Living car-free in Berlin is ridiculously easy. I have my own bicycle, but still grab a Jump bike when I've walked somewhere and need to get home faster/easier.
But this is the summer. I haven't done the winter here yet. That'll be the test.
In the last winters it barely snowed in Berlin, so I know quite a few people who kept riding their bikes all through the year.
Of course, use your head - if it is damp and then below zero, be careful. Common sense, really.
If all fails, public transport is decent enough to get you anywhere on foot. It's not perfect, I think mostly because Berlin is spatially huge and comparably empty. Cities like Paris have a much more dense public transport infrastructure. But I think you never need to walk more than ten to fifteen minutes (compared to a max of five minutes in Paris and London), which is acceptable.
There really isn't much of a reason to own a car if you live within the S-Bahn ring.
Biking in the snow can be quite fun, I enjoyed it last winter up here in Seattle. Good gloves, glasses and rain pants are useful to make it an enjoyable ride tho :P
You mean like a ski mask? Because I instantly imagined someone biking while wearing a Beagle Boys style mask and got confused as to why that would help.
I am lucky to live on the outskirts of Brussels and cycle for 17km to work once or twice a week. I would have done it every day, but I have to put kids in school and pick them up by 17:20.
Schools (and kids, by extension) are a major traffic issue and impediment to cycling.
I'm cycling year round in Berlin. It's really no big deal. Get some good gloves and something to protect your ears and you'll be fine. It hardly snows anyway and the roads are cleared fairly quickly when it does.
Its amazing to me how cheap these changes are, and how much people love them after they are implemented. You go to a neighborhood meeting in the US and all you hear about is "loss of parking", "traffic", but when you remove the cars, everyone loves it.
I never knew loss of parking was even a thing in the US.
I can't imagine it being as bad as within European cities where most of the streets (and adjacent buildings) have been built before cars were a thing. Probably one of the main reasons why alternatives to cars are well-received is that cars have never been an option anyways, especially in historic districts.
Big cars are another dimension of this problem.
American cars are usually larger because they don't have these types of issues.
You won't see a majority of people driving pickup trucks in Europe.
Where I live, the two biggest fears about non-car transportation is that it's a) inconvenient or stressful and full of delays (for public transport) or b) too dangerous (for stuff like electric scooters).
It depends on the city, but there's a weird entitlement in some big, dense American cities from people who feel they have an inherent right to store their car for free or very cheap on public land, when that land is in the middle of a dense city with a ton of competing uses for public land (bike lanes, sidewalks, pickup/delivery zones, street trees, bus lanes, heck even traffic lanes). In the densest cities, these also tend to be more affluent people. Oddly, though, also usually the kind of affluent people who consider themselves environmentalist and liberal. At least that's true in NYC and DC, two cities with substantial neighborhood pushback against reallocating street parking to other uses, happening in well-off neighborhoods that are full of signs promoting liberal causes (Upper West Side NYC, Dupont Circle DC, etc.).
I can see it in lower-density, car-dependent areas, where you arguably need somewhere to park, and poorer residents of apartment buildings without their own off-street parking might be impacted. But the cognitive dissonance around being an affluent liberal in Manhattan and suing to stop a bike lane [1] because you don't want to lose free street parking in Manhattan is absurd. Of course, they're still environmentalist because they support banning straws.
It's crazy that Manhattan doesn't have a blanket "15 minutes only" rule for parking, no return within an hour, which gives enough time for deliveries and dropoff/pickups, but prevents garaging.
The value of a typical 17 square metre parking space in Manhattan is about $400k [0]. If you want to park your car on the road, rather than paying for a commercial garage, you should be paying for that land.
I live in a mid sized town, and a contentious issue is parking for government employees. The people who have free parking consider it to be a benefit of their jobs.
There was a big hooplah in my neighborhood when a nearby government building converted to being leased from a developer, who immediately started charging for parking. Most of the employees found places to park on the nearby residential streets, annoying the residents due to the added congestion and traffic, including on a street that was already a designated bike thoroughfare.
I certainly support better urban planning, and I get around town by bike whenever possible, but I'm also sympathetic to the short term disruptions that people have adapted to parking arrangements that can change overnight.
There is pushback against car-impacting measures in Europe too, make no mistake.
The yellow jackets in France started as a protest against increase in tax on petrol. The previous president in France, Hollande, had to roll back a toll system. It took Paris 2 years of legal battles to close the roads along the Seine.
The major difference, compared witg the US, is that at least in an urban setting, in Europe you can imagine other alternatives.
The problem of the US is that outside of major cities, the entire country was designed and built on the premise of cheap, individual transportation. Everyone has his own little house with a little garden. No town centres. This lack of density means that public transport or bikes will never be able to be able to provide a serious alternative to the automobile, and so people will never given them up.
I don't know how it is in the USA but in France (and I suspect most old European cities) the richer people who can afford to live in the city center are generally in favor of removing cars because they either don't have a car or can afford to pay for a private parking spot while people who live in the suburbs and take their cars to work every day have to suffer the consequences. So you end up with this "class warfare" type situation.
Of course since in practice the richer people who live in the city centers are also those who elect the mayors things still eventually move forward in the direction of fewer cars.
I suspect that it might be different in the USA because I've always heard that things worked the other way around here: rich people live in wealthy suburbs and go everywhere by car while poor people stay stuck in the city centers.
I take your point but you can't also discount the air quality in cities being quite a big factor as to becoming less dependent on cars. LEV's (Low Emission Vehicles) are taxed less, for example (although the infrastructure is still lacking, perhaps CAV's (Connected Autonomous Vehicles) may one day solve that as parking could be placed further away and there may be more of a 'sharing' system in place, such that you don't really own a car, just dial one up like an Uber)
Do people commute into Paris by car in relatively large numbers? Where on earth do they park?
Certainly in the UK cities I've known people who live in the core are much less likely to own cars, but people from outside rarely commute in by car to the core because it's just too slow.
Medieval city plans just don't suit cars, even where the walls were demolished to make a ring road. I used to joke that there was no way to fix Cambridge's traffic problem without demolishing a college, then someone showed me a 1960s plan that involved taking a corner off St John's.
Paris is a bit special, it's not a city which kept a lot of its medieval layout heritage thanks to Napoleon III and Hausmann. You have a lot of Boulevard which are quite large and decently arranged.
As for commuting, it depends also. Basically, the subway is exceptionally dense within Paris (keep in mind that Paris, as an administrative entity is actually very small and dense, roughly 10km in diameter, and you have a station every 500 meters or so in any direction within it).
As for the Paris area, the regional trains (RER) are roughly in a star pattern, with the crossing point between the lines in the center of Paris (Chatelet).
All that means that if you live withing Paris, you can easily go anywhere in Paris, but also in most of the Paris area in roughly 1 hour max.
If you are in the suburbs and work within Paris, it's pretty much the same.
However, if you are in the suburbs, and work in the suburbs, then, it tends to suck, because if you are unlucky, you have to go from your home "suburb" to Paris and then from Paris to your "work" suburb which can be a huge detour.
As an example, I used to live southeast of Paris (Evry), and work in the southwest of Paris (Clamart), in that configuration using a car was the only viable option, and the few times I didn't have my car, taking the transports meant 4 to 5 hours commuting every day. Typically, I drove around 25000km per year in these years.
Then I moved within Paris, and my car became far less useful, I went for 25000km a year to 3000km a year because the public transports became a viable option.
And lately my job got closer to Paris, so I finally sold my car without replacing it.
As for traffic, the roads are not that bad, and there are quite a lot of rings/partial rings, (Peripherique near Paris, in place of the old city walls from the XIXth century, A86 about 10/15km from the center, and the A104/n104/n118 20/30km away from the center, and quite a few highways radiating from the Peripherique (A13, A6, A1, etc). But it's not enough and there are a lot of traffic jams. As an example, the 40km commute when I lived in the suburbs was taking me ~30 minutes without traffic jams, but typically it was taking me ~1 hour and in some cases, with an accident for example, even 2 hours.
Also, a lot of people tend to live in the east of Paris, where housing is a bit cheaper (like almost every European city in fact, the dominant winds pushing smokes and bad smells west to east). But you have more activities in the West, the biggest being La Defense (business district just west of Paris). Which means a lot of long commutes for these people.
So it really depends on your situation.
On last point that is interesting to note: I grew-up outside of Paris, passing your driving license between 18 and 20 years old is considered normal in such cases. When I started studying in Paris, I was a bit surprised to learn that a good portion of the students native from Paris don't even learn how to drive, or do so much, much, much later.
It seems like it should theoretically be viable to add some commuter rail lines following the same rings as the current peripherical roads, and improve the suburb-to-suburb transit experience.
> someone showed me a 1960s plan that involved taking a corner off St John's.
That's to be expected if you get someone from Trinity to draw up the plan!
Cambridge is becoming an incredibly hostile place to get to and around in if you don't live in the city. Partly it's a function of the population growth, but it is pushing people like me to spend more in towns like Bury St Edmunds rather than deal with Cambridge.
This is exactly how it is in the USA too, for about the past 20ish years now.
Wealthy people have largely eliminated poor/middle class people out of the core urban areas, and moved them mostly to the suburbs/exurbs. Then, wealthy people tear down the functional public transportation between the urban city and the rest of the metro (mostly roads and freeways), and replace them with pretty but function-less "public transit" (mostly buses in the midwest).
This is sold, in theory, on being "green". But the new bus system covers less than 5% of the road system it replaces, and their gentrification efforts actually decrease the usefulness of the buses that already existed, since they cut down a small forests worth of trees on the edge of the city every time they displace an previously-urban neighborhood -- so the net result is almost always lower ridership - https://la.curbed.com/2019/5/22/18628524/metro-ridership-dow... - and their attempts to remove cars from the city (through intentional congestion, artificial scarcity, use fees, whatever) move this transportation to less efficient routes far outside the city, where they must burn more gasoline per person to accomplish identical trips, emitting more CO2 per person and in total.
So you get this ridiculous situation where US cities can point to all these shiny new bus lines and bike lanes as "progress", but absolutely no one can afford the housing needed to use any of that, so on a CO2-per-person basis, we've regressed significantly. And 1990's era cities with it's freeways and parking were often better for the environment on a CO2-per-person basis than 2019's cities are today that lack those.
Then, wealthy people tear down the functional public transportation between the urban city and the rest of the metro (mostly roads and freeways), and replace them with pretty but function-less "public transit" (mostly buses in the midwest).
I don't understand... you are saying they replace roads and freeways and replace them with buses?
That's like replacing a glass with water. It makes no sense.
Yes. This is done either for public use (tearing out a lane of public travel, and replacing it with a lane for buses only) or privatizing the street altogether (tearing out a lane, and replacing it with front yards, or restaurant seating, or whatever).
I believe you but have never heard of cities anywhere removing roads or lanes, only adding more. Can you give any examples of cities that have actually done this?
I believe the person means something like taking an existing 2 or 3 lane road and making one lane a bus lane. So you took away a lane in a way. In Seattle they have done that but the buses work really well when they don't get stuck in car traffic. Buses are often faster than cars here. There's a huge number of buses, they get good use out the special bus lanes. On the freeway it's carpool lanes than include cars and buses. In the city they do have bus only lanes.
If you didn't have buses that go places people need and lots of them then converting a lane to bus only might not be useful. People make exactly the same claims you do about seattle but the bus system here is really effective.
Not sure if your question regards the US only, but this is how cities in the Netherlands became bike and pedestrian-friendly starting in the 70s, by removing a lot of roads.
One example is the conversion of the Embarcadero freeway into a pedestrian friendly waterfront zone, although that's not quite a fair example given that it took an earthquake destroying it to give it the oomph it needed to happen.
For a few years now, every road construction project near my Amsterdam home has removed car lanes. Also parking. Usually the freed space goes to protected cycle paths, but sidewalks, trees, and playgrounds sometimes win some new space as well.
(N.b. there is a plan to add a lane to portions of the outer ring highway, so "more car lanes to reduce traffic" still has some advocates.)
So what you meant to say was that they re-paint existing roads to make it harder for cars and easier for busses. Not that they pull out a road (a piece of infrastructure) and replace it with a bus (a vehicle).
This argument is far too loose to have any bite. You mention urban displacement and gentrification, but this has only happened in certain cities (downtown Kankakee certainly isn't gentrifying the same way that San Francisco is). You mention inefficient bus routes and link to an anecdote from LA, one of the most sprawl heavy, auto-friendly, and challenging metro environments for transit in the entire US. Gentrification and transit can be intertwined issues, but these sorts of hand-wavy accusations are more injurious to the discussion than helpful.
> So you get this ridiculous situation where US cities can point to all these shiny new bus lines and bike lanes as "progress", but absolutely no one can afford the housing needed to use any of that, so on a CO2-per-person basis, we've regressed significantly. And 1990's era cities with it's freeways and parking were often better for the environment on a CO2-per-person basis than 2019's cities are today that lack those.
There's no way this is true. Housing density has increased within cities themselves. Generally things have also become more CO2 efficient within the cities as well. More people live in cities than 20 years ago. If someone in the suburbs drives, it's the same (or less with modern cars). If they use transit, it's less. If they move out of the suburbs or stop commuting, it's also less. Where does the CO2 increase come from?
It's also important to remember that these trends vary vastly depending on the city you talk about. High density cities with good existing public transit infrastructure have very much succeeded and improved public transit, not destroyed it. LA is very much not a good example due to the sprawling nature. I lived in LA for 6 months and would not call it a city but rather 13 connected suburbs. A bus there is indeed a failed project. Heck, even the Expo line they just built to connect the west side is a lot of travel time and not much coverage.
Silicon Valley area is the perfect example. Terrible public transport apart from a very few, select areas and it's inconvenient and expensive. (BART, Caltrain, Lightrail, Amtrak)
I'm from the North East, so maybe I'm off base here, but...
Using Silicon Valley as 'the perfect example' of anything that is supposed to generalize to the rest of the country, or even within 100 miles, seems... bizarre.
>So you end up with this "class warfare" type situation.
This is a weird framing because the very poorest segments of society in Europe also tend to live in urban areas and don't even own a car and rely on public transport, so it's more of a class sandwich.
The very car reliant demographic seems to be what in the United States is called the 'dream hoarder' class, which is to say the largely socio-economic isolated middle class that fled to the suburbs. The same is true for the yellow vests in France. The people participating where generally not poor, which was very obvious when one looked at the demographic makeup of the group, notably, immigrants and people of color were largely absent.
Class isn't purely economic. It is the perception of 'inner city elites' being out of touch with the rest of the country.
In the recent Australian election, the (losing) Labour Party had a policy to target 50% of vehicles being electric by 2030.
The Liberal party jumped on this and ran a scare campaign that Labour was trying to take away the vehicles that Australians love for work and recreation, utes and 4WD/SUVs. It worked, not because any inherent inferiority of electric vehicles but, because people don't want to be told what is best for them by people that don't understand their needs.
Living unsustainably and ignoring pollution and global warming is their "need"?
Politicians running that kind of campaign should be jailed. They probably do much more actual damage than those who support terrorism or racism, which are illegal in most countries.
In a democracy it's generally accepted that the people deserve to get what they want even if it's stupid and bad for them. History mostly indicates that the downsides of this approach are far less bad than the downsides of any system where the people do not get what they want.
In France, not all poor are immigrants/PoC. The "very poorest" are protected/supported by the gov, with government allowance (equivalent to UBI), public housing, free schools, free healthcare, reduced price on public transportation… A good chunk of the yellow vests are people making just enough to not be part of the "very poorest", so don't get all those helps, but have to bear an increasing tax burden. They usually leave the poorer urban areas, often being priced out (as having no access to gov housing grants or public housing) or looking for better conditions of living than the post-war concrete blocks.
That’s the trope, but in reality, the less well off take the bus in, and the drivers for the most part could live in the city if they decided they didn’t want a yard or a parking spot. Taking road space from cars and giving it to busses/bikes helps the lower and middle classes the most.
> I suspect that it might be different in the USA because I've always heard that things worked the other way around here: rich people live in wealthy suburbs and go everywhere by car while poor people stay stuck in the city centers.
Over the last 30 years it's been flipping. working class people with no safety net have been priced out/forced out of cities leaving the wealthy, upper middle class, and poor people.
> I suspect that it might be different in the USA because I've always heard that things worked the other way around here: rich people live in wealthy suburbs and go everywhere by car while poor people stay stuck in the city centers.
For context, cities in the US used to include the rich, but then "white flight" [1] happened.
Then in the 2000's, young (usually more progressive) people with wealth and white collar jobs began to move back to cities, making that statement not really true today. Of course with this shift came the gentrification and rising urban living cost we see today in places like SF, Seattle, NYC, Boston, and many other popular areas in the US.
So your statement would be more correct in the 60's to the late 90's but not really today. Of course the combination of housing density (lower than Europe) and lack of public transport does indeed make cities more anti-(car commuter) than in Europe, which is also why its so crucial to live within the city itself, thus creating the crazy housing markets.
I think living without cars in medium-high density areas is ideal for many who don't want a rural life, but the US will need major restructuring before that's ever possible, and even then it would only apply to select regions like the Northeast/Mid-Atlantic coast, parts of California along the coast, and a few other major hubs like Atlanta, Chicago, and Seattle. The amount of land the US has all but guaranteed there will always this tension in how people live in rural versus urban areas. I find that the polarization is only growing stronger today interesting, as I'm sure tons of political scientists who have spent more time and research digging into the trend do as well.
Ive lived in Chicago for 20 years now. Between the L and Metra systems, Chicago's public works pretty great if you want to get from the suburbs into the Loop. I dont have much experience using rhe CTA or PACE bus systems. The transit system is pretty awful if you need to make an orbital commute, say from west suburbs to north, which I did for 2 years. Morning commute wasn't too bad, typically 40 minutes for 25 miles. Evening commute was typically 60 mins, maybe 90 or 120 depending on the number of accidents for the same 25 miles, on rare occasions 180 mins for bad weather. Conversely, the quickest scheduled public transit for my commute was at 180 mins each way. Had to go all the way into the Loop, then back out again. Faced with a normal 2 hour round driving trip vs 6 hour round public trans trip, yeah, I'm going to drive. New job, pays better, and spend 40 minutes in the car. Yeah, theres public trans options, but itd mean spending 3-4 hours commuting and a shit ton of walking that frankling I'm not up for 9 months of the year (either way too hot or way too cold).
I live in Chicago, and I sold my tesla and my lamborghini and replaced them with subway, a boosted board and a divvy membership. I’ve never been happier. For road trips I still pull out the lil porsche, but that rarely happens any more.
With home delivery of pretty much everything I need, I rely on Wholefoods and Peapod for what I used to have my car for. 5 Years ago that wasn’t an option.
It won't work in LA because the layout is structurally geared to maximizing distance between necessities, rather than being walkable or having effective public transport.
I'm assuming that "major cities" here is code for "Boston-to-Washington corridor, Chicago, and San Francisco"--the US cities that are the most similar to European cities and generally have strong downtowns, coherent transit systems, and generally dissuade car access to their city centers. This would be in contrast to the urban centers of places like LA or Dallas, where the downtowns are filled with surface parking lots instead of buildings.
In Vienna in 2010 the city decided to transform a huge shopping street into a pedestrian area. There was a lot of fuss and heated discussions. Media reported on it for months. Some people feared the proposed change will lead to fewer customers and this in turn will lead to stores having to close. Public opinion was split but leaning towards the transformation. One segment of the shopping street was kept a street as compromise iirc.
Fast forward to 2019 and people love it. Also the stores are thriving. Now the part that was kept as street feels odd. Change is difficult.
It's probably fine for the landlords, but if you're leasing storespace and selling bulk/heavy goods, or something so specialized that people from afar drive to you, you're going to have trouble.
If you're running a restaurant or cafe, you're in a great situation.
I think the ideal solution is to migrate business which depend on transportation into commercial areas like it has been done in the US from the beginning (because everything could be planned from scratch without "technical debt").
Of course it is hard to convince stores to move out of the historic districts of major towns into these kind of areas, but it actually makes sense for them if they're combined with other businesses and people have to spend less time travelling around to get everything done.
I have seen it being done like that here in Europe.
The biggest argument against that around here is that eventually, all stores want to move to these new business areas which causes the town's center to lose attractiveness.
That's why it's usually difficult for city administrations to decide about the locations of individual businesses.
I agree. But migration can be difficult when your restaurant supply store is on a 20 year lease.
There’s a store near me that sells just hockey goalie equipment. Moving to pedestrian-only would be a net negative for them since most of their business isn’t local foot traffic.
Good question. Not disagreeing but a bit more context:
You can still get close by car, you just can no longer drive along or cross over the shopping street. You also have access to pretty good public transport options in the area (underground, bus, tram, …).
I can imagine other scenarios and areas where a change like this might be strictly bad for some stores. From what I can tell I don't think this was the case here. Happy to be corrected though if someone knows more.
Those stores tended to already have migrated to the edge of the city during the car era. If you're coming a long way the last thing you want is to drive into the city.
Not true. Sure, one of the largest shopping centers in Europe is south of Vienna now (has been there since 1976), but the street mentioned here was very accessible by car and people (including me) found it very comfortable to park in one of the public garages and go shopping there. There was also a large furniture store with its own pickup spot/garage ("Leiner", closed now after going broke).
This is effectively a solved issue though, isn't it? Even the given example of the Mariahilfer Str. still has road access and as per the wikipedia page "Für den Lieferverkehr ist die Zufahrt und das Halten bis 13 Uhr zulässig." (Access and halting for delivery of goods is allowed until 1pm). Any city off the top of my head with pedestrian-only inner city areas still allow delivery trucks until certain times. Since the vast majority of retailers get their goods delivered in 3.5-7.5t trucks simply because of the volume, I don't see how this is going to change. Shops still need to get their goods somehow and the last thing you want to do is strangle off clothing shops or electronic goods from your city center, leaving only restaurants and cafes. Nobody would go there anymore.
I get that, but now that the mix of customer traffic has changed, the optimal usage of those spaces has changed.
People that want to fill their car with goods in one trip will continue to do so, but it won’t be in the city centre.
Perhaps all along they shouldn’t have, but it was possible/practical before.
Now they will go to the city outskirts to buy larger/bulkier/more good. The sellers thereof will suffer and/or be replaced by car-free friendly businesses (restaurants, cafes, light-weight goods).
That’s all fine long-term, but I’m shedding tears for the businesses that did exist and may not when the environment suddenly changes around them.
> The sellers thereof will suffer and/or be replaced by car-free friendly businesses (restaurants, cafes, light-weight goods).
Not only those, the fans of bicycles and public transport also suffer when they have limited options for shopping at particular places that are only present in the outskirts. In Vienna, IKEA is now opening a store near this "Mariahilfer Straße" at Westbahnhof, where there's also a huge public garage and a huge shopping centre was built a few years ago - you could say that real shopping is moving where the cars can still go in the city centre, while the former shopping street is slowly turning into a tourist promenade with bars, clothes and souvenir stores.
I think people tend to paint things in a strong dichotomy always (black and white). So it is either super car focused or pedestrians only. And if you want to reduce cars therefore you must be the proponent of a pedestrians-only solution.
In reality there are much more nuanced solutions. E.g. if you have a small street with people living in it and the majority of the streets traffic comes from cars taking a shortcut between two main roads, maybe closing that direct connection and creating a dead end is the better solution that boosts the atractivity of the whole street, while at the same time making it more friendly to pedestrians, locals, cyclists etc. Cars can still enter. They just have no reason to do so, except if they live there.
The only downside is the loss of a shortcut, which might have impacted traffic on the main roads negatively.
In traffic there are often situations were all involved sides win if you take something away or encourage certain uses while discouraging others. On other paradox occasions, everybody can lose, if you add more lanes to a street.
In case of Mariahilfer it might be still possible to deliver, but the attractivity as a pure transit street got reduced, simply by showing what the priority is. If this impacts other transit routes also in a positive way, I don’t see why Vienna should do more of this thing — especially if it is willing to win the title of “City most worth living in” also in the future.
Some people do, others don't. Currently they are complaining about homeless and drunk people hanging out there.
To be honest, it's more crowded and looks desolate now. The shops aren't deserted, but it's a different crowd. And everybody complains about bicycles going 30 Km/h and endangering pedestrians.
It is the same story everywhere. Businesses complaining and fighting tooth and nail to keep that one parking spot in front of their shop window claiming they will go out of business if the car free street is implemented. Then when it happens business is booming and every shop wants to move in.
Europe has had fantastic public transportation for a long time. I lived in Germany for three years in the 1980s, never had a car, and never felt I needed one. I traveled all over western Europe.
Germany is totally different. Even in Berlin, if a train is a bit packed and I just wait 2-3min for the next one. It’s nothing like packing onto London Underground with the deep tunnels and narrow gauge.
Rush hours are unpleasant, but so is rush hour traffic.
If you compare the throughput of the rush-hour tube vs rush-hour roads, you'll find that it's simply impossible to move this many people so quickly by cars.
Note for others not familiar, if you go Hammersmith Tube Station to Shepherd's Bush Tube Station overland by bicycle then it takes five minutes, depending on traffic lights. That is actual five minutes, as in three hundred seconds.
Clearly both areas are larger than their respective train stations but the stations are representative.
To actually get a tube or other train between the two is not entirely direct, you would probably get on the wrong Hammersmith station at first (there are two), spend five minutes crossing the road to get to the other one. Then at the end a bus or long walk would be needed, so you would soon be in 45 minute territory.
The traffic can be mostly ignored if doing the route by bicycle except on the various mini ring roads they have to keep traffic deadly. Hammersmith itself is like a six lane motorway ring road of hell, easy to die on that one. Then at Shepherd's Bush there is that green bit where the traffic just goes round and round very slowly. On the bike you just go straight without getting sent around these merry-go-rounds of car fumes.
No idea why anyone would want to drive in such parts of London even though I have had to do it for work myself. It is not even driving, just slowly shunting along, blocking the way for 'serious' road users who care about their time and arriving promptly. As a cyclist I don't see myself as a serious road user, I assume those people in cars have more important journeys than mine so I am deferential to them. Yet, if being prompt matters to you and you do work in London, the bicycle is the only reliable means of getting from A to B in a dependably timely manner.
By that definition, those people in their posh cars, inching along, can't really be that serious. If they thought about it properly they would abandon their tin boxes or find better jobs. Travel by car is that silly in London.
Most people are coming from outside of London and what you find is that it is usually quicker to drive in and just sit in the traffic than mess about doing park and rides and then travelling in.
It was far quicker to walk a mile to Twyford station, get the train to Ealing, and the tube to White City (or fast train to Paddington and tube to Shepherds Bush now) than to drive.
It was a long time ago, and I don't work in Shepherds Bush any more, but the trip today would be
0835 - leave home
0856 - get slow train to London
0935 - arrive Ealing
0950 - arrive White City
0955 - arrive at office
Or
0840 - leave home
0900 - get fast train to London
0932 - arrive Paddington
0950 - arrive White City
0955 - arrive at office
Driving was
0800 - leave home
0900 - arrive Hammersmith flyover turnoff
0950 - arrive car park
0955 - arrive at office
It was the hammersmith roundabout that was the real killer.
The reason I drove in for 10AM (once a week) was because I was on 12-14 hour shifts, and driving home after 10pm was about 50 minutes. Very few people working office hours would drive into London, especially Central London, and parking at stations across the south east is often full by 9AM.
Interesting tbh if it was the same amount of time I would just drive in.
Outside of London the train is always slower. I used to live in Manchester and get the train into Stoke. Driving was always faster without exception. Generally it was cheaper as well (I have a crappy old diesel astra that is even cheaper to repair and I will drive it til the wheels fall off).
All things being equal I'd rather take the train - you can read, work, watch TV
The main benefit of driving is not having to wait for a specific train.
From where I live in south cheshire, it's quicker to get the train into Manchester than drive (although quicker to drive to Stoke than train). That's with a 0930 arrival in Picadilly Gardens.
Same to get to Cardiff, Birmingham and certainly London (2h15 to Euston, vs 2h40 to the M25 with no traffic)
If I had to be in Picadilly Gardens for 0900 though it would be faster to drive thanks to the train times.
Virgin trains wants basically another 10-15 a month on top of your journey for internet and you can't take a bike on their trains without phoning ahead first. Cross country aren't much better.
Phone internet doesn't work on the train typically. That combined with the travel sickness after each journey make the car much more appealing.
I will never go back to using the train as long as I can legally drive. They are just garbage in the UK and expensive.
I doubt I will buy a new car either. I own two cars. I have an old 1994 mercedes SL which is kept in a storage garage at the moment and the other car is a 2005 vauxhall astra that is getting up to 400,000 miles and doesn't show any signs of dying just yet. Every newer car I have driven is full of mostly electric crap which tends to break or they have some awful drive by wire nonsense that takes the feeling out of the vehicle.
I think much like the operating systems I use, I am going to resist using any newer tech as long as I am able to.
I use 4G tethering and works really well between Crewe and Manchester (well enough for uninterupted youtube streaming and ssh sessions). Virgin "pendilinos" have free wifi now too. Northern run on the Manchester-Stoke line and don't need bike reservations. YMMV.
> I lived in Germany for three years in the 1980s, never had a car, and never felt I needed one.
You don't know what you're missing. I pity the people who have to use the hot, crowded, smelly, slow public transport every day and don't know any better.
I've got friends in Berlin who have no car.
They're a family of four and they go everywhere either on their bikes or public transport.
Last year when they took vacation, they just jumnped on their bikes and spent two weeks on the road cycling. For me it was unthinkable until they told me there are guides telling you which roads are safe for cycling.
Good! Americas obsession with cars is one of its most glaring deficiencies. Every city should be accessible without a car, however unless you are in NYC, Chicago, or LA, or San Fran, well then that just isn't true.|
I have taken several trips to Los Angeles without using a car. It's not convenient, but it works if you allow enough time - the bus lines do at least exist.
It's going to be tough doing this in a lot of US cities, especially those which had most of their growth after WW2. So much was built with the assumption that all transportation would be via car (or bus as an afterthought, sometimes). You can probably do it in an old downtown area but good luck trying it in suburbia
The US is seeing a large move back toward cities. It makes a lot of sense -- it's where the capital, culture, resources are concentrated. I don't think we'll see a car-less suburbia in the foreseeable future, but we can certainly build and modify our cities to be walk/bike/transit-first going forward.
There seems to be this ambient feeling that everything is as it will be, ah well, but it took decades of (bad) city planning and massive infrastructure spending to get us our suburban dystopias. It could take decades still for transit-focused cities to become the new norm.
Well, a lot of America is white and middle class. The push to move to suburbs was fueled by the white middle class, who fled the cities during and after desegregation, and was termed the White Flight.
There's a very real displacement problem that's linked to the urban population growth that you seem skeptical of; marginalized communities are being priced out of their long-time homes, being pushed out of urban centers and into suburbs and exurbs.
Anyway, census data shows strong growth of urban areas, and tepid growth of rural areas, which are a shrinking fraction of the US population.
Some cities have seen astonishing growth:
> Among urbanized areas with populations of 1 million or more, the Charlotte, N.C.-S.C., area grew at the fastest rate, increasing by 64.6 percent, followed by the Austin, Texas, area, at 51.1 percent, and Las Vegas-Henderson, Nev., at 43.5 percent.
Mind you, "urban" by census definitions is very broad. I live in the middle of about 100 acres with a couple of neighbors 40 miles outside of a major city and I'm considered urban.
A lot or urbanization isn't Brooklyn. It's smaller cities with minimal transit systems.
It's a lot easier for Europe to go carless than the USA. They have better intra-city public transit for one. Also, most (all?) of their major cities laid out their grids before the invention of the car.
In the USA, even older cities had all but their city centers designed around cars, and if you look at the top 10 cities, 7 of the 10 saw >90% of their road construction after the invention of the car.
That being said, I don't understand why new cities in the US aren't being planned around being carless. I guess it's just so engrained in our culture that it will be hard to overcome?
I think there's a growing realization that designing around car traffic is a losing proposition going forward. There's still a lot of political inertia to overcome, but we're starting to see bills liks SB50 (legislating to build housing around mass transit) be proposed and get traction.
Unfortunately “new cities” develop in places where everyone is used to driving, so it takes a lot to overcome a car centric culture.
I live in a college town in a rural area. The transition to public transportation happens when parking becomes expensive or impractical (such as at the university) so people park and ride on a bus.
But that still requires cars. Frankly cars have value that’s hard to replace when there’s a disperse population. Which maybe is the real problem in the US: there’s a culture around “I want my own land”. It pervades even in progressive circles...
How many such "new cities" are there really? Car culture wasn't a thing until the 1950s and I can't think of a single metropolitan city that was founded after that.
I think one of the problems in discussing cities is the hazy meaning of "city" that different people have in mind. Many (most?) people who live in cities aren't in the biggest ones, and the dynamics are different eg when bikeable-distance suburban housing is affordable, and distances inside the urban area are walkable.
There are lots of new cities, or at least cities that were founded or built substantially after the invention of the car. Irvine, CA, for example began construction in the 60s and incorporated in the 70s (and now has more than 250K people making it a top 100 city by population). The town I grew up in only incorporated in 1982 (and most every house was built in the 70s to 90s).
Also the city of Mountain House is a planned community for 20,000 that started construction in 2001.
There’s not really “new cities” in the sense of someone establishing a new town. There’s just smaller towns growing into small cities, small cities growing to mid-sized, etc...
The problem is those places start car dependent and the US is such that we have a lot of land and there’s not a lot of incentive to urbanize. We want our 40 acres and a mule, with a big fence around our land, and a big sign that says “no trespassing” then we want to drive our cars to get to common areas
> In the USA, even older cities had all but their city centers designed around cars, and if you look at the top 10 cities, 7 of the 10 saw >90% of their road construction after the invention of the car.
I feel like this can be spun as a positive, every street is 3 lanes wide + parking on both sides. So much room to convert for more pedestrian and micromobility space – in European cities it's often either/or.
There are lots of new cities, or at least cities that were founded or built substantially after the invention of the car. Irvine, CA, for example began construction in the 60s and incorporated in the 70s. The town I grew up in only incorporated in 1982 (and most every house was built in the 70s to 90s.
we build new cities next to existing cities. very few cities spring up in the middle of nowhere. if you want to connect back to the original town, say mountain house to oakland, you’ll drive in to oakland. or drive to bart and bart in. it’s not realistic that everyone lives close enough to public transit that they can bike or walk or bus to it. a big draw of living out of the most populated areas is having your own house and land somewhere quiet. and this is definitely engrained in our culture, it’s the american dream to own your own home
EU has the advantage that most of its small and old cities are very dense. I think it makes a lot of sense to start removing cars from their city centers. Cars are not particularly efficient or convenient anyway in narrow streets. That being said I really wonder why Amsterdam still allows cars to drive in its rings.
> It's not just the narrowness of the streets: they're also short and not on a grid.
The US suburbs with their hierarchical residential < collector < highway system were designed for cars, however most networks in the US city centers were designed before the invention of the car.
Narrow streets are usually the start point/destination, with most of the traffic in the wider boulevards. And city planned before the advent of cars can still be car-friendly, like the Haussmann works in Paris.
We're working on it. Parking is being removed pretty quickly, one of the three major canal rings will go car-free soon. (And by 2030 we hope to allow only electric motors anywhere in the center, but that's driven by air quality rather than land use.)
Seems like individual non-fixed prices could be some kind of undiscovered Holy Grail to increase revenue and fix the unequal distribution of scooters. Also, I see scooters being collected at night for charging. Maybe another use-case for such incentives?
If you want to experience a car-free place in the US, you should check out Mackinac Island in between the Upper and Lower peninsulas of Michigan. Horses, bikes, and feet are the forms of transportation—motorized vehicles have been banned since 1898. There’s great history, Victorian architecture, and Great Lakes beauty. It’s a pure slice of Americana.
The only thing happening on the island is tourism, which is pretty much gone during the winter, and access to the island is marginal at best when the ferry shuts down for the season. All of the labor is seasonal as well, mostly from overseas.
In general, even legendary levels of snow and ice doesn’t stop thousands of collegiate Michiganders from walking long distances in subzero temps, biking on icy sidewalks, or even skiing/snowshoeing to class (in the UP). Sometimes in shorts.
True story: Kirk Cousins used to one of the intrepid winter-bikers on MSU’s campus. Good thing he didn’t break his $84 million arm.
There are also no cars on Bald Head Island, in southeast North Carolina. There's not even a bridge to the island from the mainland... all access is via boat or ferry (unless you're a really good swimmer).
I live in a suburb of Seattle, I haven’t owned a car for about two years. It used to be owning a car was liberating, but now I think the day I sold my car was one of the most liberating days of my life.
What do you mean "share" the road with cars? I walk almost everywhere. I have a Zipcar account that I use less than once a month and a bus pass that I use even less frequently. It is hard to say how many of my neighbors are car-less, most people seem to own cars, but not out of necessity — it is a pretty rich area.
On vacation in Rome this summer, there is so much foot traffic on the major streets there is often no room for cars, and they need to inch forward until the people in front of them notice them and move out of the way.
Seemed like almost all the cars were taxis, too.
So navigating the city with a personal car seemed completely impractical.
> So navigating the city with a personal car seemed completely impractical.
YMMV, I spent my last 2 holidays in Italy with my car and went pretty much everywhere, including the old town of Siena, the center of Florence, Lucca by car. Italy is exceptionally car-friendly, but some tourists seem to be afraid to go.
Driving in Tuscany can be a bit intimidating. I've done it, albeit before GPS, and in retrospect I'd probably not have driven. That said, you look at getting to and around smaller towns and it can get difficult and time-consuming to depend on busses.
From what I hear, traveling between cities in Italy by car is pretty convenient. But driving along side all the people walking in the middle of Firenze streets does not sound like the kind of stress I want while on vacation.
I wish the UK was a little more forward thinking when it comes to small electric mobility devices but they actively fine you here for using them on public roads and cycle lanes.
Imagine that people have been riding electric scooters for a hundred years and along comes some new technology, a diesel van. It can transport all the things we buy online to our doors and would be beneficial to society. The problem is that there have been a few fatal accidents between vans and scooters. One of the van drivers was a celebrity. The scooter drivers die, no one else gets hurt. The government decides to ban the new vans because they are too dangerous to OTHER people. There is a big uproar and people would rather scooters be banned instead because that solves the problem too (well, except for bicycles and... people).
I'm glad this works for the people who live there and makes them happy. As for myself, I refuse to live in any city dense enough to even have a public transportation system.
A thought in the back of my mind is fear of government oppression in a world without prevalent cars.
If you have a car you can travel hundreds of miles with few limitations and it's particularly hard to quash this even in an oppressive state.
If you only have your feet and public transit you are very limited to distance and location and tracking movements is an easy feature of the system. Things going wrong? The government can shut down the trains at whim.
A car grants a whole lot of freedom that many progressive people are really excited to give away.
Not even necessarily without cars... imagine if you could sell the populous on a car with limited range that took ages to fill back up. If they were gullible enough, you could probably even sell it at a premium. What a wonderful stepping stone to the post freedom era.
Yes, if only said car had some other benefit, like being cheaper to run and maintain.
Imagine if the same car had more than enough range for 95% of people's travel and could be filled up at home for a fraction of the cost. Finally, imagine if there was some other indirect benefit, like helping stop the world burn.
Sadly your snippy little comment doesn't make them any better. They cost more, don't go as far, take longer to refill, and do very little to help stop the world burning. If people need to head to the capital to protest or whatever, electric vehicles make that demonstrably more difficult. There is nothing about them that gives their owners more freedom than they have now. We are definitely in a golden age of freedom, and electric cars are just another method in which that will be chipped away.
an interesting point but such a quintessentially american mindset imo. This thing could potentially used wrong so let's build in all kinds of hedges and failsafes; our freedoms could be impinged in these edge cases so this is a no go, etc.
cannot help but lament the inefficiency and stagnation arising from this culture of distrust
Sorry to the American folks here, this might sound offensive, but I agree with bllguo. As an European colechchristensen's point of view feels alien.
I'd argue that for the average European this kind of comment would seem paranoid bordering on insane.
I guess some cultural differences are found way deeper than you'd expect.
The European point of view about the whole "government opression" thing is that you don't fight tyranny with guns and cars (LOL), but with a population educated about the benefits of democracy. If you've lost the people, nothing can save you.
on the cultural differences.. I've always loved the saying:
Europeans see 100km as a long distance, while Americans/Australians see 100 years as a long time.
Well, 100 km is next door when there's a direct rail line and when discussing with my granparents, 100 years is a long time. I get what you mean though
But a police officer can stop your car _right now_ if your passenger-side taillight is broken and then search your vehicle for a variety of things. So many marijuana related arrests have happened exactly this way. With license plate scanners and chips being embedded into cars, the ability to be pervasively tracked in a car is more apparent than ever. In contrast, walking or biking doesn't require registration or licensing by the government.
(As silly as I thought the movie was, the protagonist of the first Jack Reacher movie took the bus everywhere specifically so the government had no records on him, so the idea certainly isn't lost in popular culture either.)
>But a police officer can stop your car _right now_ if your passenger-side taillight is broken and then search your vehicle for a variety of things. So many marijuana related arrests have happened exactly this way.
Sounds like the arrest happened because of the marihuana, and not because of the broken taillight. How about not having drugs in your car, though.
Arguments like this ignore the billions of dollars that maintain and create highways, roads, parking lots that the government already invests in. The blindspot regarding this "freedom" which apparently to some people exists magically is astounding.
The government created the current layout of cities by building highways and making laws and regulations that birthed the city structure we have today. It did not develop organically.
The let me astound you even more that there also exist such things as off-road vehicles, natural roads (think of countries like SA or AUS), and that .gov cannot just bomb all it's roads away in an instant, like they could stop all trains and most flights.
But most people don’t drive off-road vehicles anyway, so redesigning cities to prioritize trains over minivans does nothing to increase the population’s dependence on government infrastructure. The minivans won’t work without the roads the government built either.
> If you only have your feet and public transit you are very limited to distance and location and tracking movements is an easy feature of the system.
I don't know about you, but I feel like if you're trying to avoid being tracked driving around in a large shiny vehicle with a uniquely identifying number mounted on the front and back seems to be about the worst thing you could do.
> A car grants a whole lot of freedom that many progressive people are really excited to give away.
A car grants dependence on a long supply chain (oil drilling, shipping, processing, storage) of fuel that the government can easily sever. Not only are you dependent on the supply chain but you are dependent on the government and foreign governments to maintain it.
If you really want to be a freedom loving, rugged individualist then you'd get an off road capable bike or a horse.
Not just Europe! Tokyo, for example, is a remarkably pedestrian and bicycle-friendly city, despite also supporting quite heavy traffic in some areas. And of course, the extensive train network completely eliminates the need for a car in daily life.
If you pick a random place on the map (like [1]), you'll see that the high-speed traffic is very well-separated from residential areas, with infrequent intersections. There is also little incentive to take a "shortcut" through residential areas since neighborhood roads are so narrow. The result is that neighborhood are safe and quiet enough that parents feel safe letting their small children walk along the road. I even see wildlife!
And unlike the absolutely terrifying planned city-like look you get from looking at pictures used to represent Superblocks, in Tokyo the superblock mechanism is the logical conclusion of organic development over the decades and has a natural feel, leading to pretty small buildings that are just densely packed together.
Almost all[1] roads in Tokyo are single lane! Not "one lane each direction" but "one lane". The massive avenues are sparse because it turns out you don't need that sort of capacity in most places.
Walking around Tokyo, even European cities feel super wasteful and car-centric with how wide roads are.
[1]: maybe 80%+? Less true in the most popular parts of the city though, where you have the biggest ap't complexes
Oh, interesting! I was just thinking how much space in SF is wasted on roads. I'd love to see them create superblocks and turn some streets into parks, housing, etc.
In many ways developing nations can and do have the option to skip auto-based transit and go directly into mass transit if only because many up and coming consumers don’t have the capital to invest into a depreciating asset.
India, Indonesia, much of LatAm, including Mexico, most of Africa, etc. They could make autos cost prohibitive (in many places they in essence are) and invest heavily in mass transit. Skip roadways and other infra for personal vehicles.
China is in the cusp. They could simply decide to ban cars nationwide after a vigorous campaign promoting transit values.
I have lived in both Europe and US for years. It is not fair to compare both places as the population density is totally different. You still do need a car if you are living in suburb area in Europe (in my case the Netherlands). And in US there is much less people living in the city.
I'd argue that even the suburbs of Netherlands are super bike-friendly. It's always a reasonable bike ride to the nearest train station, buses fill in the rest, and the roads are setup to be safe for bikers. That's not really the case in most of the US.
I've biked from Amsterdam to Gronigen. I biked through those suburbs. At least 90% of it was on dedicated bike paths (fietspad). And I had choices on which routes to take.
I agree, the biking experience in the US doesn't compare at all to the Dutch experience. Dedicated bike paths are a game-changer. A fully-connected path network takes it to a whole other level.
That is not completely true. 50% of the US population live in just 35 metropolitan areas (Los Angeles, CA; New York, NY; Chicago, IL; Philadelphia, PA; Washington, DC; Detroit, MI; Houston, TX; Atlanta, GA; Dallas, TX; Boston, MA; San Bernardino, CA; Phoenix, AZ; Minneapolis, MN; Orange County, CA; San Diego, CA; Nassau, NY; St. Louis, IL; Baltimore, MD; Seattle, WA; Tampa, FL; Oakland, CA; Pittsburgh, PA; Miami, FL; Cleveland, OH; Denver, CO; Newark, NJ; Portland, OR; Kansas City, MO; San Francisco, CA; Fort Worth, TX; San Jose, CA; Cincinnati, OH; Orlando, FL; Sacramento, CA; Fort Lauderdale, FL) that together have 173328 square miles. That is a density of
654 inhabitants per square mile or 253 inhabitants per square kilometer. Compare that with the 232 inhabitants per square kilometer in Germany, or the 118 inhabitants per square kilometer in France. And yes you can live without a car even in rural Germany (at least if you don't have kids).
The 20 densest metropolitan areas contain 25% of the US population and have 400 inhabitants per square kilometer, comparable to the 416 inhabitants per square kilometer averaged over the Netherlands.
The lack of public transport in the US is not a density problem. That is just the excuse because people don't want to change.
EDIT: Before anybody says "but the density in German cities is much higher": I lived for years in a German district with a density of 217 inhabitants per square kilometer, without needing a car.
When I lived for 4 years in Barcelona I didn't have a car and I lived pretty far from the city center (Horta). I only missed it when I went to the Ikea of Badalona.
I am visiting Montréal on holdiday today with my family. Old Montreal by the waterfront was a wonderful pedestrian experience. I recently read that they had proposed a highway in the same area back in the 60s. What fools we were.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 332 ms ] threadBut this is the summer. I haven't done the winter here yet. That'll be the test.
If all fails, public transport is decent enough to get you anywhere on foot. It's not perfect, I think mostly because Berlin is spatially huge and comparably empty. Cities like Paris have a much more dense public transport infrastructure. But I think you never need to walk more than ten to fifteen minutes (compared to a max of five minutes in Paris and London), which is acceptable.
There really isn't much of a reason to own a car if you live within the S-Bahn ring.
Now with climate crisis, it's not really snowing anymore there
Schools (and kids, by extension) are a major traffic issue and impediment to cycling.
Big cars are another dimension of this problem. American cars are usually larger because they don't have these types of issues. You won't see a majority of people driving pickup trucks in Europe.
Where I live, the two biggest fears about non-car transportation is that it's a) inconvenient or stressful and full of delays (for public transport) or b) too dangerous (for stuff like electric scooters).
I can see it in lower-density, car-dependent areas, where you arguably need somewhere to park, and poorer residents of apartment buildings without their own off-street parking might be impacted. But the cognitive dissonance around being an affluent liberal in Manhattan and suing to stop a bike lane [1] because you don't want to lose free street parking in Manhattan is absurd. Of course, they're still environmentalist because they support banning straws.
[1] https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2019/07/30/breaking-upper-west-s...
The value of a typical 17 square metre parking space in Manhattan is about $400k [0]. If you want to park your car on the road, rather than paying for a commercial garage, you should be paying for that land.
[0] 22.83 square miles of land in Manhattan is 78304708.32 square metres. Parallel parking space is 2.76m by 6.1m according to https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-size-of-a-standard-parking...
There was a big hooplah in my neighborhood when a nearby government building converted to being leased from a developer, who immediately started charging for parking. Most of the employees found places to park on the nearby residential streets, annoying the residents due to the added congestion and traffic, including on a street that was already a designated bike thoroughfare.
I certainly support better urban planning, and I get around town by bike whenever possible, but I'm also sympathetic to the short term disruptions that people have adapted to parking arrangements that can change overnight.
Thing is, historic districts don't make up most of cities, even before the post-war rebuild/new cities expansion.
The yellow jackets in France started as a protest against increase in tax on petrol. The previous president in France, Hollande, had to roll back a toll system. It took Paris 2 years of legal battles to close the roads along the Seine.
The major difference, compared witg the US, is that at least in an urban setting, in Europe you can imagine other alternatives.
The problem of the US is that outside of major cities, the entire country was designed and built on the premise of cheap, individual transportation. Everyone has his own little house with a little garden. No town centres. This lack of density means that public transport or bikes will never be able to be able to provide a serious alternative to the automobile, and so people will never given them up.
Of course since in practice the richer people who live in the city centers are also those who elect the mayors things still eventually move forward in the direction of fewer cars.
I suspect that it might be different in the USA because I've always heard that things worked the other way around here: rich people live in wealthy suburbs and go everywhere by car while poor people stay stuck in the city centers.
Certainly in the UK cities I've known people who live in the core are much less likely to own cars, but people from outside rarely commute in by car to the core because it's just too slow.
Medieval city plans just don't suit cars, even where the walls were demolished to make a ring road. I used to joke that there was no way to fix Cambridge's traffic problem without demolishing a college, then someone showed me a 1960s plan that involved taking a corner off St John's.
Paris is a bit special, it's not a city which kept a lot of its medieval layout heritage thanks to Napoleon III and Hausmann. You have a lot of Boulevard which are quite large and decently arranged.
As for commuting, it depends also. Basically, the subway is exceptionally dense within Paris (keep in mind that Paris, as an administrative entity is actually very small and dense, roughly 10km in diameter, and you have a station every 500 meters or so in any direction within it). As for the Paris area, the regional trains (RER) are roughly in a star pattern, with the crossing point between the lines in the center of Paris (Chatelet).
All that means that if you live withing Paris, you can easily go anywhere in Paris, but also in most of the Paris area in roughly 1 hour max. If you are in the suburbs and work within Paris, it's pretty much the same. However, if you are in the suburbs, and work in the suburbs, then, it tends to suck, because if you are unlucky, you have to go from your home "suburb" to Paris and then from Paris to your "work" suburb which can be a huge detour.
As an example, I used to live southeast of Paris (Evry), and work in the southwest of Paris (Clamart), in that configuration using a car was the only viable option, and the few times I didn't have my car, taking the transports meant 4 to 5 hours commuting every day. Typically, I drove around 25000km per year in these years.
Then I moved within Paris, and my car became far less useful, I went for 25000km a year to 3000km a year because the public transports became a viable option.
And lately my job got closer to Paris, so I finally sold my car without replacing it.
As for traffic, the roads are not that bad, and there are quite a lot of rings/partial rings, (Peripherique near Paris, in place of the old city walls from the XIXth century, A86 about 10/15km from the center, and the A104/n104/n118 20/30km away from the center, and quite a few highways radiating from the Peripherique (A13, A6, A1, etc). But it's not enough and there are a lot of traffic jams. As an example, the 40km commute when I lived in the suburbs was taking me ~30 minutes without traffic jams, but typically it was taking me ~1 hour and in some cases, with an accident for example, even 2 hours.
Also, a lot of people tend to live in the east of Paris, where housing is a bit cheaper (like almost every European city in fact, the dominant winds pushing smokes and bad smells west to east). But you have more activities in the West, the biggest being La Defense (business district just west of Paris). Which means a lot of long commutes for these people.
So it really depends on your situation.
On last point that is interesting to note: I grew-up outside of Paris, passing your driving license between 18 and 20 years old is considered normal in such cases. When I started studying in Paris, I was a bit surprised to learn that a good portion of the students native from Paris don't even learn how to drive, or do so much, much, much later.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Paris_(project)
That's to be expected if you get someone from Trinity to draw up the plan!
Cambridge is becoming an incredibly hostile place to get to and around in if you don't live in the city. Partly it's a function of the population growth, but it is pushing people like me to spend more in towns like Bury St Edmunds rather than deal with Cambridge.
Wealthy people have largely eliminated poor/middle class people out of the core urban areas, and moved them mostly to the suburbs/exurbs. Then, wealthy people tear down the functional public transportation between the urban city and the rest of the metro (mostly roads and freeways), and replace them with pretty but function-less "public transit" (mostly buses in the midwest).
This is sold, in theory, on being "green". But the new bus system covers less than 5% of the road system it replaces, and their gentrification efforts actually decrease the usefulness of the buses that already existed, since they cut down a small forests worth of trees on the edge of the city every time they displace an previously-urban neighborhood -- so the net result is almost always lower ridership - https://la.curbed.com/2019/5/22/18628524/metro-ridership-dow... - and their attempts to remove cars from the city (through intentional congestion, artificial scarcity, use fees, whatever) move this transportation to less efficient routes far outside the city, where they must burn more gasoline per person to accomplish identical trips, emitting more CO2 per person and in total.
So you get this ridiculous situation where US cities can point to all these shiny new bus lines and bike lanes as "progress", but absolutely no one can afford the housing needed to use any of that, so on a CO2-per-person basis, we've regressed significantly. And 1990's era cities with it's freeways and parking were often better for the environment on a CO2-per-person basis than 2019's cities are today that lack those.
I don't understand... you are saying they replace roads and freeways and replace them with buses?
That's like replacing a glass with water. It makes no sense.
Car traffic hopefully slows and makes things safer for pedestrians crossing the road and much safer for cyclist.
The wikipedia only lists a few examples where it has been implemented:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_diet
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_diet#Examples_of_implemen...
If you didn't have buses that go places people need and lots of them then converting a lane to bus only might not be useful. People make exactly the same claims you do about seattle but the bus system here is really effective.
Though the examples do show what I consider progress, the tiny amount of changes reinforces your point, like deafening silence.
(N.b. there is a plan to add a lane to portions of the outer ring highway, so "more car lanes to reduce traffic" still has some advocates.)
There's no way this is true. Housing density has increased within cities themselves. Generally things have also become more CO2 efficient within the cities as well. More people live in cities than 20 years ago. If someone in the suburbs drives, it's the same (or less with modern cars). If they use transit, it's less. If they move out of the suburbs or stop commuting, it's also less. Where does the CO2 increase come from?
It's also important to remember that these trends vary vastly depending on the city you talk about. High density cities with good existing public transit infrastructure have very much succeeded and improved public transit, not destroyed it. LA is very much not a good example due to the sprawling nature. I lived in LA for 6 months and would not call it a city but rather 13 connected suburbs. A bus there is indeed a failed project. Heck, even the Expo line they just built to connect the west side is a lot of travel time and not much coverage.
Using Silicon Valley as 'the perfect example' of anything that is supposed to generalize to the rest of the country, or even within 100 miles, seems... bizarre.
This is a weird framing because the very poorest segments of society in Europe also tend to live in urban areas and don't even own a car and rely on public transport, so it's more of a class sandwich.
The very car reliant demographic seems to be what in the United States is called the 'dream hoarder' class, which is to say the largely socio-economic isolated middle class that fled to the suburbs. The same is true for the yellow vests in France. The people participating where generally not poor, which was very obvious when one looked at the demographic makeup of the group, notably, immigrants and people of color were largely absent.
In the recent Australian election, the (losing) Labour Party had a policy to target 50% of vehicles being electric by 2030.
The Liberal party jumped on this and ran a scare campaign that Labour was trying to take away the vehicles that Australians love for work and recreation, utes and 4WD/SUVs. It worked, not because any inherent inferiority of electric vehicles but, because people don't want to be told what is best for them by people that don't understand their needs.
Politicians running that kind of campaign should be jailed. They probably do much more actual damage than those who support terrorism or racism, which are illegal in most countries.
In Seattle the complaint is it's the other way around. Only the well off can afford to live in the city, and the less well off drive in.
Over the last 30 years it's been flipping. working class people with no safety net have been priced out/forced out of cities leaving the wealthy, upper middle class, and poor people.
For context, cities in the US used to include the rich, but then "white flight" [1] happened.
Then in the 2000's, young (usually more progressive) people with wealth and white collar jobs began to move back to cities, making that statement not really true today. Of course with this shift came the gentrification and rising urban living cost we see today in places like SF, Seattle, NYC, Boston, and many other popular areas in the US.
So your statement would be more correct in the 60's to the late 90's but not really today. Of course the combination of housing density (lower than Europe) and lack of public transport does indeed make cities more anti-(car commuter) than in Europe, which is also why its so crucial to live within the city itself, thus creating the crazy housing markets.
I think living without cars in medium-high density areas is ideal for many who don't want a rural life, but the US will need major restructuring before that's ever possible, and even then it would only apply to select regions like the Northeast/Mid-Atlantic coast, parts of California along the coast, and a few other major hubs like Atlanta, Chicago, and Seattle. The amount of land the US has all but guaranteed there will always this tension in how people live in rural versus urban areas. I find that the polarization is only growing stronger today interesting, as I'm sure tons of political scientists who have spent more time and research digging into the trend do as well.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight
With home delivery of pretty much everything I need, I rely on Wholefoods and Peapod for what I used to have my car for. 5 Years ago that wasn’t an option.
I live in a suburban area where outside commuter type service there is no mass transit into the city.
So as the city restricts parking I worry about accessibility. Park and rides are also usually a commuter hours only option too.
> The problem of the US is that outside of major cities...
What urban setting does the US have outside its major cities? Arguably, that is one of the major problems.
Fast forward to 2019 and people love it. Also the stores are thriving. Now the part that was kept as street feels odd. Change is difficult.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariahilfer_Stra%C3%9Fe#Mariah...
It's probably fine for the landlords, but if you're leasing storespace and selling bulk/heavy goods, or something so specialized that people from afar drive to you, you're going to have trouble.
If you're running a restaurant or cafe, you're in a great situation.
It's a solvable issue, but it may be ignored.
The biggest argument against that around here is that eventually, all stores want to move to these new business areas which causes the town's center to lose attractiveness. That's why it's usually difficult for city administrations to decide about the locations of individual businesses.
There’s a store near me that sells just hockey goalie equipment. Moving to pedestrian-only would be a net negative for them since most of their business isn’t local foot traffic.
You can still get close by car, you just can no longer drive along or cross over the shopping street. You also have access to pretty good public transport options in the area (underground, bus, tram, …).
I can imagine other scenarios and areas where a change like this might be strictly bad for some stores. From what I can tell I don't think this was the case here. Happy to be corrected though if someone knows more.
Or they deliver, e.g furniture.
People that want to fill their car with goods in one trip will continue to do so, but it won’t be in the city centre.
Perhaps all along they shouldn’t have, but it was possible/practical before.
Now they will go to the city outskirts to buy larger/bulkier/more good. The sellers thereof will suffer and/or be replaced by car-free friendly businesses (restaurants, cafes, light-weight goods).
That’s all fine long-term, but I’m shedding tears for the businesses that did exist and may not when the environment suddenly changes around them.
Not only those, the fans of bicycles and public transport also suffer when they have limited options for shopping at particular places that are only present in the outskirts. In Vienna, IKEA is now opening a store near this "Mariahilfer Straße" at Westbahnhof, where there's also a huge public garage and a huge shopping centre was built a few years ago - you could say that real shopping is moving where the cars can still go in the city centre, while the former shopping street is slowly turning into a tourist promenade with bars, clothes and souvenir stores.
In reality there are much more nuanced solutions. E.g. if you have a small street with people living in it and the majority of the streets traffic comes from cars taking a shortcut between two main roads, maybe closing that direct connection and creating a dead end is the better solution that boosts the atractivity of the whole street, while at the same time making it more friendly to pedestrians, locals, cyclists etc. Cars can still enter. They just have no reason to do so, except if they live there.
The only downside is the loss of a shortcut, which might have impacted traffic on the main roads negatively.
In traffic there are often situations were all involved sides win if you take something away or encourage certain uses while discouraging others. On other paradox occasions, everybody can lose, if you add more lanes to a street.
In case of Mariahilfer it might be still possible to deliver, but the attractivity as a pure transit street got reduced, simply by showing what the priority is. If this impacts other transit routes also in a positive way, I don’t see why Vienna should do more of this thing — especially if it is willing to win the title of “City most worth living in” also in the future.
Some people do, others don't. Currently they are complaining about homeless and drunk people hanging out there.
To be honest, it's more crowded and looks desolate now. The shops aren't deserted, but it's a different crowd. And everybody complains about bicycles going 30 Km/h and endangering pedestrians.
"desolate" means the opposite of "crowded".
> The shops aren't deserted, but it's a different crowd.
So the shops are missing the kind of people you would like to see shopping, but full of a "different" kind of people. What kind of people are those?
No, it also means:
: showing the effects of abandonment and neglect : DILAPIDATED
> What kind of people are those?
Bums, poor people, slob tourists.
That's a curiously selective reading of that definition.
> Bums, poor people, slob tourists.
And who are these desired, non "Bum", non-tourist wealthy people you wish were shopping there still?
The pattern will repeat with flying, decreasing population growth, and moving the economy from producing so much disposable stuff.
But we're still in the stage where everyone thinks of what they'll miss, not what they'll gain.
If you compare the throughput of the rush-hour tube vs rush-hour roads, you'll find that it's simply impossible to move this many people so quickly by cars.
Clearly both areas are larger than their respective train stations but the stations are representative.
To actually get a tube or other train between the two is not entirely direct, you would probably get on the wrong Hammersmith station at first (there are two), spend five minutes crossing the road to get to the other one. Then at the end a bus or long walk would be needed, so you would soon be in 45 minute territory.
The traffic can be mostly ignored if doing the route by bicycle except on the various mini ring roads they have to keep traffic deadly. Hammersmith itself is like a six lane motorway ring road of hell, easy to die on that one. Then at Shepherd's Bush there is that green bit where the traffic just goes round and round very slowly. On the bike you just go straight without getting sent around these merry-go-rounds of car fumes.
No idea why anyone would want to drive in such parts of London even though I have had to do it for work myself. It is not even driving, just slowly shunting along, blocking the way for 'serious' road users who care about their time and arriving promptly. As a cyclist I don't see myself as a serious road user, I assume those people in cars have more important journeys than mine so I am deferential to them. Yet, if being prompt matters to you and you do work in London, the bicycle is the only reliable means of getting from A to B in a dependably timely manner.
By that definition, those people in their posh cars, inching along, can't really be that serious. If they thought about it properly they would abandon their tin boxes or find better jobs. Travel by car is that silly in London.
It was a long time ago, and I don't work in Shepherds Bush any more, but the trip today would be
Or Driving was It was the hammersmith roundabout that was the real killer.The reason I drove in for 10AM (once a week) was because I was on 12-14 hour shifts, and driving home after 10pm was about 50 minutes. Very few people working office hours would drive into London, especially Central London, and parking at stations across the south east is often full by 9AM.
Outside of London the train is always slower. I used to live in Manchester and get the train into Stoke. Driving was always faster without exception. Generally it was cheaper as well (I have a crappy old diesel astra that is even cheaper to repair and I will drive it til the wheels fall off).
The main benefit of driving is not having to wait for a specific train.
From where I live in south cheshire, it's quicker to get the train into Manchester than drive (although quicker to drive to Stoke than train). That's with a 0930 arrival in Picadilly Gardens.
Same to get to Cardiff, Birmingham and certainly London (2h15 to Euston, vs 2h40 to the M25 with no traffic)
If I had to be in Picadilly Gardens for 0900 though it would be faster to drive thanks to the train times.
Phone internet doesn't work on the train typically. That combined with the travel sickness after each journey make the car much more appealing.
I will never go back to using the train as long as I can legally drive. They are just garbage in the UK and expensive.
I doubt I will buy a new car either. I own two cars. I have an old 1994 mercedes SL which is kept in a storage garage at the moment and the other car is a 2005 vauxhall astra that is getting up to 400,000 miles and doesn't show any signs of dying just yet. Every newer car I have driven is full of mostly electric crap which tends to break or they have some awful drive by wire nonsense that takes the feeling out of the vehicle.
I think much like the operating systems I use, I am going to resist using any newer tech as long as I am able to.
You don't know what you're missing. I pity the people who have to use the hot, crowded, smelly, slow public transport every day and don't know any better.
Last year when they took vacation, they just jumnped on their bikes and spent two weeks on the road cycling. For me it was unthinkable until they told me there are guides telling you which roads are safe for cycling.
There seems to be this ambient feeling that everything is as it will be, ah well, but it took decades of (bad) city planning and massive infrastructure spending to get us our suburban dystopias. It could take decades still for transit-focused cities to become the new norm.
Is it really, or are you using "US" to mean white middle class? I googled and can't find a reference for this - do you have one?
Edit: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.URB.GROW?locations=U...
As far as I can tell from this graph, urban population growth in the US was lower in 2018 than it's ever been.
There's a very real displacement problem that's linked to the urban population growth that you seem skeptical of; marginalized communities are being priced out of their long-time homes, being pushed out of urban centers and into suburbs and exurbs.
Anyway, census data shows strong growth of urban areas, and tepid growth of rural areas, which are a shrinking fraction of the US population.
Some cities have seen astonishing growth:
> Among urbanized areas with populations of 1 million or more, the Charlotte, N.C.-S.C., area grew at the fastest rate, increasing by 64.6 percent, followed by the Austin, Texas, area, at 51.1 percent, and Las Vegas-Henderson, Nev., at 43.5 percent.
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/2010_censu...
A lot or urbanization isn't Brooklyn. It's smaller cities with minimal transit systems.
In the USA, even older cities had all but their city centers designed around cars, and if you look at the top 10 cities, 7 of the 10 saw >90% of their road construction after the invention of the car.
That being said, I don't understand why new cities in the US aren't being planned around being carless. I guess it's just so engrained in our culture that it will be hard to overcome?
I live in a college town in a rural area. The transition to public transportation happens when parking becomes expensive or impractical (such as at the university) so people park and ride on a bus.
But that still requires cars. Frankly cars have value that’s hard to replace when there’s a disperse population. Which maybe is the real problem in the US: there’s a culture around “I want my own land”. It pervades even in progressive circles...
Also the city of Mountain House is a planned community for 20,000 that started construction in 2001.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_House,_San_Joaquin_...
The problem is those places start car dependent and the US is such that we have a lot of land and there’s not a lot of incentive to urbanize. We want our 40 acres and a mule, with a big fence around our land, and a big sign that says “no trespassing” then we want to drive our cars to get to common areas
I feel like this can be spun as a positive, every street is 3 lanes wide + parking on both sides. So much room to convert for more pedestrian and micromobility space – in European cities it's often either/or.
They're not designed for throughput, which really amplifies the benefits of a subway/metro vs. buses/trams.
The US suburbs with their hierarchical residential < collector < highway system were designed for cars, however most networks in the US city centers were designed before the invention of the car.
Even before the car, a horse and buggy can get through a city faster arranged in a grid withoug having to turn a lot.
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/22/us/22ice.html
True story: Kirk Cousins used to one of the intrepid winter-bikers on MSU’s campus. Good thing he didn’t break his $84 million arm.
Cars within dense cities are a cancer.
Seemed like almost all the cars were taxis, too.
So navigating the city with a personal car seemed completely impractical.
Same with Florence and Cinque Terre.
YMMV, I spent my last 2 holidays in Italy with my car and went pretty much everywhere, including the old town of Siena, the center of Florence, Lucca by car. Italy is exceptionally car-friendly, but some tourists seem to be afraid to go.
You are truly a madman (or madwoman).
From what I hear, traveling between cities in Italy by car is pretty convenient. But driving along side all the people walking in the middle of Firenze streets does not sound like the kind of stress I want while on vacation.
Imagine that people have been riding electric scooters for a hundred years and along comes some new technology, a diesel van. It can transport all the things we buy online to our doors and would be beneficial to society. The problem is that there have been a few fatal accidents between vans and scooters. One of the van drivers was a celebrity. The scooter drivers die, no one else gets hurt. The government decides to ban the new vans because they are too dangerous to OTHER people. There is a big uproar and people would rather scooters be banned instead because that solves the problem too (well, except for bicycles and... people).
If you have a car you can travel hundreds of miles with few limitations and it's particularly hard to quash this even in an oppressive state.
If you only have your feet and public transit you are very limited to distance and location and tracking movements is an easy feature of the system. Things going wrong? The government can shut down the trains at whim.
A car grants a whole lot of freedom that many progressive people are really excited to give away.
Imagine if the same car had more than enough range for 95% of people's travel and could be filled up at home for a fraction of the cost. Finally, imagine if there was some other indirect benefit, like helping stop the world burn.
What a dystopian nightmare.
cannot help but lament the inefficiency and stagnation arising from this culture of distrust
I'd argue that for the average European this kind of comment would seem paranoid bordering on insane.
I guess some cultural differences are found way deeper than you'd expect.
The European point of view about the whole "government opression" thing is that you don't fight tyranny with guns and cars (LOL), but with a population educated about the benefits of democracy. If you've lost the people, nothing can save you.
Lmfao if anything this is a super European mindset. Does this not remind you of another hot button issue? (hint: GUNS)
(As silly as I thought the movie was, the protagonist of the first Jack Reacher movie took the bus everywhere specifically so the government had no records on him, so the idea certainly isn't lost in popular culture either.)
Sounds like the arrest happened because of the marihuana, and not because of the broken taillight. How about not having drugs in your car, though.
The government created the current layout of cities by building highways and making laws and regulations that birthed the city structure we have today. It did not develop organically.
I don't know about you, but I feel like if you're trying to avoid being tracked driving around in a large shiny vehicle with a uniquely identifying number mounted on the front and back seems to be about the worst thing you could do.
A car grants dependence on a long supply chain (oil drilling, shipping, processing, storage) of fuel that the government can easily sever. Not only are you dependent on the supply chain but you are dependent on the government and foreign governments to maintain it.
If you really want to be a freedom loving, rugged individualist then you'd get an off road capable bike or a horse.
If you pick a random place on the map (like [1]), you'll see that the high-speed traffic is very well-separated from residential areas, with infrequent intersections. There is also little incentive to take a "shortcut" through residential areas since neighborhood roads are so narrow. The result is that neighborhood are safe and quiet enough that parents feel safe letting their small children walk along the road. I even see wildlife!
See also [2] about mixed-use zoning in Japan.
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@35.6405724,139.622306,14.42z
[2] http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_block#Superblock
Almost all[1] roads in Tokyo are single lane! Not "one lane each direction" but "one lane". The massive avenues are sparse because it turns out you don't need that sort of capacity in most places.
Walking around Tokyo, even European cities feel super wasteful and car-centric with how wide roads are.
[1]: maybe 80%+? Less true in the most popular parts of the city though, where you have the biggest ap't complexes
India, Indonesia, much of LatAm, including Mexico, most of Africa, etc. They could make autos cost prohibitive (in many places they in essence are) and invest heavily in mass transit. Skip roadways and other infra for personal vehicles.
China is in the cusp. They could simply decide to ban cars nationwide after a vigorous campaign promoting transit values.
We made a huge mistake with car oriented design and we need to rebuild our cities the right way.
I agree, the biking experience in the US doesn't compare at all to the Dutch experience. Dedicated bike paths are a game-changer. A fully-connected path network takes it to a whole other level.
The 20 densest metropolitan areas contain 25% of the US population and have 400 inhabitants per square kilometer, comparable to the 416 inhabitants per square kilometer averaged over the Netherlands.
The lack of public transport in the US is not a density problem. That is just the excuse because people don't want to change.
EDIT: Before anybody says "but the density in German cities is much higher": I lived for years in a German district with a density of 217 inhabitants per square kilometer, without needing a car.