railroads: all uses want the same piece of infrastructure, leading to the usual problems of mixing trains of different speed classes on the same tracks. Freight bypasses are possible, but passenger bypasses are rare
France has built thousands of miles of what are effectively passenger bypasses: their LGVs (Lignes a Grand Vitesse).
Edit: spello
ADDED: I expect a lot of folks here would absolutely characterize Jabobs as a NIMBY in a lot of ways given that I think it's fair to say she was far more concerned with the livability of cities for their residents than enabling a large population influx.
So, while bulldozing low-rise buildings in poor neighborhoods to build highrise apartment buildings would increase density, it's a very costly and inequitable way of doing it, especially when SO much area of NYC (and all U.S. cities) is designated exclusively for personal automobiles.
Zoning is no doubt sometimes the issue. But there's a lot of evidence that, given availability of land at the time of initial construction, the organic behavior tends toward detached single-family homes and duplexes.
Indeed, they do. And I'm not defending all resistance to zoning changes, etc. But, if you have a large swath of 1-2 story housing, even in the absence of significant zoning and permitting restrictions, it's probably going to be a very slow process for that to densify into 3-5 story housing organically.
(Density numbers are always tricky. The figures change a lot depending upon which boundaries you use.)
What roads are exclusively for personal automobiles?
It seems to me that the key is to find ways to make automobiles less mandatory in general. So instead of needing two or three lanes for automobiles in each direction, you only need one. And, ideally, a reduction in the need for curbside parking.
This can be accomplished through tax policies, zoning, and ordinances that promote walkability and transit-oriented development. Shift taxes off buildings and onto land value. Allow mixed-use development. End mandatory minimum parking requirements. Implement congestion pricing and smart parking meters. Use pigouvian penalties for pollution, in proportion to the harm caused.
All of those could be implemented without requiring top-down planning or accumulating more municipal debts.
I'm all for spending money on parks, libraries, bike trails, and public transit, but you can't just drop those into a community where all the economic incentives incline us towards the McLifestyle with big box stores, strip malls, and drive-thru.
Including mandatory handicapped spaces?
Even in our current largely non-walkable cities, there's neighborhoods with high walkability scores. Doesn't make sense for planners to hand out edicts from on high, which force these places to spend money on parking that they don't want. Which, by the way, causes sprawl since more land is devoted to cars rather than people.
It makes sense to mandate that a certain ratio of parking be allotted to the handicapped. But if the total parking is zero, then the ratio would net out to zero.
Virtually every suggestion this author made would benefit disabled people. Denser/walkable cities aren't just good for walkers. They're easier to traverse in wheelchairs, crutches, etc, too. A 2+-ton, 100+hp vehicle capable of going 150+mph is not the best way to transport a disabled person. It's just what we have available, given our current city layouts. We can do better.
Accusing me of dishonest argumentation ends the argument, and indicates your side has no actual points to make.
When you look at busy streets where all of the houses have turned their backs on the noise, pollution and general filth that comes with regular traffic think how different it would be if every one of those vehicles 'sat in traffic' and inching forward was an electric vehicle.
People could have clean windows and open their front doors to the street. They could even grow a few plants. Crossing the road even in solid traffic would be safer just because you could hear.
If individual communities could vote if their street was electric only then there would be an incentive for people to get their street essentially car free. Imaginably the lamp posts would be charging points too.
Streets designed a century or more ago and where community once thrived would come back to life. House price values would be vastly more for 'electric' streets just because the standard of living is better. So you could buy an electric car and offset that against the higher valuation of the house - assuming you are owning and not renting.
As for old fashioned cars blazing through and creating pollution, there are license plate reading cameras and fines. As for the folks from the countryside that still have their old ICE vehicle, they just have to park a street or two away when visiting their friends on 'electric' streets. This will obviously stress out the parking in neighbouring streets incentivising them to go electric too. Eventually everyone can have a livable street even if there is lots of slow moving traffic moving at a snails pace. It just won't be noisy traffic with killer fumes.
Electric cars are about eliminating the issue of pollution. The idea of ridesharing is to eliminate the maintenance, debt, and storage costs of owning a car. Self-driving cars are about eliminating the accidents and wasted time spent driving. Hyperloop is about using up less valuable surface space just for transportation, and hiding the ugliness of roads underground.
Personal Rapid Transit has been able to accomplish literally all those goals since its inception. Each pod is autonomous, on-demand, driverless, and electric. It can be either on a hanging monorail, or undergound, to avoid wasting valuable surface space. And it doesn't require miles of ugly gray asphalt.
Electric vehicles still don't help cities too much, they still sit unused for 95% of the time time, and occupy a large amount of space compared to bicycles, pedestrians, or public transit.
Electric vehicles simply are not on the table for a massive swathe of the population who are driving $2000 clunkers that they need in order to be able to get to/from work every day. Until we can get electric cars on the used market for that kind of price range, that still have the effectively-unlimited range of a gas car, this entire idea is a pipe dream.
Penalizing people for doing what they have to do in order to go about their lives is a recipe for a populist uprising that undoes all of your changes and sets the effort back a decade. Spending millions on expensive, privacy-invading license plate cameras to charge people a fine for going through the motions of their life is dystopian and horrible - and doesn't make good financial sense. Far better to directly incentivize people to get the electric car you want them driving, rather than punishing them.
If gas prices had continued to rise like they were doing a decade ago, then we might be in a situation now where it would make financial sense for more people to convert to an electric car. This didn't happen, and so right now for most people it makes no sense to do. Put an artificial barrier like your penalty in place, and they'll elect Doug Ford in order to stop you. It has to actually make real economic sense, not artificial, or it will fall apart.
True. The yellow vest riots in France were ignited by a gas tax. Of course, probably anything would've set them off since they have a completely different political climate.
Cities should be designed so that walking/biking/buses provide 90% of your transit needs with SOVs as the exception, not the rule.
I really question whether the average HN poster considers the normal person's use case. Nobody _wants_ to drive all over the damned place, we do it because it's the only thing that makes sense for a dynamic lifestyle.
Also, we don't have to completely design cities around cars to support the single digit percentage of population that has infants at any given time. Some people can still drive even in pedestrian focused cities.
If you have to push a baby carriage 2 kilometers just to go to the store, then that is, by definition, not a very walkable neighborhood.
Neighborhoods with the highest walkability scores have good stores within a couple blocks radius. Or, in other words, about the same distance that it takes to traverse a Wal-Mart parking lot.
>If you have to push a baby carriage 2 kilometers just to go to the store, then that is, by definition, not a very walkable neighborhood. >Neighborhoods with the highest walkability scores have good stores within a couple blocks radius. Or, in other words, about the same distance that it takes to traverse a Wal-Mart parking lot.
Well, that parent is just totally misguided. The idea that walkable means no more walking than you'd do when you drive to a Walmart… real nonsense.
People who actually live in walkable neighborhoods walk all the time with babies and groceries and can go 1-2km easily.
As others mentioned, lots of baby carriages exist that have extra room for stuff like groceries. I tended to wear the baby in a sling while pushing a larger shopping cart in order to get groceries at the multiple places in around a 1.5 mile radius from my home at the time that I had an infant. Americans way overuse strollers and carriages.
What makes for walkability is quiet-enough streets that were safe as opposed to having to walk by overly-fast heavy traffic or cross at dangerous intersections.
In cold conditions, walking a mile is terrible. You shouldn't be needing to cross many intersections just to go shopping.
The car infrastructure is half of what makes everything spread out in the first place. The other half being zoning and underdeveloped land, often held that way for speculation purposes.
It is totally conceivable to live somewhere that has good shopping within two blocks radius. I've lived in multiple apartments where this was true. This should not be some kind of crazy unattainable thing, this should be the default.
> In cold conditions, walking a mile is terrible.
Or you can just be decently prepared and have warm clothing. If you go faster, you stay warmer. That said, I'll admit that I go on less mile+ walks when the weather is rougher (although I do have Raynaud syndrome).
> You shouldn't be needing to cross many intersections just to go shopping
What we want is to avoid crossing traffic. The number of intersections isn't really the issue. In places like Portland where the street grid makes for tiny blocks, it's not a big deal that you may cross 10 intersections when you go just a half mile, as long as it's the tiny streets where cars have to pull over just to let another car go the other way and traffic is really slow.
I otherwise really agree with all the gist of your comment. Car-focused living is the source of probably the majority of all the ills in our modern life. It's anti-social (people don't see neighbors and run into friends on the street), it's dangerous, it creates unsustainable development patterns, and it's destroyed huge portions of our natural environment even leaving aside all the pollution and the costs of SO much paved roads and parking lots…
On Manhattan it's different because the land is so expensive. There are very few grocery stores around Times Square or Bryant Park: those who afford to live there don't to grocery-shopping themselves, and just won't notice the expense of food delivered right to their door.
It's not. It's very nice. But you're asking for a lot of time out of the day, to do something unrealistic, when a quick car ride will sort it all out in a much simpler fashion.
I'll buy an electric car when I can. But here I am, another privileged HN poster. I don't think most people are going to be able to do that.
> we don't have to completely design cities around cars to support the single digit percentage of population that has infants at any given time
Natalistic policies are going to be needed if we want to keep our birth rate high enough to replace ourselves.
Obviously this wouldn't be easy to pull off for existing buildings, but for new construction it'd make life a lot easier for everyone (drivers have an easier time parking, pedestrians/cyclists have more room for dedicated sidewalks and bicycle lanes, etc.).
The trick is to avoid the need for parking in the first place. A small town can get by with on street parking. As the town grows it can get by with one parking lot on the edge of town if the growth goes up as well as out. Allow tearing down old historic buildings for something more modern. Allow houses to turn into duplex to turn into 5 floor apartments. (I stopped at 5 floors for a reason: for engineering reasons more than 5 tends to not be cost effective though in some locations the rich may be say who cares about cost and build higher anyway) More radically allow someone to turn their first floor into a shop and live upstairs.
All of this allows people to live, work, and shop withing walking distance. Once you actually walk most places not having a car is something to think about. When you have to drive to work like most people do (because there are zero houses/apartments within walking distance of the office park their job is in) buying a car is the most cost effective way to have a car and then the incremental cost of using the car for other things is nearly zero.
I suppose it'd be possible to do that even with above-ground parking, though. First level would be storefronts + the garage entrance, second through Nth levels would be parking, then (N+1)th through (N+M)th levels would be offices and/or residential and/or more retail and/or whatever else.
I'm not suggesting that they're the solution, but a symptom, and evidence of demand for shopping without having to dodge cars.
I've never really understood the appeal of major roads for bicyclsts. I much prefer sidestreets when bicycling and don't mind cutting over a block to have to deal with less traffic. I think this demand along with a general blowback against cars due to American culture treating non-vehicle traffic as second class leads to bad outcomes.
In my town, a six-lane arterial connects neighborhoods with a major N-S arterial, downtown, and past downtown is a US highway. The town has taken that six lane road and turned it into a two lane road with center turn lane, bicycle lanes, and parking. What should be a 40+ mph speed limit is now a 25 mph speed limit.
This has bad outcomes for drivers and bicyclists.
Effectively, from the perspective of a driver, this road is now equivalent to any of a dozen parallel roads: single lane in each direction and 25 mph. This disincentivizes drivers from cutting over to the arterial, effectively spreading out the traffic onto parallel roads (many of which lack traffic lights when they hit the major N-S artery). However, it remains the busiest road for vehicle traffic, and because it is so wide, speed significantly faster than 25 mph feel safe, so speed variance can be higher, with traffic typically traveling between 20-40 mph. It's particularly sketchy for traffic turning on from side streets. Drivers expect traffic to be going the posted 25 mph, but are sometimes surprised by the person going 40 mph. So, drivers generally get where they are going more slowly, but at increased danger due to increase in speed variance.
But it also increases danger for bicyclists in two ways. First, it encourages the bicyclists to use the still relatively busy arterial. It's not clear why anyone would want to incentivize this. For a bicyclist, any of the parallel streets were already attractive options and would get the bicyclist where he was going. Second, because of the changed incentives, those parallel roads are now busier than before (making the bicycle lane on the busier road more attractive). Whatever a bicyclist decides, there is an increase in vehicle/bicycle interactions.
A much better solution would have been to keep the arterial an arterial and make dedicated bicycle lanes on some of the parallel roads. This would encourage a separation of vehicle and bycicle traffic that wouldn't really inconvenience either one of them.
This is a description of a heavily car-oriented urban plan.
Ideally no urban street should have 40+ mph driving; it’s grossly unsafe for pedestrians/cyclists. Save those speeds for the highway. In my opinion cities should not have 6 lane streets. Such wide bands of pavement break up the neighborhood and are very unfriendly to everything but cars. Unfortunately, once you have built your city on such a plan with a 100 foot gap between buildings, figuring out what better to do with the space gets tricky.
A six lane, 40+ mph urban arterial street is a (significant) highway, though it may not be a controlled-access freeway (in practice, they have more controlled access than less significant urban streets, though often less than freeways, which also have higher speed limits; it's a continuum.)
I grew up in Southern CA, and the way cities there are crisscrossed by super-wide 6-lane roads (and every destination is surrounded by parking lots) is very disruptive to anything but a car-dominated lifestyle/culture. In many cities people almost exclusively travel by car, even though the weather is pleasant throughout the year. As a consequence lives are heavily scheduled and people spend little time talking to their neighbors.
I also spent significant time growing up in a colonial city in southern Mexico, designed around narrow streets with little available parking. The cultural difference was stark: in the Mexican city people walked everywhere and it was impossible to go anywhere without running into multiple friends in the street.
We generally don't. Arterial roads—what was being discussed—are typically between neighborhoods forming a widely-spaced network, from which a dense network of smaller roads branch off which are the roads “through the middle of city neighborhoods”.
That's what the word “arterial” means.
If side streets are available, they're great. But many places simply have none. And especially on bikes, most people prefer to get where they're going via the most expeditious route possible.
I enjoy the calm of side streets, but any route that is low in traffic is frequently (maybe even axiomatically) much longer or full of stop signs, both of which can be rather burdensome to a cyclist. E.g. I can bike to work 5 miles down the main road, or I can avoid cars almost entirely but it's 9 miles.
In my town, a six-lane arterial [...] turned it into a two lane road with center turn lane, bicycle lanes, and parking
A 40mph+ thoroughfare with parking added on both sides? That's so crazy I feel like we're missing something here. Does this road go right through the heart of downtown? High speeds are not really compatible with a downtown replete with bars, shopping, nightlife, & pedestrians.
It's about not getting lost when you travel someplace where you don't go often, at least for me.
A good approach is to split the lanes - instead of 3+3 as in a high-speed road, they have 2+2 in the middle for thru-traffic, sandwiched by strip of sidewalk, plus another lane on each side for local traffic, and finally another sidewalk next to the buildings.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queens_Boulevard
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queens_Boulevard#Safety_issues...
Sheesh, no wonder it's unpleasant. I'm talking about four express lanes, and a single narrow (just over 8ft, not 11!) service lane on each side.
(In the map view below, the bike lane is the green lane, where the tan painted area is designated for pedestrians. But almost no pedestrians are going to be walking parallel with the road between the local and through lanes. And if they are, they're likely going to be on the actual median instead of in the painted area. So it's safe to bike in the tan paint, and leave the entire green bike lane as a buffer area. This may sound disrespectful to pedestrians, but when I biked the entire length of the bike lane the other day, I didn't see a single pedestrian walking in this area or even on the median.)
[0]: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7389203,-73.8891268,64m/data...
Early road bypasses failed precisely because of the lack of development restrictions: they increased traffic and cheap land value drew businesses seeking to capitalize on it, so now the bypasses of yesteryear are of the urban fabric. The classic way to armor against this is to make the roadway limited access, and then you have development concentrating only at intersection nodes. Or the jurisdictions at play can always place additional restrictions on development.
But underneath all the SimCity we can play with roads and zoning, the transportation geography will always remain constrained to edges and nodes, corridors and chokepoints. It's these chokepoints that truly define the way people will get around, because getting to a point beyond them will require crossing it, and there's only ever a handful of time-effective paths to take between you and it. Bridges and mountain passes are the obvious chokepoints, but in a car-oriented world so are motorway interchanges and meetings of big arterials. Much criticism is levelled at US suburban development where single-family homes are plopped onto winding streets that only discharge to big avenues at subdivision entrances, so everyone has to take the big roads to get anywhere, but most European cities aren't that different: the lesser streets aren't passable at a pace that motorists have come to expect, and rarely does an uninterrupted network of them exist to get into a different part of the city using only small streets. Although the planning forces, commercial forces, and histories are different, they both arrive at the same result, of cars being channeled to a small number of higher-capacity paths, instead of distributed more evenly throughout.
There's cities that have leveraged the grid to great effect to arrive at a less crushing result. Las Vegas is a good example: attractions are located along a narrow corridor with heavy traffic that locals have learned to avoid. The rest of the urban area forms a large grid with dozens of avenues at regular intervals, and amenities and retail are sprinkled among housing. You have many options of traversing the urban area from one side to another.
There's other urbanized areas that have the same basic form, but they're imbalanced by a nearby node that draws traffic and upsets the network. Plano, TX looks really similar, but is a surburb to much larger Dallas. Other times, there's far too little commercial in a sea of residential, like much of South Florida or Inland Empire or Oklahoma City, or the desired directions of travel don't match the grid, like in Orange County, CA. Sometimes the grid is limited by natural obstructions that create chokepoints, significantly impairing the utility of the grid, like in Seattle, Minneapolis, or the connections of Manhattan to elsewhere.
One of the goals of railroads, motorways, subways, etc. is to "warp" and cheat the natural network and create connections among nodes that previously didn't exist, or weren't even nodes. This requires clever and thoughtful design that goes beyond simply putting transit along every avenue, or putting in more lanes.
The design solutions are there and obvious for prioritising pedestrians, cyclists, etc. But its impossible to enact these when road authorities are separate to planning authorities. The overarching solution is a structural change in governing these spaces.