That is for an apartment, not a full house of multiple storeys. If you have four storeys (counting the ground-floor), then interestingly the costs would be roughly on par. I am not sure, how many storeys the houses are supposed to have in Copenhagen.
Sure it is for an apartment, no matter the stories, it is a "living unit", the comparison is between 1 sqm of something that is covered by a roof, surrounded by walls, etc, and in which you can live and 1 sqm of asphalt/parking space.
There is NO market in the world AFAIK where 1 sqm is considered multi-storey, a house that is 100 sqm in plan and is 2 storeys is a 200 sqm one.
Sure, but the comment above is talking about "how valuable that space in major city centres is".
The opportunity cost of 1 sqm of street parking space is not 1 sqm of "living unit", but 1 sqm of land.
If 1 sqm of apartment is worth $7.5K/month, and average building height is 4 stories, that suggests 1 sqm of land is worth approximately 4 * 7.5 = $30K/month (minus value of the building).
My note was not about "opportunity cost", it was about the (extremely high) "rent" that a parking space at 5 US$/hour represents compared to its cost.
If you buy a 50-55 sqm apartment/flat/living unit in Copenhagen, you spend roughly 400,000 $, you can possibly rent it for 5%/year, i.e. around 20,000 $/year.
If you can manage to extort 5 $ /hour (for 12 hours/day) for a parking space which is 1/4th of area (and is not a building) you get more or less the same.
If the city charged you based on the value of the land you use, you'd go bankrupt after a picnic in the park. Cities offer plenty of things "for free" (payed by taxes and other sources of income) and you benefit from a lot of those also as pedestrian or cyclist. Drawing the line at drivers seems a bit self centered. I have the feeling you consider most of what you do to be worthy of gratuity. Bycicle lanes and parking still cost to build and maintain but you get them for no additional explicit cost. Ironically (car) road tax pays for some of that.
Oh my, that's shockingly cheap from my perspective.
In the downtown core of much of the east cost US, you're looking at $20+ for a minimum period of 3 hours. On the other hand, in my small city in the midwest during my adult life parking has gone from $.50/hour to $1.60/hour, and people have been outraged by each incremental increase.
Edit: noted that $20+ is often for multiple hours, but you regularly can't buy a single hour for $7, you're stuck paying a min of $20 upfront.
$20 an hour on the east coast? Where? The only place I can imagine that is in a parking garage, not on the street. Even the most congested parts of Manhattan that actually charge for parking don’t cost nearly that much, and that’s when they do actually charge for street storage.
I am referring to parking garages, apologies. My experiences are mostly NYC (Manhattan, midtown and lower) and Boston's back bay, though in fairness, many places are $25-$35 for multiple hours, which is much cheaper per hour, but pretty annoying if you only need the spot for 20 minutes.
Sounds pretty par for the course for a parking garage in an upscale part of Boston or DC with a minimum charge.
For convention centers, hospital clinics and other "people who have to come from far away must come directly here and they are likely to have a situation whereby public transit is impractical" type destinations $20 would be cheap.
What free parking. You mean the one where you have to circle a block for an hour until someone leaves.
It's so bad, now when I drive through Manhattan and see an open free parking spot I get a twitch urge to park there immediately. Even though my destination is in Queens...
There’s an estimated 190,000 on-street parking spaces in Manhattan, with an estimated 3 million parking on street spaces in NYC total[0]. The primary issue is not a lack of parking. Cars don’t scale in dense urban environments.
There's no recent official counts, but the latest data I could find looks like it's about 82,000, citywide[0]. That number is 10 years old, so there is definitely a little room for error. But if the estimated total of on street parking spaces in NYC is at 3M, that puts metered parking at just 2-3% of the total on street spaces citywide.
If you were to double or triple that number(which is unlikely), that still means the vast majority of parking in NYC is absolutely free of charge. That 3M number also doesn't take into account all of the 'No standing', 'No parking', sidewalks or bike lanes which have been repurposed into parking by people with parking placards, PBA cards, or whatever other miscellaneous artifacts allow drivers to leave their cars wherever they want with impunity[1].
What I find amazing is that people have an expectation of being able to bring a several thousand pound object that is bigger than many NYer's kitchens, into one of the densest parts of the country that is served 24/7 by public transit and for-hire vehicles, and store it for free. Even tourists with tiny suitcases have to pay to store their suitcase somewhere.
> Now can we remove the free street parking from Manhattan?
Yes, they absolutely should. Here in Chicago, a residential street parking permit costs $25 per year per car and allows you to park in a specific zone near your residence. 24-hour permits for visitors are sold in sheets that end up costing just slightly more than 50 cents each. The program more or less brings in revenue to pay for itself but makes getting street parking much more fair.
It's pretty much free by Chicago standards too. That's not the point. You can only get the parking stickers if you live nearby!
Oh, I forgot to mention that you cannot buy more then 45 of the 24-hour passes per 30-day period. And that's per address, so if you have roommates or a spouse their purchases are all aggregated together.
Had a BoyScout leader who was wheelchair bound with a car modified to be driven with only hands. It was a pretty fun learning experience when he let us take it around the parking lot a few times.
I'm lucky enough to have a decent job in a fairly rural area and a cheap car that I can easily maintain. At one point I was even a car enthusiast that liked doing modifications. I still think society as a whole should be progressing towards a carless future. Although I'd appreciate it if VR tech was advanced enough to let me drive around in virtual classic cars by that point with feel and smell.
It's not worth shitting up the entire (and old) mass transit system to enable a tiny number of people to use it - I'd support subsidised taxis for people unable to use the metro.
Conversely one might think of free parking spaces as a subsidy for the middle class and up, at the expense of those who can't afford a car.
Public transport in Paris is wonderful, and while there are parts where I still would rather not bike around, cyclist safety is getting much better too. The city is simply adapting to other modes of transport that are better for everyone.
Only someone who never lived in Paris more than two days could ever write this sentence. Paris’ subway is one of the worst in the world (often on strike, technical problems, stink piss, expensive, unsecure especially for ladies, no accessibility, etc.)
When I had choice to take sub for 40 min or walk 40 min to go to the same place, I took walking every time because of how bad public transportation are in Paris.
Well, I don't live there anymore but did a couple of years ago, and definitely for more than two days. If anything bothered me about the subway, it was the extreme overcrowding during rush hour. If you had that much trouble with strikes and technical problems either you were extremely unlucky, or I was extremely fortunate. Definitely cheaper than owning a car, too. Can't comment on accessibility.
I haven't used a lot of subway systems, but worst in the world seems excessive. It's vastly better than NYC or London, at the very least. Breathing in the London Underground turns your mucus black. Exciting!
I tried to find some actual details on this, apparently it goes back to an announcement in January from Anne Hidalgo when she said she wanted to make 60k spaces into bike lanes. Now it's 70k and they're asking people what should be done with the space? Interesting idea.
I assume most of the streets in Paris were built before cars were a big thing, what was that space used for way back then? Sounds like a silly question, but, did people park horses in the same spaces used for cars now? (I assume you didn't "park" your horse, but it seems like more or less the same concept?)
I always assume it was filled with merchant carts as that’s always how old cities are portrayed in movies. But I honestly have no idea. Maybe there was more “sidewalk” before and the street slowly encroached over the decades?
Makes you wonder what would have happened to our cities if they hadn’t build those oversized roads. Maybe the cars would have never entered the city in such large numbers.
> I assume most of the streets in Paris were built before cars were a big thing
The streets of Paris were mostly built at the end of the XIX century where cars were common, just powered by horses.
The problem since the mid 1990s is the increase in the car traffic. It is remarkable when you watch movies from the 70s to see those empty streets, full of empty parking slots on the sides.
For instance this short film. Shot early in the morning (so empty streets expected) but look at the side of the roads, almost no cars parked anywhere. Today these streets are packed bumper to bumper. It feels like another city: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-GqZIR0HUw
But you would notice the same on any film or documentary from the 70s.
I've driven once in Paris, and people seemed to drive very aggressively. If they never find a parking space on top of that regular chaos, I guess we are going to create some angry French drivers in the "city of love".
Maybe they should stop driving around a major city with world-class public transportation and excellent bike infrastructure? That's what I did when I moved to NYC after a year of frustrated searching for parking.
Might need a boost in capacity. Metro/RER during rush hour isn't all that much fun. Though one could argue that rush hour is a problem that needs to be tackled separately.
People get angry because there's JUST ENOUGH parking for it to be worth it to chaotically circle and fight over spots.
I'd imagine reducing spaces to the point where the assumption is "there is no parking" instead of "if I fight hard enough I can find a space" would actually reduce the number of people searching and driving in the city center in the first place.
Similar to the observation that expanded highways don't actually reduce congestion, they just attract more cars.
If there is an increase in traffic after you have expanded the highway, you are going in the right direction. If it is levelling off, you have gone far enough. Then congestion will reduce. The argument that more roads do attract more cars just shows that we are still planning in a state of poverty. It is completely backwards. It is like saying "don't give the starving more food, they'll just eat more, and more starving will beg".
I live there, with a flat in Paris and a house 50km away.
Commuting by car or public transport takes 1h30 to 2h, so up to 4 hours a day on the bad days. Traffic is terrible. Parking is terrible. Train is OK ish and comfortable enough to work or read. Some trains (RER) are awful. Working remotely, 3 days a week around the weekend is the best.
People indeed becomes quite aggressive, even if somehow disciplined. I worked in south India earlier this year, and I found people there completely undisciplined on the road, but very friendly. Like line splitting in front of a bus with a friendly smile and a gentle press on the horn.
>People indeed becomes quite aggressive, even if somehow disciplined. I worked in south India earlier this year, and I found people there completely undisciplined on the road, but very friendly. Like line splitting in front of a bus with a friendly smile and a gentle press on the horn.
Exactly. There's local norms of conduct for traffic everywhere. There's standards for acceptable aggression and obliviousness (and other attributes). Paris, India, etc are all low on obliviousness. If you expect to be able to just blindly follow markings and signals and think that all you have to watch out for is the car in front of you you are going to have a bad time. India is lower on aggressiveness because the nature of the traffic there really doesn't lend itself to that. Likewise if you try to drive like you're in Rome in a wealthy American suburb or somewhere else where high obliviousness is the norm you're gonna piss a lot of people off because you're not gonna behave the way they expect.
This is Europe. There is no land to buy. Land has a specific purpose, for example business, agriculture, housing. You cannot just buy a small plot of land to park your car. It's simply not available.
What you can do, is buy or hire a parking garage that already exists. This is possible of course, but expensive. Think 1/3rd of the cost of a family car (either as monthly rent, or as purchase price).
I sense a bit of anger in your last sentence, "why does everyone". For new car purchasers, your solution is possible. For existing owners, that would mean a severe increase in cost of living.
Sorry I didn’t mean it to come off that way. I know that in certain places in the world it’s different but in my city it’s very expensive to own a car and we have a working public transportation system and bike infrastructure, those who drive mostly do it because they can afford to and enjoy the luxury. There are exceptions of course and those that are less able bodied should not be penalised for needing a car.
For existing pedestrians, it would also mean a severe increase in quality of life for no additional cost of living. Everything is always a tradeoff in some way. I’m sure people with horses were hurting when stables started closing too. Its time cities reevaluate what sort of lifestyle they subsidize with land use decisions.
> For existing owners, that would mean a severe increase in cost of living.
And if you force the government to inefficiently reserve street space for cars, society has to incur the same costs, except non-car owners are forced to unfairly subsidize car owners by bearing those costs.
A quick google shows car parking in Paris seems to be in the 100-150 euros a month range, which is pretty cheap to be fair. If you're paying less than that, you're being subsidised by the land owner (the city, and thus the residents of that city)
Maybe that's too much to park your car, but land has a cost, why should a car owner be allwoed to store their property on public land for free? Can I build a shed in that space instead?
I cant tell if this is a sarcastic comment or not. I have a car in Chicago. There are no parking spaces in my apartment building. Street parking is the only non $250+ a month option. I did not have a car here until we needed one to be able to travel during COVID (to avoid taking public transit during the pandemic).
I can not buy land outside the city to park my car. I can not afford a second car payment to rent a monthly spot. City parking is really my only option to avoid taking public transit and risk getting and spreading COVID.
> City parking is really my only option to avoid taking public transit and risk getting and spreading COVID.
You didn't need to buy a car and avoid taking public transit to risk getting and spreading COVID. Likely every single one of the places you've gone by car have been more risky than taking the train or bus.
Multiple research articles have found no link between public transport and the spread of COVID, even when looking at places like Seoul and Tokyo where transit use is much higher. The risk of catching COVID is higher at the grocery store than on a bus.
I sympathize with why you thought you needed to do that and I genuinely hope you will dispose of the vehicle once the pandemic is over. Humans are terrible at evaluating risk, and people's sudden impulse to buy a car when that's not where the risk lies is an example of this.
Places like seol and tokyo probably have a much higher per capita mask usage rate. Ive seen bus drivers in Los Angeles with their masks around their chin. Even after LA times reported metro operators were dying.
There are 2.7 million people in Chicago city, it's total area is 234.21 square miles. Taht's 11,500 people per square mile
Are you really suggesting that 7% of Chicago's entire land area be given away for free to car owners -- because if everyone owned one car you'd need 1.7 million square feet to park them. That's in addition to the space used for those cars to move around which is at least as much.
If you don't own a car, how can you claim your free space?
I am 100% for reducing the amount of cars on the road but this logic doesn't really work when you've driven in from out of town and there aren't sufficient parking garages.
Cars are terrible for cities, they make everything about cities worse. So if we are to have both cars and cities, what's needed is a mode change. If you can't afford the cost of renting the space to put your car, a better solution would be to put the inefficient land use of parking where land is cheap, and provide access to the transit system from there. Whether it's parking at commuter rail, or parking on a lot that has bus service.
Of course it’s happening, that’s what the article is all about. It’s what other commenters here are talking about.
And all the families that currently live high quality loves, without cars, in these places would find your assertion about “can’t have a family without cars” absolutely comical.
For large chunks of the US, top down urban planning has forces people in most areas to own cars. But it doesn’t have to be that way, it was a choice that was made, and a choice that can be changed.
It's kind of hard for me to see what the problem is. Most of the world doesn't have the problem that you say is intractable. So doing a web search, I found this that says that North Americans really are a complete outlier on grocery shopping habits.
I live in NA, but a grocery store is an easy walk, and was on my daily commute in pre-COVID times. This makes me an outlier among North Americans I guess. But it would be the norm for places that allow for car free life.
The following is therefore speculation, but the best I can come up with to try to meet you where you are. Right now, your car based life is so inconvenient and so inefficient, that stopping by a store is something to be minimized, to do as infrequently as possible. So to you, going to the store more than once a week is an inconvenience. You have to drive somewhere special outside of your normal route, park, walk a long distance from the car to the store, wander around a store so large that the idea of stopping and grabbing something quick is almost inconceivable. You likely even have to wait in line, because checking out a single person with a full week of groceries takes many minutes.
Once we allow the possibility of not living with a car, which means all of your daily needs within walking distance, an entirely new world opens up that is much more convenient. There is a smaller, well stocked store along most routes you take. Grabbing groceries for a day or two is not an affair that has an extra half hour of driving and walking. It's a quick hop in and out. You can always have fresh food, because you stop frequently and quickly, without having to wait a week in between trips because to shop more frequently would be wasteful of time. Run out of sugar? No big deal, it's conveniwnt to buy some more.
Once cars are gone and cities are designed around that, everything is more accessible and convenient. I mean, the whole thread started with how life in cities so not need cars, and how having cars in cities ruins life there. And for that matter, much of small town life can be similar to cities, because there, needs can also be within walking distance for a small compact town.
It's only car-based suburbia with highly restricted unmixed land uses that leads to this "I can only go the grocery store once a week" attitude. Life does not have to be that way, people that want it should be able to live like that, and those that don't want it should be able to have walkable lives. Walkable areas mean more accessibility than car-based areas, because stopping does not involve parking.
Given that I have to provide food and drink for 5 people two/three times per day means "grabbing something quick" is right out. Both on weight/carrying capacity ... and on price. This is not happening and I don't see how it is a serious suggestion.
This is not about "allow[ing] the possibility of not living with a car", all your suggestions increase costs, some increase them a lot. And sure, with unlimited money, I understand that the center of a big city is more luxurious than the suburbs or countryside, this is not controversial. You get to drop the car, which is about 500 dollar per month. But you spend double that on the equivalent apartment (I don't mean equal sized to what you get in the suburbs, I mean the MINIMUM apartment for 5 people)
So yes, costs will need to be comparable, as a basic condition. So using something between a convenience store and a "agent" supermarket is not a serious option, nor is fulfilling every meal by "grabbing something quick", not just from a weight/carrying perspective but from a financial perspective. Making the choice simply based on which is the closest is not a reasonable option either. The problem with a family of 5 is that every cost you have when you are single multiplies by a factor of 3-4, and I'm sure it'll be 5 by the time the kids really get past puberty.
Furthermore, you haven't answered my original question: just simply how to carry it. I assure you a 2-3 day supply of soda for a family of 5 weighs minimum 6kg, and 12kg is better (even that is 3-4 days at best). Carrying this onto public transport, over the sidewalk and/or into an apartment block is supremely uncomfortable. Your suggestions change nothing except making it expensive as well.
Let's take an example: 1 day breakfast + lunchbox + dinner for 2 adults and 3 kids. Take 2 bottles of soda (3kg), 2 cartons of milk (3kg), breakfast cereal (750g), 2 full size breads (750g), something to put on there (700g), vegetables (1.5kg), meat (500-750g), potatoes (2kg), and general supplies (2kg). This is three bags of groceries weighing 15kg. I assure you it definitely won't last 3 days.
How do I comfortably carry this on public transport, and sidewalk, and up a flight of stairs, and you say to carry it on the way home, so in combination with what I carry to work (let's say 5kg) ?
Going once a week, with, say 3 people, carrying something like 20-40kg of groceries, seems vastly more comfortable, attractive, cheaper, easier and faster to me.
Street space is even more limited than parking garage space. If space is so constrained that there isn't any free garage space how can there possibly be free street area available for parking?
You seem to casually dismiss the problem of space. Where would people put it away in a European city like Paris?
In my city in The Netherlands, new buildings sometimes get a parking garage below the apartments. The ratio is 1 parking spot for every 3 apartments, and next year it'll be 1:4. But new houses don't get a parking garage below them, because that raises the price of the house too much, or so I was told by an architect employed by the municipality. Thus inhabitants get to fight over the available space in the streets.
> because that raises the price of the house too much
Yeah, demand will always consume everything that is free, but as soon as you put a price on something behavior changes.
Owning a car costs money.
When I bought my condominium in the USA, I got two parking spaces in a garage with it. With only 1 car, I rent out the second space. 3 years ago, I could rent it for $350 per month. Now, I can get $200.
Around here, the condominium and the parking space are different tax IDs, so you can buy and sell them independently. A lot of buyers choose not to buy the parking space when they buy the condominium. You should assume that when your local builders are moving from 1:3 to 1:4, they are doing so in response to market demand for parking.
You don't know city governments in The Netherlands :) The parking spot limit is prescribed by current building codes. Also, owners are not able to sell their spot, as this is also prescribed and further codified into the seller's contract.
Do note that I just describe the current situation. I do agree with the fact that the amount of cars/parking spots needs to go down, to make a city more liveable.
I don't own a car. I need one, to regularly visit clients and visit family. Thus, I have joined a car sharing initiative. However, it's about equally as expensive as leasing a new family car. I can afford this, but I recognize not everyone can. And I find this recognition is sometimes missing from the discussion.
Prepare yourselves. A key factor of for solving climate change will be actions like this. Removing free parking and replacing with bike/bus/walking space is an incredibly high impact carbon reduction strategy. What’s surprising is in basically every area that has taken strong moves like this to remove car dependency, before the action takes place everyone wrings their hands about all the bad possible outcomes, but after it takes place everyone agrees things are much much better with less cars and no one wants to go back.
I personally love being in highly 'walkable' areas, and I confess I don't spend much time thinking about the climate. The peace of mind I get from roaming around freely by foot, without worrying about cars or hearing traffic, is bliss.
An area does not become walkable because there are no cars. First you have to ensure that journey distances are within walking range. That means having stores, work locations, and living locations all within a kilometer or two at most (not everyone is capable of riding a bike at race speeds every day). Paris, at least some parts of Paris, might have that in place. So too maybe NYC or SF. But a great many places are not setup that way and don't have mass transit infrastructure to convert quickly.
Also consider the climate / weather. Paris might be OK during the winter, but some place like Michigan might have very terrible winters - walking around outside is possible but not terribly fun, cycling on icy sidewalks is also generally not a good experience. In almost all cases in the winter it's easier to be in a climate controlled method of transportation, which for most people is a private vehicle.
In Oslo snow and ice can lasts up to 5 months. Yet it does not prevent people from going outside as city does reasonable job in general to keep pavements walkable. Surely that can be improved, but I do not see how one can blame climate and not local city government for snow heaps with ice on the pavements.
According to wikipedia, average lows in Oslo are about -5. That's pretty warm. Salt still melts snow at those temperatures. Even sunlight will melt snow on pavement at -5. But below around -10/-15 salt stops melting ice, vastly increasing the manpower needed to clear roads/sidewalks. Clearing ice at proper winter temperatures requires mechanical means, hammers, if not propane torches.
Where I grew up (Edmonton, Alberta), the winter is a force to be reckoned with as not only does the sun not melt the snow away once it’s settled in October, but “warm” days bring 6+inches of slush that can then freeze solid to the roads and sidewalks if it’s not cleared before nightfall.
Biking was practically impossible (and very dangerous), and sometimes even walking a few blocks was a challenge.
That being said, I’d still advocate for places like Edmonton being “15-min” cities, and in-fact it would make it much easier in the winter when transportation is more limited.
Edmonton (also where I grew up) was actually a leader in transit in the 70s and 80s, although it obviously hasn't kept up. Having an LRT in such a low density coverage, and good (although slow) coverage by bus using a hub and spoke network was pretty progressive at the time.
My dad commutes by bike through the winter in the Midwest. It's a whole production to winterize the bike, dress up in specialized gear, etc. Only the elite few, most hardcore bike commuters from the summer are still doing it in the winter. Maybe Oslo is a gentler winter, maybe people there just have stronger constitutions, but I do not see the average Midwesterner doing this ever.
I also know 1 person that bikes to work every day of the year in Colorado. Even when snowing and -10 degrees. Even after getting into multiple collisions with cars. Everyone, including his wife, thinks he’s a nutcase. It’s just not practical around here.
I think the main thing is studded tires, and ski jacket. Whitehorse isn't exactly a big town, at most you're 10km from where you want to go, but mostly it's 5km or under.
I could follow up and get his exact equipment if you'd like?
I'm in Wisconsin and bike all year. I have a hybrid with studded tires (specifically Nokian) and an internal hub. I'd also like to get a fat bike for fresh/powdery snow, but it's rare that's a big deal. There's of course some trade-off between how much traction/stability your tires give you and how much friction & inertia you have to work against when pedaling. Some people have a few different winter options so they can select the bike that will be easiest to propel but still be able to handle the particular day's conditions.
It's good to have warm clothes for your extremities, but your core gets surprisingly warm when you bike with any kind of coat on. I often just wear a think goretex jacket till it's in the single digits fahrenheit. I wear winter boots, warm gloves or mittens (depending on how cold it is), and a balaclava or gaiter. Also ski goggles for really cold/windy weather. If you don't start off feeling somewhat cold, you've overdressed.
I've been biking year-round in Denver for decades. The winters here are relatively mild, but we do get blizzards now and then.
I tried studded tires, but found they didn't help much. Black ice is rare here compared to layers of snow and slush, which don't give studs much to bite into. For me, three inch tires with an open tread pattern at low pressure -- plus an upright riding position that distributes weight evenly between the wheels -- gives me the most confidence.
Regarding the cold, I'd say windproofing is most important, and expedition-style mittens are well worth the investment. You won't need much insulation (except maybe at the extremities) once you start generating body heat. Multiple top layers, each with their own full length zipper, will let you regulate your temperature without getting off the bike. That's especially helpful if you have long climbs and long descents.
It's certainly possible with the right equipment but most people prefer to be warm, dry, safe, and comfortable. Those lucky enough to have indoor parking can go straight from home to car to work without even putting on a jacket. Cycling is going to be a tough sell with them.
I feel like the issue here is 40% individual resistance/convenience, & 60% cultural. The society doesn't have role models for them, of people who do cycle regularly in a variety of weathers.
In heavy bike using cultures, people have gear ready to go. Spending a minute to put it on is not really a barrier, an inconvenience. If there is a practice. If your environment supports it, by having plowed routes for bikes, bike parking.
I think we overrate the convenience & comfort factor. Don't knock it till you be tried it. You might like it! There is some real difficulty when your society self selects to only support & assist one mode of transit, doesn't have bike parking readily available, doesn't have safe paths for biking. And trying to embrace biking on your own, learn how to do it comfortably & safely, when few others do, that's hard. But I think the inherent comfort g convenience of cars is somewhat/greatly overrated. The mindset is that biking is inconvenient, but so many who successfully live it will tell you, it's easy & it feels great.
Sure, but that has a cost on everyone else.
Make them bare that cost, and actually make the decision as opposed to saying that the opposite is impossible.
You shouldn’t be, at least. Last winter I was driving back home from town and the weather flipped on a dime. Ended up in white-out conditions on a windy mountain road. Luckily a police car had their lights on pulled over on the side of the road. We pulled over behind them and waited it out. It was the scariest drive I’ve ever done and I drive that road every day.
*just as long as you don't have chronic pain or a mobility-limiting disability.
there's also the issue of those with pre-dawn and night commutes, these people are disproportionately lower income and live farther and farther away from gentrified city centers. it is not uncommon to see as much as a 20+ degree drop once the sun goes down and you'd better hope there's no windchill on top of that.
For a while, I was living in Marquette, MI and that got to -10 to -20F (-23C to -29C) many days during the winter, even during the day, and that was before factoring in the wind chill and the 3 feet of snow around you. They'd frequently cancel classes because it was dangerous to go outside if you had any skin exposed. And Marquette is a relatively small town that I'd classify as mostly "walkable". But on those days, walking 2 miles to the grocery story was not something anyone should have been doing nor were the roads or sidewalks clear enough to ride any kind of bike (if you even can at those temperatures).
I now live on the other extreme in Phoenix, AZ and during the summer, you'll see 115F (46C) or higher for ~2 months a year with no cloud cover. That's hot enough that you don't even really sweat while walking; it evaporates so quickly that it can't do its job. We've had people at my office go for walks during lunch and collapse after 15 minutes due to it. And Phoenix is one of the most unwalkable places to live imaginable from a layout/distance standpoint to boot.
But I will admit both of those are in the extremes and most of the country isn't like that, although many areas will have quite a few days that go subzero (-17C) and over 100F (38C) each year. I think a big thing the US needs to do is start rezoning areas and rely less on everyone living on a half acre of land 2 miles from the nearest non-residential building. Unless that happens, much of the US won't be able to realistically implement policies like Paris is.
If the city was built like those in deserts, with narrow walking paths between 2-3+ story buildings, with awnings over the walkway, it would be no problem.
> I don't find cold places to be as unwalkable as hot ones. You get used to the cold, the snow/ice are generally cleared after a few days.
> If anything, walkability is frequently about how a place looks and winter time can look quite nice with all the snow.
Why do you walk? Is it to go for a purposeless, leisurely afternoon stroll? Or to on a daily basis, go to your job, the grocery, to the dentist, the hairdresser?
In order for a place to be walkable, you should be able to safely, and predictably, with 99% confidence, be able to purposefully walk to that job, that grocery, that dentist, and that hairdresser, at any time of day - not just on a sunny weekend afternoon, after all the snow has been shoveled.
Any place with snow on the ground for 4-5 months out of the year is a misery of walkability. Maybe your job starts at 7 am, and walking to it sucks, because the snow hasn't been shoveled yet. Sometimes, you need to avoid patches of black ice (Good luck when you're carrying heavy bags of groceries). For weeks, at the start, and the end of the season, you are dealing with absolutely atrocious slush, that has a habit of freezing over-night.
I don't really care about the cold - I can solve that problem by putting on more clothes. I do care about all the other problems of walking in snow.
I now live in a mild climate, where snow isn't an issue. I can, with full confidence, walk anywhere I want on any day of the year, any time of day, and predictably get there at a good pace. I couldn't say the same for when I lived in a cold climate.
>here are many places that aren't walkable simply because they are frozen for most of the year.
You have to be a lot below freezing before mere temperature makes a city unwalkable. Very few places actually get that cold with any regularity. If sidewalks are maintained and it isn't crazy windy, you really don't need to change your walking behaviour much at all.
Heat is in practice often worse for walkability, especially when combined with humidity.
With eBikes the number of folks who can go at bike race speeds is incredible. I also know a lot of disable folks who can use eBikes but cannot drive. It’s an incredible technology.
If we are going down that road, slap a large enough battery/motor on it and you have an electric motorcycle capable of any speed you want. Slap on a couple extra wheels and you are getting close to a Tesla. "Walkable" means not having high speed vehicles sharing space with pedestrians.
People on electric scooters travel at frightening speeds in Paris, often without helmets. Even without cars it looks extremely dangerous. I am curious to know the injury (quadriplegia?) rate.
I think people seriously underrate the safety benefits of micro cars, and the necessity of car like vehicles for older people.
I once saw a couple of scooters collide (same direction), one of the riders fell and looked like they did somersaults -fortunately they were wearing helmets.
Pony is yes even at lower speeds collisions can be dangerous.
With eBikes the number of folks who can go at bike race speeds is incredible
It would only be incredible if that number is higher than 0. An ebike has higher friction than a racing bicycle and even the fastest ones have a top speed of 45 km/h (30 mph). "Bike race speeds" (road races) are up to 65 km/h, so 40 mph. I don't think even a Tour de France-level cyclist could reach bike race speeds on an eBike.
Id say any american town over 15k people has a little spit of downtown or some other commercial corridor built before 1950s suburbanization that is in varying states of boom or bust. These corridors are all zoned to be perfectly walkable.
> That means having stores, work locations, and living locations all within a kilometer or two at most (not everyone is capable of riding a bike at race speeds every day).
I've heard that this is already true of everywhere except the US, and the main reason it's not true of the US is zoning laws.
I moved into a walkable Seattle downtown-fringe area in 2005. Most needed stuff was sold within a few blocks. Thanks to great nearby transit connects to anywhere in the region, sold my vehicle after a year.
Lived there 12 years ... 120k miles less gas & maintenance. Miss it a lot now (one bus, nearest stores 2 miles, nearest transit station is a 15 min ride away. Perfect for Covid I guess.)
> but after it takes place everyone agrees things are much much better with less cars and no one wants to go back.
Except that most people cannot live in Paris because it's too expensive and need to commute every day. And using the RER which is dirty, smells like piss and full of graffitis, overcrowded at peak hours and often on strike is so unreliable that it is hardly an enticing option.
The majority of the people who are prohibited from living in Paris due to cost but commute in for work use transit, they’d do not drive. Redistributing road space from cars to bike and transit space is a benefit to them. Additionally an eBike costs an order of magnitude less than a car and is functionally the same range/value as a commute tool.
Its because you were alone.
Paris was well known to be unsafe even for a mechanical bike.
With the CoViD measures, many Parisians got equipped with high end electric and non-electric bikes and the number of them exploded.
Now that there are other pricy bikes everywhere, the risk that your bike will be targeted by a robber has highly reduced.
Moreover, cops and random pedestrian are also more aware.
Ultra qualitative data, would be better to find more quantitative to build the case but without more info, it is how I feel it.
I felt the same in Toronto (just have a shit bike), but the bike boom this summer led to somebody stealing my out-of-true rear wheel with extremely worn freewheel, and peeling the tape off my cracked seat revealing that, yes, it is cracked, and taking it anyway.
When people are out for a $5-$10 return for crack at 4AM, nothing is safe.
The government will solve that by making you pay to register your e-bike and fining and checking the papers anyone caught riding an unregistered e-bike.
Well this sounds cool but I think the stolen bikes would be reduced to space parts very easily, which I agree is a hurdle for the thieves but still I personally wouldn't risk it.
On the other hand, if anybody has any info if this will be a thing in Germany, please let me know! It's surely better than nothing.
Germany had voluntary bike registration to prevent thefts, I still have an old bike with the sticker. Didn't work because the police just flat-out tells you that they will not investigate bike theft if you report a bike as stolen. You just get a copy of the report for the insurance, but they systematically refuse to do anything.
You are complaining about public transportation in the Île-de-France region. Think about that for a second. Few regions have such an extensive network of public transport options.
For instance in Vienna (Austria) you can park your car cheaply a few miles away from the centre in large car parks and go easily and quickly to the inner city by tram. There isn't anything remotely similar in Paris. There are underground parking spaces but far from the necessary scale. Plus they are extremely expensive (4€/hour is common).
Public transports are extensive, but they're overcrowded and perpetually strained to the limit of breakage. This week, a 400 tons concrete beam fell on RER C tracks. I suppose it will be weeks before it runs normally again. This sort of problems happens constantly.
Paris resident are only about 30% to own a car (a constantly dwindling number). Most cars in Paris come from the suburbs, therefore making motorists miserable isn't a problem for the mayor as most motorists vote elsewhere. This has the very unfortunate effect that nobody is really interested in solving the problem at its root.
> You are complaining about public transportation in the Île-de-France region. Think about that for a second. Few regions have such an extensive network of public transport options.
Yes, and it still sucks. Now imagine how much it sucks in other regions.
The complaints you make are largely cultural. Metro trains in Asia, for instance, suffer fewer of those problems. The reason I believe authorities in Europe are settling on trains is because there are only a few problems inherent to trains as a technology. Far fewer than the problems inherent to cars as a technology. The problems that do exist are also far more tractable long term.
In Germany we have similar reliability issues I think as in France. They stem from two issues. First, that workers strikes are acceptable, and second that the infrastructure is often old and in disrepair.
The first reason is obviously cultural, but forbidding workers from striking would have some knock-on effects that the rest of society may not appreciate. The second reason, at least in Germany, has a lot to do with the semi-privatization of our train system which doesn't have inventives to invest in it's infrastructure and due it's cozy market position enabling rent-seeking.
The first problem, at least in the cities, could be solved with grade 4 automated metro according to the example of Copenhagen. The trains even drive much better than human drivers there, with no abrupt stops.
This would create unemployment, but it wouldn't infringe on people's rights.
The second problem we would have to solve by replacing the politicians that enable this. A much more difficult undertaking.
Another way to think about it might be "how do we give workers bargaining power, without them withdrawing their labour?"
How can we use capital to create meaningful work, rather than the status quo oscillation left<-->right?
Using capital just automate for the sake of excluding workers is (IMO) silly. Improving safety and reliability, fine. But capital is also needed to start new labour intensive jobs, and anti-labour capitalism has a blind spot for this, and it leads to more political unrest.
> And using the RER which is dirty, smells like piss and full of graffitis, overcrowded at peak hours and often on strike is so unreliable that it is hardly an enticing option.
I was surprised that the RER doesn’t have bathrooms on-board. In Ontario Canada, we have similar double-decker commuter trains and they have them. They’re about airline-style in terms of size (barring 1 “accessible” one per train), but they do the job.
The vast majority of cars in the streets of paris are not from suburban commuters but from people in the 15th and 16th (read: wealthy) neighborhoods preferring to drive than to mingle with the rest.
Besides, removing cars from the road means that busses will be more reliable (less traffic jams) so you can avoid the trains in more situations.
> A key factor of for solving climate change will be actions like this
Maybe, but seeing how Western nation's personal transport being way down due to COVID having little effect on CO2 leads me believe the real issue for the future is China's manufacturing sector, which will not go down.
Worse than that, rather than using 100KWh of natural gas power to generate, you buy from abroad, from a less efficient producer who uses 150kWh of coal fired power, and then use another 100kWh of oil power to transport it.
With gas being 1 "badness" per 100KWh, oil being 2 and coal being 3, this would mean avoiding 1 unit locally, but getting importing 5 units.
The beauty of a carbon tax is that it satisfies those on both the environmental side ("the left") and the localism side ("the right"). The only ones not liking it are globalists that don't care about the environment.
May need more cultural changes before a law. Trials in France haven’t worked.
Minimalism, KonMari methods and digital nomad trends (to name a few) are showing that you can live a very happy, fulfilled and wealthy life with a lot less material stuff.
A solution could be to be mass communicate on this to help people become confident enough for a carbon tax.
Isn't calling it "China's manufacturing sector" a bit disingenuous? For better or worse China's manufacturing sector is actually the western worlds manufacturing sector.
No, because a lot of "gotta do something" actions in the west don't practically matter in the short or long term (I'm discounting "raising awareness" type goals). Whether or not Chinese manufacturing is the west's fault is secondary to reducing China's growing output.
Off topic, but what's odd about COVID is that China's manufacturing sector is down as well. Even in absolute terms. It makes me realize there are things out there that I'm obviously not even aware of that cause us to pump all this CO2 into the air.
Or maybe the transportation and power generation sectors pollute far more than what I read and believed?
Or maybe clothing manufacture? Or food?
Who knows? But it's made me really curious about what it is out there that hasn't gone down during COVID? (And not just because I want to make a fast buck. It's genuine curiosity.)
Global greenhouse gas emissions can also be broken down by the economic activities that lead to their production.[1]
25% is from electricity and heat production;
14% from transport;
6% from residential and commercial buildings;
21% from industry;
24% from agriculture, forestry and other land use;
10% from other energy uses.Source: IPCC (2014);
So as a species, our big gains against global warming are going to be made by reducing CO2 output from the power generation and food production sectors.
I'm particularly fond of the "ourworldindata" website because they combine a very direct and focused outline of the facts with clear visual graphs and charts. IMHO its impossible to understand the scope and complexity of climate change and greenhouse gas emissions without picturing a lot of charts in your head. This pie chart in particular is a very good starting point:
Bullshit: isn't incredibly impactful. Short low speed trips in city centers by electric vehicles have marginal contribution to global emissions.
What's really motivating policies like this is an aesthetic aversion to cars from a few loud people who think they can socially engineer a beautiful shining future for humanity whether we want it or not.
I like cars. I'm perfectly happy to talk about emissions, but I'm not willing to give up my car on some new urbanist's say-so.
You're right about one thing though: we should all expect a lot more of this top down meddling with our lives.
He is not entitled but (at least in my country) you pay a tax to be able to drive it (where the car is registered), so probably not "entitlement" but some right he does have.
But does that tax levied on that car / maintenance expenses cover the costs of road maintenance, excess utility infrastructure from the sprawl that driving infrastructure incentivises, negative health and environmental externalities. I highly highly doubt it.
I'd be perfectly happy paying for the public space my car occupies. I'm a fan of congestion charges and tolling every road. But bans on cars altogether? No way in hell.
I know people talk about it — I talk about it, semi-seriously — but I don't see any comments here mentioning banning cars (except yours), and it's not in the article.
Electric cars are still extremely polluting. Tire and break dust is the majority of pm 2.5 particulate pollution in US cities and there is a growing body of research that shows reducing these emissions is a huge impact on our general cognitive ability and happiness (particulate air pollution makes us statistically significantly dumber). As with anything, I’m pretty happy with allowing what the market will support. Accurately pricing parking and making people pay the market rate for parking will drastically reduce car use. This is the plan is Paris (reducing free parking) We don’t need to ban cars, we just need to stop subsidizing them.
These goalposts are moving at light speed. You'll always be able to find some negative effect of cars. What annoys me about new urbanist types is that they're so dogmatically anti-car that they won't even acknowledge the positives
The thing that isn't talked about is the function of a personal vehicle. A car is a major contributing factor to personal freedom. You are able to travel short to long distances on YOUR schedule, not someone else's. The biggest issue with a lot of public transpo is the lack of freedom. You dont travel when convenient to you and you dont get taken to exactly where you want to go. This of course has its pros that go with the cons, both environmental and cost (cost to a degree, not all public transport is created equal and I have a big problem with considering it savings if you spend 1.5 hours round trip to do a 30 min round trip commute, but that's a slightly different topic).
When people argue for the rights of cars, they are really talking about their own personal rights to large movement (grocery shopping is far easier with a car than by public transpo and foot as a quick example).
And as the caveat, yes I do believe we need to take steps to solving our pollution generation. In the same breath, I dont believe in taking away personal freedoms or independent abilities. Paris is literally an archaic city. The design is archaic and what city planners have to deal with are hacks due to legacy design. Then again, French culture is rather archaic as well. They still refuse to adopt loaner words as an example, something the rest of the world has been doing for the past few hundred years at least. Using them as a poster child for what the rest of the modern world should do to fix pollution problems is like trusting an Italian engineering firm to build a bridge... it's going to collapse :P Add to that, banning anything is a very buercratical answer to a complex problem. Tell me the last time banning/prohibition has worked well and never had 2nd or 3rd order severe consequences. Historical speaking, they're pulling ideas out of their ass and are going to regret this decision regardless if its "for the greater good".
A good public transport system is more convenient than a car. I see kids as young as 10 (maybe younger but I haven't seen it) riding my local city bus system alone - compare that to the other parents who drive their kids to school. When the public transport system goes where you want about when you want it is really nice to not have to drive.
Most people have never experienced a good transport system. Even in Europe most have not. Paris is good for some people, but not even everyone in Paris. It is even worse in the US.
I think maybe you need to leave your American cities and come visit a modern city like London or Paris that has excellent public transport.
Living in London I travel on my schedule everywhere on public transport. That because a bus or a train turns up at every station or stop every 4 mins. Very little need to wait, never any need to plan.
I live in flat with a parking space (and paid a hefty premium for it) but still don’t have a car. Not because I can’t afford one, but because it just doesn’t make sense. It quicker, easier and cheaper to take public transport everywhere than it is to drive. Trains don’t get stuck in traffic, and there’s more train crossings over the river than there is car crossings, making most trips more direct by public transport.
You view cars as personal freedom. I see them as noisy pollution machines that try kill me when I walk and cycle. Why the hell should i give up my personal freedoms to walk and cycle, just so you can drive?
I've traveled between core London and Heathrow many times, and every time I've taken the train, I've had a faster, more pleasant experience that I would have had in a taxi. Maybe it's different if you're heading to Heathrow from outside Zone 1.
I guess we all have different definitions of best. Personally I'd much rather take a 15 minute train (leaving every 15 minutes) to the centre of London then a connecting tube (total £25ish, 30 mins) than sit in a taxi for at best half an hour, and often much longer, at a cost of £50-£100.
Of course, depending on timetables/connections the train could be a bit slower, and if one has a lot of luggage door-to-door by taxi might be better. But for me it would be hard to argue that fighting through London traffic in a car or taxi is superior to public transport.
The world of urban centers is a world of a fixed amount of lane-miles of road. Cars are an extremely inefficient use of road space, they have some of the worst throughout in terms of people per lane-mile per hour relative to other transit modes. What cities like Paris are doing is reallocating lane-miles of road from cars to alternate mere efficient transit modes, which increases there throughout and decreases their commute times. In a world of limited resources (lane miles of road) how much of a penalty should bus riders pay (in terms of minutes wasted sitting in car traffic) to increase the freedom of a much smaller in number group of drivers. I don’t have the numbers offhand, but let’s say there are 5 unique passenger trips in a bus for every unique passenger trip in a car in Paris. It’s calculable, by saying “preserve car drivers freedom” you are also saying “increase commute times by 30% for a group of people that is 5x as big as those having their freedom preserved.
In Oslo, Norway I talked with few car owners that were affected by removal of parking spaces in the city. They supported it as it saved them time. They need to walk more to the parking, but they spent less time sitting in traffic jams.
There is no single factor that contributed. Perhaps it is more efficient if everybody drives to one big parking, perhaps people overall started to use cars less, perhaps rash hour became more spread in time leading to lesser max car density and smaller jams. Whatever the reason, it was win-win.
> with bike/bus/walking space is an incredibly high impact carbon reduction strategy.
It is not. On a CO2 per mile bases cars emit less than non-vegan humans, because it takes a lot of energy to grow food. If you put 2 people in the car it's not even close.
> but after it takes place everyone agrees things are much much better with less cars and no one wants to go back.
Speak for yourself. Every place that has done that is basically a place I will never go to. Since I'm not there anymore I can't complain, right?
It's especially stupid when a downtown of a large city does that - God help anyone who needs city services and lives in the suburbs. (Are you expected to walk for 3 hours? Spend a ton of money on a taxi? There is no bus.) What ends up happening is the city and the surrounding area mentally split into two, and they fight politically.
> It's especially stupid when a downtown of a large city does that - God help anyone who needs city services and lives in the suburbs. (Are you expected to walk for 3 hours? Spend a ton of money on a taxi? There is no bus.)
This is Paris in the EU. Home to the densest (most stations per square mile) metro system in the world.
Trust me, you don’t need a bus, nor will you walk for 3 hours.
Don’t assume that every city in the world lacks resent public transport. That seems to be a uniquely American thing.
That’s fine, you are allowed to pay the true unsubsidized market rate cost of operating a car. No one is stopping you, we are just making sure you’re not externalizing the costs.
> On a CO2 per mile bases cars emit less than non-vegan humans
If we take the bottom table, "US Diet, typical", it looks like it is 1000 for driving, 230 for walking. That is more than 4x lower GHG emission by walking, per mile.
Which numbers from that article are you comparing?
This is like zoning away new housing construction. No one complains and everyone would agree that there's less traffic.
There are a group of people that are hurt but those people aren't around to complain.
The same with this. The people who need a car and can't get a space have to move out. Now it's true that population could be zero but to the extent it's more then zero you probably won't hear from them because they aren't in Paris.
Very few people actually need a car. The status quo in most cities is that car use is extremely subsidized through free parking. Remove the subsidy and allow people to pay the cost for their choices.
Might be true in Paris, but not in all cities. Most cities don't have the transport system to allow a serious about not having a car. Most cities are pretty small though, the bigger the city the more likely it is to have a transport system.
This isn’t correct at all. If you look at cities by population and/or density pretty much all global cities, from SF to Lima to Tokyo have sufficient transit and non-car mode share.
Yea, most cities don’t because they are small, but most people have access to these mode shares because more people live in large cities than small cities
Is this true? Is urban commuter traffic a significant contributor to carbon emissions (compared with carbon-based power, shipping goods across the world, etc)?
Right, but how much of that would be affected by policies like these? I guarantee you this won’t happen in rural or suburban areas, and even in urban areas, presumably a good portion of that 10% is public transit, taxis, ride share, etc which wouldn’t be affected. Never mind the fact that these policies will only reduce (not eliminate) urbanites driving to work. As ideal as it may be, America isn’t going to completely overhaul its infrastructure to be more European in just a few decades. It will probably move incrementally in that direction, but the bulk of the commuter emissions problem is certainly going to be addressed by making commuter vehicles more efficient (e.g., electric).
Article says that 70k of 140k parking spaces will be converted. This similar article [0] makes clear that 140k is the number of surface parking spaces. There are an additional 620k parking spaces in underground garages.
Yes! When you look at the price per square meters for housing in Paris, it's madness to allow people to leave their car overnight to sleep for free in the street!
You can't get a car in Tokyo unless you can prove that you have a place to park it. And IIRC Copenhagen managed to reduce public parking spots by 1-2% every year over a number of years. Combined with great public transport, this seems like a sensible thing to do.
> You can't get a car in Tokyo unless you can prove that you have a place to park it.
An important second part is that over-night street parking is also very, very limited and towing heavily enforced. It's important to have both parts, otherwise you just end up with people getting parking permits through corrupt bureaucrats/etc and just leaving them overnight and the problem doesn't get any better.
This is great. Where I live the city closed many parking spaces for cafes and restaurants because of covid, to allow them offer outdoor seating. It's been really nice.
Well, and then the police stops you and fines you for child endangerment and unsafe behaviour on the road. I'm not the overprotective kind, but this example is one of extreme recklessness.
However, that's the sort of legitimate delivery that's actually a lot easier if the roads are not so congested with people driving themselves to work in huge comfortable 4x4s.
Why is it not realistic at night? And umbrellas have been around for a tad bit more than 4000 years by now. I walked or took public transport to school on my own since I was 7 until I graduated from university.
Living in Paris here, I can’t agree more with this decision.
The whole city is very walkable, everything is within a 30min bike ride if you’re sporty enough. And the public transport is definitely world class if you can’t bike.
However this is very polarizing in France because living space is very costly within the city. And it will not decrease as building any residential space may imply destroying an historical building and disfigure the skyline.
Therefore, middle and lower class, needed to run a city like this are pushed to live in the suburbs. Where public transport is not as good as in the city center, so people need cars...
I hope this decision will help find solutions to solve this inextricable problem, which might be the challenge of the decade for the city of love.
The number of metro stations is too big, they are so close that taking 1 stop ride is meaningless, walking is as fast. This makes metro very slow. But the number of RER lines is very low. Both are not very reliable - I mean the number of nines in 99.[here]%. I'm not even sure it's above 99% in Paris. Other than the strikes, I've had more problems with metro/subways in a year here than over 17 years in Moscow. Random unannounced station closures, someone forgets things on a station and a line stops for an hour, etc. And the strikes are a bad joke, why are they legal!? With the strikes, average reliability is < 95%.
I really like how NYC has local/express sharing the same infrastructure. Manhattan has near the same height as Paris (Peripherique), yet it's possible to travel all the distance with 5 or so stops.
As someone living in NYC I can attest that the local/express lines are great. But I'd kill for 95% reliability! The on-time performance in NYC is somewhere around 80% and likely to get worse with the huge budget issues NYC will have post-COVID.
Keep in mind that the Paris metro has 0% reliability if you need to ride it between 2AM and 5:30AM. Or rather it is 100% reliably not running during those hours. NYC could probably boost those numbers if they could do track maintenance during guaranteed non-running hours.
What do you mean by "on-time performance"? I lived for 6 months in Manhattan on 112th and it worked fine. Probably one or two times my station was closed in the morning and I had to walk down to the next one.
And as someone who lived in Moscow for a long time I can attest it is the gold standard. It's the second busiest (or top-3) and just always works as scheduled. One rare thing one could rely on that comes from the government.
I regret to inform you that the NYC subway has many more problems than you experienced. Before the pandemic I traveled between Brooklyn and Manhattan and problems were common. Much more common was just random slowdowns, sitting between stations, etc. that makes it a lot more difficult to know when you'll arrive at your destination.
I'm not sure, but it looks that OTP is much stricter measure than what I meant. I was talking about: I want to change from line A to B on station X (or exit on the station X)... Station X is closed, and I learn about that on station (X-1), or even just by not stopping on the station X.
It happened in Paris more than "extraordinary" number of times, so I have to put extra 15 mins to every important travel.
OTP sounds like: the train is scheduled at 3:25, it arrives at 3.26. Correct me if I'm wrong here. But if the normal margin is 5 mins for total time of travel, making it 15 mins is not nice.
That’s pretty strange though, I don’t think I’ve seen a subway with a time table before. It’s too frequent for it to matter in the first place, you just need to know when the next train towards your destination is coming!
One could make the argument that a train showing up ten minutes late vs one on time doesn't really matter to a person so long as it shows up within a reasonable time of them getting to the station and it still takes them to their destination on time. If the headways are five minutes and every single train is running at the same speed just five minutes late, this is a distinction that doesn't matter to the passenger.
- due to all the merging in and out throughout the system, trains need to be in the right place at the right time or merging delays will cascade throughout the system
- for purposes of employee scheduling, you need to make sure that the right employees are in the right place at the right time; generally a train leaving a terminal is being driven by a crew that had to come in from somewhere else.
Isn't that a different idea than a timetable? "We're aiming for one train every 10min" and "there's a train at 12.10, 12.20, 12.30" are similar, but not quite the same. You can get your approximation without a timetable though.
Tracked vehicles require centralised traffic management and scheduling as they cannot casually overtake one another as street traffic can, and setting switching points and clearing control blocks is required for safety.
Passengers transferring to other lines or transit modes may also appreciate predictability.
All lines fulfilled this objective except line 4, with 96.1%
AS for RER, there is an official governemental website that gives the numbers: http://www.qualitetransports.gouv.fr/les-chiffres-de-la-ponc... (in French)
The most reliable one in 2020 is the A with about 94% of reliability and the worst one was RER B in March, with 78.9%.
All these numbers are very very low, when you consider that this is essentially how Parisian are supposed to go to and from work, get food, go to school, the dentist and so on.
The best RER gets you late around 1 every 20 trip. So once every 2 weeks on average if you count two trips per day. The worse one doesn't get you on time almost every other day !
You basically have to factor the unreliability of the transport system every single trip. This is very far from something you can count on. Even for the best lines.
Worker strikes arent something you can legislate away unless you're going to start forcing people to work, which is, uh, let's say widely frowned upon.
If you want to end strikes, you'll need to convince workers that showing up is in their interest.
Sure, but the original question was why is striking legal. Firing people for striking isn't the same as criminalizing it.
If you're responding to my statement of "can't legislate it away", then I suppose yes you're right that is an example of being able to do that and I should have worded that differently, but the key there is that it only works if your threat convinces the workers to return. Which, according to that Wikipedia article, it didn't entirely and their staffing levels didn't fully recover for a decade.
In Denmark you're only allowed to strike under certain circumstances, and primarily strikes happen every three years when collective agreements between unions and employers needs to be renewed.
This makes strikes a rare happening, and usually very predictable.
Your premise is wrong because there are many people in the voting population who do not work for the government, let alone as members of the same working group. E.g, a bus drivers union can't on their on their own dictate who the mayor is.
This assumes a significant number of those spaces are contiguous such that they're eligible for being replaced by housing. Moreover, Paris doesn't build tall buildings, so the housing isn't very dense (compared to a typical US city). I'm very skeptical this would create enough housing to lower property values.
EDIT: Oof, that's quite an error on my part. I was absent-mindedly conflating "downtown areas" with the whole city. My bad. Never the less, I'm skeptical that this change will amount to much in terms of lower property values, but I'd be happy for someone to articulate why my skepticism is misplaced.
> housing isn't very dense (compared to a typical US city)
Maybe we are thinking of different things but I see the average US city as suburban with 4 people per quarter acre lot. Paris is 10-100x more dense than that. That's why public transit is far more effective there.
Paris is denser than virtually every American city, and it's not even close. I honestly can't tell if the comment is supposed to be taken seriously. Density does not equal high rises.
Barcelona's 'superblock' structure boasts the highest density in the world (exceeding the world's densest city overall, Manila, and looks like this:
Yeah, I was mistakenly comparing US downtown areas with Paris downtown areas. Mea culpa.
I do imagine that a high rise is going to be more dense than a Parisian 5-story. I understand that Parisian apartments are smaller and they aren't going to have parking or on-site greenspace like a US high rise, but I would be surprised if they are still less dense. Of course, that doesn't validate my original claim that Paris is sparser than US cities.
Line automation a la line 1 and more recentry 4 may be the solution to strikes. Of course, employees will shut down the automation as well during a strike, no strikebreaking robots allowed to work. I liked the London Tube better though. Couldn't get lost in it, even if supposedly drunk and it seemed more reliable. Mind the gap!
Agree on the tube in London. And it has many more challenges than Paris, narrower, deeper and older tunnels. But somehow it feels like a more civilised crowd, people are queuing, not pushing (the narrow crowded platforms would be lethally unforgiving) letting people out first, the cars and tunnels aren't filthy (with the notable exception of Saturday night).
Take your kids for a 2 hours bus + RER + metro ride and have some fun. Oh wait, I forgot, you're "sporty enough", right, you mean, you're "rich enough" to live inside the city, you have that nice, well paid job in an office that's always magically clean, and everything is always magically ready for you in Paris.
The city of love really IS magic for little privileged people like you. Go ahead and keep it up telling how other should live, and if they can't it's their fault: they just had to have your little privileged lifestyle, of a "nanti" as we say in France. First hit on the poor, who live far away from paris and come down to clean your office, and "hope this will help finding a solution". I guess it's their fault, they should just have been ... privileged like you.
Have you any idea of the pain it has become to use a car in Paris ? Does it really strike you as if people really had a better choice ?
tell them. its the same problem everywhere. rich kids fillING the cities with daddy money and then demanding all the original folks to change.
same in Amsterdam. We call them 'juppen'.. they destroy the city.
luckily due to corona, a lot of them are moving back to their parents home.
middle and lower class, needed to run a city like this are pushed to live in the suburbs
You could always take the Singaporean solution and make replacing them with automation a national priority? I am not being serious, I am pointing out there are actually national programs for this sort of social adjustment. It's more than a little scary.
This is very good, both for drivers and pedestrians.
I moved from Moscow to Paris a year ago, and I think Moscow is a success story of fixing traffic.
* Make streets in the center narrower, remove 1-2 lines and make sidewalks wider;
* Remove parking slots, make the remaining ones very expensive;
* No barriers to taxi aggregators or car sharing, just regulations on hours of work;
* Improve public transport (new metro lines);
* (Optional: pave the sidewalks with tiles (Собянинская плитка). Despite bad jokes it really feels nice vs old broken asphalt)
The city became pleasant to pedestrians, traffic jams reduced a lot. Before that I even refused to use taxis, because the price was high, quality was low, and sitting for 1 hour just to move 300 meters was usual. I do not drive myself, but taking a taxi there is no brainer - $5 per ride and much faster than before, without traffic.
Now Paris reminds me of Moscow in the 2000s. Often narrow sidewalks where even two people find it difficult to walk past each other, parked cars that make this difficult even for one person (good luck with baby carriage!). This is not everywhere, not on the main streets, but Paris is an old city and there are many old narrow streets. Those should be made completely pedestrian or keep just one line.
Before the confinement I lived near Petit Champs/Chabanais streets. They made Chabanais and one part of Petit Champs pedestrian, and removed 1.5 lines from another part in favor of sidewalks. Local activity thrived, children were playing, cafes full of people on the sidewalks or streets themselves. I used to joke that they called Moscow mayor Sobyanin to fix the streets. If they didn't, they should... at least not be afraid of radical measures.
And the measures should be radical so that improvements to pedestrians (or taxis, public transport) are big and more people give up on their own cars faster. Biking and scooters are possible all year around in Paris vs just five months in Moscow, so I'm looking forward to more and more of those changes.
P.S. Paris should also make public transport strikes illegal!
At first I thought "wtf this this the second person here who want to make striking illegal", then I realized you are the same :)
We are a democratic country, people are free to strike, and it's a good thing. It's a bit annoying sometimes, but it's certainly worth it (I'm sure there is no strike in north korea, but I'm happy to live in a free country with that minor annoyance)
Do you think free countries should have the right to use temp workers ("scabs" in unionist lingo) to operate transit infrastructure during worker strikes?
In France it's not allowed. However what they can do for public transportation, to ensure "minimum service", is to make non drivers employees (like management for example) drive the train.
They are also fully automating more and more lines.
No, the correct thing to do is to break the accreditation agencies and professional associations' grip over medical school admissions and massively increase the supply of surgeons.
In France, the government sets the number of 2nd year medical school seats available. Anyone can sign up for year 1, but only the top N students at the end of year exam make it to the second year.
This stands in stark contrast with the USA where the AMA calls the shots. In effect, the doctors control the supply of doctors.
The restriction on supply is less about the number of medical school places and more about the number of residency training slots available post graduation from medical school.
Simply increasing the number of medical school places would result in many people spending years of their life (and in the US, 100s of thousands of dollars in debt) without then being able to then start their career.
Some degree of central planning seems reasonable here.
You have to remember that in a well working labour market strikes are a last resort, and 99% of the time having a strike as a tool helps the labour side wield their fair share of collective bargaining vs the dominant position of the employer organisation.
They are not followed in the first place and it's a problem. Drivers who work for 16+ hours per day cause road accidents. But those regulations are a good thing, same as for aircraft pilots.
There is actually something called "service minimum" by law for public transport workers during strikes. Without it, there would not be any metro or RER at all during strikes in Paris.
So let me, please, pay zero taxes, during the strikes. Or the minimum that doesn't go to those who are striking. It's a public service, like medicine... What if one has an appointment to an oncologist at 11AM, outside of "service minimum" hours. It's so irresponsible!
Well, I want no taxation without representation, literally! Public transportation is financed from taxes. People who take jobs there must have some obligations, like I do to my employer. Why they should decide whether I should go to work or pay so much for taxi, if it's available at all? If those people working on public transport are not happy, I do understand them... But please announce everything in advance, not the Charlie Foxtrot situation that happened a year ago.
I expect that some drivers will switch to other options as a reaction to this. However, there could also be a substantial amount of cars that as a result will now circle the streets much longer in order to find a spot for their car.
There is a real chance this will not have the effect hoped for, or at least not to the intended extent.
Living in the close suburb (Neuilly/92) and i can't agree more, i don't know the reasons but the amount of people going to pick up their baguette or just go to the dry cleaner by car is insane. When I ask my neighbor why they took the car to do a one km ride to get to the "boulangerie" she was answering because it's more comfortable...
My gut feeling is that no matter how many cycling lane or pedestrian they would anyway park on there, the invincibility due of lazyness is unbearable high here.
Even as a lifelong car nut it bothers me how much of our urban space is dedicated to cars. If it hadn’t happened so gradually I think we would have rebelled a lot sooner.
Not sure about Paris, it would be interesting to rezone all existing parking lots and structures for mix use / residential to alleviate housing issues in some Canadian cities. Assuming the industry can build fast enough.
France is becoming my favorite country for reasons like this. 75% nuclear, no cars in the streets. Parking in large cities is always a nightmare anyway.
Sounds like you've never been to Paris. Its an absolute pit. Especially the banlieus, ghettos with incredibly high crime, civil unrest... Last time I was there (summer this year) we drove around Paris over the highway and found thousands of people sleeping in tents.
Every time I travel abroad, I'm always in awe of functional public transit (well, before COVID anyways, until that's over I'm staying put. It's not like anyone is itching to allow Americans into their country considering just how astonishingly poorly we've handled it).
I'd really love for the pressure against public transportation in the United States to abate - from auto industry lobbyists to the public view that owning a car is a status symbol and that only "poor" people take public transit. My parents spent many years living just outside the SF Bay Area and their town can't get mass transit access because Livermore refuses to have a BART stop in their town because of the "bad actors" (read: poor people) it could bring in. Livermore even went so far as to design all of their new bridges to get in the way of the center-of-highway BART tracks. Anyone further down I-580 Eastbound be damned.
I traveled across Japan and Germany completely on mass transit (buses, subways, high speed rail, walking), there were only a few places I would've preferred to have a car for. If I were using it for work travel, I'd much rather take a train and pull out a laptop and do something than have to drive, maybe even just enjoy the view.
Do you have a source for Livermore designing their bridges to specifically prevent BART expansion? I'm a transit nerd and I find this to be stunning, but I Googled around and couldn't find anything corroborating that
Bridges in Livermore look to be of similar design to what exists on the section where BART does run, the center posts are not an issue, and there are center posts on every overpass of the BART tracks. Look at the overpasses to the east/west of the current terminus, for example.
Livermore's government has been advocating for bringing BART service further, has been frustrated by BART shooting down the extension proposal: https://www.bart.gov/about/projects/liv
Further, after the extension proposal was shot down, they were the ones that pushed for the creation of a new transit entity to build a connecting service, and have been a substantial portion of what's pushing the project forward. And it's planned to run on I-580 in Livermore, so clearly they don't seem to think the bridges are a problem.
It's not only false, it's offensive. Livermore, like the rest of the 680 corridor in Alameda county, has been paying full BART taxes for two generations with no service.
> Livermore even went so far as to design all of their new bridges to get in the way of the center-of-highway BART tracks. Anyone further down I-580 Eastbound be damned.
Wow, really? If true, that's some straight up Robert Moses level racial tactics.
> I'd really love for the pressure against public transportation in the United States to abate
Biggest issue is that America is so vast. Take for instance where I live. I am 15 minutes by car (going about 55mph) from anywhere. Public transport is only feasible in heavily populated areas.
Here in Boston mostly wealthy or single people take the subway. Poor people and middle class families can't afford to live close enough. It used to be the other way around.
If you are a disabled person living or working in Paris this might put you in a really bad spot. Because Paris' subway system is mostly not accessible to disabled people. (Few or no elevators / escalators in key subway stops).
I know this from personal experience when I took my two kids in strollers to Paris. Lugging the strollers up and down stairs was a nightmare.
But maybe disabled people have other options like buses so it might not be as bad as it seems initially.
> If you are a disabled person living or working in Paris this might put you in a really bad spot.
Can you share some link to the complains of the disabled community? I see you position posted quite often, but I have never seen any details and I am interested in there nuances of the situation.
I have experience with Barcelona and the public transport was adapted a decade ago. Is that an unique case?
The position of Paris was to try to improve access to the bus system rather than the metro system. Last year only 3% of the metro network was accessible whereas 70% of the bus network was
Source in french: https://actu.fr/ile-de-france/paris_75056/3-metro-paris-acce...
Only one Paris Metro line with 9 stations has elevators and ramps for autonomous wheelchair access. There are 16 numbered lines and hundreds of stations in the city.
I live in Vancouver which has been building up its downtown core and discouraging people driving to downtown through various measures like taxes, reducing lanes, etc.
I used to drive in from the suburbs for work. I spent a lot of money downtown. Expensive dinners, evenings at the bar, or show/concert/sports/event, bought all my clothes, electronics, gifts, office supplies, dentist, some food shopping, haircut, insurance, doctor, RMT, physio, acupuncture. I did as many errands downtown as possible.
Now that I'm working from home due to the virus I haven't been back. When the office opens I won't go back. If they force me I'll find a new job where I can work remote. Now I spend all my money where I live.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 253 ms ] threadNow can we remove the free street parking from Manhattan?
In the center of Copenhagen it's $4-6/hour.
30 days x 12 h/day x 5 US$/h= 1,800 US$ month x 12 = 21,600 US$/year
Typical rent 5% of value.
21,600/0.05= 432,000
Size of a parking spot 5x2.5 m = 12.5 sqm, let's make it 15.
432,000/15= 28,800 US$/sqm
Cost of a house in Copenhagen (centre):
https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/in/Copenhagen
47,555.60 kr = +/- 7,500 US$/sqm
That is for an apartment, not a full house of multiple storeys. If you have four storeys (counting the ground-floor), then interestingly the costs would be roughly on par. I am not sure, how many storeys the houses are supposed to have in Copenhagen.
There is NO market in the world AFAIK where 1 sqm is considered multi-storey, a house that is 100 sqm in plan and is 2 storeys is a 200 sqm one.
The opportunity cost of 1 sqm of street parking space is not 1 sqm of "living unit", but 1 sqm of land.
If 1 sqm of apartment is worth $7.5K/month, and average building height is 4 stories, that suggests 1 sqm of land is worth approximately 4 * 7.5 = $30K/month (minus value of the building).
16 will be 4 times that.
My note was not about "opportunity cost", it was about the (extremely high) "rent" that a parking space at 5 US$/hour represents compared to its cost.
If you buy a 50-55 sqm apartment/flat/living unit in Copenhagen, you spend roughly 400,000 $, you can possibly rent it for 5%/year, i.e. around 20,000 $/year.
If you can manage to extort 5 $ /hour (for 12 hours/day) for a parking space which is 1/4th of area (and is not a building) you get more or less the same.
In the downtown core of much of the east cost US, you're looking at $20+ for a minimum period of 3 hours. On the other hand, in my small city in the midwest during my adult life parking has gone from $.50/hour to $1.60/hour, and people have been outraged by each incremental increase.
Edit: noted that $20+ is often for multiple hours, but you regularly can't buy a single hour for $7, you're stuck paying a min of $20 upfront.
Sounds pretty par for the course for a parking garage in an upscale part of Boston or DC with a minimum charge.
For convention centers, hospital clinics and other "people who have to come from far away must come directly here and they are likely to have a situation whereby public transit is impractical" type destinations $20 would be cheap.
It's so bad, now when I drive through Manhattan and see an open free parking spot I get a twitch urge to park there immediately. Even though my destination is in Queens...
[0] https://toomanycars.nyc/
How many of those are free, since that was the claim? Nothing in Midtown is free, for instance.
If you were to double or triple that number(which is unlikely), that still means the vast majority of parking in NYC is absolutely free of charge. That 3M number also doesn't take into account all of the 'No standing', 'No parking', sidewalks or bike lanes which have been repurposed into parking by people with parking placards, PBA cards, or whatever other miscellaneous artifacts allow drivers to leave their cars wherever they want with impunity[1].
What I find amazing is that people have an expectation of being able to bring a several thousand pound object that is bigger than many NYer's kitchens, into one of the densest parts of the country that is served 24/7 by public transit and for-hire vehicles, and store it for free. Even tourists with tiny suitcases have to pay to store their suitcase somewhere.
[0] https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2011/03/22/new-york-has-81875-me...
[1] https://twitter.com/placardabuse
Yes, they absolutely should. Here in Chicago, a residential street parking permit costs $25 per year per car and allows you to park in a specific zone near your residence. 24-hour permits for visitors are sold in sheets that end up costing just slightly more than 50 cents each. The program more or less brings in revenue to pay for itself but makes getting street parking much more fair.
Oh, I forgot to mention that you cannot buy more then 45 of the 24-hour passes per 30-day period. And that's per address, so if you have roommates or a spouse their purchases are all aggregated together.
Having lived in 'walkable' European cities, I can vouch for them, and I think it benefits the vast majority of people living there.
I'm lucky enough to have a decent job in a fairly rural area and a cheap car that I can easily maintain. At one point I was even a car enthusiast that liked doing modifications. I still think society as a whole should be progressing towards a carless future. Although I'd appreciate it if VR tech was advanced enough to let me drive around in virtual classic cars by that point with feel and smell.
Transit isn’t the only issue.
Public transport in Paris is wonderful, and while there are parts where I still would rather not bike around, cyclist safety is getting much better too. The city is simply adapting to other modes of transport that are better for everyone.
Only someone who never lived in Paris more than two days could ever write this sentence. Paris’ subway is one of the worst in the world (often on strike, technical problems, stink piss, expensive, unsecure especially for ladies, no accessibility, etc.)
When I had choice to take sub for 40 min or walk 40 min to go to the same place, I took walking every time because of how bad public transportation are in Paris.
(There's also buses and bike shares, by the way.)
We probably don't have the same sense of wonderful. It's overcrowded, unsafe and the metro smells horrible.
Now yes, you can live there without owning a car, but I don't call that wonderful.
I assume most of the streets in Paris were built before cars were a big thing, what was that space used for way back then? Sounds like a silly question, but, did people park horses in the same spaces used for cars now? (I assume you didn't "park" your horse, but it seems like more or less the same concept?)
Bike lanes or Lime and Bird scooter lanes?
The large streets have been rebuilt many times already, before and after the war.
The Haussmann reform is famous for enlarging the streets to make way for protests, err, no, army maneuvers. Large, straight streets.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding something, but wasn't it to prevent barricades?
Funny note though, protesters are counted by the police only if not walking on the sidewalks. Those would be considered observers.
The streets of Paris were mostly built at the end of the XIX century where cars were common, just powered by horses.
The problem since the mid 1990s is the increase in the car traffic. It is remarkable when you watch movies from the 70s to see those empty streets, full of empty parking slots on the sides.
For instance this short film. Shot early in the morning (so empty streets expected) but look at the side of the roads, almost no cars parked anywhere. Today these streets are packed bumper to bumper. It feels like another city: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-GqZIR0HUw
But you would notice the same on any film or documentary from the 70s.
:-)
I'd imagine reducing spaces to the point where the assumption is "there is no parking" instead of "if I fight hard enough I can find a space" would actually reduce the number of people searching and driving in the city center in the first place.
Similar to the observation that expanded highways don't actually reduce congestion, they just attract more cars.
Commuting by car or public transport takes 1h30 to 2h, so up to 4 hours a day on the bad days. Traffic is terrible. Parking is terrible. Train is OK ish and comfortable enough to work or read. Some trains (RER) are awful. Working remotely, 3 days a week around the weekend is the best.
People indeed becomes quite aggressive, even if somehow disciplined. I worked in south India earlier this year, and I found people there completely undisciplined on the road, but very friendly. Like line splitting in front of a bus with a friendly smile and a gentle press on the horn.
Exactly. There's local norms of conduct for traffic everywhere. There's standards for acceptable aggression and obliviousness (and other attributes). Paris, India, etc are all low on obliviousness. If you expect to be able to just blindly follow markings and signals and think that all you have to watch out for is the car in front of you you are going to have a bad time. India is lower on aggressiveness because the nature of the traffic there really doesn't lend itself to that. Likewise if you try to drive like you're in Rome in a wealthy American suburb or somewhere else where high obliviousness is the norm you're gonna piss a lot of people off because you're not gonna behave the way they expect.
The difference is how drivers reacts to the deviation from the rules.
In Paris, it seems that revenge is preferred. If you honk me, I squeeze you. Or push the brakes violently. Then finger.
Rome is more exotic but a lot quieter in fact. A lot less crowded too.
What you can do, is buy or hire a parking garage that already exists. This is possible of course, but expensive. Think 1/3rd of the cost of a family car (either as monthly rent, or as purchase price).
Then factor this into the price you have to pay to own a car, why does everyone need to subsidise car owner's parking?
And if you force the government to inefficiently reserve street space for cars, society has to incur the same costs, except non-car owners are forced to unfairly subsidize car owners by bearing those costs.
There is always land available to buy, €10k per square metre for this property for example: https://tranio.com/france/adt/1928891/
Maybe that's too much to park your car, but land has a cost, why should a car owner be allwoed to store their property on public land for free? Can I build a shed in that space instead?
I can not buy land outside the city to park my car. I can not afford a second car payment to rent a monthly spot. City parking is really my only option to avoid taking public transit and risk getting and spreading COVID.
You didn't need to buy a car and avoid taking public transit to risk getting and spreading COVID. Likely every single one of the places you've gone by car have been more risky than taking the train or bus.
Multiple research articles have found no link between public transport and the spread of COVID, even when looking at places like Seoul and Tokyo where transit use is much higher. The risk of catching COVID is higher at the grocery store than on a bus.
I sympathize with why you thought you needed to do that and I genuinely hope you will dispose of the vehicle once the pandemic is over. Humans are terrible at evaluating risk, and people's sudden impulse to buy a car when that's not where the risk lies is an example of this.
Are you really suggesting that 7% of Chicago's entire land area be given away for free to car owners -- because if everyone owned one car you'd need 1.7 million square feet to park them. That's in addition to the space used for those cars to move around which is at least as much.
If you don't own a car, how can you claim your free space?
Or are you only complaining about on-street parking?
And all the families that currently live high quality loves, without cars, in these places would find your assertion about “can’t have a family without cars” absolutely comical.
For large chunks of the US, top down urban planning has forces people in most areas to own cars. But it doesn’t have to be that way, it was a choice that was made, and a choice that can be changed.
https://priceonomics.com/how-the-world-shops-for-groceries/
I live in NA, but a grocery store is an easy walk, and was on my daily commute in pre-COVID times. This makes me an outlier among North Americans I guess. But it would be the norm for places that allow for car free life.
The following is therefore speculation, but the best I can come up with to try to meet you where you are. Right now, your car based life is so inconvenient and so inefficient, that stopping by a store is something to be minimized, to do as infrequently as possible. So to you, going to the store more than once a week is an inconvenience. You have to drive somewhere special outside of your normal route, park, walk a long distance from the car to the store, wander around a store so large that the idea of stopping and grabbing something quick is almost inconceivable. You likely even have to wait in line, because checking out a single person with a full week of groceries takes many minutes.
Once we allow the possibility of not living with a car, which means all of your daily needs within walking distance, an entirely new world opens up that is much more convenient. There is a smaller, well stocked store along most routes you take. Grabbing groceries for a day or two is not an affair that has an extra half hour of driving and walking. It's a quick hop in and out. You can always have fresh food, because you stop frequently and quickly, without having to wait a week in between trips because to shop more frequently would be wasteful of time. Run out of sugar? No big deal, it's conveniwnt to buy some more.
Once cars are gone and cities are designed around that, everything is more accessible and convenient. I mean, the whole thread started with how life in cities so not need cars, and how having cars in cities ruins life there. And for that matter, much of small town life can be similar to cities, because there, needs can also be within walking distance for a small compact town.
It's only car-based suburbia with highly restricted unmixed land uses that leads to this "I can only go the grocery store once a week" attitude. Life does not have to be that way, people that want it should be able to live like that, and those that don't want it should be able to have walkable lives. Walkable areas mean more accessibility than car-based areas, because stopping does not involve parking.
This is not about "allow[ing] the possibility of not living with a car", all your suggestions increase costs, some increase them a lot. And sure, with unlimited money, I understand that the center of a big city is more luxurious than the suburbs or countryside, this is not controversial. You get to drop the car, which is about 500 dollar per month. But you spend double that on the equivalent apartment (I don't mean equal sized to what you get in the suburbs, I mean the MINIMUM apartment for 5 people)
So yes, costs will need to be comparable, as a basic condition. So using something between a convenience store and a "agent" supermarket is not a serious option, nor is fulfilling every meal by "grabbing something quick", not just from a weight/carrying perspective but from a financial perspective. Making the choice simply based on which is the closest is not a reasonable option either. The problem with a family of 5 is that every cost you have when you are single multiplies by a factor of 3-4, and I'm sure it'll be 5 by the time the kids really get past puberty.
Furthermore, you haven't answered my original question: just simply how to carry it. I assure you a 2-3 day supply of soda for a family of 5 weighs minimum 6kg, and 12kg is better (even that is 3-4 days at best). Carrying this onto public transport, over the sidewalk and/or into an apartment block is supremely uncomfortable. Your suggestions change nothing except making it expensive as well.
Let's take an example: 1 day breakfast + lunchbox + dinner for 2 adults and 3 kids. Take 2 bottles of soda (3kg), 2 cartons of milk (3kg), breakfast cereal (750g), 2 full size breads (750g), something to put on there (700g), vegetables (1.5kg), meat (500-750g), potatoes (2kg), and general supplies (2kg). This is three bags of groceries weighing 15kg. I assure you it definitely won't last 3 days.
How do I comfortably carry this on public transport, and sidewalk, and up a flight of stairs, and you say to carry it on the way home, so in combination with what I carry to work (let's say 5kg) ?
Going once a week, with, say 3 people, carrying something like 20-40kg of groceries, seems vastly more comfortable, attractive, cheaper, easier and faster to me.
This is a common concept in some European cities, with large parking garages directly attached to the subway/train stations.
Kinda like how hot-desking reduces your desk space needs by 30%+.
In my city in The Netherlands, new buildings sometimes get a parking garage below the apartments. The ratio is 1 parking spot for every 3 apartments, and next year it'll be 1:4. But new houses don't get a parking garage below them, because that raises the price of the house too much, or so I was told by an architect employed by the municipality. Thus inhabitants get to fight over the available space in the streets.
Yeah, demand will always consume everything that is free, but as soon as you put a price on something behavior changes.
Owning a car costs money.
When I bought my condominium in the USA, I got two parking spaces in a garage with it. With only 1 car, I rent out the second space. 3 years ago, I could rent it for $350 per month. Now, I can get $200.
Around here, the condominium and the parking space are different tax IDs, so you can buy and sell them independently. A lot of buyers choose not to buy the parking space when they buy the condominium. You should assume that when your local builders are moving from 1:3 to 1:4, they are doing so in response to market demand for parking.
Do note that I just describe the current situation. I do agree with the fact that the amount of cars/parking spots needs to go down, to make a city more liveable.
I don't own a car. I need one, to regularly visit clients and visit family. Thus, I have joined a car sharing initiative. However, it's about equally as expensive as leasing a new family car. I can afford this, but I recognize not everyone can. And I find this recognition is sometimes missing from the discussion.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
An area does not become walkable because there are no cars. First you have to ensure that journey distances are within walking range. That means having stores, work locations, and living locations all within a kilometer or two at most (not everyone is capable of riding a bike at race speeds every day). Paris, at least some parts of Paris, might have that in place. So too maybe NYC or SF. But a great many places are not setup that way and don't have mass transit infrastructure to convert quickly.
During the summer months it's great though.
According to wikipedia, average lows in Oslo are about -5. That's pretty warm. Salt still melts snow at those temperatures. Even sunlight will melt snow on pavement at -5. But below around -10/-15 salt stops melting ice, vastly increasing the manpower needed to clear roads/sidewalks. Clearing ice at proper winter temperatures requires mechanical means, hammers, if not propane torches.
Biking was practically impossible (and very dangerous), and sometimes even walking a few blocks was a challenge. That being said, I’d still advocate for places like Edmonton being “15-min” cities, and in-fact it would make it much easier in the winter when transportation is more limited.
It's good to have warm clothes for your extremities, but your core gets surprisingly warm when you bike with any kind of coat on. I often just wear a think goretex jacket till it's in the single digits fahrenheit. I wear winter boots, warm gloves or mittens (depending on how cold it is), and a balaclava or gaiter. Also ski goggles for really cold/windy weather. If you don't start off feeling somewhat cold, you've overdressed.
I tried studded tires, but found they didn't help much. Black ice is rare here compared to layers of snow and slush, which don't give studs much to bite into. For me, three inch tires with an open tread pattern at low pressure -- plus an upright riding position that distributes weight evenly between the wheels -- gives me the most confidence.
Regarding the cold, I'd say windproofing is most important, and expedition-style mittens are well worth the investment. You won't need much insulation (except maybe at the extremities) once you start generating body heat. Multiple top layers, each with their own full length zipper, will let you regulate your temperature without getting off the bike. That's especially helpful if you have long climbs and long descents.
In heavy bike using cultures, people have gear ready to go. Spending a minute to put it on is not really a barrier, an inconvenience. If there is a practice. If your environment supports it, by having plowed routes for bikes, bike parking.
I think we overrate the convenience & comfort factor. Don't knock it till you be tried it. You might like it! There is some real difficulty when your society self selects to only support & assist one mode of transit, doesn't have bike parking readily available, doesn't have safe paths for biking. And trying to embrace biking on your own, learn how to do it comfortably & safely, when few others do, that's hard. But I think the inherent comfort g convenience of cars is somewhat/greatly overrated. The mindset is that biking is inconvenient, but so many who successfully live it will tell you, it's easy & it feels great.
there's also the issue of those with pre-dawn and night commutes, these people are disproportionately lower income and live farther and farther away from gentrified city centers. it is not uncommon to see as much as a 20+ degree drop once the sun goes down and you'd better hope there's no windchill on top of that.
Cars are a tool to overcome that in the same way that air conditioning allows businesses to operate in Arizona summers.
Which places are you thinking about? I'm from a place that's quite cold during the winter (-15C some days) plus can have quite a bit of snow.
I don't find cold places to be as unwalkable as hot ones. You get used to the cold, the snow/ice are generally cleared after a few days.
If anything, walkability is frequently about how a place looks and winter time can look quite nice with all the snow.
I now live on the other extreme in Phoenix, AZ and during the summer, you'll see 115F (46C) or higher for ~2 months a year with no cloud cover. That's hot enough that you don't even really sweat while walking; it evaporates so quickly that it can't do its job. We've had people at my office go for walks during lunch and collapse after 15 minutes due to it. And Phoenix is one of the most unwalkable places to live imaginable from a layout/distance standpoint to boot.
But I will admit both of those are in the extremes and most of the country isn't like that, although many areas will have quite a few days that go subzero (-17C) and over 100F (38C) each year. I think a big thing the US needs to do is start rezoning areas and rely less on everyone living on a half acre of land 2 miles from the nearest non-residential building. Unless that happens, much of the US won't be able to realistically implement policies like Paris is.
> If anything, walkability is frequently about how a place looks and winter time can look quite nice with all the snow.
Why do you walk? Is it to go for a purposeless, leisurely afternoon stroll? Or to on a daily basis, go to your job, the grocery, to the dentist, the hairdresser?
In order for a place to be walkable, you should be able to safely, and predictably, with 99% confidence, be able to purposefully walk to that job, that grocery, that dentist, and that hairdresser, at any time of day - not just on a sunny weekend afternoon, after all the snow has been shoveled.
Any place with snow on the ground for 4-5 months out of the year is a misery of walkability. Maybe your job starts at 7 am, and walking to it sucks, because the snow hasn't been shoveled yet. Sometimes, you need to avoid patches of black ice (Good luck when you're carrying heavy bags of groceries). For weeks, at the start, and the end of the season, you are dealing with absolutely atrocious slush, that has a habit of freezing over-night.
I don't really care about the cold - I can solve that problem by putting on more clothes. I do care about all the other problems of walking in snow.
I now live in a mild climate, where snow isn't an issue. I can, with full confidence, walk anywhere I want on any day of the year, any time of day, and predictably get there at a good pace. I couldn't say the same for when I lived in a cold climate.
You have to be a lot below freezing before mere temperature makes a city unwalkable. Very few places actually get that cold with any regularity. If sidewalks are maintained and it isn't crazy windy, you really don't need to change your walking behaviour much at all.
Heat is in practice often worse for walkability, especially when combined with humidity.
With eBikes the number of folks who can go at bike race speeds is incredible. I also know a lot of disable folks who can use eBikes but cannot drive. It’s an incredible technology.
I think people seriously underrate the safety benefits of micro cars, and the necessity of car like vehicles for older people.
Pony is yes even at lower speeds collisions can be dangerous.
But yeah motorcycles are probably an order of magnitude more dangerous then cars... Specially with cars around.
encouraging most people 80+ to stay behind the wheel to shop and socialize is a pretty bad plan. maybe waymo and uber changes this..
It would only be incredible if that number is higher than 0. An ebike has higher friction than a racing bicycle and even the fastest ones have a top speed of 45 km/h (30 mph). "Bike race speeds" (road races) are up to 65 km/h, so 40 mph. I don't think even a Tour de France-level cyclist could reach bike race speeds on an eBike.
I've heard that this is already true of everywhere except the US, and the main reason it's not true of the US is zoning laws.
Lived there 12 years ... 120k miles less gas & maintenance. Miss it a lot now (one bus, nearest stores 2 miles, nearest transit station is a 15 min ride away. Perfect for Covid I guess.)
Except that most people cannot live in Paris because it's too expensive and need to commute every day. And using the RER which is dirty, smells like piss and full of graffitis, overcrowded at peak hours and often on strike is so unreliable that it is hardly an enticing option.
Except on rainy days in car I arrive at work warm and dry. On eBike I arrive wet, cold and miserable.
I jumped on the eBike ship very early but I simply can't leave it anywhere.
When people are out for a $5-$10 return for crack at 4AM, nothing is safe.
On the other hand, if anybody has any info if this will be a thing in Germany, please let me know! It's surely better than nothing.
At the moment, it costs a lot more inconvenience+money to use SNCF/RER than driving for many people.
If someone stabs you in the kidney, and someone stabs you in kidney and chest.
You don't thank the former.
Plenty of areas you can only move either with own car or calling taxi.
The next bus stop is a couple of kilometres down the road and only crosses a couple of times per day.
Public transports are extensive, but they're overcrowded and perpetually strained to the limit of breakage. This week, a 400 tons concrete beam fell on RER C tracks. I suppose it will be weeks before it runs normally again. This sort of problems happens constantly.
Paris resident are only about 30% to own a car (a constantly dwindling number). Most cars in Paris come from the suburbs, therefore making motorists miserable isn't a problem for the mayor as most motorists vote elsewhere. This has the very unfortunate effect that nobody is really interested in solving the problem at its root.
Yes, and it still sucks. Now imagine how much it sucks in other regions.
The first reason is obviously cultural, but forbidding workers from striking would have some knock-on effects that the rest of society may not appreciate. The second reason, at least in Germany, has a lot to do with the semi-privatization of our train system which doesn't have inventives to invest in it's infrastructure and due it's cozy market position enabling rent-seeking.
The first problem, at least in the cities, could be solved with grade 4 automated metro according to the example of Copenhagen. The trains even drive much better than human drivers there, with no abrupt stops.
This would create unemployment, but it wouldn't infringe on people's rights.
The second problem we would have to solve by replacing the politicians that enable this. A much more difficult undertaking.
How can we use capital to create meaningful work, rather than the status quo oscillation left<-->right?
Using capital just automate for the sake of excluding workers is (IMO) silly. Improving safety and reliability, fine. But capital is also needed to start new labour intensive jobs, and anti-labour capitalism has a blind spot for this, and it leads to more political unrest.
I mean, that's the bazillion-euro question, right?
I would love to apply stochastic principles to it, using random choice to break deadlocks and force choice.
See also, models of collaboration between companies: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3679737
Also bomb defusing. F* you World-War 2, even for all the wrong reasons!
I was surprised that the RER doesn’t have bathrooms on-board. In Ontario Canada, we have similar double-decker commuter trains and they have them. They’re about airline-style in terms of size (barring 1 “accessible” one per train), but they do the job.
I’m sorry, when did we start talking about BART
Besides, removing cars from the road means that busses will be more reliable (less traffic jams) so you can avoid the trains in more situations.
Maybe, but seeing how Western nation's personal transport being way down due to COVID having little effect on CO2 leads me believe the real issue for the future is China's manufacturing sector, which will not go down.
The politcal view is "can't do that, price of cheap imported tat will increase and people would have to buy locally, which would be awful"
Yes this is key, as otherwise it's just outsourcing to others and hiding under carpet at the expense of local jobs.
With gas being 1 "badness" per 100KWh, oil being 2 and coal being 3, this would mean avoiding 1 unit locally, but getting importing 5 units.
The beauty of a carbon tax is that it satisfies those on both the environmental side ("the left") and the localism side ("the right"). The only ones not liking it are globalists that don't care about the environment.
Or maybe the transportation and power generation sectors pollute far more than what I read and believed?
Or maybe clothing manufacture? Or food?
Who knows? But it's made me really curious about what it is out there that hasn't gone down during COVID? (And not just because I want to make a fast buck. It's genuine curiosity.)
The EPA knows! [0]
[0] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emiss...So it is power generation and farming.
That makes sense. Thanks.
So as a species, our big gains against global warming are going to be made by reducing CO2 output from the power generation and food production sectors.
https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector#energy-electr...
What's really motivating policies like this is an aesthetic aversion to cars from a few loud people who think they can socially engineer a beautiful shining future for humanity whether we want it or not.
I like cars. I'm perfectly happy to talk about emissions, but I'm not willing to give up my car on some new urbanist's say-so.
You're right about one thing though: we should all expect a lot more of this top down meddling with our lives.
I know people talk about it — I talk about it, semi-seriously — but I don't see any comments here mentioning banning cars (except yours), and it's not in the article.
When people argue for the rights of cars, they are really talking about their own personal rights to large movement (grocery shopping is far easier with a car than by public transpo and foot as a quick example).
And as the caveat, yes I do believe we need to take steps to solving our pollution generation. In the same breath, I dont believe in taking away personal freedoms or independent abilities. Paris is literally an archaic city. The design is archaic and what city planners have to deal with are hacks due to legacy design. Then again, French culture is rather archaic as well. They still refuse to adopt loaner words as an example, something the rest of the world has been doing for the past few hundred years at least. Using them as a poster child for what the rest of the modern world should do to fix pollution problems is like trusting an Italian engineering firm to build a bridge... it's going to collapse :P Add to that, banning anything is a very buercratical answer to a complex problem. Tell me the last time banning/prohibition has worked well and never had 2nd or 3rd order severe consequences. Historical speaking, they're pulling ideas out of their ass and are going to regret this decision regardless if its "for the greater good".
Most people have never experienced a good transport system. Even in Europe most have not. Paris is good for some people, but not even everyone in Paris. It is even worse in the US.
Living in London I travel on my schedule everywhere on public transport. That because a bus or a train turns up at every station or stop every 4 mins. Very little need to wait, never any need to plan.
I live in flat with a parking space (and paid a hefty premium for it) but still don’t have a car. Not because I can’t afford one, but because it just doesn’t make sense. It quicker, easier and cheaper to take public transport everywhere than it is to drive. Trains don’t get stuck in traffic, and there’s more train crossings over the river than there is car crossings, making most trips more direct by public transport.
You view cars as personal freedom. I see them as noisy pollution machines that try kill me when I walk and cycle. Why the hell should i give up my personal freedoms to walk and cycle, just so you can drive?
That there is some public transport rather than none doesn't make it 'excellent'.
Of course, depending on timetables/connections the train could be a bit slower, and if one has a lot of luggage door-to-door by taxi might be better. But for me it would be hard to argue that fighting through London traffic in a car or taxi is superior to public transport.
Soon it’s gonna be even better with Crossrail.
There is no single factor that contributed. Perhaps it is more efficient if everybody drives to one big parking, perhaps people overall started to use cars less, perhaps rash hour became more spread in time leading to lesser max car density and smaller jams. Whatever the reason, it was win-win.
It is not. On a CO2 per mile bases cars emit less than non-vegan humans, because it takes a lot of energy to grow food. If you put 2 people in the car it's not even close.
https://www.carboncommentary.com/blog/2014/07/22/walking-can...
http://web.mit.edu/2.813/www/readings/DrivingVsWalking.pdf
> but after it takes place everyone agrees things are much much better with less cars and no one wants to go back.
Speak for yourself. Every place that has done that is basically a place I will never go to. Since I'm not there anymore I can't complain, right?
It's especially stupid when a downtown of a large city does that - God help anyone who needs city services and lives in the suburbs. (Are you expected to walk for 3 hours? Spend a ton of money on a taxi? There is no bus.) What ends up happening is the city and the surrounding area mentally split into two, and they fight politically.
This is Paris in the EU. Home to the densest (most stations per square mile) metro system in the world.
Trust me, you don’t need a bus, nor will you walk for 3 hours.
Don’t assume that every city in the world lacks resent public transport. That seems to be a uniquely American thing.
Also, I've taken public transport in major EU cities. It's a miserable experience compared to less dense city with a car.
It basically discourages me from living in a large city, it's such a terrible experience. Which is, of course, my choice.
But I think lots of people are going to start making that choice.....
If we take the bottom table, "US Diet, typical", it looks like it is 1000 for driving, 230 for walking. That is more than 4x lower GHG emission by walking, per mile.
Which numbers from that article are you comparing?
There are a group of people that are hurt but those people aren't around to complain.
The same with this. The people who need a car and can't get a space have to move out. Now it's true that population could be zero but to the extent it's more then zero you probably won't hear from them because they aren't in Paris.
[0] https://www.bicyclenetwork.com.au/newsroom/2020/12/03/paris-...
I don't like street parking. It's using public space to store private property.
I like how cities like Chicago are turning parking spaces into miniature parks.
An important second part is that over-night street parking is also very, very limited and towing heavily enforced. It's important to have both parts, otherwise you just end up with people getting parking permits through corrupt bureaucrats/etc and just leaving them overnight and the problem doesn't get any better.
You know you can do this on foot or on bike too right?
https://cupofjo.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/biking-three-...
Part of the idea of a walkable city is that everything you need - nursery, groceries, parks, schools, housing - is within a 15 minute walk.
For the centre of Paris that is easily achievable for many.
https://twitter.com/fietsprofessor/status/684397797358067713
I go a bit more often than I would have done by car, and I've started buying all my meat separately at a local butcher.
But it's amazing how much you can fit into 2 panniers and a rack.
However, that's the sort of legitimate delivery that's actually a lot easier if the roads are not so congested with people driving themselves to work in huge comfortable 4x4s.
I guess these central areas of Paris will become completely unsuitable to families, who will be forced out to suburban areas.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autolib%27
However this is very polarizing in France because living space is very costly within the city. And it will not decrease as building any residential space may imply destroying an historical building and disfigure the skyline. Therefore, middle and lower class, needed to run a city like this are pushed to live in the suburbs. Where public transport is not as good as in the city center, so people need cars... I hope this decision will help find solutions to solve this inextricable problem, which might be the challenge of the decade for the city of love.
I really like how NYC has local/express sharing the same infrastructure. Manhattan has near the same height as Paris (Peripherique), yet it's possible to travel all the distance with 5 or so stops.
(the entire system is shut down overnight right now anyway)
And as someone who lived in Moscow for a long time I can attest it is the gold standard. It's the second busiest (or top-3) and just always works as scheduled. One rare thing one could rely on that comes from the government.
https://www.mta.info/press-release/nyc-transit/new-full-year...
I regret to inform you that the NYC subway has many more problems than you experienced. Before the pandemic I traveled between Brooklyn and Manhattan and problems were common. Much more common was just random slowdowns, sitting between stations, etc. that makes it a lot more difficult to know when you'll arrive at your destination.
It happened in Paris more than "extraordinary" number of times, so I have to put extra 15 mins to every important travel.
OTP sounds like: the train is scheduled at 3:25, it arrives at 3.26. Correct me if I'm wrong here. But if the normal margin is 5 mins for total time of travel, making it 15 mins is not nice.
If you dont have one, how do you measure performance of the system?
One could make the argument that a train showing up ten minutes late vs one on time doesn't really matter to a person so long as it shows up within a reasonable time of them getting to the station and it still takes them to their destination on time. If the headways are five minutes and every single train is running at the same speed just five minutes late, this is a distinction that doesn't matter to the passenger.
- due to all the merging in and out throughout the system, trains need to be in the right place at the right time or merging delays will cascade throughout the system
- for purposes of employee scheduling, you need to make sure that the right employees are in the right place at the right time; generally a train leaving a terminal is being driven by a crew that had to come in from somewhere else.
Passengers transferring to other lines or transit modes may also appreciate predictability.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralized_traffic_control
Depends on the line and destination.
All lines fulfilled this objective except line 4, with 96.1%
AS for RER, there is an official governemental website that gives the numbers: http://www.qualitetransports.gouv.fr/les-chiffres-de-la-ponc... (in French) The most reliable one in 2020 is the A with about 94% of reliability and the worst one was RER B in March, with 78.9%.
The best RER gets you late around 1 every 20 trip. So once every 2 weeks on average if you count two trips per day. The worse one doesn't get you on time almost every other day !
You basically have to factor the unreliability of the transport system every single trip. This is very far from something you can count on. Even for the best lines.
How so ? Except for work, all the other thing you describes are basically at a walkable distance. And you also have a lot of buses.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_popul...
Worker strikes arent something you can legislate away unless you're going to start forcing people to work, which is, uh, let's say widely frowned upon.
If you want to end strikes, you'll need to convince workers that showing up is in their interest.
If you're responding to my statement of "can't legislate it away", then I suppose yes you're right that is an example of being able to do that and I should have worded that differently, but the key there is that it only works if your threat convinces the workers to return. Which, according to that Wikipedia article, it didn't entirely and their staffing levels didn't fully recover for a decade.
This makes strikes a rare happening, and usually very predictable.
See: https://tema.3f.dk/bjmfimmigrant/new-in-denmark/are-you-allo...
EDIT: Oof, that's quite an error on my part. I was absent-mindedly conflating "downtown areas" with the whole city. My bad. Never the less, I'm skeptical that this change will amount to much in terms of lower property values, but I'd be happy for someone to articulate why my skepticism is misplaced.
Maybe we are thinking of different things but I see the average US city as suburban with 4 people per quarter acre lot. Paris is 10-100x more dense than that. That's why public transit is far more effective there.
> The French capital has 56,000 people per square mile while NYC, the most densely settled U.S. metropolis, has only 27,000 people per square mile
Manhattan and a few select sections are denser but US cities are sprawling.
edit: the Bois de Vincenne is roughly three times the size of Central Park (10km^2 vs. 3.4km^2).
Barcelona's 'superblock' structure boasts the highest density in the world (exceeding the world's densest city overall, Manila, and looks like this:
https://www.eltis.org/sites/default/files/news/shutterstock_...
A good chunk of Parisian suburbs is already among the most densely populated areas in the world:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_popul...
I do imagine that a high rise is going to be more dense than a Parisian 5-story. I understand that Parisian apartments are smaller and they aren't going to have parking or on-site greenspace like a US high rise, but I would be surprised if they are still less dense. Of course, that doesn't validate my original claim that Paris is sparser than US cities.
The city of love really IS magic for little privileged people like you. Go ahead and keep it up telling how other should live, and if they can't it's their fault: they just had to have your little privileged lifestyle, of a "nanti" as we say in France. First hit on the poor, who live far away from paris and come down to clean your office, and "hope this will help finding a solution". I guess it's their fault, they should just have been ... privileged like you.
Have you any idea of the pain it has become to use a car in Paris ? Does it really strike you as if people really had a better choice ?
You could always take the Singaporean solution and make replacing them with automation a national priority? I am not being serious, I am pointing out there are actually national programs for this sort of social adjustment. It's more than a little scary.
I moved from Moscow to Paris a year ago, and I think Moscow is a success story of fixing traffic.
* Make streets in the center narrower, remove 1-2 lines and make sidewalks wider;
* Remove parking slots, make the remaining ones very expensive;
* No barriers to taxi aggregators or car sharing, just regulations on hours of work;
* Improve public transport (new metro lines);
* (Optional: pave the sidewalks with tiles (Собянинская плитка). Despite bad jokes it really feels nice vs old broken asphalt)
The city became pleasant to pedestrians, traffic jams reduced a lot. Before that I even refused to use taxis, because the price was high, quality was low, and sitting for 1 hour just to move 300 meters was usual. I do not drive myself, but taking a taxi there is no brainer - $5 per ride and much faster than before, without traffic.
Now Paris reminds me of Moscow in the 2000s. Often narrow sidewalks where even two people find it difficult to walk past each other, parked cars that make this difficult even for one person (good luck with baby carriage!). This is not everywhere, not on the main streets, but Paris is an old city and there are many old narrow streets. Those should be made completely pedestrian or keep just one line.
Before the confinement I lived near Petit Champs/Chabanais streets. They made Chabanais and one part of Petit Champs pedestrian, and removed 1.5 lines from another part in favor of sidewalks. Local activity thrived, children were playing, cafes full of people on the sidewalks or streets themselves. I used to joke that they called Moscow mayor Sobyanin to fix the streets. If they didn't, they should... at least not be afraid of radical measures.
And the measures should be radical so that improvements to pedestrians (or taxis, public transport) are big and more people give up on their own cars faster. Biking and scooters are possible all year around in Paris vs just five months in Moscow, so I'm looking forward to more and more of those changes.
P.S. Paris should also make public transport strikes illegal!
We are a democratic country, people are free to strike, and it's a good thing. It's a bit annoying sometimes, but it's certainly worth it (I'm sure there is no strike in north korea, but I'm happy to live in a free country with that minor annoyance)
They are also fully automating more and more lines.
This stands in stark contrast with the USA where the AMA calls the shots. In effect, the doctors control the supply of doctors.
Simply increasing the number of medical school places would result in many people spending years of their life (and in the US, 100s of thousands of dollars in debt) without then being able to then start their career.
Some degree of central planning seems reasonable here.
You have to remember that in a well working labour market strikes are a last resort, and 99% of the time having a strike as a tool helps the labour side wield their fair share of collective bargaining vs the dominant position of the employer organisation.
https://www.iledefrance.fr/les-passes-navigo-du-mois-de-dece... (in French)
There is a real chance this will not have the effect hoped for, or at least not to the intended extent.
My gut feeling is that no matter how many cycling lane or pedestrian they would anyway park on there, the invincibility due of lazyness is unbearable high here.
Paris also is one of the most congested city in Europe - which this move is actually trying to fix.
Every time I travel abroad, I'm always in awe of functional public transit (well, before COVID anyways, until that's over I'm staying put. It's not like anyone is itching to allow Americans into their country considering just how astonishingly poorly we've handled it).
I'd really love for the pressure against public transportation in the United States to abate - from auto industry lobbyists to the public view that owning a car is a status symbol and that only "poor" people take public transit. My parents spent many years living just outside the SF Bay Area and their town can't get mass transit access because Livermore refuses to have a BART stop in their town because of the "bad actors" (read: poor people) it could bring in. Livermore even went so far as to design all of their new bridges to get in the way of the center-of-highway BART tracks. Anyone further down I-580 Eastbound be damned.
I traveled across Japan and Germany completely on mass transit (buses, subways, high speed rail, walking), there were only a few places I would've preferred to have a car for. If I were using it for work travel, I'd much rather take a train and pull out a laptop and do something than have to drive, maybe even just enjoy the view.
------------
Bridges in Livermore look to be of similar design to what exists on the section where BART does run, the center posts are not an issue, and there are center posts on every overpass of the BART tracks. Look at the overpasses to the east/west of the current terminus, for example.
Livermore's government has been advocating for bringing BART service further, has been frustrated by BART shooting down the extension proposal: https://www.bart.gov/about/projects/liv
Further, after the extension proposal was shot down, they were the ones that pushed for the creation of a new transit entity to build a connecting service, and have been a substantial portion of what's pushing the project forward. And it's planned to run on I-580 in Livermore, so clearly they don't seem to think the bridges are a problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tri-Valley-San_Joaquin_Valley_...
https://www.valleylinkrail.com/
None of their actions seem to be transit-hostile to me.
Wow, really? If true, that's some straight up Robert Moses level racial tactics.
Here's a softer take on Robert Moses' racially-segregating road building for those not steeped in NYC / Long Island lore: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-09/robert-mo...
Biggest issue is that America is so vast. Take for instance where I live. I am 15 minutes by car (going about 55mph) from anywhere. Public transport is only feasible in heavily populated areas.
I know this from personal experience when I took my two kids in strollers to Paris. Lugging the strollers up and down stairs was a nightmare.
But maybe disabled people have other options like buses so it might not be as bad as it seems initially.
Can you share some link to the complains of the disabled community? I see you position posted quite often, but I have never seen any details and I am interested in there nuances of the situation.
I have experience with Barcelona and the public transport was adapted a decade ago. Is that an unique case?
Only one Paris Metro line with 9 stations has elevators and ramps for autonomous wheelchair access. There are 16 numbered lines and hundreds of stations in the city.
I used to drive in from the suburbs for work. I spent a lot of money downtown. Expensive dinners, evenings at the bar, or show/concert/sports/event, bought all my clothes, electronics, gifts, office supplies, dentist, some food shopping, haircut, insurance, doctor, RMT, physio, acupuncture. I did as many errands downtown as possible.
Now that I'm working from home due to the virus I haven't been back. When the office opens I won't go back. If they force me I'll find a new job where I can work remote. Now I spend all my money where I live.