YES, but.... there's a whole part of this that is missing.
Bentonville and Fayetteville have built almost 1000 miles of bike specific, particularly Mountain Biking specific trails, right through town.
This is not the faux "bike friendly" BS crap with "bike lanes" that painted in traffic that everyone ignores... These are not an attempt to squeeze bikes into an automotive infrastructure and all the other crap politicians pull... these are trails through the woods, backyards, down neighborhoods, paralleling sidewalks, etc. This is making Biking a first class citizen.
Very few people are comfortable riding bikes in automovtive traffic. You will eventually get hit by someone posting selfies on instagram or playing their friends in wordle. If cities want actual change, they need dedicated infrastructure for bikes, and these two cities have shown that it absolutely works.
> Very few people are comfortable riding bikes in automovtive traffic. You will eventually get hit by someone posting selfies on instagram or playing their friends in wordle.
And what's worse, I've had drivers stop to yell at me for riding on the (completely empty) sidewalk when crossing a narrow bridge busy with car traffic. As if hundreds of bikers don't die every year from getting whacked by careless drivers.
I can do you one better, I've been yelled out by drivers for riding my bike through a bike lane that happened to be in the way of the turning lane. You just can't win if you're trying to cycle in the US.
Because bikes DO NOT belong on roads. Getting hit by a car while you're on a bike is deadly. A bike running into a pedestrian on a sidewalk is an inconvenience.
I disagree agree with poster, but to play devils advocate bicyclists are a free rider problem on public roads. It's pretty clear based on the design of most roads they were designed for motor vehicles, not bicycles. Fuel taxes are a major way these roads are funded and maintained, and bicyclists don't pay registration / licensing / fuel tax. Especially in heavily urban areas, roads have extremely high land value that bicyclists are unjustly profiting from.
It's not clear to me why there should be any right for bicyclists to be allowed on the road.
I'm not clear that there should be any right for cars to be on the road either. Roads are for people to walk on, historically, and it's adding cars that made them dangerous. They're paid for by people who largely don't need them, too - the folks who live in the inner city
People driving fuel consuming vehicles are paying for the roads via fuel tax, and registration fees to the states maintaining those roads. These drivers are funding these roads thus it makes sense for them to be compensated for their payment.
It's conceivable a bicyclist can get away without paying any tax whatsoever on the road, especially if their income is small. Free rider, welfare queens of the road.
>Roads are for people to walk on, historically, and it's adding cars that made them dangerous
In urban areas that's actually typically what the sidewalk for, and it's often illegal to walk on the road.
But this is why I'm against public roads, there are all sorts of bad problems associated with this being a public good.
I own two expensive cars that get driven. So, I’m paying my share of fuel taxes and above average registration/property taxes. When the wear cyclists pit on roads becomes a problem, we can discuss mitigating it. But, we’re nowhere near that point.
Historically, streets were for walking. Walking in cities predates cars in cities by thousands of years.
You're probably way overpaying for your use of the road if you have 2 cars. It's just an insane system to have public roads, where people like you are subsidizing large vehicles that wear the road much faster as well as many bicyclists who pay nothing. Public roads where the land value sometimes unjustly supports motor vehicles when bike only roads would far more represent judicial use of public coffers, other times supports free-rider bicyclists when others bear the burden of providing the road.
>Historically, streets were for walking. Walking in cities predates cars in cities by thousands of years.
Historically, thousands of years ago, women commonly died in childbirth, a large fraction of children died before reaching age 5, and the only way for the greatest portion of the population to survive was manual labor in agriculture or some sort of subsistence existence. Most roads at least in US were not built thousands of years ago, a overwhelming portion of the total road area in America was designed with motor vehicle transportation in mind.
To suggest American roads are built as places for walking, for the vast portion of mileage, is just laughable at face and you only have to witness them to see this. And, in many cases, illegal.
Privatize the roads, IMO, and let the market decide how to efficiently allocate costs. It would be the fastest way to move towards more efficient systems in urban areas, such as much more bicyclists rather than wasteful cars. Bicyclists would pay their share, but see that it is very low. Car drivers may just see how wasteful it is to drive everywhere, when the cost is in front of them. It could lead to a rejuvenation and revival of the age of the urban bicyclist -- and just maybe a safer and cleaner world for everyone.
Rights don't depend on what you pay taxes for; those would be fees and services. Roads are generally considered a public good, a commons, not a service you pay for (beyond toll highways)
Bicyclists are a tragedy of the commons. This is yet another reason why I'm in favor of complete elimination of public roads in favor of private/toll roads. There is no 'right' to a bicyclists being provided a free public road in the way there is say a right to free speech.
Access to good roads is among the very few things that is so vastly important to the general prosperity of the population that leaving them to private companies would do more harm than good.
As the dude I overhead in some backcountry bar in the middle of nowhere put it: the government should pay for two things - clean water, smooth roads, and that's it.
Must not have been back into the country very far as water from a well doesn't need to be supplied by the government and rough roads keeps the outsiders outside.
I'd argue cars are the tragedy of the commons. Roads existed before cars, and they were for people and, yes, bicycles. Cars came and took them over, made them extremely unpleasant and unsafe places to be, require much more infrastructure and are much less efficient for short trips.
Fuel taxes are a major source of funding, but depending on state it is not even the majority. California sits at about 50% funding by fuel tax [1]. Road wear does not scale linearly with vehicle weight either; larger vehicles add significant damage to the roads while pedestrians and bicycles have virtually no impact [2]. This matches my experience as well, a bike and pedestrian only trail in my hometown has been repaved only once in the last thirty years and is in good condition, while the roads have received more maintenance and are in poorer condition.
I would be in favor of moving to a per mile, per pound (scaled by actual wear estimates) axle weight tax system for all vehicles including bicycles. Based on the data though, it could get very expensive for some cars and would likely be nothing but an administrative burden for bicycles.
Cars have a free rider problem. Public transport is expected to pay itself but since car infrastructure is subsidized public transport has to be subsidized to be competitive.
> I've been yelled out by drivers for riding my bike through a bike lane that happened to be in the way of the turning lane. You just can't win if you're trying to cycle in the US.
Some people are jerks in every situation. I don't believe bicyclists stand out as victims, except the expectation that they ride in traffic and the consequences of colliding with a car.
Having lived in Bentonville, the trails are absolutely meaningless if there aren't sidewalks off the trail with which to get to final destinations.
I was a pedestrian cyclist there from 2017-2020 and I frequently was walking or riding in the roads or ditches when the sidewalk ran out. Sure, I could get across town, but when I get there, who knows if there's sidewalks?
If I wanted to go grocery shopping and be on a sidewalk/bike trail, I had to go an extra mile out of my way to go under the overpass and through the community college to get to neighborhood market. That trip was already a mile if I rode along the road, so double the distance. That's not making cycling a first class citizen! That's hiding cyclists from cars who are the real first class citizen. I know, I grew up there.
Fayetteville and Rogers get this right(ish), Bentonville wants to pretend they have it right so talent will move there for Walmart after Walmart spent decades making sure brain drain was inevitable by keeping the area "small town" (they bragged about this during my corporate orientation) and fighting density that could have naturally precipitated good pedestrian and biking infrastructure.
And the separate bike lanes through the woods are not some grand way to make cycling first class they are NECESSARY or the rural drivers who come into the "city" would be playing chicken games and trying to run cyclists off the road. When I grew up this was a common thing to joke about!
Living in Europe this question doesn't compute at all. Such a foreign idea to even contemplate. If it doesn't have a sidewalk, it must be a country road or a highway right? Couldn't happen in a reasonably densely populated area...?
USA seems to be unique in the case that they think this design constitutes a finished product.
Edit: the Not Just Bikes youtube channel has great content regarding contemporary urban planning. Here's their video about stroads
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORzNZUeUHAM
Kuala Lumpur is waving at you. Some of the best beef-broth noodle meals I've had there were sitting on crates next to Jersey Kerb, which was between me and a 6 lane highway of chaos.
Sidewalks went out of style in the 1960s, and a trend that started reversing around 2000. Developers have learned that people like sidewalks and do use them so they are building them again to attract people to build on their lots.
That said, the purpose of said sidewalks is to exercise your dog, or let your kids ride their bikes around. They often don't connect up to anything in a useful way (other than nearby parks and maybe elementary schools - but only if they are very close)
> They often don't connect up to anything in a useful way (other than nearby parks and maybe elementary schools - but only if they are very close)
What should it connect to? Thanks to zoning there is no Café you can go to or a small supermarket or anything else in the vicinity. Not even public transport which then might bring you elsewhere.
Sidewalks went out of fashion because developers thought they took away property sq footage. So a 5000sqft SFH lot became 4800 sqft. But then homeowners realized if kids don’t have sidewalks they’ll play in the streets.
If they could get away with it developers would drop sidewalks completely. It’s only because cities and towns started mandating it that they became fashionable again.
Wait, do you mean that building sidewalks is the developer's responsibility? Do you mean like greenfield development on wholly privately owned land? Around here it's the municipality's job to plan and build (with subcontractors of course) transport infrastructure in new developments, just like power/water/etc infrastructure.
In a lot of places, that means you only have to build a sidewalk when you're doing some kind of construction on the property. In some Seattle neighborhoods (mostly suburbs), you'll have neighborhoods with 20 houses in a row, and only the 5 or 6 newest houses will have a short sidewalk that is only the length of the property. So you're bouncing back and forth between sidewalks and ditches. Sidewalks just start, end and go nowhere.
In most suburban streets it would still be fine. Though parents are more paranoid than in 1960. However suburbs need buys roads all over (many are stroads, but the fact of car living means you need busy roads to get around)
I have read that some developers deliberately omitted sidewalks in order to produce the impression of being out in the country--though given the closeness of the houses, the impression must have been pretty vague.
There is a little wedge of Washington, DC, bounded by Oregon Avenue, Western Avenue, and Chestnut St, called "Hawthorne". I used to run through and see signs reading "No Sidewalks in Hawthorne", after a while varied by signs says "Yes, Sidewalks in Hawthorne", but probably fewer. I suppose that this is six miles from the White House by air line, probably seven by road.
(And now there are sidewalks in Hawthorne, at least a few.)
Your shock is reasonable :) most midwestern US States are the size of most European countries, but with 1/10-1/100 of the population. Bentonville/Fayetteville are pretty well off the beaten path, both previously being farm communities, though Bentonville was also a trade hub in the western frotier days. Bentonville is famous from being Walmart's headquarters, which is sort of crazy given how tiny the town is. Fayetteville has a fairly large college. The two cities have really only seen extraordinary prosperity in recent years, so there's not a lot of extra money to spend on stuff that's not always needed, given their history.
Minneapolis has a lot of bike paths through its city parks (there are a lot of parks in Minneapolis: the chain of lakes, the Mississippi river, etc) and they really enhance the city when snow isn't on the ground.
They enhance the use of parks, they don't make parks more noxious, they increase property values, they keep the city valuable.
E-bikes are going to magnify the value of cities with good biking infrastructure. All of a sudden car trips become bike trips, and there are no concerns about hills or headwinds or towing a burly of stuff: the electric motor handles some or all of the required needed power. Need to haul ten bags of groceries and a kiddo up the big hill on the Mississippi? the electric motor will get you there.
It hopefully will reduce the amount of surface area dedicated to cars, and switch those over to more parks and more recreation.
e-bikes in parks need to be limited in speed though. Don't turn our parks into dangerous for pedestrians bike freeways. Bicycles in walkers do not mix very well, while it isn't as deadly as a car, getting hit by a bike still hurts.
Minneapolis takes biking seriously. In huge amounts of snow and horrible weather!!
Weather down there seems even more conducive.
My dad can bike from their house to downtown in 15 minutes (more like 30 as getting older). It's amazing. Completely protected separate bike lane going through old rail corridor. I can bike to whole foods from there too without having to go on a busy street.
They are expanding light rail there too but seems like similar to most cities it isn't great yet. Hopefully we'll see more density around the stops. My city Denver feels the same it's not actually used as much as it could be.
In NYC, a lot of people (especially cops) seem to be under the impression that bike lanes are just extra parking.It's pretty irritating because going around them involves getting on the street, which isn't usually an issue, but occasionally roads in NY get extremely busy, and people in here seem to lack the ability to read speed limit signs (at least in Brooklyn).
I think thats because, for all the progress NYC has made in installing bike infrastructure, they've done basically nothing to reduce the number of cars on our streets.
Two specific policies, but there’s also just the fact that every bike lane/pedestrian street/bus lane/low speed limit/etc. makes the city less car friendly and at some point that makes a difference.
There should be a banner for any transit discussions that state you cannot optimize environments for both individual cars and non individual car transportion.
It's strange, because NYC is simultaneously overpopulated with cars, but is also one of the only places in the US where you can reasonably live without a car (I don't have one).
It's even stranger when you realize that probably only 20% of trips in New York are conducted by car, and yet they are by far the largest physical presence everywhere you go. Actually quite obnoxious.
> probably only 20% of trips in New York are conducted by car
I’d reckon it’s less than 20%, maybe even as low as 5%. The subway alone has a daily ridership of about 2 million, plus the massive amount of people who just walk or bike to the store, work, etc. I think it seems like more people are using cars than actually are due to their visibility, like you mention—they take up more space, they’re given more space, etc. It’s insane.
In some places the towing companies are directly allowed to tag and tow illegally parked cars, and inpound them until a fine is paid. You need to be very careful about corruption (that is they don't tow legally parked cars), but towing companies could help you as they make money from illegally parked cars.
That might work on civilian cars, but I doubt that a lot of towing companies are going to risk towing a cop car, no matter how corrupt they are. I'm certainly not brave enough to tattle on them.
Yeah, if it is police only properly filed formal complaints (sometimes get one line on the form that they avoid giving you wrong means they throw it away), or getting a large group at all city hall meetings work. Even then it takes persistence.
Agreed that the recreational biking infrastructure in NW Arkansas is great, but not enough Fayetteville people bike for transportation for that to be a big part of this outcome. It's just 1% of all commutes, for example. Compare that to 4%-10% in university towns that use a lot of on-street bike lanes that take you more directly to destinations: Eugene, Corvallis, Bozeman, Madison, Fort Collins, Palo Alto, Berkeley, Ann Arbor. (Not saying those cities are perfect either, to be clear.)
It's true that shitty bike lanes on auto-oriented streets are shitty, and that off-street paths are great. But lanes and paths are not the same thing, and neither of them is the reason this policy is working in Fayetteville.
> You will eventually get hit by someone posting selfies on instagram or playing their friends in wordle.
You will eventually get hit by someone who punishment passes you and is dangerously negligent because they've dehumanized you, and they just don't care if they do violence to you, and its you're fault because you're slow.
Or you will get hit by people who simply don't register bikes and consciously or unconsciously think that bicyclists must yield to cars, sometimes turning left in front of you with no time for you to stop.
Or you will get right hooked by someone who just passed you a second earlier and that is too long for their minds to track the fact that you're still there, or they again think they're entitled to drive however they want and you need to yield to whatever they do.
I bought a dashcam for my car because of bicyclists:
1. randomly wandering out of the bike lane and into the car lane
2. stopped in the middle of the car lane around a blind curve
3. drafting 3 feet behind the panel truck in front of them at 40 mph
4. riding two or three abreast, with the 2 or 3 well into the car lane
5. continuing to cycle at 25 mph in the right hand bike lane while the traffic is going much slower, and there's a right hand turn coming up (it's difficult to spot these bikers while driving, heck, even cars are hard to see there which is why overtaking on the right is illegal)
None of these incidents were kids on bikes, they were all middle aged adults who really should know better.
I talked to a couple of these cyclists (in their tour de france outfits, naturally) once, and they laughed and said if they get hit by a car it'll be their big payday lawsuit. I replied getting crippled isn't worth a billion dollars.
Ride defensively, folks, regardless of what the law says or who is at fault.
Comments like yours are exactly why I'm somewhat predisposed against bike lanes - there is no such thing as a "car lane".
By all means yes, get a dashcam. The more evidence, the better. While driving, I've had a few cyclists come around around blind corners going the wrong way. Any type of road user can be an idiot. But the main commonality of your list is people clashing with your own personal expectations. Don't assume that evidence of such will exculpate you (eg #2).
I expect them to follow the rules. They don't. I'm aware they don't, so I am pretty vigilant of their expectation that they are exempt from common sense.
I took a class in performance driving once. The central rule there is to "be predictable", as that's how accidents are avoided at 200 mph when you're 2 feet off of someone else's bumper.
It's a lesson I took to heart in my everyday driving, and I wish that principle was taught regularly to other drivers, and that cyclists would have a clue about it.
Not following the rules is an issue for all road users. So yes, having that dashcam is a good thing. Getting it because of cyclists is prejudiced.
It is also worth noting that motorists sometimes create the problems themselves. I try to stick to traffic regulations while on a bike since, as you say, being predictable is important. (In fact, it's something that a lot of cyclists in my neck of the woods preach.) Then you get a driver who tries to wave a cyclist waiting to make a left turn through when they have the right of way. No thank you. I have no plans on being road kill because the motorist is trying to be nice, and the guy behind him decides to pass on the right.
Unfortunately, tonnes of situations like that pop up. Stopping for pedestrians when they have the right of way can be quite scary. I have had pedestrians to the right thing (push the button, wait to cross), I've stopped, and the car behind me decides to race through. They had plenty of time to stop. I know because I always do a shoulder check before stopping for pedestrians. Not doing so can be fatal. I have had motorists get angry at me for stopping for pedestrians in intersections where pedestrians had the right of way under similar circumstances.
I realize that this is by no means a one way relationship. Some cyclists are idiots, either taking to many risks or by being to timid. Both result in unpredictability. I also realize that the behaviour of some motorists and some cyclists may be due to a "bad day". Let's face it, some people have to be on their bikes or in their cars even if they know they are unable to be fully attentive.
I also realize that there are many incentives to behave properly on the roads because bad behaviour can have nasty consequences. Unfortunately, it often feels as though a lot of drivers failed basic physics and don't understand their larger mass and higher speeds gives them a great deal more kinetic energy.
Not long ago in Seattle, a truck driver was going down a street under the speed limit, passing a line of cars all parked along the side of the road. As he approached a crosswalk, a cyclist suddenly was in the crosswalk, and the driver was unable to stop in time and smacked him, killing him.
The driver was slapped with a huge lawsuit, on the grounds that the cyclist was in a crosswalk.
Fortunately for the driver, there were many eyewitnesses who attested that the cyclist suddenly turned and angled into the crosswalk at high speed. The view of the approaches to the crosswalk were hidden by the parked cars. The driver was judged not at fault, yet there was still a hew and cry in the paper to hang him.
The driver was pre-judged as guilty, and had to prove his innocence. Without several eyewitnesses testifying in his defense, there's no doubt what the outcome would have been.
Hence I have a dashcam.
> it often feels as though a lot of drivers failed basic physics and don't understand their larger mass and higher speeds gives them a great deal more kinetic energy.
And the cyclists need to understand that cars have larger mass and higher speeds and are less maneuverable and have less 360 visibility, hence should not assume that the drivers can see and avoid the cyclist. For their own safety. I do not understand adults failing to look after themselves.
Have you even been in a bus garage? It's basically yellow lines painted everywhere, and associated safety rules around them. They let staff know where buses are supposed to drive, where they are stored, where the pits and hoists are, and so on. If staff ignore the rules, the staff are disciplined. If management tells the staff to ignore the rules, management is disciplined. Heavy machinery has to be dealt with respect, both sides can break the rules, and neither side is presumed to be of blame. Well, at least ideally. If all of that was tossed aside, we would be back to the factory days of a century ago. Lives were lost simply because certain lives were disposable, at least in the eyes of many factory owners. Incidentally, the disposable lives were not those of the factory owners.
Like I said, I understand why you have a dashcam. It can be a valuable tool to prove your innocence should the need arise. The thing I take issue with is the presumed guilt of cyclists. Yes, there are times when cyclists are to blame. On the other hand, there are times when motorists are to blame. Those circumstances are common since most cyclists realize that they are the ones who are going to die. A lot of motorists don't seem to have the realization that they are the ones who can take lives. At least in the moment.
Here are some things that I have encountered as a cyclist:
- I have been in a hit-and-run. The impact was hard enough that I chunk of their car was broken off in the accident and loud enough that people could hear the crash in their houses. Witnesses said there was no way the driver could have not noticed they hit someone, yet they left me for dead. That is not how you treat another human being. I don't know who is to blame here since visibility may have been an issue, though I was following traffic laws to the letter, but the police said the driver's behaviour after the fact was likely the product of drunk driving.
- I have been intentionally hit by a driver. At least that is the only way I can explain it since they were stopped behind me at a red light and decided to go straight through me while I was waiting for an opening to make a left turn. Yes, I was signalling. Again, a hit and run. The police did not want to deal with it.
- The right hook is famous amongst cyclists. Believe it or not, these aren't always the result of cyclists passing to the right. I never pass to the right since I realize that many motorists don't signal turns. (I cannot predict what they will do, so I don't know when it is safe to pass.) Then there is the visibility factor that you mentioned. Yet vehicles will pass me and turn across me on a regular basis. I have even had that happen when the vehicle is in another lane.
- I have had vehicles make left turns from behind me because they are impatient and had poor judgment on the speed of oncoming traffic. I have seen several near collisions between two automobiles because of that, and it places me as a cyclist at greater risk.
- Certain groups of people like to distract cyclists. I'm not talking about people honking or screaming expletives here. I'm talking about people screaming absolutely nonsensical things at me in an attempt to pull my attention from the road.
I'm not bringing up these examples to say that motorists are always to blame. I know they aren't. I've certainly had my sloppy days on the road, though, ironically, those seem to be the times when I had the fewest issues. I'm bringing it up because there are plenty of times when large bundles of kinetic energy aren't following the law and are endangering people's lives. I'm not saying this is because your veering cyclist should avoid the blame. Most of the cyclists I know would frown upon such behaviour even if there wasn't an accident. I'm saying it because there are all too many cases where motorists seem to believe they are never to blame, even when they are not paying attention to the rules of the road themselves,...
I am not presuming the guilt of cyclists. I am objecting to the presumed guilt of the driver. I am for assigning guilt fairly based on the evidence. That is why I got a dash cam.
These arguments between drivers and bikes are stupid.
Bikers ride like shit all the time. Drivers drive like shit all the time. Hell, pedestrians do stupid shit all the time too. Nobody is in some superior transportation group.
None of them know the actual rules of the road, and all assume they are correct and the ones in the right. You do any one of these things long enough, you'll see the stupid things the others do.
> I think you mean becausr if bicyle infrastructure rather than bicyclists.
Nope. I thought I was pretty clear. There's no sane reason to park in the middle of the road around a blind corner. Or draft. Or wander randomly in and out of the bike lane into traffic.
I never did any of those things back when I was bike commuting and I still got punishment passed regularly and had drivers turn left in front of me when I had the right of way nearly causing collisions (when I was wearing a glaringly bright yellow jacket).
I also never saw any other bicyclists on my commute do anything particularly dangerous or come near to causing collisions. I saw a few of them brake the law, but I saw a lot of cars break the laws as well.
The last time I think I saw a truly dangerous bicyclist was probably 10 years ago when some idiot blew a 4 way hauling ass after coming down a hill and given a minute one way or the other I would have killed him.
I really need to get a dashcam because of all the bad drivers out there though. Just the level of tailgating at highway speeds out there is fucking insanity, with every other driver convinced that their testicles will shrivel up if someone changes lanes in front of them.
It's not a car lane. It's just a lane. There are tractors, construction vehicles, children crossing or playing street hockey, horse drawn carriages, broken down vehicles, construction workers, neighborhood electric vehicles and bicycles which are all allowed to use them.
As an operator of a motor vehicle, it is my responsibility to not endanger or injure other road users. It drives people nuts usually, but I take it seriously. I stop at stop signs and red lights. I take turns slowly. I don't pass in an un-safe manner. I drive slower. Cyclists riding like idiots doesn't really bother me because it doesn't really HURT me in any way. They aren't the ones driving multi-ton machines.
These shouldn't be thought of as orthogonal issues. You can dramatically improve the walkability of a place by reducing the amount of space reserved for parking.
City centers in forward-thinking European cities are trying things like this: forbidding cars from the central square and a few blocks' perimeter results in much calmer and more pleasant pedestrian experiences. Instead of roads for cars you have pedestrian boulevards, avenues, and alleys with greenery throughout and a distinct sense that you live in a community, rather than merely among it.
I am perplexed that this makes headlines. Even the free market has spoken. People pay premium to live in a more dense areas where the stuff they enjoy and interact with is within their proximity.
Interesting how successful the car manufacturer lobby was in the US, transforming whole cities and life styles of ordinary Americans for generations.
To take nothing away from the power of the manufacturers, I wonder to what extent local dealerships have had influence. In suburbia and mid-sized cities, the owners of dealerships tend to have a big say in local politics.
Then why was there a mass exodus during the height of WFH? Data seems to show that people pay that premium to reduce commute time. Let's not forget full remote was a lot harder to get before covid.
That's because the HN urbanist crowd is a very small and vocal minority. The vast majority of people WANT to live in suburban or rural areas. Only 19% of Americans want to live in a dense urban environment. [1]
People have no idea what they really want. They however know how they live now, so when asked they will say they don't want to change.
Where someone lives is a compromise. Everyone wants the best of ALL words: the dense urban area with a subway entrance on the same street, plenty of shopping and other entertainment. They also want a ski lift up a mountain, finish your day ski day in your own backyard, and a tropical beach in the front yard, among the other benefits of rural living. That is physically impossible no matter how much money you have, so you make the best of what you can get even though it cannot be perfect.
With the current situation of the US subrubs are the best compromise, but as things change different compromises become better. Right now dense areas are a lot more expensive for a lot less space, and often that space comes with the problems of living in a very old building.
Note that change will not happen overnight. Even if 30000 square foot apartments (intentionally be absurdly large to make the point) in neighborhoods with good schools was free it would take a lot of time for people to move even though the rent savings would allow for more than enough other lifestyle changes as to make it a better compromise for most people.
Yup, it's generally just a balancing of priorities and trade offs. For me, having to drive everywhere I need to go would make me really sad, so I chose an urban environment, in a neighborhood where there's a good mix of residential and commercial, that is decently well-connected to public transit. But that means I have to deal with more noise, crime, and homelessness, and don't get to have a yard, despite higher living costs.
But that's my trade off, and others don't prioritize the same things I do.
Yep, and the costs is good summary of where the compromises balance out on average. Since urban areas cost more, it's fair to say people prefer urban areas more.
Supply and demand come into play too. It only takes a slight imbalance to drive costs up. That is if there are 1000 units in an area and 1001 families (counting roommates and single people living alone as families) want a unit then the price will go up until someone is no longer willing/able to pay it.
The numbers in the survey are linked are where people want to live, not where people currently live. More urban residents want to move to the suburbs/rural areas than vice-versa.
60% of Americans prefer living a a community with larger houses and having to drive miles to get to school, stores, and restaurants versus having smaller houses and businesses within walking distance. Urban residents are divided almost evenly and 49% of them would prefer to drive miles to get to businesses if it meant that they could live in a large house. [1] I suspect the discrepancy with the previous survey is because both scenarios had the participants living in houses and if they were asked to pick a walkable apartment community or the car-dependent house community the number of people who would pick the denser community would be lower. The data is clear, more people prefer the suburban and rural car dependent lifestyles than the walkable urban lifestyle. Making arguments that people just don't know what they want is incredibly condescending and controlling.
No one is arguing against suburbs. We are arguing that car infrastructure (roads 100% devoted to car traffic, free curbside parking and parking lots everywhere) should not be subsidized. You want to use a car? Pay for it. Otherwise free car infrastructure destroys the vitality and livability of wherever it spreads.
Suburbs existed before the car. See "Streetcar suburbs" on youtube.
The point is that it isn't a bad thing if a local government listens to their constituents and builds what they want instead of building what a online vocal minority of people who don't live in their area want. Your argument about subsidies is only logical if you also advocate for no non-use-based taxes and the privatization of all services like healthcare, schools, and transit, since if one shouldn't have to pay for some things they don't use or want to use, then they shouldn't have to pay for anything they don't want to. Transit is also far more subsidized on a per user level than roads are, and I would be perfectly willing to pay the unsubsidized cost of car infrastructure (and so would most drivers), but I suspect that you wouldn't like having to pay the unsubsidized cost of transit. Car infrastructure also doesn't destroy the livability of an area, as shown by the survey results above; no one wants to live in an unlivable area by definition and most people want to live in areas you would deem "unlivable".
You missed the point of the comment. The relative price increase for car drivers to pay for 100% of their infrastructure cost is far lower than for transit riders. In my area, which is one of the most pro-density and transit-oriented cities in America, it would take a small increase in gas tax, and we've already had a large gas price increase from the market, so returning to normal prices with a small tax increase wouldn't hurt too much. Meanwhile, a bus ride costs the taxpayer ~$7 and the rider pays ~$3. That number does not include the cost of the roads the buses drive on, as government owned vehicles are exempt from gas tax and the transit system does not contribute anything towards road maintenance. A train ticket costs ~$3 but costs the taxpayer ~$30, not including capital costs. Most of the fare revenue also comes from unlimited use passes that all businesses are forced to buy for their employees if they are over a certain size, even if the employees never use them. Meanwhile, drivers in my state pay a ~-70 cents per mile subsidy (that's a negative in front) for the highways. Local roads are more complex, as nearly every arterial has a bus or bike lane these days and every building needs a road to run up to for a variety of reasons. These numbers are taken directly from my state government and my local transit agency's reports, not from some YouTube editorial or blog post. I find those personalities just speculate on what the "true" cost of infrastructure is instead of actually looking it up.
Going from $3 train tickets to over $30 tickets hurts a lot more than going from a 50 cents a gallon gas tax to a 60 cent one. In my particular case, moving to a user-pays system would mean that I would save $500 a year in car registration taxes that are used exclusively to fund the transit system, which would more than cover a fair increase in the gas tax.
Those numbers are just the operating costs, which scale much more closely with the number of riders, the cost of the building the infrastructure itself isn't included. Including the capital costs would make transit look even worse.
That is false, Transit costs go down per rider as things go up. The cost to operate a bus is just over $100/hr in the US (average), including capital costs. It doesn't matter if only the driver is on the bus or it is packed full. It doesn't mater if everyone is riding for an entire hour or they only ride for 5 minutes.
The cost operating costs for a train can be much less (a train can be fully automated which really brings costs down), or much more (if you run drivers and conductors). However as until the train is full requiring that you buy more the costs do not change at all.
Roads have similar concerns - the cost to build and maintain a road is mostly fixed, but it scales to much slower. A full bus every 5 minutes has far more people than the same road with the maximum number of moving cars, so you need to build more roads faster, thus the capital costs of roads is much higher.
If you have more people who want to ride a bus than the bus can carry, then you need another bus and driver. That is a step function that scales with the number of riders. What you said is only true until the bus reaches capacity, but if people actually use the transit (which is not the case in most of the US, but is the case in the area my numbers are from), then the cost is directly related to the number of riders.
Also, most buses don't have 5 minute headways, so if you're going to assume that you may as well assume that every car contains 4 people. Additionally, a 100 person articulated bus coming every 5 minutes is equivalent to 20 single occupancy cars per minute (or 1 car every 3 seconds), which is typical for a busy street. You need really short headways to match a car lane, shorter headways to beat it, and even shorter headways to justify making the lane exclusive to buses.
But where people want to live is influenced by what they know. So they want the suburbs to get out of bad schools, not thinking they can reform their schools. They want suburbs for a nice house without asking why their neighborhood can't be made great.
What if they think that every family having a nice house makes their neighborhood great? Why is being able to walk to a dozen restaurants the only thing that makes a neighborhood good? Is it possible that people do in fact know what they want, and you are being condescending by assuming that they are too stupid to not know their own wants and desires? Stop with the conspiracy theory that people disagree with you because they are brainwashed or uncultured.
Every family having a nice house is one of the things that make a neighborhood great. Walking to a dozen restaurants is another such thing. We can continue making this list until it has several thousand items (maybe even millions?). In the end you cannot have everything on the list, so you compromise.
I did not say people are stupid. More like people are creatures of habit and often fail to realize how a change they could make would cascade into making things better. That is they are more likely to be pessimistic and see the downsides.
People know what they want when given the existing choices. Frankly the existing choices for dense city living suck for most people (bad schools and they can't afford as much space are big ones), so it is no surprise that people choose suburbs: it is the best choice. The real question is can we reform the dense urban areas so that people will decide they want it over suburbs?
You are still assuming that people who want to live in suburbs are heathens who just need to be shown the light. You aren't even considering that they just don't like density.
I'm saying people are more complex than that. Thet don't hate density, given their options density isn't the best life for them. I'm further saying that dense areas have made themselves unappealing and given some changes many suburban people would prefer density.
There are advantages to density, and advantages to rural living, but yiur cannot have both at the same time.
That survey didn't ask respondents to ignore price, so it's not simply revealing what they want. Urban areas cost more and this was presumably considered in these responses.
Even if the responses were the same ignoring prices, I would probably put more weight on the market prices (i.e what people actually do and the resources they devote to it). Why do urban areas cost more and have a lot of people if people don't actually want it?
The price per square foot may be higher in the city, but people often spend more in total on housing in the suburbs. For example, someone who moves from a small urban apartment to a large house in a nearby suburb is likely spending more, and they do it because they prefer living in the house over having more money in their bank account.
It wasn't just the car lobby. Folks in charge of state / local DoT's have huge influence. Many people know about Robert Moses, just how politically powerful and influential he became, and how he deliberately used civic infrastructure projects as a way to try to redline particular populations.
Similar dynamics still go on. Where I live Portland is overwhelmingly the major metro area, but the Oregon DOT is run out of the state capital, Salem, a much smaller and much more suburban community a bit south of the metro area. Despite supposedly being qualified professionals, it's clear ODOT sees things entirely in a car centric way. The only projects they're excited about pushing forward are freeway expansions. Portland is rather emphatic on NOT wanting that, but rather a multi-modal transit network that actually works with the density we have. In recent years ODOT has gotten so tired of the popular backlash on their projects in Portland that they've started playing deceptive games around the public notification process to try to sneak stuff through without pushback.
This whole nation just somehow lost its mind over the ideal of a car centric suburban lifestyle. And yes, some of that was straight up racially motivated, in the trend of white flight. But there were lots of things that fed into it imo. And to be fair, there are plenty of people who do like a suburban lifestyle where they live on a culdesac and have to drive to a strip mall for routine errands. But if you look at the overall migration pattern, all the growth is happening in the 20 or so major metro areas, and in particular in the ones that offer the combination of high income jobs and a more urban lifestyle. Yet somehow all these DoT's across the nation are still acting like the dream of the 1950s is their only priority.
The other thing I've seen is safety-maximalism from the fire departments. They really push for wide streets, flat curbs, and maximum access. There is rarely any impact-benefit analysis evaluating the number of times a fire truck needs a certain amount of space, nor what the likely safety impact would be if the area was more dense, and less accessible. There also is no examination of other second-order effects of the wide, obstacle-free spaces they prefer, such as more speeding, etc.
why is your State DOT planning and executing projects in the city of Portland at all? Doesn't portland have its own planning department? The state DOT is car centric because they take care of all the highways and highway bridge structures in your state. Your city's transportation or public works section should be planning and executing public works for multimodal systems within the city.
Unless you have some kind of information to explain it, my bet is the Oregon DOT only provides grants for some related projects that the city of portland executes.
That's now how these organizations are structured in any state I'm aware of. The state DoT has state wide jurisdiction, and provides the majority of funding for anything that gets done. City planning only handles much more local issues such as residential streets. What I described above is in fact part of a protracted conflict between the state and city levels.
> why is your State DOT planning and executing projects in the city of Portland at all?
Your argument is being made in isolation of political-economic reality, at least as it currently exists in the united states. Tax receipts that could be used for roads (aka not property taxes which currently fund schools) flow out and up from city residents, primarily to the federal government, then to states, and lastly to municipalities. Cities don’t have the same ability to set tax rates as the nation or a state for the simple reason that it’s far more feasible for someone to change cites vs states, to say nothing of county.
Federal dollars are given to states, which are combined with state taxes to build highways, freeways, and other high speed high volume roadway. This constitutes the majority of all road spending, and cites simply have to integrate with that.
I’ll give you four specific examples in the Portland area:
1. The I84/I5 interchange. ODOT wants to upgrade it. There has had to be an extreme amount of community push-back to get the proposal even half way integrated with the city itself. As it stands now, it includes partial capping and better bike and transit options above ground. However, it still expands car capacity.
2. The I5 bridge across the Columbia River. It needs to be replaced for seismic and age reasons. The community wants there to be expanded infrastructure for non-cars across one of only two bridges across the Columbia near the city. The other bridge was built recently(ish) and doesn’t have any meaningful non-car transit options. The community wants, at a bare minimum, there to be light rail going from Portland to Vancouver, WA included in a bridge project. So far, that hasn’t quiet materialized.
3. There are many roads in Portland still “owned” by the state. 82nd Ave used to be a good example, though it was transferred to the city last year. These roads have notoriously poor maintenance and high traffic deaths since they really aren’t well-designed for urban areas. (Too fast, too wide, too many access points to be a proper highway, etc.)
4. When the initial freeways were built in Portland, the original plan was for there to be several more highways than there are today. You can see many locations in the existing infra where a highway was meant to connect in but was never built. The Mt. Hood freeway is an example. It took very significant community pushback to get those projects cancelled.
Here’s my take on this, as a Portland resident. The state of Oregon is willing to spend billions of dollars upgrading transportation infrastructure in the Portland area. Why the fuck does 99% of that have to go to highways? Why can’t, say, 50% of it go to vastly expanding bike infrastructure to reduce the cost of road maintenance? That still leaves 50% of, again, billions of dollars of projects to car projects. I’m not even talking 50% of the state transportation budget, I’m talking 60% of the money they would already be spending in our community.
We basically just want more efficient transit methods to get more funding. It’s ok (to me) if the I84/I5 interchange gets improved. It currently sucks and doesn’t feel safe. But I’m not in favor of doing that project without first spending a lot of money or more effective and efficient transportation options. If there’s billions of dollars to be spent on infra, it should absolutely be going to bikes and transit first.
It doesn’t really matter who has jurisdiction, to people who live here
It seems to me looking through the available literature that most of this funding comes from gasoline taxes which is why it's restricted to auto travel type projects, and there are separate smaller funds for other methods of travel. Your first example where you complain that it "still expands car capacity" is an odd one. Why wouldnt an interchange project focus on traffic capacity? Do you not think that's important? Why isn't that ok?
In your second example the community wants to force a light rail project into a bridge project, which sounds like the community had no idea what anything costs and is just repeating something theyve been told is good. There are also rules about funding diversions to exactly stop municipalities from taking money from other levels of government and spending it on things outside of those programs. The community may decide it wants a lot of things - light rail is a whole different proposition than a bridge project.
Portland's transport org doesn't spend billions of dollars and they do have leverage to spend tens of millions on bike projects if they were actually a priority to the city.
But the majority of funding comes from gas taxes and car registration, and bikes aren't paying it, and represent a tiny fraction of the people and goods moved each day.
Fayetteville is less than 100K people, and the entire metro area (the so-called "Northwest Arkansas" region) is about 500K people. It seems small, self-contained, and isolated.
I live in Alexandria, a famous historical neighborhood in the Washington DC metro area. Alexandria proper has about 160K people, in a metropolis of 6-7 million, and Alexandria attracts a large number of outside visitors from around the region because of its notoriety.
I think that eliminating parking requirements for businesses is an interesting idea worth consideration. But I wonder how far this can really be taken in my city. We already have high and problematic overflow of visitor parking into residential neighborhoods. I wonder if Fayetteville can pull this off primarily because of its size.
> I wonder how far this can really be taken in my city. We already have high and problematic overflow of visitor parking into residential neighborhoods.
The problematic thinking is that the cars need to be here in the first place. If it is easy to get to the residential neighborhoods by walking, biking or public transit then most of these cars don't need to exist.
Of course it isn't easy. It takes a long time to shift habit, culture and perception. But the upsides are great. It is easier and faster to get around, less people getting hit by cars, less noise. Plus there are other benefits like I can go out and drink without worrying how I can get home or who is the DD.
Not disagreeing, really, but - habit, culture, perception, and infrastructure. Minimum parking requirements, and more generally streets designed around cars, are a form of infrastructure. I'm not saying it's a good form of infrastructure, but it is one. Local government needs to invest in alternatives: pervasive sidewalks, well-designed protected bike lanes so that people who are interested in biking but worried about being hit - which is over 50% of adults in US metro regions, see https://jenniferdill.net/types-of-cyclists/ - actually decide to bike, legal use of e-bikes, intersection designs that don't prioritize high-speed cars, reliable and frequent and ideally 24-hour public transit with dense stops (so probably buses and bus lanes), and so forth.
And yes, to be fair, habit and culture and perception play into this too. Cities build this infrastructure when people demand it and can convincingly argue that it will get used. Potential bus stops are more useful when there isn't a parking lot separating the bus route and the store people want to get to. Useful sidewalks are a natural consequence of commercial districts designed to be accessed by foot/bike/transit instead of by car, and so forth. But it does take both of these.
Also consider that many places in the US aren't conducive to pervasive, year-round cycling. I know there are some places in the world where people cycle in 85F and 30F weather alike, but I don't think most Americans (especially if they are visiting a city with a different climate than they're used to) would be interested in a freezing cold trip, or one where they have to take a shower when they arrive.
That part is getting a lot better with e-bikes, which is part of why I mentioned them. :) I'm in NYC, where the temperature does vary at least that much between summer and winter, and I recently got an e-bike in preparation for our office reopening, because I wanted to be able to avoid the subway in more weather than I'd be happy using an ordinary bike for (especially while the office's showers are closed!). On warm days, I can easily get up the bridge without sweating if I let the pedal assist do its thing and don't try to go super fast. And on cold days, if I do the same thing, I don't have the problem where I start to sweat under warm clothes - I can wear exactly what I'd wear without a bike (a warm jacket, decent inner layers, and gloves, nothing more complicated than that) and it works fine, too. It's a lot harder if it's more than a few degrees below freezing, extremely hot, or heavily raining/snowing, but I think it's pretty manageable most days.
But also, that's one of many reasons that bike infrastructure isn't enough to displace car infrastructure on its own. Good public transit helps, apart from being a viable year-round transit option in its own right, helps here because it allows people to decide that they can bike on days with good weather, knowing they have fallback options the rest of the time, whatever their own comfort level with with weather may be. And frankly taxis/ride-hailing services can also solve the problem of getting people from place to place without requiring a huge amount of parking spaces.
I don't think it is a fair assumption to say that reducing the number of available parking spots will automatically mean it is harder to find parking. If there are fewer parking spots available, fewer people will try to drive and park there. There is an induced demand that more parking spaces provides.
Now, will that mean less people in the area? Maybe, or maybe they will use alternative transportation.
> But I wonder how far this can really be taken in my city.
It can and should be taken to 100%. Even Los Angeles and Dallas – much bigger cities than Alexandria – are studying eliminating parking minimums.
Practically, eliminating parking minimums does not mean there will be no parking built: developers will still include enough parking that makes sense (and sometimes that's – gasp – none!) for a project, because in real life a large apartment buildings with absolutely no parking makes just as little sense as an apartment building with twice the number of parking spaces as tenants, especially in an urban area where car ownership is certainly not 100% (or in some neighborhoods, much less than 50%). This is something that almost every other major city in the world figured out long ago.
Philosophically, parking minimums are only something Americans think is necessary because it's been that way for so long. Why don't we have bike rack minimums? Parking maximums?
Anecdotally, my single family home in Los Angeles technically has a parking minimum of 8(!) cars, due to weirdness with the zoning laws. I live right near transit and don't even have one car. I'd love to replace part of my driveway with a deck and expanded backyard, still leave a few spots for guests, and it would effect literally no one, but doing so would mean my home is no longer up to code.
Dallas is the 9th (soon to be 8th) biggest city in the US at 1.4M people in its city limits alone. DC is about half that size. That’s not including the 800k within Fort Worth just 30 miles away from downtown Dallas.
DFW metro area is about 7-8M people as of 2022. That puts its the fourth largest metro area in the country, behind only NYC, Los Angeles, and Chicago (which it will also soon pass, if migration trends continue), respectively.
I think by all metrics Dallas is much bigger than DC. Though if you’ve only ever lived on the coasts, that may surprise you.
I have lived in many places out west, thanks. Metro areas are kind of arbitrary things with surprisingly arbitrary definitions. But going by USGS, the Washington DC metro area alone is about 6.4 million people, surprisingly close to the Dallas metro area. If you're going to insist on including Fort Worth, then you probably should also allow the DC metro area to include Baltimore, whose city center is under 40 miles from the White House. The combined DC and Baltimore metro area is about 9 million people, larger than DFW I believe.
I understand that everything is bigger in Texas. But everyone seems to want to restrict DC to the diamond, which is like restricting New York to Manhattan. DC is much larger than many people realize. Regardless, my point is: from the perspective of the impact on population size, Dallas and DC are roughly equivalent environments.
I didn't even know that minimum parking was an issue, where else can I read about this? How prevalent is it in other cities? It sounds like some 50s/60s era white flight policy permanently enshrining cars into city life.
I've been to Bentonville (~2016) quite a bit for work, always said I'd go to Fayetteville next time. Bentonville wasn't anything worth writing about for how I want to live but I can see it being an attractive place for quite a lot of people, I was kind of surprised by how underpopulated it seemed. I guess not a lot of jobs outside of the obvious few. Crystal Bridges was a great museum, the Ozarks are lovely. In general I felt a lot more positive visiting that area than I was expecting to.
So much of American zoning code makes our suburbs into ugly, inhumane places. StrongTowns.org is a good place to start. Their blog is great and will quickly radicalize you.
Minimum parking requirements are ubiquitous in the US. Houston, famous for "not having zoning," has these too and is the reason it's as car-centric as the rest of the US (only in 2019 did it remove them for a small part of the city).
Even Downtown Brooklyn, one of the best connected areas by public transit in NYC, has minimum parking requirements to this day. Manhattan used to as well: they were only lifted in the 80s as a response to federal regulation requiring cities to have better air quality. (Manhattan went even further and added parking maximums, which is very rare.)
In NYC, this is one reason (among others) landlords often don't demolish old buildings to replace them with newer ones: old ones were grandfathered and predated parking minimums. Demolishing and replacing them means you have to build parking. In many places, old buildings are already at the max height allowed by zoning, so demolishing a building means replacing residential square footage with parking. You'd actually be removing housing from a city in a housing crisis if you followed regulations!
Seeing as this just changed six years ago, it's a bit early to start calling it a success. I spent a lot of my teenage years in Fayetteville, and remember parking sucking downtown and near Dickson. Ending parking requirements six years ago just means that they're six years into a project during which they're going to gradually make parking even worse, and see what happens.
"And that’s kind of the point. Business owners shouldn’t have to be experts in parking regulations to decide if a site will work for them."
If that's the point, it's a shit point. What other regulations shouldn't they be forced to read or think about?
It's more about the city planners not having to be parking experts. Parking minimums are one of many subsidies to drivers in that they set a supply floor for parking spots. If driving is so popular then why do we have to shower drivers with money at every level of government?
The restaurant mentioned likely relies on street parking for those that drive there. As a shared & city owned resource it's within the purview of the city to manage it.
For the most part this story is overblown. Few cities have parking minimums in their cores these days. And you'll find few that support parking minimums there.
It would be interesting to see city ban all traffic in their area. No private or public vehicles, taxis, delivery trucks, busses or emergency vehicles. Just allow certain sized cargo bikes and like. The true only walking neighbourhood.
Shit point for who? The commuters who drive in from the outer burbs, or the people who live within the walkable area and provide the density needed to support a rich ecosystem of shops and restaurants within a close proximity?
The point of this urban design trend is to not think of these regions as destinations, but rather as places you live in and so can avoid the car trips in the first place. If you can walk there, why is parking relevant?
Is it friendly towards the people who live in suburban housing developments who need a car to get anywhere? No. But those people chose to live in a place where you need a car to get everywhere, so they shouldn't be surprised their lifestyle isn't accommodated in districts that have made a conscious decision to be less car-centric.
"But only the rich people can afford to live in the cute small downtown!" Great... that's telling you something about the market desirability of small, dense walkable regions. Why don't we get rid of more zoning codes and build more places that the market demands?
Unfortunately you still need a car. Everyone in Fayetteville owns a car and you need one to get to any real grocery store. I think it’s awesome that despite the fact that everyone owns cars, the expansion from Dickson has been done in a pedestrian-friendly way.
Yes, by flooding our cities with 'zero-person-one-car' traffic. (An Uber driver going to a pickup point is a car on the road that is, effectively, transporting exactly zero people.)
From a fewer-cars-need-to-be-built perspective, it's an improvement. From a traffic/GHG emissions/more-roads-need-to-be-built perspective, it's a regression.
Obvious conclusion: since the removal of minimum parking requirements worked in this particular situation, they work everywhere for everyone in all situations.
The author's follow-up, Parking and the City, is a mere 534 pages and more readable. (Part of the reason Shoup has been so successful as a policy change agent is that he's a gifted writer.) Still goes for an academic price, unfortunately. https://www.amazon.com/Parking-City-Donald-Shoup/dp/11384971...
It is good to see support for better urban planning on Hacker News. Issues of urban planning and city design often escape notice of the popular milieu due to the banality of local politics, but are nonetheless important.
One of the lasting impacts of our lives is the places we build. Make America Walkable Again.
Ohhh is this why in American cities you see so many free standing restaurants with parking all around them? I always find them a bit weird, we don't have many like that here in Melbourne.
Usual pattern here if driving to restaurant is spending a long time looking for a park then a long walk. It's good to get the exercise afterwards
The problem is that in the US - that can often mean an hour long walk or more both ways. People don’t want to go out for food if it means walking near a loud and ugly street (where there might not even be a pathway for pedestrians) for over an hour each way…
Yes. Parking is required for essentially all building types in the US, including office buildings and residential buildings (houses, apartments) too. Often even in very dense areas with public transit.
Cars are a fundamental requirement for living in most of America. The problems which arise from lack of parking is that cars become a nuisance fast.
I lived in an apartment complex where the parking minimum requirements were...bent... by the developer and it was by far the worst place I ever lived. Basically, what happened was the complex was under development, and the soil couldn't support a parking lot where one was planned due to drainage. So parking was added to another section of the development, around 1.0mi or so down the road. Meaning one complex had 4 spots per unit, with the other had like 0.5 spots per unit, but it worked out to 2.25 or something spots per unit on average. (I know this because I was friends with the complex manager, and she gave me the details)
The end result was people would park on sidewalks, in the middle of the road, in front of garages, double park, etc. It was a nightmare of epic proportions. People blocked in by assholes would blare their horns at 6AM. Others would intentionally "move" cars out of the way, which led to fights. There was a shooting. The fire marshal stepped in and started fining the complex, but they couldn't get people to stop, short of evictions.
The people who paid ridiculous amounts of money for their town homes next door were so pissed off about people parking in their private community that the cops were constantly harassing people for trespassing. I faced this myself just by going for a walk.
Why didn't people just get cars towed? Because tow trucks won't come out on someone's word. You actually have to go and tell the main office, then they have to call the tow company. But the thing is, the tow company doesn't tell you that, they just say they are "on their way," so you wait an hour or two for them to tow the car blocking you in and they never come.
So yeah, minimum parking is bad. But no minimum parking when everyone ones a car is worse. You need space for cars somewhere.
I say this as a person who absolutely loves walkable cities, and lives in a decently walkable one myself. We need to get rid of parking minimums, but we need to be smart about it. Maybe have the developers build parking in lots in designated areas on the perimeter of the development (kind of like those outdoor malls have)?
Pretty persuasive! Though also (I think) a pretty good illustration of why developers will almost always try to include some on-site parking even if it's not mandatory. In this case it seems as if they decided that completing construction on an unpleasant apartment building would be more profitable than walking away from it mid-project, and then persuaded the city to let them complete it.
Which city was this, if you don't mind saying? About how many units in your building? Was there any attempt by the city to manage the curbsides with permits etc? I'd think that'd be part of the solution in this case.
> Which city was this, if you don't mind saying? About how many units in your building? Was there any attempt by the city to manage the curbsides with permits etc? I'd think that'd be part of the solution in this case.
SW Ohio - outer suburbs, so township level governance, not town/village/city. Around 800 I think. No, there aren't actually any public streets suitable for parking. The complex was on a private drive right off of a minor highway and it connected to another private subdivision. So the only viable street parking was in a private, gated subdivision (the gate didn't stop people).
Or you could have residential development tied in with infrastructure. You want to build a no-parking building? It needs to work with the existing infrastructure. Doesn’t work with it? You need to contribute to making the infrastructure work with the building. (Paying for cycling pathways, adding separate paths for pedestrians and cyclists, improving public transit, etc.)
Right. It's something that needs to be looked at holistically. There are a lot of non-obvious prerequisites to getting rid of cars. Some of which won't make financial sense until a critical mass has abandon them.
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[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 396 ms ] threadBentonville and Fayetteville have built almost 1000 miles of bike specific, particularly Mountain Biking specific trails, right through town.
This is not the faux "bike friendly" BS crap with "bike lanes" that painted in traffic that everyone ignores... These are not an attempt to squeeze bikes into an automotive infrastructure and all the other crap politicians pull... these are trails through the woods, backyards, down neighborhoods, paralleling sidewalks, etc. This is making Biking a first class citizen.
Very few people are comfortable riding bikes in automovtive traffic. You will eventually get hit by someone posting selfies on instagram or playing their friends in wordle. If cities want actual change, they need dedicated infrastructure for bikes, and these two cities have shown that it absolutely works.
And what's worse, I've had drivers stop to yell at me for riding on the (completely empty) sidewalk when crossing a narrow bridge busy with car traffic. As if hundreds of bikers don't die every year from getting whacked by careless drivers.
It's not clear to me why there should be any right for bicyclists to be allowed on the road.
It's conceivable a bicyclist can get away without paying any tax whatsoever on the road, especially if their income is small. Free rider, welfare queens of the road.
>Roads are for people to walk on, historically, and it's adding cars that made them dangerous
In urban areas that's actually typically what the sidewalk for, and it's often illegal to walk on the road.
But this is why I'm against public roads, there are all sorts of bad problems associated with this being a public good.
Historically, streets were for walking. Walking in cities predates cars in cities by thousands of years.
>Historically, streets were for walking. Walking in cities predates cars in cities by thousands of years.
Historically, thousands of years ago, women commonly died in childbirth, a large fraction of children died before reaching age 5, and the only way for the greatest portion of the population to survive was manual labor in agriculture or some sort of subsistence existence. Most roads at least in US were not built thousands of years ago, a overwhelming portion of the total road area in America was designed with motor vehicle transportation in mind.
To suggest American roads are built as places for walking, for the vast portion of mileage, is just laughable at face and you only have to witness them to see this. And, in many cases, illegal.
Privatize the roads, IMO, and let the market decide how to efficiently allocate costs. It would be the fastest way to move towards more efficient systems in urban areas, such as much more bicyclists rather than wasteful cars. Bicyclists would pay their share, but see that it is very low. Car drivers may just see how wasteful it is to drive everywhere, when the cost is in front of them. It could lead to a rejuvenation and revival of the age of the urban bicyclist -- and just maybe a safer and cleaner world for everyone.
As the dude I overhead in some backcountry bar in the middle of nowhere put it: the government should pay for two things - clean water, smooth roads, and that's it.
I would be in favor of moving to a per mile, per pound (scaled by actual wear estimates) axle weight tax system for all vehicles including bicycles. Based on the data though, it could get very expensive for some cars and would likely be nothing but an administrative burden for bicycles.
[1] https://taxfoundation.org/states-road-funding-2019/ [2] https://streets.mn/2016/07/07/chart-of-the-day-vehicle-weigh...
Some people are jerks in every situation. I don't believe bicyclists stand out as victims, except the expectation that they ride in traffic and the consequences of colliding with a car.
I was a pedestrian cyclist there from 2017-2020 and I frequently was walking or riding in the roads or ditches when the sidewalk ran out. Sure, I could get across town, but when I get there, who knows if there's sidewalks?
If I wanted to go grocery shopping and be on a sidewalk/bike trail, I had to go an extra mile out of my way to go under the overpass and through the community college to get to neighborhood market. That trip was already a mile if I rode along the road, so double the distance. That's not making cycling a first class citizen! That's hiding cyclists from cars who are the real first class citizen. I know, I grew up there.
Fayetteville and Rogers get this right(ish), Bentonville wants to pretend they have it right so talent will move there for Walmart after Walmart spent decades making sure brain drain was inevitable by keeping the area "small town" (they bragged about this during my corporate orientation) and fighting density that could have naturally precipitated good pedestrian and biking infrastructure.
And the separate bike lanes through the woods are not some grand way to make cycling first class they are NECESSARY or the rural drivers who come into the "city" would be playing chicken games and trying to run cyclists off the road. When I grew up this was a common thing to joke about!
Living in Europe this question doesn't compute at all. Such a foreign idea to even contemplate. If it doesn't have a sidewalk, it must be a country road or a highway right? Couldn't happen in a reasonably densely populated area...?
Or in many of the places, the sidewalks exist, but are useless because cars are allowed to park on them.
I've never understood how people in wheelchairs are able to get anywhere in most of "civilized" Europe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroad
USA seems to be unique in the case that they think this design constitutes a finished product.
Edit: the Not Just Bikes youtube channel has great content regarding contemporary urban planning. Here's their video about stroads https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORzNZUeUHAM
That said, the purpose of said sidewalks is to exercise your dog, or let your kids ride their bikes around. They often don't connect up to anything in a useful way (other than nearby parks and maybe elementary schools - but only if they are very close)
What should it connect to? Thanks to zoning there is no Café you can go to or a small supermarket or anything else in the vicinity. Not even public transport which then might bring you elsewhere.
If they could get away with it developers would drop sidewalks completely. It’s only because cities and towns started mandating it that they became fashionable again.
Which was considered fine at the time and depending on where you live is still fine.
There is a little wedge of Washington, DC, bounded by Oregon Avenue, Western Avenue, and Chestnut St, called "Hawthorne". I used to run through and see signs reading "No Sidewalks in Hawthorne", after a while varied by signs says "Yes, Sidewalks in Hawthorne", but probably fewer. I suppose that this is six miles from the White House by air line, probably seven by road.
(And now there are sidewalks in Hawthorne, at least a few.)
When the Feds someday allocate billions to bike infrastructure, they’ll get the sidewalks, etc.
Imo securing rights of way that can be a framework for a future system is key.
Just curios, are you guys Java internally? If you can't answer, no worries.
They enhance the use of parks, they don't make parks more noxious, they increase property values, they keep the city valuable.
E-bikes are going to magnify the value of cities with good biking infrastructure. All of a sudden car trips become bike trips, and there are no concerns about hills or headwinds or towing a burly of stuff: the electric motor handles some or all of the required needed power. Need to haul ten bags of groceries and a kiddo up the big hill on the Mississippi? the electric motor will get you there.
It hopefully will reduce the amount of surface area dedicated to cars, and switch those over to more parks and more recreation.
Weather down there seems even more conducive.
My dad can bike from their house to downtown in 15 minutes (more like 30 as getting older). It's amazing. Completely protected separate bike lane going through old rail corridor. I can bike to whole foods from there too without having to go on a busy street.
They are expanding light rail there too but seems like similar to most cities it isn't great yet. Hopefully we'll see more density around the stops. My city Denver feels the same it's not actually used as much as it could be.
https://mashable.com/article/nyc-city-council-lyft-uber-cap-...
Two specific policies, but there’s also just the fact that every bike lane/pedestrian street/bus lane/low speed limit/etc. makes the city less car friendly and at some point that makes a difference.
I’d reckon it’s less than 20%, maybe even as low as 5%. The subway alone has a daily ridership of about 2 million, plus the massive amount of people who just walk or bike to the store, work, etc. I think it seems like more people are using cars than actually are due to their visibility, like you mention—they take up more space, they’re given more space, etc. It’s insane.
It's true that shitty bike lanes on auto-oriented streets are shitty, and that off-street paths are great. But lanes and paths are not the same thing, and neither of them is the reason this policy is working in Fayetteville.
You will eventually get hit by someone who punishment passes you and is dangerously negligent because they've dehumanized you, and they just don't care if they do violence to you, and its you're fault because you're slow.
Or you will get hit by people who simply don't register bikes and consciously or unconsciously think that bicyclists must yield to cars, sometimes turning left in front of you with no time for you to stop.
Or you will get right hooked by someone who just passed you a second earlier and that is too long for their minds to track the fact that you're still there, or they again think they're entitled to drive however they want and you need to yield to whatever they do.
1. randomly wandering out of the bike lane and into the car lane
2. stopped in the middle of the car lane around a blind curve
3. drafting 3 feet behind the panel truck in front of them at 40 mph
4. riding two or three abreast, with the 2 or 3 well into the car lane
5. continuing to cycle at 25 mph in the right hand bike lane while the traffic is going much slower, and there's a right hand turn coming up (it's difficult to spot these bikers while driving, heck, even cars are hard to see there which is why overtaking on the right is illegal)
None of these incidents were kids on bikes, they were all middle aged adults who really should know better.
I talked to a couple of these cyclists (in their tour de france outfits, naturally) once, and they laughed and said if they get hit by a car it'll be their big payday lawsuit. I replied getting crippled isn't worth a billion dollars.
Ride defensively, folks, regardless of what the law says or who is at fault.
By all means yes, get a dashcam. The more evidence, the better. While driving, I've had a few cyclists come around around blind corners going the wrong way. Any type of road user can be an idiot. But the main commonality of your list is people clashing with your own personal expectations. Don't assume that evidence of such will exculpate you (eg #2).
I took a class in performance driving once. The central rule there is to "be predictable", as that's how accidents are avoided at 200 mph when you're 2 feet off of someone else's bumper.
It's a lesson I took to heart in my everyday driving, and I wish that principle was taught regularly to other drivers, and that cyclists would have a clue about it.
It is also worth noting that motorists sometimes create the problems themselves. I try to stick to traffic regulations while on a bike since, as you say, being predictable is important. (In fact, it's something that a lot of cyclists in my neck of the woods preach.) Then you get a driver who tries to wave a cyclist waiting to make a left turn through when they have the right of way. No thank you. I have no plans on being road kill because the motorist is trying to be nice, and the guy behind him decides to pass on the right.
Unfortunately, tonnes of situations like that pop up. Stopping for pedestrians when they have the right of way can be quite scary. I have had pedestrians to the right thing (push the button, wait to cross), I've stopped, and the car behind me decides to race through. They had plenty of time to stop. I know because I always do a shoulder check before stopping for pedestrians. Not doing so can be fatal. I have had motorists get angry at me for stopping for pedestrians in intersections where pedestrians had the right of way under similar circumstances.
I realize that this is by no means a one way relationship. Some cyclists are idiots, either taking to many risks or by being to timid. Both result in unpredictability. I also realize that the behaviour of some motorists and some cyclists may be due to a "bad day". Let's face it, some people have to be on their bikes or in their cars even if they know they are unable to be fully attentive.
I also realize that there are many incentives to behave properly on the roads because bad behaviour can have nasty consequences. Unfortunately, it often feels as though a lot of drivers failed basic physics and don't understand their larger mass and higher speeds gives them a great deal more kinetic energy.
Let's explore the prejudice angle.
Not long ago in Seattle, a truck driver was going down a street under the speed limit, passing a line of cars all parked along the side of the road. As he approached a crosswalk, a cyclist suddenly was in the crosswalk, and the driver was unable to stop in time and smacked him, killing him.
The driver was slapped with a huge lawsuit, on the grounds that the cyclist was in a crosswalk.
Fortunately for the driver, there were many eyewitnesses who attested that the cyclist suddenly turned and angled into the crosswalk at high speed. The view of the approaches to the crosswalk were hidden by the parked cars. The driver was judged not at fault, yet there was still a hew and cry in the paper to hang him.
The driver was pre-judged as guilty, and had to prove his innocence. Without several eyewitnesses testifying in his defense, there's no doubt what the outcome would have been.
Hence I have a dashcam.
> it often feels as though a lot of drivers failed basic physics and don't understand their larger mass and higher speeds gives them a great deal more kinetic energy.
And the cyclists need to understand that cars have larger mass and higher speeds and are less maneuverable and have less 360 visibility, hence should not assume that the drivers can see and avoid the cyclist. For their own safety. I do not understand adults failing to look after themselves.
Like I said, I understand why you have a dashcam. It can be a valuable tool to prove your innocence should the need arise. The thing I take issue with is the presumed guilt of cyclists. Yes, there are times when cyclists are to blame. On the other hand, there are times when motorists are to blame. Those circumstances are common since most cyclists realize that they are the ones who are going to die. A lot of motorists don't seem to have the realization that they are the ones who can take lives. At least in the moment.
Here are some things that I have encountered as a cyclist:
- I have been in a hit-and-run. The impact was hard enough that I chunk of their car was broken off in the accident and loud enough that people could hear the crash in their houses. Witnesses said there was no way the driver could have not noticed they hit someone, yet they left me for dead. That is not how you treat another human being. I don't know who is to blame here since visibility may have been an issue, though I was following traffic laws to the letter, but the police said the driver's behaviour after the fact was likely the product of drunk driving.
- I have been intentionally hit by a driver. At least that is the only way I can explain it since they were stopped behind me at a red light and decided to go straight through me while I was waiting for an opening to make a left turn. Yes, I was signalling. Again, a hit and run. The police did not want to deal with it.
- The right hook is famous amongst cyclists. Believe it or not, these aren't always the result of cyclists passing to the right. I never pass to the right since I realize that many motorists don't signal turns. (I cannot predict what they will do, so I don't know when it is safe to pass.) Then there is the visibility factor that you mentioned. Yet vehicles will pass me and turn across me on a regular basis. I have even had that happen when the vehicle is in another lane.
- I have had vehicles make left turns from behind me because they are impatient and had poor judgment on the speed of oncoming traffic. I have seen several near collisions between two automobiles because of that, and it places me as a cyclist at greater risk.
- Certain groups of people like to distract cyclists. I'm not talking about people honking or screaming expletives here. I'm talking about people screaming absolutely nonsensical things at me in an attempt to pull my attention from the road.
I'm not bringing up these examples to say that motorists are always to blame. I know they aren't. I've certainly had my sloppy days on the road, though, ironically, those seem to be the times when I had the fewest issues. I'm bringing it up because there are plenty of times when large bundles of kinetic energy aren't following the law and are endangering people's lives. I'm not saying this is because your veering cyclist should avoid the blame. Most of the cyclists I know would frown upon such behaviour even if there wasn't an accident. I'm saying it because there are all too many cases where motorists seem to believe they are never to blame, even when they are not paying attention to the rules of the road themselves,...
Bikers ride like shit all the time. Drivers drive like shit all the time. Hell, pedestrians do stupid shit all the time too. Nobody is in some superior transportation group.
None of them know the actual rules of the road, and all assume they are correct and the ones in the right. You do any one of these things long enough, you'll see the stupid things the others do.
Those are all problems with the road, and not limited to bicycles. Eg. I see cars overtake on the right all the time
Nope. I thought I was pretty clear. There's no sane reason to park in the middle of the road around a blind corner. Or draft. Or wander randomly in and out of the bike lane into traffic.
> I see cars overtake on the right all the time
It's still illegal, and for good reason.
Not in every state, not every context:
https://app.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=46.61.115
For bikes it is even more nuanced (in my state):
https://www.dugganbikelaw.com/perilous-passing-on-the-right
I also never saw any other bicyclists on my commute do anything particularly dangerous or come near to causing collisions. I saw a few of them brake the law, but I saw a lot of cars break the laws as well.
The last time I think I saw a truly dangerous bicyclist was probably 10 years ago when some idiot blew a 4 way hauling ass after coming down a hill and given a minute one way or the other I would have killed him.
I really need to get a dashcam because of all the bad drivers out there though. Just the level of tailgating at highway speeds out there is fucking insanity, with every other driver convinced that their testicles will shrivel up if someone changes lanes in front of them.
As an operator of a motor vehicle, it is my responsibility to not endanger or injure other road users. It drives people nuts usually, but I take it seriously. I stop at stop signs and red lights. I take turns slowly. I don't pass in an un-safe manner. I drive slower. Cyclists riding like idiots doesn't really bother me because it doesn't really HURT me in any way. They aren't the ones driving multi-ton machines.
Cyclists still just rode on the roads.
Not to say this can't be done elsewhere but this seems like a place that was going to be popular / this was going to work regardless.
The whole US was once walkable, then we massively subsidized driving for 2 generations, and now they are not walkable.
Interesting how successful the car manufacturer lobby was in the US, transforming whole cities and life styles of ordinary Americans for generations.
Even if it is common sense, it is new and rare, which is newsworthy.
[1] https://pewresearch.org/social-trends/2021/12/16/americans-a...
Where someone lives is a compromise. Everyone wants the best of ALL words: the dense urban area with a subway entrance on the same street, plenty of shopping and other entertainment. They also want a ski lift up a mountain, finish your day ski day in your own backyard, and a tropical beach in the front yard, among the other benefits of rural living. That is physically impossible no matter how much money you have, so you make the best of what you can get even though it cannot be perfect.
With the current situation of the US subrubs are the best compromise, but as things change different compromises become better. Right now dense areas are a lot more expensive for a lot less space, and often that space comes with the problems of living in a very old building.
Note that change will not happen overnight. Even if 30000 square foot apartments (intentionally be absurdly large to make the point) in neighborhoods with good schools was free it would take a lot of time for people to move even though the rent savings would allow for more than enough other lifestyle changes as to make it a better compromise for most people.
Yup, it's generally just a balancing of priorities and trade offs. For me, having to drive everywhere I need to go would make me really sad, so I chose an urban environment, in a neighborhood where there's a good mix of residential and commercial, that is decently well-connected to public transit. But that means I have to deal with more noise, crime, and homelessness, and don't get to have a yard, despite higher living costs.
But that's my trade off, and others don't prioritize the same things I do.
60% of Americans prefer living a a community with larger houses and having to drive miles to get to school, stores, and restaurants versus having smaller houses and businesses within walking distance. Urban residents are divided almost evenly and 49% of them would prefer to drive miles to get to businesses if it meant that they could live in a large house. [1] I suspect the discrepancy with the previous survey is because both scenarios had the participants living in houses and if they were asked to pick a walkable apartment community or the car-dependent house community the number of people who would pick the denser community would be lower. The data is clear, more people prefer the suburban and rural car dependent lifestyles than the walkable urban lifestyle. Making arguments that people just don't know what they want is incredibly condescending and controlling.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/08/26/more-americ...
Suburbs existed before the car. See "Streetcar suburbs" on youtube.
Going from $3 train tickets to over $30 tickets hurts a lot more than going from a 50 cents a gallon gas tax to a 60 cent one. In my particular case, moving to a user-pays system would mean that I would save $500 a year in car registration taxes that are used exclusively to fund the transit system, which would more than cover a fair increase in the gas tax.
The cost operating costs for a train can be much less (a train can be fully automated which really brings costs down), or much more (if you run drivers and conductors). However as until the train is full requiring that you buy more the costs do not change at all.
Roads have similar concerns - the cost to build and maintain a road is mostly fixed, but it scales to much slower. A full bus every 5 minutes has far more people than the same road with the maximum number of moving cars, so you need to build more roads faster, thus the capital costs of roads is much higher.
Also, most buses don't have 5 minute headways, so if you're going to assume that you may as well assume that every car contains 4 people. Additionally, a 100 person articulated bus coming every 5 minutes is equivalent to 20 single occupancy cars per minute (or 1 car every 3 seconds), which is typical for a busy street. You need really short headways to match a car lane, shorter headways to beat it, and even shorter headways to justify making the lane exclusive to buses.
I did not say people are stupid. More like people are creatures of habit and often fail to realize how a change they could make would cascade into making things better. That is they are more likely to be pessimistic and see the downsides.
People know what they want when given the existing choices. Frankly the existing choices for dense city living suck for most people (bad schools and they can't afford as much space are big ones), so it is no surprise that people choose suburbs: it is the best choice. The real question is can we reform the dense urban areas so that people will decide they want it over suburbs?
There are advantages to density, and advantages to rural living, but yiur cannot have both at the same time.
Even if the responses were the same ignoring prices, I would probably put more weight on the market prices (i.e what people actually do and the resources they devote to it). Why do urban areas cost more and have a lot of people if people don't actually want it?
Similar dynamics still go on. Where I live Portland is overwhelmingly the major metro area, but the Oregon DOT is run out of the state capital, Salem, a much smaller and much more suburban community a bit south of the metro area. Despite supposedly being qualified professionals, it's clear ODOT sees things entirely in a car centric way. The only projects they're excited about pushing forward are freeway expansions. Portland is rather emphatic on NOT wanting that, but rather a multi-modal transit network that actually works with the density we have. In recent years ODOT has gotten so tired of the popular backlash on their projects in Portland that they've started playing deceptive games around the public notification process to try to sneak stuff through without pushback.
This whole nation just somehow lost its mind over the ideal of a car centric suburban lifestyle. And yes, some of that was straight up racially motivated, in the trend of white flight. But there were lots of things that fed into it imo. And to be fair, there are plenty of people who do like a suburban lifestyle where they live on a culdesac and have to drive to a strip mall for routine errands. But if you look at the overall migration pattern, all the growth is happening in the 20 or so major metro areas, and in particular in the ones that offer the combination of high income jobs and a more urban lifestyle. Yet somehow all these DoT's across the nation are still acting like the dream of the 1950s is their only priority.
Unless you have some kind of information to explain it, my bet is the Oregon DOT only provides grants for some related projects that the city of portland executes.
Your argument is being made in isolation of political-economic reality, at least as it currently exists in the united states. Tax receipts that could be used for roads (aka not property taxes which currently fund schools) flow out and up from city residents, primarily to the federal government, then to states, and lastly to municipalities. Cities don’t have the same ability to set tax rates as the nation or a state for the simple reason that it’s far more feasible for someone to change cites vs states, to say nothing of county.
Federal dollars are given to states, which are combined with state taxes to build highways, freeways, and other high speed high volume roadway. This constitutes the majority of all road spending, and cites simply have to integrate with that.
1. The I84/I5 interchange. ODOT wants to upgrade it. There has had to be an extreme amount of community push-back to get the proposal even half way integrated with the city itself. As it stands now, it includes partial capping and better bike and transit options above ground. However, it still expands car capacity.
2. The I5 bridge across the Columbia River. It needs to be replaced for seismic and age reasons. The community wants there to be expanded infrastructure for non-cars across one of only two bridges across the Columbia near the city. The other bridge was built recently(ish) and doesn’t have any meaningful non-car transit options. The community wants, at a bare minimum, there to be light rail going from Portland to Vancouver, WA included in a bridge project. So far, that hasn’t quiet materialized.
3. There are many roads in Portland still “owned” by the state. 82nd Ave used to be a good example, though it was transferred to the city last year. These roads have notoriously poor maintenance and high traffic deaths since they really aren’t well-designed for urban areas. (Too fast, too wide, too many access points to be a proper highway, etc.)
4. When the initial freeways were built in Portland, the original plan was for there to be several more highways than there are today. You can see many locations in the existing infra where a highway was meant to connect in but was never built. The Mt. Hood freeway is an example. It took very significant community pushback to get those projects cancelled.
Here’s my take on this, as a Portland resident. The state of Oregon is willing to spend billions of dollars upgrading transportation infrastructure in the Portland area. Why the fuck does 99% of that have to go to highways? Why can’t, say, 50% of it go to vastly expanding bike infrastructure to reduce the cost of road maintenance? That still leaves 50% of, again, billions of dollars of projects to car projects. I’m not even talking 50% of the state transportation budget, I’m talking 60% of the money they would already be spending in our community.
We basically just want more efficient transit methods to get more funding. It’s ok (to me) if the I84/I5 interchange gets improved. It currently sucks and doesn’t feel safe. But I’m not in favor of doing that project without first spending a lot of money or more effective and efficient transportation options. If there’s billions of dollars to be spent on infra, it should absolutely be going to bikes and transit first.
It doesn’t really matter who has jurisdiction, to people who live here
In your second example the community wants to force a light rail project into a bridge project, which sounds like the community had no idea what anything costs and is just repeating something theyve been told is good. There are also rules about funding diversions to exactly stop municipalities from taking money from other levels of government and spending it on things outside of those programs. The community may decide it wants a lot of things - light rail is a whole different proposition than a bridge project.
Portland's transport org doesn't spend billions of dollars and they do have leverage to spend tens of millions on bike projects if they were actually a priority to the city.
But the majority of funding comes from gas taxes and car registration, and bikes aren't paying it, and represent a tiny fraction of the people and goods moved each day.
I live in Alexandria, a famous historical neighborhood in the Washington DC metro area. Alexandria proper has about 160K people, in a metropolis of 6-7 million, and Alexandria attracts a large number of outside visitors from around the region because of its notoriety.
I think that eliminating parking requirements for businesses is an interesting idea worth consideration. But I wonder how far this can really be taken in my city. We already have high and problematic overflow of visitor parking into residential neighborhoods. I wonder if Fayetteville can pull this off primarily because of its size.
The problematic thinking is that the cars need to be here in the first place. If it is easy to get to the residential neighborhoods by walking, biking or public transit then most of these cars don't need to exist.
Of course it isn't easy. It takes a long time to shift habit, culture and perception. But the upsides are great. It is easier and faster to get around, less people getting hit by cars, less noise. Plus there are other benefits like I can go out and drink without worrying how I can get home or who is the DD.
And yes, to be fair, habit and culture and perception play into this too. Cities build this infrastructure when people demand it and can convincingly argue that it will get used. Potential bus stops are more useful when there isn't a parking lot separating the bus route and the store people want to get to. Useful sidewalks are a natural consequence of commercial districts designed to be accessed by foot/bike/transit instead of by car, and so forth. But it does take both of these.
But also, that's one of many reasons that bike infrastructure isn't enough to displace car infrastructure on its own. Good public transit helps, apart from being a viable year-round transit option in its own right, helps here because it allows people to decide that they can bike on days with good weather, knowing they have fallback options the rest of the time, whatever their own comfort level with with weather may be. And frankly taxis/ride-hailing services can also solve the problem of getting people from place to place without requiring a huge amount of parking spaces.
Now, will that mean less people in the area? Maybe, or maybe they will use alternative transportation.
Increased parking does not increase demand, it satisfies more of the demand that has always been there.
Parking inducing demand is pretty well accepted in the urban planning community: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-12/study-the...
Ticket sales don't tell you how many people didn't go to Disneyland because the tickets cost too much.
It can and should be taken to 100%. Even Los Angeles and Dallas – much bigger cities than Alexandria – are studying eliminating parking minimums.
Practically, eliminating parking minimums does not mean there will be no parking built: developers will still include enough parking that makes sense (and sometimes that's – gasp – none!) for a project, because in real life a large apartment buildings with absolutely no parking makes just as little sense as an apartment building with twice the number of parking spaces as tenants, especially in an urban area where car ownership is certainly not 100% (or in some neighborhoods, much less than 50%). This is something that almost every other major city in the world figured out long ago.
Philosophically, parking minimums are only something Americans think is necessary because it's been that way for so long. Why don't we have bike rack minimums? Parking maximums?
Anecdotally, my single family home in Los Angeles technically has a parking minimum of 8(!) cars, due to weirdness with the zoning laws. I live right near transit and don't even have one car. I'd love to replace part of my driveway with a deck and expanded backyard, still leave a few spots for guests, and it would effect literally no one, but doing so would mean my home is no longer up to code.
Well... LA is huge but Dallas is not that much bigger than DC.
DFW metro area is about 7-8M people as of 2022. That puts its the fourth largest metro area in the country, behind only NYC, Los Angeles, and Chicago (which it will also soon pass, if migration trends continue), respectively.
I think by all metrics Dallas is much bigger than DC. Though if you’ve only ever lived on the coasts, that may surprise you.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_statistical_are...
I understand that everything is bigger in Texas. But everyone seems to want to restrict DC to the diamond, which is like restricting New York to Manhattan. DC is much larger than many people realize. Regardless, my point is: from the perspective of the impact on population size, Dallas and DC are roughly equivalent environments.
I've been to Bentonville (~2016) quite a bit for work, always said I'd go to Fayetteville next time. Bentonville wasn't anything worth writing about for how I want to live but I can see it being an attractive place for quite a lot of people, I was kind of surprised by how underpopulated it seemed. I guess not a lot of jobs outside of the obvious few. Crystal Bridges was a great museum, the Ozarks are lovely. In general I felt a lot more positive visiting that area than I was expecting to.
https://www.youtube.com/notjustbikes
https://www.youtube.com/c/OhTheUrbanity
https://www.youtube.com/c/CityBeautiful
If you want to go deep on parking policy, here's a talk by Donald Shoup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0gokb4rPik
https://www.strongtowns.org/parking
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/11/25/parking-minim...
Some more: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-26/to-save-t...
Even Downtown Brooklyn, one of the best connected areas by public transit in NYC, has minimum parking requirements to this day. Manhattan used to as well: they were only lifted in the 80s as a response to federal regulation requiring cities to have better air quality. (Manhattan went even further and added parking maximums, which is very rare.)
In NYC, this is one reason (among others) landlords often don't demolish old buildings to replace them with newer ones: old ones were grandfathered and predated parking minimums. Demolishing and replacing them means you have to build parking. In many places, old buildings are already at the max height allowed by zoning, so demolishing a building means replacing residential square footage with parking. You'd actually be removing housing from a city in a housing crisis if you followed regulations!
"And that’s kind of the point. Business owners shouldn’t have to be experts in parking regulations to decide if a site will work for them."
If that's the point, it's a shit point. What other regulations shouldn't they be forced to read or think about?
For the most part this story is overblown. Few cities have parking minimums in their cores these days. And you'll find few that support parking minimums there.
The point of this urban design trend is to not think of these regions as destinations, but rather as places you live in and so can avoid the car trips in the first place. If you can walk there, why is parking relevant?
Is it friendly towards the people who live in suburban housing developments who need a car to get anywhere? No. But those people chose to live in a place where you need a car to get everywhere, so they shouldn't be surprised their lifestyle isn't accommodated in districts that have made a conscious decision to be less car-centric.
"But only the rich people can afford to live in the cute small downtown!" Great... that's telling you something about the market desirability of small, dense walkable regions. Why don't we get rid of more zoning codes and build more places that the market demands?
From a fewer-cars-need-to-be-built perspective, it's an improvement. From a traffic/GHG emissions/more-roads-need-to-be-built perspective, it's a regression.
(Pickup/dropoff might be annoying with no parking lane, but honestly, they use the bike lane for that more often than the parking lane.)
It's very clear to me after reading these that government enforced parking minimums and free parking should go.
Henry Grabar is working on what will hopefully be a more popular-press approach: https://twitter.com/henrygrabar/status/1156649614596038656
One of the lasting impacts of our lives is the places we build. Make America Walkable Again.
Usual pattern here if driving to restaurant is spending a long time looking for a park then a long walk. It's good to get the exercise afterwards
I lived in an apartment complex where the parking minimum requirements were...bent... by the developer and it was by far the worst place I ever lived. Basically, what happened was the complex was under development, and the soil couldn't support a parking lot where one was planned due to drainage. So parking was added to another section of the development, around 1.0mi or so down the road. Meaning one complex had 4 spots per unit, with the other had like 0.5 spots per unit, but it worked out to 2.25 or something spots per unit on average. (I know this because I was friends with the complex manager, and she gave me the details)
The end result was people would park on sidewalks, in the middle of the road, in front of garages, double park, etc. It was a nightmare of epic proportions. People blocked in by assholes would blare their horns at 6AM. Others would intentionally "move" cars out of the way, which led to fights. There was a shooting. The fire marshal stepped in and started fining the complex, but they couldn't get people to stop, short of evictions.
The people who paid ridiculous amounts of money for their town homes next door were so pissed off about people parking in their private community that the cops were constantly harassing people for trespassing. I faced this myself just by going for a walk.
Why didn't people just get cars towed? Because tow trucks won't come out on someone's word. You actually have to go and tell the main office, then they have to call the tow company. But the thing is, the tow company doesn't tell you that, they just say they are "on their way," so you wait an hour or two for them to tow the car blocking you in and they never come.
So yeah, minimum parking is bad. But no minimum parking when everyone ones a car is worse. You need space for cars somewhere.
I say this as a person who absolutely loves walkable cities, and lives in a decently walkable one myself. We need to get rid of parking minimums, but we need to be smart about it. Maybe have the developers build parking in lots in designated areas on the perimeter of the development (kind of like those outdoor malls have)?
Which city was this, if you don't mind saying? About how many units in your building? Was there any attempt by the city to manage the curbsides with permits etc? I'd think that'd be part of the solution in this case.
SW Ohio - outer suburbs, so township level governance, not town/village/city. Around 800 I think. No, there aren't actually any public streets suitable for parking. The complex was on a private drive right off of a minor highway and it connected to another private subdivision. So the only viable street parking was in a private, gated subdivision (the gate didn't stop people).