Columbus is sprawling, sad to see so much of that from parking and other pavement. As a driver though it is much better than Cleveland.
Ultimately I do wish we had more biking trails and pedestrian friendly cities in Ohio. And I'd trade my car in for an electric bike if my city made it happen.
As someone who visited the US as a kid and was even then shocked by the amount of space dedicated to cars, seeing this information on a map still blew me away.
The space needed for these parking lots basically guarantees you can not walk or bike to get anywhere. I believe that unless there's big investment in public transportation, there might be no way for these cities to break out of this vicious circle. And that seems to be politically unfeasible at the moment, for reasons that elude me.
The hyperloop, a ridiculously bad alternative to a subway, garnered so much attention even with its obvious downsides, so having actually useful public transportation should be a no-brainer imho.
The concept of a 'big investment' takes on a whole new meaning when it comes to public transportation in the United States, especially considering the vast geographical expanse of many metropolitan areas. In most cases, unless one resides in the heart of a city, public transportation isn't a practical option. This is evident in the fact that a 20-minute drive can easily transform into a commute of 90 minutes or longer when relying on public transit. I truly wish there were a way for me to avoid driving and still get to my destination efficiently.
I think that’s part of the point. This vast sprawl is somewhat caused by our over reliance on private vehicles. Also, a factor of more than 2 for travel times is VERY bad for public transit, even in the US.
I’ve previously written up “what would it take to make a 9 AM meeting at my office?” It’s a factor of 4 or 5 worse via public transit and I live in a probably top 5 (definitely top 10) US city as it pertains to our public transit system (Boston).
One of the first search results for Boston bicycle declares it the fourth best biking city in the US, so you're going to need to be more specific about whatever criticism you're exaggerating.
Boston sometimes gets 2 feet of snow in a single day, and often has sub-freezing temperatures. People just get on with life (but not really on e-bikes).
After a 2 foot snowfall ends, secondary roads are usually passable within ~3-12 hours, depending on how much snow was removed during the storm. Major roads will almost always remain passable during the entire snow event. Essential stores and services almost never close as people can move around despite the weather (and except for a few hours immediately after, are expected to).
Sidewalks and bike paths will take days to be down to pavement and some bike paths aren’t salted or plowed at all so become safe to use again when the snow naturally melts.
> Sidewalks and bike paths will take days to be down to pavement and some bike paths aren’t salted or plowed at all so become safe to use again when the snow naturally melts.
From my perspective as an individual living 8-9 miles from the office, there is no practical difference. It’s not like I’m going to go out and shovel it.
If things can be taken car of so cars can operate in winter there's no reason why they can't be for bicycles (as someone who lives in Toronto, Canada).
So the three times a year that happens, you find a different way to work or WFH. Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good. Minneapolis gets a decent bike share in winter. If they can bundle up and ride, it's positively simply for Bostonians to do it.
Buying an e-bike to accomplish this commute would not be cheaper as it would not be a full replacement for the car, so I’d be paying for a car and an e-bike.
There is oodles of parking at the office (was built for commuters) and I already have to park the car near home. Eliminating a parking space on either end won’t move any of the existing buildings closer.
The GSA usage rate is $0.585/mile. That is $9.945/day in car usage from a 8.5 mile commute to the office. I understand you can drive for less than this rate, but it would be hard to reach $0.35/mile and doing so would sacrifice dependability of the motor vehicle.
My e-bike is significantly cheaper to maintain than my car. It uses something like .7KWH for a full charge which handles over 30 miles. Thats less than 10 cents for a full charge at my rate. Other consumable goods like tires, chains, tubes, break pads are all similarly 10x-100x cheaper than their car counterpart. The only expensive wear item is the battery pack, which admittedly cost $550. I'd estimate my personal usage of the device to be around $0.05/mile.
It's cheaper to own both and maintain both if you are going to use both. Using simple linear math, the ebike will save you over $2000 in ongoing costs (initial price) within 3850 miles or 235 commutes. A pretty good ROI.
Honestly travel times on transit are bad everywhere. Its hard to beat the car, which is essentially a bus that goes express door to door to your destination, and can leave when you want. People take the alternative only when they can’t afford to take the car in regularly (e.g. bridge tolls and high parking costs in nyc ensure mainly high income people enjoy the convenience of a car). Even if you lived just 15 mins walking from a train station, thats a half hour added to every trip just getting back home, to say nothing of the walking on the other end. Imagine if you were not in walking shape on top of this. Its for the greater good of course to take collective transportation over resource intensive individual transportation, but you sure do pay for it with your free time in most places, not just in the U.S.
I think one of the issues is that once you start designing places around driving, cars become non-optional for day to day living, whereas many places designed around transit generally do not expect people to use transit for every single outing.
For example: most car oriented American suburbs simply require a car for anything other than visiting a neighbor, whereas in a transit oriented city you might use transit to commute to work, but be able to walk to some local shops and services.
I think many people who are familiar only with car dependent lifestyles make the mistake of imagining a car-free lifestyle that involves replacing all of the car trips they make one-to-one with bus or train trips, which would indeed be really cumbersome, but isn’t really how things work (at least in my experience growing up in a rural small town in the US and having lived in a couple of European cities and NYC).
Even if you lived out in the kanto plain where the trains came before the highways, its not like people are taking the bullet train to the grocery store thats a 5 min drive with the car you already own. Few places on earth are so dense where the car is actually a consistently losing bet when you account for all your trips. I’m not even sure what building for transit rather than car would look like for a semi urban or rural area, considering the transit with the lowest capital investment, the bus, is also benefited by car oriented development like a road network with more connections between nodes. Even in the times before a car, some people had a horse or mule to essentially play the role of a car today, of an instant express bus.
I’m a big fan of taking the bike around. Of course you do get those people who can’t imagine biking if theres weather. And it favors more able bodied people for the most part.
Existing bike lanes in the us need a serious overhaul. One of the standard designs runs along the dooring areas of parked cars, and right turning traffic is allowed to cross over it at intersections. The mobility scooters I’m familiar with seem to top out at a brisk walk speed on the other hand. That sort of speed differential is a recipe for danger as the roads and bike lanes are currently built in north america.
> […] considering the transit with the lowest capital investment, the bus, is also benefited by car oriented development like a road network with more connections between nodes.
'Improving' car-oriented development has been observed to make things worse:
> It is a paradox in that improvements in the road network will not reduce traffic congestion. Improvements in the road network can make congestion worse if the improvements make public transport more inconvenient or if they shift investment, causing disinvestment in the public transport system.
I think that you need to realise that the US is not representative of the rest of the world.
If you can't imagine how public transport can work in a big city, just try to visit a big city where it works (there are plenty outside the US). Seems more constructive to me than being extremely vocal about how you think it cannot exist.
* Public transport relies on population density. Once the density is high enough, people tend to take transit whenever it's faster and/or more convenient than driving. Which is trivially true for many people, because there is not enough space for wide enough roads and enough parking for everyone to drive.
* If you assume that public transport is only for those who can't afford driving, you basically guarantee that it's going to be bad. If you want good public transport, you must design it for the middle class.
* 15 minutes of walking is a very long distance to the nearest station. If you are in an area served by reasonable public transport, you should be able to reach the next station in at least one direction in that time.
I have a commute that parallels the freeway for a portion. The train takes 18 mins or so to get through the stretch stops and all. The highway in rush hour takes about 30 mins if its really bad. However, the twist is I don’t work directly on this corridor, I need to transfer. The highway has an interchange with another, making the entire trip even in bad traffic about 40 minutes by the time I park and walk in.
With the train I need to transfer to another train. This could be a 10 minute wait at the platform before the train arrives, plus its an end of the line stop for this particular line so it will sit for another 5-10 mins while it changes operators. Then once it gets moving, another 15 mins since there are a few at grade crossings with this line and then a 10 min walk. I do it over driving because I can zone out half asleep in the mornings.
The transfering and frequencies are where transit enters a world of pain and these are expensive, complex issues to fix compared to an interchange ramp. Anytime I bring someone unfamiliar on the train, they basically swear off the system for good and moan why we didn’t just pay for the surging uber.
In many big asian cities, the nearest MRT stop is less than 5 minutes walking away, there are trains every 3 minutes, they ride fast, and the layout is such that you usually need 0 or 1 transfers to another colored line, can't really beat it imho, except with the public bikes in some cases
EU's metros are a bit dated compared to that, but still very useful.
In the NY one, I was sometimes thinking walking is about as fast if you add up the slow train speed with the waiting time. In SF, there is none?!
I’d love to see some maps of good examples, but I think transit with minimal transferring is a really tough network nut to crack. You can build hub and spoke or with a few hubs and spokes but this often requires going way out of your way into somewhere you can transfer between spokes. You can build a grid basically like what is done with busses, but again, the routing demands compromising your personal convenience because you are moving along a grid, versus more as the crow flies. At the end of the day no one is going to be perfectly happy with transit by definition. It serves the average commuter along the given corridor, never you in particular and your particular commute. A lot of car drivers today probably wont accept that, taking a backseat and saying they will deal with waiting if it means second order benefits that aren’t immediately obvious, since for the last 100 years they’ve held the notion that they are in charge.
To me your opinion sounds really US-centered (where public transports typically suck).
It is fine to say that US has evolved for the individual car, and it's very hard to change. But I don't get why you say that it's the same everywhere else...
Of course but its more convenient when you choose when this time sink has to happen. Its why people go for a run in the morning instead of just jogging everywhere they go in life. Not to mention its a cost you pay more than once if you go down to the station multiple times a day. Take just three trips and your day just turned into a 22 and a half hour one only factoring the walk on the home side.
1. Any commute is a time sink we have little choice when to do it. I found walking as part of a commute with mass transit to be a better use of my time than sitting in a car. My walk was exercise. On transit I could read a book or answer work email/slack. In a car I was sedentary and focused on driving.
2. I don't know anyone that leaves their home for three separate trips on transit a day. Two tops, and usually it's just one. It's rare to leave the home three times in one day with a car if one of the trips is an eight hour workday. Usually people combine trips.
3. Again, walking is good. We should be walking. It's fantastic to have places to walk to. This isn't a bad thing or a chore.
In a car you can listen to podcasts or audiobooks at least. If it self drives for you then email and slack is fair game too. 3 separate trips wouldnt be hard to imagine. The commute is trip one. Picking up takeout is trip two. Running to target after dinner is trip three. That sort of thing is tough with transit though. Oftentimes your business is not in the same place, so you might be going all over town running errands or making appointments. The car is of course much faster to pivot between places than tranfers and waiting. Walking is good, but clearly people today have opted for the temporal convenience of driving over the physical benefits of walking, which might be faster to achieve with a more intense gym session. Its not like many rail stations see 100% car free living within their walksheds today. For some they have big lots because many of their riders prefer a few minutes driving to the station in a climate controlled vehicle over the alternative.
I can listen to those while walking. And if that podcast or audiobook gets interesting, it is not interfering with my ability to pay attention. The amount of people who say they are taking their language lessons or other involved listening in car is absurd on HN. But, it explains some amount of causalities.
And no, going to gym is not easier. It costs money, it is time consuming and it does not have the same effect as normal walking.
>I don't know anyone that leaves their home for three separate trips on transit a day. Two tops, and usually it's just one.
Is not this the problem with transit? Your traveling is so cumbersome that you seem to be restricting yourself to the bare minimum. Of course, you can also claim "that's a good thing!" but can you talk from the both sides of your mouth and claim that transit is faster and more convenient while also limiting your travel options?
Walking and jogging are not comparable at all. Jogging is a full on sport, walking is mode of transport with an element of healthy movement. People who frequently walk somewhere dont necessary go for jogging, only determined minority of people jog.
> Take just three trips and your day just turned into a 22 and a half hour one only factoring the walk on the home side.
The exact same thing goes if you go to the same place with a car. But, first, you did not had that healthy factor of walking. Second, if you are tired, overworked, have troubles you need to think about or want to listen some educational tape, you are becoming hazard on road as a bonus.
I agree in the abstract on an individual level. All else being equal, it's very difficult to beat the travel time of your own point to point transport that leaves whenever you want. But the only way that works is with a non-trivial up-front personal cost to obtain that transport, ongoing cost to operate it, and a massive societal investment to ensure you have ample road and parking infrastructure.
There's also the consideration that all those point to point journeys and parking at each end is a fairly inefficient way to enable a city's worth of people to move around. There's no way a city like NYC could exist at all if everyone relied on cars for transportation. A point-to-point personal car journey in NYC may in theory be faster than taking public transit, but it would be impossible for everyone to do that as the car transit times would trend towards infinity as everyone is stuck in traffic. And because of the increased density a non car-centric city allows, you can actually shrink public transit times too because things can be closer together and transit can run more often and have more routes. And the increased density also allows point to point personal transport other than cars to be practical, like walking or cycling.
I can often get somewhere fast during rush hour in Beijing on the subway rather than a taxi. But Beijing’s traffic is Superbad compared to the USA. The city is also huge, but they have just done a good job building it out everywhere.
The same with most big Chinese cities (smaller cities have taxis, so you still don’t need your own car). Tokyo’s system works ok as well, although I’m not sure if taxi would be faster since it is too expensive for me to try. The subway/loop lines are good enough to get places as quickly as I don’t think taking a taxi would save much time.
Funny I know plenty of places where public transport is faster than a car (maybe with the exception of the middle of the night). You bring up the example of walking 15min to a train station (that's already a longish walk), but somehow ignore the case of having to find a parking spot. I certainly have spend >20min finding a parking spot when I really needed to take a car for some reason (and the often still had to walk 10min after). Sure that's not the case if you consider a vast US City designed around cars where parking makes up a large fraction of the city (incidentally that's the point of the article), but a city like that is not very livable either.
I think its pretty easy to park because most american cities are overparked, and as they convert surface lot to 5/1 they end up even more overparked because that usually comes with a subterranean garage and another 300 spaces that weren’t there before.
You’d be hard pressed to lay rail based transit so densely where everyone in the metro area has a 15 min walk to a station much less one going somewhere relevant for them. Simple bussing upgrades are much more realistic for us to see comprehensive transit in our lifetimes. Things like signal priority and a protected lane would go a long way for little cash and time. Too bad the bus is invisible to most people and politicians.
If in your city, cars are faster than public transportation, I would say that's most likely due to poor implementation of it. In my experience in NYC, London, Tokyo, Bangkok, even the Bay Area (TBF, haven't visited in years), metros are much faster and much more pleasant.
Unfortunately, in the US, we let a bunch of politicians who claim the government is bad at everything run the government. They have a vested interest in making sure it's not well run. For goodness sake, we had a president who said, "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government, and I'm here to help." A sitting US president, who according to Wikipedia, is part of the government. We should have demanded his resignation then and there, and got someone who wasn't terrified of the organization he was a head of.
The most immediate solution to this is stop relying on contractors and let the government at every level build up public planning departments and a construction workforce that doesn't get let go when the project is finished.
The metros being faster always is dependent on your destination being favorably connected to the lines you are near. Take a random a to b in any of those cities, and I’d say the car is typically going to be fastest. Here’s a random trip across tokyo, which at the time of writing takes 50 mins by car or an hour and 38 minutes by transit.
Not only that, right now is the middle of the night in Tokyo. If you change the "depart at" time to something like 5 PM, the driving time is estimated to be anywhere from 65 to 125 minutes.
We wouldn’t ever expect public transportation to be significantly faster than driving the same trip. If it were, people would switch from driving to the faster option. Decreasing the number of cars would then ease congestion and speed up driving, until a new, faster, equilibrium was reached.[0]
This is how improving public transportation is actually one of the most effective ways to benefit drivers.
It’s easy to beat the car if the car isn’t allowed where public transport is… which can be approximated by not building any parking in places where people want to or need to be.
Because the US insists transit need to look like a big sexy expensive two mezzanine underground platform, when a decidedly unsexy painted bus lane on the already existing wide arterial would offer most of the same utility for orders of magnitude less money.
All of the commenters are missing a huge point. US commuter rail projects are hugely corrupt enterprises. Just look at Honolulu for a blatant example of corruption in infrastructure spending (their train NO-ONE wanted)
I’ve heard sometimes metros are forced to contract with certain contractors in particular because they have headhunted all the talent qualified to interpret the metros own requirements. You can imagine how much abuse this situation can lead to.
The US needs to drop the contractor model and just directly staff labor for public works. If there is enough work going around to maintain a contracting company, then there’s therefore enough work to staff a public rail building division, and build out some standardized and therefore cheaper designs for this infrastructure.
> This is evident in the fact that a 20-minute drive can easily transform into a commute of 90 minutes or longer when relying on public transit. I truly wish there were a way for me to avoid driving and still get to my destination efficiently
It's not like it's the natural state of things that 25% of the Atlanta city center is dedicated to parking so we just have to accept the downsides.
There's a reason everything is so spread out and so it's difficult to walk places or design efficient public transit, and it's the same reason driving and parking your car is the most efficient transportation method.
I feel assured that the transition is going to be pretty quick, watching Waymos and Cruises going around SF and dealing with some challenging traffic situations and weather(Waymo is definitely better at not getting stuck, but the gap is not insurmountable).
As soon as they proliferate at scale, the risk profile changes such that you can bike everywhere safely, and parking is no longer a major urban issue, because the fleet is going to have a more flexible usage pattern whether or not individuals own the vehicles: instead of one space per vehicle per destination, it's going to be compressed down to parking space for the neighborhood plus drop-off zones.
So to me, it's obvious that the market is going at the problem just about as fast as it can, and once the adoption S-curve hits, "need to drive" relaxes because other potential uses aren't being suppressed. You'll still have many instances where mass transit and active transit present a lower cost structure than taxi, and they'll have a lot of leeway to grow.
Maybe. From the outside looking in self driving cars are vaporware that are very late on delivery. I wouldn't want to bet my city's architecture on this promise.
It might be nice if they deliver on this promise though.
> The answer to this particular problem isn't public transportation.
Public transport is not a self-goal, but it’s the best way by far to reduce the spatial requirements for transportation. In particular subways and commuter trains can move an absolutely insane amount of people for even the largest metropolitan areas, without obliterating the ability to walk and getting quickly from point A to B.
Others include having motorcycles and bicycles for individual transport. That can work in small cities but usually impact walkability anyways. If you look at south east asia for instance, often lacking in good public transport, but having a lot of motorcycles in large cities making pedestrian movement hard.
As someone who recently experienced hanoi traffic as both pedestrian and motorcyclist - I can attest that it can be scary, but after a certain learning period not that bad.
The big problem there was the lack of sidewalks for pedestrians so you kinda had to go into traffic even if you were just following the streets.
Crossing even the busiest boulevards was actually easy, if a bit nerve racking. The flow of scooters just parts around you as you cross, giving you the “I am Moses” feel - you only have to be visible and consistent with your movement.
Honestly they should just get rid of all the zebra crossings and pedestrian lights - those don’t work anyway, and just build lots of pedestrian islands everywhere and they would be golden, oh and ban cars.
The amount of people those scooters move throughout hanoi is just staggering - even if they are a bit slow, they make up for it being like an organic flow that doesn’t stop for anything as it can just ride around it.
Except that the answer to this is public transportation??
The problem is that people need a place to store their single-occupancy-vehicles. which means that each individual with a car takes up a permanent ~100 Sqft. They also need places to put that car. If you remove the parking lots, and the roads, admittedly, you'll create a more walkable city that means people don't need cars. But people will still want something for longer distances. And that something is public transit.
Private shared transport could also solve the parking problem since a taxi doesn’t need to hang out and park in the dense area it drops off passengers, except maybe to on board other passengers. In China this works well enough, although the traffic is still atrocious.
lol, you even admit your example doesn't work well enough to "fix" traffic.
Your private taxi cab is never going to compete with the people-moving capacity of a bus, or a train. A road with 100s of cars on it, is a demonstration of how many people are heading in a common direction. If you want them to move faster in that direction, find a denser form of transportation that doesn't take up the space of 100s of cars.
Okay, I definitely misread this. :) That said, I suspect my misread is because...
Is parking an unsolved problem? I think in most cities it's a solved problem, and the consequence is traffic. But I would be curious of your take given that it's the question you asked. What is there to solve for parking?
edit: Also, Public Transportation, arguably, fixes both traffic and parking.
If parking were the only problem, you could call it solved in places where taxis are cheap and ubiquitous, which might happen in the developed world with self driving cars.
But ya, if we could eliminate parking, we have some more space for some nice things, but having lived it, it doesn’t solve the main problem at all if private transportation is still viable.
It is possible for private personal transport to be viable without parking, and in that case, we can still run 80th the too many cars/not enough road problem.
Personal transport is convenient. I admit to changing my schedule to super early in the morning and leaving work at 3 just so I could take a taxi rather than deal with the subway due to Beijing’s harsh traffic jams. It wasn’t the right choice for society, but it was the right choice for me.
Good public transit is convenient. Ask anyone in any city with good public transit how they commute. Trains and buses that run all day consistently are even cheaper and more convenient to plan around.
"[A developed city isn't one where poor people take cars but where rich people take public transit.]"
if we solve parking then we have more space for offices, shops, etc, which means more people travelling into the area, which means more traffic. only public transport and walking can properly scale up.
US intersections are also pedestrian-hostile with the "right turn through red light" rule. So even when it's indicated as safe to cross the pedestrian still has to account for potential moving traffic.
As a man I don’t like the perception that I’m under suspicion of being a threat to half the population. And I shouldn’t be. The vast majority of violence against women is perpetuated by men they know, not strangers [1].
Domestic violence is not a reason why our cities should be filled with 1-ton death machines that spew soot, carbon monoxide, and nitrous oxide. Cars don’t solve that problem.
The potential downside for a woman who misjudges a dangerous man is far more severe than the potential downside for a man who is misjudged as dangerous by a woman.
> Do folks realize that walking somewhere in a city is like running a gauntlet to some of the population?
Which is more of a reason to have more people walk: the more people in area going hither and thither the less isolated and vulnerable a person will feel.
People often feel most vulnerable when they feel isolated, which is what happens on a lifeless street. If a street has a sidewalk cafes, bars, restaurants, and people waiting in lines to get into clubs, then there is a feeling of community.
My wife and I a couple years back moved to the very edge of the suburbs. Like, across the street is forest preserves, and behind us is a river. We have only spoken with fewer than 10 neighbors since we moved in 2 years ago.
Her, and her sisters all talk about it being like a "serial killer neighborhood". Even my fishing buddy nextdoor sort of rolls his eyes about how his wife says similar things sometimes.
But I tell my fishing buddy: You'll never understand how vulnerable women feel. Ever. Honestly, being afraid of a place where nobody is around is statistically safer - people don't lock their doors in my neighborhood. I've started also not locking doors. It's that kind of place. That has been a point of friction for my wife and I too - I have been really diligent prior to this, because I always lived in really populous areas.
My wife, thankfully, has never been a victim of any kind of violence. But she has had experiences where she avoided that. Once time some big guy late at night followed her into her apartment building asking to use her phone to call for a tow truck or some nonsense. She knew it was BS, but gave it to him anyways. He ran away.
Men will never be able to understand how vulnerable women feel. We simply do not experience the world in the same way. I'll give another example to help anyone still reading get it: I once went to a haunted house (the Rob Zombie one in Chicagoland) with my buddy and his wife. Probably 10 times, actors working there tried to jump-scare her, and not me or my buddy. Every goddamned time. Whether she was in front, or behind, or between us. She does not scare easily, so she was just really annoyed. Predatory men see women as easy victims in ways they do not other men.
I have a Yale lock that locks automatically after 5 minutes. This is important because we have unhoused neighbors who will occasional door check our home and you don’t want to wake up in the morning to find someone sleeping in your living room.
> The hyperloop, a ridiculously bad alternative to a subway
The idea was for the Hyperloop was to do the 400 miles straight shot from LA to San Francisco at speeds up to 300mph. I don't see how a subway could do anything comparable.
Good point! My idea is to have people simply rocket launched via pods from LA to SF over the air about 200-300 meters off the ground on average. Sure, it’s unsafe, and probably has a ton of reasons that it won’t work. But isn’t it an innovative way to solve transportation problems that definitely isn’t a tactic intended to downplay public transit in CA so that my totally unrelated car business has less of a risk of succeeding?
The CAHSR plans were for ~350 km/h rail speed, which is basically the highest end of high-speed rail. It's the ~200 km/h speed of the NEC that is at best barely-high-speed rail.
> seems to be politically unfeasible at the moment, for reasons that elude me.
Ever see that monorail episode of The Simpsons? Yeah that's where we're at. There's a strong desire from many people to slow things down and be more deliberate and careful before any more big changes. There's a sense of disillusionment about "progressivism" amongst even those who crave the most righteous of vibes. This is a weird time to be alive and people just don't want to wake up to construction crews ironically destroying their cities to make way for yet another wave of gentrification pretending not to be.
I'll counter this - the majority of the people in the US want to live somewhere and get around in the least difficult method. Due to decades of policymaking, that happens to be houses and cars.
It's very nearsighted to think our model is the penultimate in structuring society. Plenty of people are happy, fulfilled, and productive living in apartments & townhouses while taking trains to work.
Why would someone prefer to live like ants? Moving from a large place with a forest backyard to a tiny apartment is a lower standard of living. You live in an apartment and trade away personal space and still have to take a train to work where you get little personal space.
People can be happy in an apartment but most would trade that in for a house they could afford it.
> Moving from a large place with a forest backyard to a tiny apartment is a lower standard of living. You live in an apartment and trade away personal space and still have to take a train to work where you get little personal space.
A house does not imply a large backyard. Suburbs are the bigger problem, and they don't usually have much forest.
And apartments don't have to be tiny. If you're comparing against a house in a similar location, that buys a lot of apartment space.
Unnecessarily inflammatory wording. (Don't use the popular "shoebox" either.)
> Moving from a large place with a forest backyard
Most Americans live in suburban houses and over 90% of suburbs don't have a forest backyard. You're painting a sunny caricature.
> tiny apartment
Apartments come in a range of sizes, easily from 300 sq ft to 2000 sq ft. You get what you pay for. With houses, the minimum size is so large that many people have no choice but to overpay for space they don't need.
> lower standard of living
Being in proximity to people, shopping, and businesses, as well as having a shorter commute to work, contribute to a higher standard of living.
> Being in proximity to people, shopping, and businesses, as well as having a shorter commute to work, contribute to a higher standard of living.
I live in a suburb. I'm in proximity to people, shopping and businesses. In fact, I'm in closer proximity to shopping and businesses than most residential areas in the closest city. Most of the large employers in my area are also in the suburbs so, commuting would be even longer living in the city since it would involve taking public transportation or driving from the city to the suburbs. Even if I lived and worked in the city walking, taking a bus or the subway from residential areas to the employment centers would take longer than my 15-minute commute.
Eh, people can like different things. I think "most feel house > apartment" is way way too broad of a generalization.
You give up space by living in a dense city but gain walkability and more public amenities, and on the other hand if you lived in the suburbs you would give that up for more personal space and - at least in the case of the US - better school districts. If you're rich you can have the plusses of all.
Living in an apartment is a compromise. Unfortunately, most apartments in the US do not have much to offer.
Most are not well insulated, particularly for sound. The overwhelming majority are rentals; and most of those are managed by landlords who charge an arm and a leg, only to be less than helpful.
Public transit relies on good apartments, and good apartments rely on public transit. It's symbiotic. The US has largely failed at providing both.
People don't choose what is available in the market. They choose from what is available in the market.
> You live in an apartment and trade away personal space and still have to take a train to work where you get little personal space.
You have a limited view of 'urban living'. Want a front yard, back yard, and garage (attached to a laneway)? Plenty of that was built pre-WW2, and there's no reason why it couldn't be again:
Examples (Streetview) of urban tree-lined streets which can support transit and where cycling is practical (and where a car is an option versus a necessity):
If you would travel to those places you would actually realize how depressing it actually is. They have some of the highest depression rates in the world. They overlfowing with people you can barely walk on sidewalks. Someone explain how that is peaceful and enjoyable to live in.
I live in an apartment in a city (not in the US). Walking distances from my home:
Pharmacy - seconds (right in the next building)
Bar - seconds
Supermarket - 1 minute
Bakery - 1 minute
Greengrocer's - 1 minute
Children's playground - 1 minute
Beach - 1 minute (OK, not representative of every apartment dweller, I'm privileged) :)
Stationery shop - 2 minutes
Bookshop - 2 minutes
Bank branch with ATM - 3 minutes
Amazon locker - 3 minutes
My son's school - 4 minutes
High school - 4 minutes
Health center - 6 minutes
Park - 7 minutes
Library - 7 minutes
Theatre - 13 minutes
Cinema - 15 minutes
Commute - 3 minutes walk to bus stop, buses every 5 minutes, 15-minute trip
Train station - 25 minutes
For me, moving to a house where I would need a car or much longer walks for most of those things would be a huge downgrade in standard of living, not an upgrade. Sure, I would have more space. Not worth it at all.
What about not having to hear your neighbors? What about not having to worry about your neighbors hearing you? Maybe you like listening to loud music at night. Maybe you want a home theater. Maybe you want to play your piano/drum any time of the day.
I think you're underestimating how nice it is to have space.
Everything you are talking about exists at least as much in the suburbs and then add in the constant mowing, leaf blowing, and weed eating to it too.
> I think you're underestimating how nice it is to have space.
This isn’t a trade we need to make. You can have space and be able to walk to things if we just build right. Take the suburb you live in now. Pick 5 houses randomly and turn those into some of the things the OP mentioned. Now you have your space and walkability. Throw in an apartment and some variations of housing so young and old and people with various incomes can live there too and there you have it. Now we’ve reduce car usage so you aren’t driving 5 miles in a 2,000 lb machine to get a loaf of bread and you still get to keep your car and your space.
The person said they were living in an apartment and would never move to a house. What you're proposing (making 5 random houses into apartments), would probably still have most people living in apartments, so people wouldn't have the room.
Also, I would like to point out people don't drive 5 miles to get a loaf of bread. They buy stuff for the whole week/month in one go, which you just can't do by foot.
> The person said they were living in an apartment and would never move to a house.
Yes and I’m keenly honing on on the benefits they highlighted and how those benefits don’t have to be unique to (as they are describing) a dense urban center with apartment only dwellers. Also the OP could just live in an apartment in a mixed-use, medium density neighborhood. They could be your neighbor even!
> Also, I would like to point out people don't drive 5 miles to get a loaf of bread.
Hey there! Yes it’s me. Fellow suburbanite for many years who can tell you first hand as a 100% fact that people do in fact drive distances like this for a single loaf of bread. You can to it for other items too. “Whoops forget sour cream for taco night”, “oh I’m going to make a beer run”, “better grab milk and eggs for that snow storm!”. Etc.
> They buy stuff for the whole week/month in one go, which you just can't do by foot.
You don’t need to do that and they likely do that (most make multiple trips) because you have to go drive a while to make it to the grocery store and deal with traffic. There’s nothing wrong with walking 10 minutes to grab a few things a few times/week. It’s better and healthier. You’re describing “how things are” and not using your imagination to understand how things could be.
Saving this for last:
> What you're proposing (making 5 random houses into apartments), would probably still have most people living in apartments
I just told you that you can take an existing neighborhood and modify it by transforming a few houses so that they have different functions. This is only limited by zoning. Why in the world would that result in “most people living in apartments”? No apartments would be required!
Not the op, but in a similar situation to them. I can't hear my neighbors and they can't hear me. I can play music/watch TV pretty loudly and they won't be able to hear me. I'd have to throw a rager for anyone to even here a little noise.
My building is reinforced concrete/steel construction. There's proper insulation. The issue in the US is that construction is poor. Construction of single family homes is actually considerably worse than apartments, but you have the benefit of distance.
Better construction is the right answer here, rather than more sprawl.
> The majority of the people in the US want to live somewhere and get around in the least difficult method. Due to decades of policymaking, that happens to be houses and cars.
I think this is well said. The other dimension is public schools since US school funding comes from property taxes so more expensive areas have more funding for their schools, which usually means a higher quality education.
This is how it is in Washington state. But each state and even localities can do it differently. For example, someone was complaining that Montana property taxes would go up if all houses appreciated the same in value, or down if they all depreciated, which I thought was weird.
1. Does school funding come mostly from property taxes?
The answer here in Seattle is yes having seen some breakdown chart in some government document a while back.
2. What determines the amount of property tax?
Thanks for sharing that link about how in Canada the tax collection amount works backwards from a goal amount.
My understanding is that in the US, your property tax is assessed annually and the person doing it presumably uses market comparables to determine the taxable price - I don’t know if they work backwards from a target, but that sounds odd to me.
> My understanding is that in the US, your property tax is assessed annually and the person doing it presumably uses market comparables to determine the taxable price - I don’t know if they work backwards from a target, but that sounds odd to me.
In my county they will definitely work back from a goal. The county will determine the budget for the coming year and adjust the tax rate to meet that budget. If assessed values go up 8% but the budget only goes up 4% the board of supervisors will lower the tax rate so the increase in property taxes only meets the 4% needed. This is politically easier than doing the reverse, but they have at times increased the tax rate when assessed property values have not risen enough to bring in the funds needed for the desired budget.
> I'll counter this - the majority of the people in the US want to live somewhere and get around in the least difficult method
No they don’t. People consistently give up better commutes for more space.
> It's very nearsighted to think our model is the penultimate in structuring society. Plenty of people are happy, fulfilled, and productive living in apartments & townhouses while taking trains to work.
100% agree. But Americans want houses more than a public train ride. Figure out how to solve the issue of living in shoeboxes with people still getting space to have a personal garden, a wood shop, etc and you’ll be onto something.
Many suburban churches and organizations run community gardens, but it's rare to see in cities because of how much space it requires.
We have shared wood/etc shops, even in small towns. "Makerspace" is one common name for them. Major issues include: storage, tool quality/maintenance, limited hours, staffing, high cost, clashing personalities.
In either case, you'd likely need to drive to get to them. Some apartment complexes have shared gyms, but most of my landlords have been pathologically worried about insurance risks. I'm not sure they would be eager to go along with installing a communal lathe. As for gardens, I once lived somewhere that had small tin beds on the roof, but the landlord rented them out for $300/mo each...there were people who paid to use them, but I thought it was a ridiculous ask for a couple sqft of soil.
Makerspaces only work well when there’s a strong sense of community among the members. It’s all too easy to fall to tragedy of the commons - people not putting things back where they found them, cleaning up for themselves, etc. there’s only so much you can do with cameras and surveillance. Ultimately you need things like events that bring people together and help them learn from each other for people to see it any other way than “shitty version of a personal workspace”.
You can’t really raise a kid in the city without private school. Large school districts are super inefficient and have to spend lots of money to bring up kids from broken families. High quality schools cheat that problem by excluding poor families through expensive real estate thereby increasing the number of resources per student. It’s not fair but that’s how the game is played
If you've only traveled in the US, you think public transportation is for poor people. I haven't used all US metros, but even NYC is pretty shabby in comparison to London or Tokyo. Most folks probably also haven't lived in a walkable city (which implies denser, smaller housing).
I don't want to force a lifestyle on anyone, but for me it is glorious just popping on a skytrain or a subway, listening to my music, and watching the world go by. I don't have to buy a car, pay for insurance, get gas every week, change the oil, repair it when it inevitably breaks down or things wear out, thus easily doubling the initial cost, find parking, and wash and clean it. I don't like dealing with different vehicle sizes, pedestrians on their phone, and drivers who think their time is worth my safety.
I’ve been to both London and Tokyo. Their transportation is significantly better, but it’s optimized for a local minimum from the American suburban perspective.
“They made the best of a shit scenario, which is way too many people living in one place. It’s better than the way the US dealt with the people that have to live like that, but it’s still worse than being able to have an acre to yourself in the middle class.” The US optimized for people who are in that camp.
People like living in the suburbs at a price point which is heavily subsidized. Remove the federally backed home loans and mortgage tax deductions, federal highway subsidies, auto industry favoritism, a foreign policy that promotes cheap oil, zoning laws which favor car transport and suburban development, and finally adjust local taxes to reflect the true maintenance cost of water/electricity/gas/roads to their endpoints and you will see a major increase in suburban housing prices and a corresponding decrease in their demand.
Biking here in the states isn't a problem from a distance perspective -- the problems are road safety and destination security (bike theft is a big problem but typically not valued by police because of the nominally low dollar impact). Walking, yeah.
That depends on the city, and where in it you live.
If you live in a large suburban area (like many Americans), then biking distance is a huge problem.
Sure, making an actually tractable amount of public transit in every suburb would resolve that problem, but that's a huge investment, and the overwhelming majority of Americans can't even imagine what the result might look like.
I would argue biking distance isn't the problem in suburbia, it's biking safety. My rather spread out suburb is about 8 miles across. That's less than an hour for any cyclist and a fit cyclist could do it in half that time. The trouble is that most of those miles are on 45 mph stroads with either no bike lane or a thin stripe of paint for protection from cars and it's full of debris most of the year.
At one point my commute was 78 miles each way. It would take me about an hour depending on traffic and speed traps. The shortest commute I’ve ever had is 15 miles. I live in one of the largest cities in America. We have no public transportation. A bike is simply unworkable. A motorcycle isn’t even particularly great here. I drive a mid size SUV and I’ve had people not see me and merge into me. Multiple people I know have been rammed full speed while stopped at a traffic light.
Bicycles are neither safe nor efficient enough for a daily commute in the US.
> And that seems to be politically unfeasible at the moment, for reasons that elude me.
That's because you are looking from the outside in.
Every person who has grown up in the US has grown up in this situation. Having to drive nearly everywhere is our version of normal.
Public transit in the US sucks. In practically every city that even has it, it's the worst way to get anywhere. It's often a last resort: a tool for the desperately poor.
On top of that, most of the US is made up of small towns that public transit wouldn't make any sense for. A significant percentage of Americans must regularly travel between a major city and a small town. That means they must have a car, and a place in the city to park it. It's a fool's errand to convince most people that they should drive and take public transit all in one trip, even if it would save them time and gas.
There is more to this situation than the vicious cycle that perpetuates it. If we can be clear about how we intend to accommodate that reality, we might be able to do something about it politically.
The UK used to have rail links from all of the small villages into the cities. It was an expensive system, but now that has been ripped out for decades we can see that the alternative is far worse.
> On top of that, most of the US is made up of small towns that public transit wouldn't make any sense for. A significant percentage of Americans must regularly travel between a major city and a small town. That means they must have a car, and a place in the city to park it.
Hang on though: I can't tell my neighbouring city to push for more housing because, while I want to live there in the future, the people that live there now like their lack of housing. Similarly, why can't the people that currently live in the city tell their local politicians that spending all this space for parking the residents don't need is stupid?
people commuting in is a large part of the work force in cities, tourism and generally shopping are important for their economies, also a lot of that parking space is needed by the residents because chicken/egg they all have cars too.
Cheaper, easier. When the land becomes more expensive, it would be built up with offices and the parking space either dissapears or goes underground or high up.
Because taking up more land is cheaper than building up thanks in large part to the various rules and regulations of municipalities and states. And in many places a parking garage is valued and taxed as a structure whereas a parking lot isn't. Prefab concrete parking garages are a thing the same way that prefab steel warehouse buildings are. The structure isn't that expensive over the life of the structure. It's the latent cost of building and owning a structure that pushes the economics in favor of parking lots.
Ironically in a "you are the problem" sort of way, the demographics doing most of the complaining about parking lots and a general lack of density are the same demographics who are in favor of fine grained management and regulation of what people do on their land that causes this situation. You reap what you sow.
If you own a parking lot that is too small, you can go around booting or towing cars that "don't deserve" to take up your limited parking space. That can get you an awful lot of money, which can get you an awful lot of lobbying power.
Big structures are expensive. Who is going to fund them save for the people who are incentivized not to?
They do need the space for parking, because they have to drive everywhere, because everything is so far apart, because so much space was given to parking...
Everything is so far apart because America is very large, not because they spaced things out with parking lots. But it does sound funny to make that the reason.
"Yup, this big country was spread out by parking lots."
We’re not talking about why Seattle is far from Miami. American city sprawl is largely a recent phenomenon (post WWII) and was enabled by the rise of the personal automobile. Even the sprawl-iest of cities (Houston, TX) used to be respectably dense and walkable. The need for a car to achieve basic needs (groceries, school, work) is a phenomenon well less than 100 years old. America has this problem in part because it’s much younger than a lot of European cities, but it’s certainly not purely a function of topography.
I will say that public transit in the US could be a lot better. However, over about forty years it has largely been how I got to work. (Washington, DC, area.)
Distances really don't have anything to do with it. If a town is too small to have public transport, it's simply too small. It's the same for the smallest European countries as it is for the US.
That can still allow for mediocre public transit. A bus that only stops every 3 hours can still be a workable commute, but not if you must travel 1-2 hours each way.
No one ends up using “every-3-hours” routes in day-to-day life. Every 3 hours can work for the tourist who doesn’t want to rent a car, but people with jobs won’t accept that if they miss the bus, the next one is in 3 hours. These routes effectively become useless and contribute to the narrative that public transit isn’t practical.
I can easily see a future in the US where the car is the next "crisis" like the housing crisis today. Auto manufacturers aren't in a hurry to ramp up production to pre-pandemic levels because they can earn record margins at their current levels. Dealers love it because they can sell pretty much everything above MSRP. It's become nearly impossible to find a basic new car as everything has shifted to crossovers and SUVs/light trucks.
The story the other day about GM dropping CarPlay and AA support was alarming for their reason why. They want to know everything about how you use your car, so they can make you "subscribe" to things like climate control and power seats/windows. The future of the automotive industry in consumer hostile. In another decade or so, it's going to be really hard to find parts for the "dumb" cars of old and Americans are going to be screwed.
You summed up all the problems pretty well and make them sound like justification for why it's right and without alternative, which is the biggest problem (:
If the proposed alternative is "be like the UK", we had better recognize how that's a bad fit.
I can dream all day about having enough buses and trains to replace 90% of city commutes. That dream includes more work than simply emulating an island nation's infrastructure.
No, please not.. still there are more alternatives then the US and UK... even some pretty comparable to the "space-distribution" of.the US for these regards.. just try looking for them ;)
You're mixing up suburbs with small towns. If it is within driving range of a big city downtown then even if it is its own municipality, it is part of the greater metropolitan area of the big city.
Suburbs became a thing after the car industry worked very hard to make sure subways and train cars can't be used. And this was also after the great interstate highway project and explicit city planning meant to mitigate the fallout of a nuclear attack by having a huge urban sprawl. All of this in the 50s and 60s.
What outsiders don't see is the massive scope and efficiency of the US interstate highway system which is the artery of the US economy. Discussions about public transport don't consider freight. You can't have freight trains to every big store and warehouse but you can get 18wheelers from any part of america to any other part of america (continental) within a day or two at most.
At the same time, explicit effort was made to make cities difficult to drive or bike in. A lot of this again goes back to the sentiment of the 50-60s where "white flight" was still a big deal and making suburbs inaccessible to certain types of people who live in cities but occupy the lowest social classes was also important.
It's expensive to be poor but cars means mandatory insurance and car payments, gas, repair bills and parking fees. And if you manage to overcome all that, cops can pull you over and search you without a warrant because you are driving and of course traffic fees and all that is nothing compared to one's safety. Childcare, food or rent? Which one should you sacrifice for that court fee? And somehow you must maintain mental fortitude to not use drugs or alcohol to cope with all that stress. Take out cars and suddenly so many problems are solved (including crime rates).
My point is, much of this is by design decisions made at a different time and era and the hostility is intentional. It is possible to have both a walkable and drivable city with much less parking lots, especially by having less single family housing concentrations (condos instead of large communities of houses that require cars to access).
Not at the scale or efficiency if the US. No country has. My point was you can also be pedestrian friendly like europe without going full on amsterdam.
We have 748 million people here in the EU, so I'm not sure what you're on about when it comes to scale. As for efficiency, I suppose that depends on how you define the numerator and denominator.
Having more people with about the same size as US (and mind you, not all europe is EU) means more population density and you have a land route to asia and close to africa.
In the US everything international (except americas) comes by ship and you have large distances between population centers. It isn't just the size and the amount of freeways but the way they are interconnected that allows all kinds of truck routes between ports and production centers (e.g.: veggies and fruit in cali or florida) to not just big cities but middle of nowhere montana or dakotas as remote and underpopulated as they may be, they all have easy access to the same interlink.
If this was networking, europe would be like a very large campus network but the US would be a metropolitan area network with a similar physical size but connecting all types of buildings.
Honestly, I think you just have to drive around and see what I mean. Many americans also don't get this. I don't mean just the roads but go to random walmarts or targete in the middle of the desert or mountains that get the same goods as big city stores and they're just as large. You can easily spend half a day shopping in a walmart.
I'm originally from the US, I understand how things work there well enough... but anyway after re-reading your original post I think we probably generally agree more than we disagree. Having lived in both continents I take issue with the idea that delivering goods via freight has anything to do with the density and walkability of cities. Tomatoes get shipped from Southern Spain to remote villages in Sweden just like they get shipped from Florida to North Dakota. There are many other factors to blame for how car centric the US is, and you point out several in your other posts.
I can understand for sure. However, you may want to consider why you only saw drunk and homeless people on the bus. It has nothing to do with public transit, but it has a lot to do with parking lots and how we build our cities. Cars insulate us from reality and allow us to ignore our problems. Our children will not be so lucky.
Who cares? If Americans want room to drive and get places and park then let them. If my suburban town 25 miles away from a major city’s downtown got rid of streets and places to park, me and 95% of the other residents would just move another 15 miles further.
I call shenanigans. Take a look at any dense urban environment:
* Concrete and asphalt EVERYWHERE. Ask yourself about the carbon cost of all that concrete - which, in the northeast, requires constant repair.
* Street lighting - I mean, you can see dense, urban areas from freaking space - think about all the energy that takes. Is that environmentally friendly and efficient?
* Heat islands - Dense, urban areas concentrate so much heat they literally change local weather.
* I've got an entire ecosystem of nature right in my back yard. Trees, wildflowers, grass, an array of wildlife, even a small garden growing local food (that the deer and groundhogs are determined to eat). What do dense, urban environments have? A practical monoculture of pigeons and rats?
You are more disruptive to that environment in your back yard than you would be if you moved to a city.
That's exactly the problem. Any asphalt and concrete you add is sustaining 1 person. Any asphalt and concrete in an urban place is sustaining 1000s of people.
You burn more fossil fuels in the winter to stay warm. You burn more fossil fuels to provide 1 source of light that only you use.
The multiplier you're missing is the number of people we service with the things we're doing in an urban environment.
Having a 1,000s crammed into small spaces is China and that populatin density caused covid, sars, etc to spread. It's not health physically or for your psychology to live in an endless noise, light polluting environment.
> that population density caused covid, sars, etc to spread
I wonder why the USA, with all its fantastic green suburbs and private motor transport, had a much higher COVID case rate and death rate per capita than other countries that have denser urban living?
Most of your argument goes against suburban living.
Concrete and asphalt: If you add up all the parking lots and roads in a suburb and divide it by the number of people, the area is much larger than the amount of concrete per apartment dweller.
Street lighting: Again, much higher in the suburbs due to the low density. An apartment building with 100 units might have 10 street lights. Each house could very well have 1 street light in front of it. Not to mention all the arterial stroads where no one lives.
Extra topic - heating: A house is surrounded on 5 sides by cold. An apartment is surrounded on 5 sides by apartment.
> How is having some open space worse for the environment than being tightly packed?
All that open space means things are farther apart and you have to expend more energy to get from Point A to Point B. Less density means more joules per capita for transportation:
I live in a 1600 sqft house on a 5600 sqft lot. If everyone in the US lived in that area, we would take up ~51,423,324 acres (assuming population of 400 million). (~2.7% of the Continental US)
If instead, every person took up 800 sqft in an apartment building, and assuming absolutely no vertical building, we would take up ~1/7th of that space (7,346,189 acres, 0.38% of the Continental US). That would free up ~44 Million acres of open space. Every level up you build, you get to increase the amount of open space by
A further 6/7ths of the previous value.
Now, Admittedly, this is back-of-the-envelope math that doesn't work for all scenarios (farms and whatnot are a separate thing). But pretending that suburbanism is better for "open space" is a load of BS. Urbanism provides more open space.
As the article established you then need to take up a similar amount of space for parking, then add the roads so suddenly you're at 10%. I thought you want open spaces?
I want less density which makes neighbourhoods have more open spaces. Stacking everyone together in a small postal stamp area creates more overall land that may be open but it creates less open areas where people live.
Open areas where people live (people's yards) are famously open to the public. There's certainly not a common acronym for what people don't want happening in their yards...
What's wrong is that I don't live on what is even the smallest per-state average of sqft for a single family home.
average yard size is ~4x that. So that's 4x less open space. You're also assuming that all parts of the US are equally habitable. We're doing a lot of work to try and let people live in increasingly inhospitable deserts.
I'd be a lot more amenable to suburbs if they weren't used to try to enforce puritanical ideals - it's usually impossible to walk to a bar from one (much less to a choice of bars).
Some people fix that problem by driving drunk (the stats aren't pretty), but I fix it by living somewhere where there are bars within walking distance, and will not countenance the idea of living in a suburb even if it would cost me 3x less for the same space.
The words "vibrant, dense neighborhoods" might mean "high crime, low privacy, and high noise" to people who prefer living elsewhere.
Lots of people write glowingly about the "gritty, vibrant" streets of 1970s New York City too. Places like that helped spur the move to the suburbs - ask yourself why.
That sounds terrible. I have a yard with a nice block wall and privacy hedges growing over the top. I have a pool, spa, 100s of plants in my garden, every type of bbq contraption you can think of, a large tv and other games for lounging and best of all, I decide who besides my family can be there. I don’t have random teenagers, homeless people, or quincenaras with mariachi bands in my backyard.
I'm talking about medium density urban housing, preferably on mass transit lines and in walkable neighborhoods.
My car gets under 100 miles of use a week. Excluding commuting to work, during the summer months I literally do not have to drive if I don't want to. Within walking distance of me there is a public library, 2 bakeries, 3 grocery stores, a public pool, a wading pools, 2 very large parks, 1 of which has equipped with grills, and 1 smaller neighborhood park. If I want to ride a bike, and extend my range out to all of 3 miles, then that list gets absurdly long.
I don't even live in a dense part of Seattle, I just happen to live in the city proper.
> Humans shouldn't be living in shoeboxes stacked 40 floors high.
You have a limited view of 'urban living'. Want a front yard, back yard, and garage (attached to a laneway)? Plenty of that was built pre-WW2, and there's no reason why it couldn't be again:
Examples (Streetview) of urban tree-lined streets which can support transit and where cycling is practical (and where a car is an option versus a necessity):
If you build 40 stories high, you can give each person much more space per square meter of land used, than if you if you build low-rises. The shoeboxes are simply a consequence of the land underneath those towers being so in demand that people would rather trade living and green space to be situated there.
> People who want fiscally responsible government?
The Washington D.C metro is a multi-billion dollar money pit from hell that's mismanaged and filled with graft, death and delays. California built a 1 billion dollar bus station that nearly collapsed on itself. In the US, some of the most fiscally un-responsible transportation is public government run transportation.
And that car-oriented 'improvements' makes things worse for drivers and worse for those for those taking public transit (often due to not being able to afford a car):
> It is a paradox in that improvements in the road network will not reduce traffic congestion. Improvements in the road network can make congestion worse if the improvements make public transport more inconvenient or if they shift investment, causing disinvestment in the public transport system.
In no instantiation of the multiverse does the data show that focusing on car-centric development and private automobile transportation is more efficient, from a fiscal or energy point of view, or better for individuals' health and things like climate change.
Certainly roads are useful for commerce and trade, but personal transportation? Not so much.
Highways lose far more money than transit. And death? Really? Please look up how many people die on highways vs buses. You have no idea what you are talking about champ.
> If Americans want room to drive and get places and park then let them.
You do realize that much of that parking exists because of mandates and subsidies, right? If Americans want something else then let them. Does your interest in letting people make their own choices extend to other people's choices as well as your own?
I've been fascinated with Milliron’s Department Store [1] from the late 1940s and it's use of parking on the roof of the department store. At the time "autotopia" was something developers cater too and seeing how architecture at the time responded is something in itself.
Sadly the rooftop lot was removed with the rear X ramps blocked off, and the store is now a relatively generic Kolhs. In Southern California though a lot of the parking lots are getting retrofitted with solar, which while still taking up space, at least providing energy and shade.
The title says cities but it's really about city centers.
Edit: This is relevant because US cities tend to include a large amount of residential areas that don't have parking lots. When city centers are commercial areas that serve the city and surrounding areas inside and outside of the city, people are going to drive there and they need a place to park. There are potential ways to make parking less concentrated in the center though, which includes public transportation, one thing we're often not great at in the US.
Look around you. How many SFH homes have been built in the last 80 years that don't have a driveway or an off-street parking spot? Maybe 1%? Probably far fewer than that.
The article title claimed that 1/5 of cities are parking lots but that wasn't what the article was about. I doubt that 1/5 of cities are parking lots (including driveways) but reading the article doesn't attempt to show that.
In what cities is sunlight a "scarce resource"? Many cities actively plant trees to create shade. Also, who the hell sunbathes in a parking lot? Nice pun tho
When you live in front of a tall building that blocks the Sun the days are shorter and it's harder to keep the house warm during the Winter. Maybe I went too far calling it a "scarce resource" but tall buildings that are too close to each other increase the lighting and heating costs a great deal.
A lot of European countries tend to regulate the height of buildings to avoid such problems, density doesn't have to come at the expense of basic standards of living
I like these maps. I do think it glosses over many details of vertical parking. It's hard to compare how tall the parking garages are. It's unclear if it covers underground parking for buildings with other uses or not. It's hard to determine exactly how much parking is provided in the red shaded regions. It's hard to determine what are parking garages and what are parking lots.
I also would have liked to compare street parking options in various cities, but this doesn't seem to document it. Street parking can have just a big of an impact as garages and lots, as it leads to wider roads, people hunting for a spot, and a hazard for bicyclist.
Street parking can have just a big of an impact as garages and lots, as it leads to wider roads, people hunting for a spot, and a hazard for bicyclist.
Street parking has always seemed slightly insane to me. You take a dense city that's already tough to get around by road and then you sacrifice half your road area for people to park on. Instead of one car park entrance you have to keep an eye on for emerging vehicles, any one of a thousand cars could suddenly move into the road with no notice. It's a safety and efficiency nightmare.
There's an entire genre of anti-car content popular on social media right now that completely overlooks the reality of how most US cities are dispersed. I agree that the utopian ideal of a car-free existence is appealing, but it's far from realistic for a lot of places and there's an awful lot of shaming and shunning going on of regular people living their lives right now.
Trends come and go, but the suburbs will continue to grow.
Anti-car posts are fun because they are escapism from the worst part of the suburbs. However, you lose all of the best parts when you switch to the current alternatives (expensive density and shared public transportation).
I don't see the "shaming and shunning" aspect much, myself. When I do see it it's usually directed at people who are driving dangerously or fighting policy that would make it easier to live without a car.
It's not about shaming and shunning. It's about educating, so that people are more amenable to non-car-centric changes to public transit and their cities that will improve everyone's way of life.
I think the thing about Public Transit, is if you truly love driving your car, you should still be in favor of public transit, because better public transit means less traffic for you.
Further, expanding roads for car-centric use just makes things worse:
> It is a paradox in that improvements in the road network will not reduce traffic congestion. Improvements in the road network can make congestion worse if the improvements make public transport more inconvenient or if they shift investment, causing disinvestment in the public transport system.
All of society subsidizes fuel for drivers by the absence of sufficient pigovian taxes to offset the externalities of burning it.
(Well, additionally by the way US military and foreign policy revolves around fossil fuel supply. Which lots of people around the world pay for, and not just US taxpayers.)
So this is a common argument, but I don’t think it holds true. Here is a video comparing the train system in Spain to the one in the US. Around the 8 minute mark he compares the population of the US east coast with Spain and their train system. The truth is that the population density in certain areas of the US is certainly high enough to support much better public transit that doesn’t exist.
> There's an entire genre of anti-car content popular on social media right now that completely overlooks the reality of how most US cities are dispersed
This content is literally about how US cities are dispersed.
The point of this is that city planning is a slow process it literally takes decades to change cities. So yes you can't change cities to only operate with public transport overnight, because they have not been designed that way, but if you want to make them so that public transport becomes an option then you need to start now. And we do need to change how we get around, even if we go full electric cars, we still use too much of our energy needs for transport.
Defaults are powerful. Undoing them will feel uncomfortable.
Since the 1940s, the vision sold to society is one of private motor transport, free-flowing highways, and houses on big lots. The past 80 years have seen the execution of this plan with little to no reflection or criticism.
We're finally starting to wake up to the reality that we find ourselves living in. We're questioning the choices made by our forebears and the infrastructure that has been constructed. If we want to change how cities are designed, we have to recognize the problem first. Only then can we embark on a decades-long transformation where we slowly replace buildings and roads with ones that reflect a new vision.
The fact that US cities are dispersed is a red herring. Most cities will have expensive areas that people want to move into but are prevented from doing so due to a lack of available housing. The demand to densify already exists. By adjusting zoning laws, parking minimums, and transportation networks, housing can be added in those areas, and no one would be coerced to move to somewhere they don't want to be.
I'm curious if there are any bright ideas on practical first and last mile transportation for people who want to take the bus or train. Say my house is 1.5-3 miles from the closest bus stop and my destination is 1.5-3 miles from its closest bus stop. Should I be bringing my scooter on the bus? Is there room for everyone's scooter on the bus?
Curious to hear from people who use the bus or train daily, how do you get to and from the bus stop in a timely manner and in the cold.
1. Bus stops can be as cheap as a sign on the road. We should embrace cheaper bus stops to build more bus stops. Another benefit of cheap bus stops is under-utilized stops can be removed with less investment lost.
2. There's rooms for lots of scooters on buses. It's pretty common for there to be places for bicycles on buses too. Have you been inside of a city bus? There pretty big.
3. Real estate near train stations is almost always more expensive. This is a type of amenity you have to look into while choosing your home.
> Another benefit of cheap bus stops is under-utilized stops can be removed with less investment lost
According to the public transit authority around here, if you remove a bus stop (due to, say, a drop in transit usage) and try to bring it back later (after usage of transit goes back up), it can take up to five years to see ridership recognize that, and start to use the stop at the same rate as when it was removed. It may be cheaper to leave the stop there long-term.
I like biking/walking. Both give me time to clear my head on my way to work. One of them is like 2x faster than the other. Scooters are fine if that works for you. AFAIK all of these options fit on the bus/train. But I will also say that the people at my work have long stated that the day they have to figure out where to park extra bikes, scooters, etc. They will make it happen. Because they take up so much less space it's much easier to manage. I think the same is probably true for public transit.
I would suggest something you enjoy :).
Accessibility is something else to consider for a lot of this... But it's not really an argument I feel people make in good faith. I would be okay with some car usage for people with accessibility needs for first/last mile transportation.
This feels like a positive feedback loop (not the good kind), where the more parking is needed, the more people feel they need to drive. And the more people feel they need to drive, the more they need parking and the more space between stores gets added.
I sure hope not, but that doesn't really solve the parking issues?
You need a parking space for your car permanently, and one for every place you might visit. (up to as many people as are likely to be visiting it). In a popular place to visit, that could be a lot if people don't have some other way to get there. So, you have to build in extra space between you and that place to account for parking, and the roads required to get there.
My point is that if the parking minimums haven't gone up, then the loop you describe doesn't actually exist, since more space between stores doesn't actually get added.
If the law that requires an absolute minimum number of parking spaces hasn't increased, then the total number of parking spaces hasn't increased?
People can build more parking spaces than the parking minimums? Also, Parking minimums themselves increase parking for new businesses? Any new structure you build being subject to parking minimums contributes to the loop I'm describing.
Much of a city will predate these regulations. Even without increasing the minimums, as grandfathered properties are redeveloped they must increase their parking. New developments will also bring up the amount of parking as they comply with current minimums.
I think of the hardest things to believe when I learned about it was that almost everywhere in the United States has laws that force anyone building a business to build parking. Often the parking has to be more in square foot terms then the building itself! In my town if you build a place that serves alcohol you have to build more parking than for any other type of building. It’s crazy to me that we mandate paving over large sections of our town. I used to blame Walmart for moving into an area and buying up local businesses and destroying them to build a parking lot, but now I know they were legally required to do that!
I think the answer to this is to adopt Land Value Taxes. This would naturally incentivize property improvement and dis-incentivize people from owning large swaths of unproductive land. Communities would grow upward before they grow outward. Infrastructure costs would drop significantly and communities (over time) would become more walkable.
Step 1 to fix out of control real estate prices and suburbia depression is not public transit.
Step 1 is to deprioritize cars. No more free parking, no single family home zoning, free-for-all zoning around train stations and bus stops.
Step 2 is to keep deprioritizing cars. Ban highway expansion beyond 2 lanes in both directions. Match demand and supply with tolls. Excess revenue goes towards funding public transit.
Step 3 is to fund public transit. Private sector will see massive opportunity to build out private bus lines and trains (see Brightline in Florida). The real play is not ticket revenue, but real estate appreciation around public transit. Republicans should get around this idea with private equity guys. This is a no brainer to me.
In conclusion, the key to this morass to make car owners suffer and switch to real estate appreciation to incentivize private development of transit systems.
Yeah, real estate appreciation has its own costs that we're going to pay for down the line... in particular increased costs of housing/living is causing more homelessness.
The increase in density will cancel out the increase in real estate cost (land). In fact, capital investment in increasing the output from a piece of land is the correct way to profit from real estate, not just squatting as people profit in current markets.
Step 1: "Control" house prices (how?)
Step 2: Change ALL zoning and monetize ALL parking spaces in a country of >0.3B people overnight
Step 3: Create money from thin air to build transit, thereby reversing Step 1
"Maps show how a lack of forward planning, well-structured free parking and public link-transport cause retroactively developed parking to be a commodity that is valued higher than a business sector nobody can drive to"
The rest of the world fixes this by banning cars in these areas, making it a nice place to be, providing out-of-town link-transport (eg Park & Ride) for people driving in.
The car is eating US cities but only because people don't have a better option.
Surely, new development can hide the parking in multi-level underground parkades. That solution isn't being rolled in those specific lots for whatever reason. We would have to interview the land owners to understand why they don't develop it into something more useful, and possibly with more parking than it has now. Might it be they are hanging on to the land as an investment, hoping to get more money in the future, and the taxation of parking lots is favorable, not to mention operating costs? Next to no utility bills, no roofs to patch, ...
I checked out some of the 50 cities they name on here and there's a curious way they decide what counts as "central city" for some of them.
e.g. Denver's map does cover the central business district but it misses a lot of the neatly adjacent places that _are_ designed for people and not cars. If the whole thesis is "make our downtowns places that are desirable to get to, and not just office parks" then the raw percentages are a little disingenuous.
Mind, the root cause that only office towers and their associated parking can really be built in that CBD...that's the big problem
I agree, I don't think the way they distill this to a single number and present it as an apples-to-apples comparison is very helpful. There's too much variability in what the "central city" is, and I think it's quite challenging to determine a useful number to compare between metros as they are laid out so very differently.
The maps themselves are interesting and potentially even useful, on the other hand.
Based on the comments in here (and on related stories) I think the US transportation conversation needs to change in some way.
Mostly, it's a lot of people complaining about cars. Which is fine, I mostly agree. But the anti-car stuff is becoming extremely toxic and parroting half-remembered tweets about induced demand, finding slightly different ways to describe cars as death machines, and good old-fashioned liberal American self-flagellation.
We're past the point where it's transgressive to point out the problems with cars, we need to actually have some kind of a sensible discussion that involves practical considerations. In particular, anti-car people need to have a good handle on why people actually like cars. Otherwise, it'll just be more of trying to punish people, like the guy in this thread who says "the key to this morass to make car owners suffer". We've got to do better than that!
One major issue is that if you as an individual attempt to go car-free, the resulting lifestyle makes cars into such an incredible intrusion into your daily life that it is hard not to become more radicalized.
That has been my story at least. My bus is late and slow, because it's stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic from all these people driving motor vehicles with a single occupant. I need ear protection on my commute because the 14th Street Bridge into DC pairs pedestrians and cyclists side-by-side with 60mph motor traffic with no noise protections. I lost a day at work because I got hit on my bike by a truck driver who was on his phone, and had to go to the ER. I am shaken and my heart rate is pounding and I am pondering my own mortality because someone gunned their engine through a left turn while I was walking across the street with a pedestrian signal - they accelerated instead of stopping to yield and I had to jump out of the way to save my own life while they sped off.
If you recognize how awful cars are for the environment and how they make city life inconvenient, unpleasant and expensive, and so you make the personal decision to forgo them to be part of the solution rather than the problem, you are taking a step into a life that will nudge you more and more to truly despise motor vehicles because your daily life will be filled with only negative interactions with them.
Quite a lot. I save a lot of money - my monthly transportation cost is some two-digit number even after including the occasional weekend trip to other cities - most of which I squirrel away and some of which I spend on other things; I am always in excellent physical shape; I have a deep knowledge of the metro, bus, bikeshare, trail and bike lane systems around the DC metro area and spend a lot of time using low-stress separated infrastructure; I go anywhere in the city anytime I want without ever having to think about parking, tolls, gas or congestion.
The drawback, if you can call it that, is that I am radically anti-car, as a direct result of the lived experiences that that life gives me.
Cool, that's a good pitch for not owning a car, and sounds great!
My issue is not with people who are anti-car, but with people who cannot understand why other people have different priorities and who make different trade-offs. That's key to building a better world.
> My issue is not with people who are anti-car, but with people who cannot understand why other people have different priorities and who make different trade-offs.
A lot to say here for why I think the number of people who can legitimately claim it is a morally neutral matter of priorities and trade-offs for them is small.
For one, there are stigmas around transit and biking. Funnily enough they are contradictory: that only the poor get around with transit and biking, and that only upper class elitists get around with transit and biking. It is extremely common for people to oppose new infrastructure or denser housing on the grounds that it will either A) cause "undesirables" to come to the neighborhood and destroy property values, or B) induce gentrification.
For two, for a lot of people, living car-centrically is an automatic habit because it was a deeply ingrained assumption all throughout their upbringing that you just need a car and that owning a car is an important rite of passage and social signifier in adulthood.
For three, lots of people who were steeped in driving growing up are intimidated by the thought of learning to navigate a transit system or learning to ride a bike.
The last and to me most important thing is that the politics of car dependency are destructive to everyone. It is a negative-sum game to widen all the highways, and increase all the parking minimums, and zone for low density, and block bike lanes. It is extremely wasteful in terms of public resources and environmental destruction and it harms everyone's quality of life.
A lot of people don't really grasp the danger and unpleasantness that their car imposes on others. Seeing, smelling, hearing, tiptoeing around motor vehicle traffic are all deeply unpleasant and you have to place an enormous amount of trust in motor vehicle operators not to kill you where you stand. This is one thing that makes me not sympathetic to the "different priorities and trade-offs" argument. The internal logic is about pros and cons to one's own self, not about the pros and cons to everyone else, and motor vehicles have many properties that put this in stark relief: they are getting bigger and heavier making them safer to the driver and more deadly to whoever they hit; their horns are loud enough to cause ear damage and cause a giant fright to bystanders but are muffled inside the cabin; and of course huge, huge tracts of even walkable cities like NY are dedicated to motor vehicle traffic with many lanes while people walking, biking, scootering, dining outdoors and so on are forced to fight for scraps of space at the margin.
For me living without a car is not just about the benefits it offers to me personally but also the full understanding of the harms to others I am refusing to inflict, or even run the risk of inflicting, by opting out.
Not only do I think this is a completely legitimate point of view, I fully agree with you in terms of your policy goals: walkable neighborhoods, high density, no parking minimums, pedestrian-and-bike-focused city design. I don't want to see cars parked on the sides of the streets. No question in my mind that's the better environment to be in.
Some pushback on your facts:
Firstly, cars are getting significantly better as they go electric. Smell is eliminated, while noise and environmental impact will be significantly reduced - without any changes to our road infrastructure. Anti-car people tend to push back on the idea that electric cars are significantly more environmentally friendly, but they're flat-out wrong. A Tesla Model 3 is 5x more efficient than the average new gas car. Four people driving in that same Tesla emit less greenhouse gas than if they were traveling on UK rail. Cars are also are pushing forward electrification technology in other domains. Impact from mining for battery materials is improving. That mining is necessary anyway for grid storage if we're to switch to renewable energy, not to mention that EV batteries are 99%+ recyclable, so we don't have to mine this material forever, either.
It's also not the case that cars are only getting safer for the passengers. Technologies like automatic emergency braking that always watch out for pedestrians and bikers is now standard, and will continue to improve as cars become more autonomous.
In the US, average weight of cars is basically the same as it was in 1975, and per-capita pedestrian deaths have halved over the same period.
Car dependent suburbanites are also anti car: their neighborhoods are designed to make driving through them inconvenient, to minimize the the cost of their car dependent lifestyle on THEM. I just want exactly the same car-hostile design, with 15 mph speed limits and copious dead ends, in my neighborhood so my neighborhood streets are also safe enough for kids to play in. How can suburbanites object?
The status quo is that the external costs of car dependent lifestyles are almost entirely pushed onto other people via highways slicing through the middle of cities, roads being paid for mostly via the general fund, larger vehicles protecting occupants at the cost of everyone else, sound isolated cabins protecting drivers from the noise they create and requiring louder emergency sirens...it just goes on and on.
EVs are better for the environment than ICE vehicles, but the noise, air pollution via tire dust, and physical danger they present is the same. The real EV is an e-bike, but most people don't want to bike because sharing roads with cars feels too dangerous. As a result, cars on the only choice.
I want 90% of my city streets to block through traffic with physical barriers, just like the suburbs. Many intersections should allow ONLY pedestrians, cyclists, transit, and service vehicles through, so the fastest and most pleasant ways from point A to point B are walking, cycling, or transit.
That's right. Suburbanites want the freedom to drive everywhere but also limit through-traffic and noise on the street their house exists on. That's why twisty roads and culs de sac exist. "Oh The Urbanity!" argues this point elegantly in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqQw05Mr63E "The Suburban Traffic Contradiction"
electric cars do have some benefits that you outline but also some new dangers I've been nearly hit by a driver who accelerated as I attempted to cross
At the time he was a long way off but by the time I crossed he had accelerated to the point he could have hit me
Electric cars will still cut up my local town into little isolated islands the same way normal cars do
Car alternatives need so much more support than they get right now it's unreal
> Firstly, cars are getting significantly better as they go electric. Smell is eliminated, while noise and environmental impact will be significantly reduced - without any changes to our road infrastructure.
The issue with the road infrastructure is also that it necessitates cars to begin with. With wide, sprawling networks of roads where motor traffic is too fast for people to comfortably walk and cycle, you end up with huge amounts of suburban sprawl. Things are located far apart; tons tons tons more infrastructure needs to be built to provide roads, water, electricity, gas, Internet, police, fire response, schooling and wastewater treatment to those people living in sprawling exurban developments. All the parking lots and strip malls and highways mean that it is simply impossible to make a trip by any way other than car, which triggers orders of magnitude more motor vehicle trips of orders of magnitude longer distance than in a mixed-use walkable neighborhood, so it's not even really useful to draw a comparison between the marginal emissions of four people in a Tesla vs. the amortized emissions of four people on a train.
> Technologies like automatic emergency braking that always watch out for pedestrians and bikers is now standard, and will continue to improve as cars become more autonomous.
I hope this will save lives, but it will never be enough to break the environment of fear and the lurking danger of death that comes with navigating cities with motor traffic, especially since you can never assume that a car is equipped with it (and that it will function correctly). You need to have an incredibly high level of trust, one that just doesn't exist when you are interacting with someone using a different means of spatial displacement. Bikes and scooters are light, slow, small, maneuverable, and offer such good visibility, both to and of the cyclist, that every single risk factor is extremely low.
Or to put another way: in the aggregate it will save lives, but will you always be able to count on it to save yours?
There are other considerations too: a person in any vehicle can, and (in my experience) many do, park or drive in bike lanes or fail to yield to bike lane traffic when making turns. Here you have not the physical threat of the car itself but the fact that by doing this the motorist can force other people to execute dangerous maneuvers, like merging into high-speed motor traffic, splitting the lane or hopping onto the sidewalk to avoid the car.
And as for noise - firstly the tire noise is still there and actually worse due to vehicle weight. The honk is still there, it is still loud enough to trigger a bystander's fight or flight response, and hoo boy is there a lot of it! The people driving in DC and NY seem endlessly upset about the fact that they are doing so.
> In the US, average weight of cars is basically the same as it was in 1975, and per-capita pedestrian deaths have halved over the same period.
There is a lot going on with these numbers. For one, the main cause of this trend was the mass adoption of cars: people are simply walking a lot less than they did half a century ago. For two, the downward trend has sharply reversed since 2009: pedestrians deaths are rising very quickly, rising 50% between 2009 and 2020[1], coinciding modestly with the rise in popularity of mass market pickup trucks and SUVs.
What about the medical costs from getting hit, or if you get hit again and are injured to the point where you are disabled for some time?
I have a motorcycle and I don’t feel comfortable driving to/through the city because of the number of times I’ve been run off the road, almost hit, or getting rammed while stopped at a traffic light in an SUV.
> What about the medical costs from getting hit, or if you get hit again and are injured to the point where you are disabled for some time?
The motorist's insurance paid for that. For incidents where that doesn't happen, this is stuff I have my own insurance (including critical accident insurance) for. Also as I keep riding, my judgment gets better, my knowledge of the area gets better, and I can anticipate/avoid danger more easily. I can't really speak to motorcycles because, due to their higher weight and beefier motors (compared to, say, a scooter or e-bike), they are subject to significantly different rules and cannot use separated infrastructure like multi-use paths, cycletracks, protected bike lanes and sidewalks. My commute from Arlington to DC is about 90% covered by separated infrastructure. I have to deal with cars when running errands inside the city but typically speeds are much lower and there are usually low-stress routes available.
I mean ultimately there is a nonzero risk, both financial and bodily, much as there is when you are in a motor vehicle. I've had plenty of friends facing surprise three- or four-digit bills due to mechanical issues or damage with their car. In the DC area, motorists frequently crash into other cars while on highways or stroads, sometimes killing themselves or others. Vehicle manufacturers have superbly played the public by using the fatalities of their own vehicles as a marketing point to sell even larger and heavier vehicles under the guise of "safety" that cause even more fatalities in a collision scenario. It's an arms race and I have absolutely no desire to play a role in it.
Put another way: "sensible discussion" is the reason why the US is stuck with car-dependent sprawl. The practical considerations were decided decades ago, and have been cargo culted into every facet of US urban and suburban design.
Cars are the designated post-hoc rationalization for an environment that is almost exclusively built for them.
If the "transgressive" tone of the conversation is the only takeaway you have, then perhaps you are not listening closely enough.
This is exactly the type of pseudo-intellectual crap that I'm trying to wade through.
You're trying to present the argument in exactly the same way I'm objecting to, like you're opening my eyes that I'm in the Matrix. That it's surprising or interesting to learn that the US is built around cars in many ways, and that's affecting my thinking such that I could not consider that cars are bad. Maybe I need to "listen" more closely, like I can't understand the secrets of the world that you are privy to.
This is all intellectually dishonest masturbatory fluff.
It's not the ability comprehend what you wrote, but rather the content - the point you're making is the same cliche white-kid-from-the-suburbs-moves-to-a-city infallible argument ("you only need cars because the system makes you want cars").
There's decades of revealed preference for larger, more private housing, rather than density and mass transit, and that dynamic strongly correlates to income.
Median household income in the states is nearly double of said demographic's mecca, the Netherlands, and I would bet my lunch money that car ownership and utilisation there goes up with income as well. So relatively dense places with relatively poor-er population will optimize towards mass transit and biking and what not, because people can't afford cars and larger houses to begin with.
I don't think so; the emergent urbanism conversation is a step in the right direction.
The anti-car stuff is extremely toxic because a large segment of society refuses to listen. Induced demand is how every lane-widening project is a huge money sink while failing to deliver on the promise of reduced congestion. You think complaining about death machines is comparable to the thousands of people inside and outside of cars who have near-death experiences every day due to cars? Or people losing autonomy and dignity by losing the ability to drive is not toxic? These topics have been politely brushed under the rug for too long.
Is it wrong for disenfranchised people to express their frustration? Are they required to empathize and understand their abusers?
Sensible solutions? They've been put forth ad nauseum already. Ending single-family exclusive zoning. Enabling mixed residential-commercial areas. Reducing commute distances. Funding public mass transit. Ending parking minimums. Tolling roads and mileage. Recognizing that roads are overbuilt and there is not enough tax base to maintain them.
Anti-car people know very well why people like cars. The dominant culture is kind of hard to ignore. The most common reasons are a sense of autonomy, the fact that working and doing errands without a car will increase travel time by several multiples, and the fact that it's a comfortable norm that almost everybody has accepted (can't go wrong with the herd right?).
> You think complaining about death machines is comparable to the thousands of people inside and outside of cars who have near-death experiences every day due to cars?
This is a wildly uncharitable and disingenuous reading of their comment. I stopped reading yours at that point, I'm sure you can do better.
As someone who dislikes cars or let's say dislikes the fact there's no other choice
I know exactly why people like cars, because I was one, I grew up playing with toy cars, micro machines, garages, play mat with roads, Sim city for car planning, building cars in Lego, playing need for speed, gran turismo, midnight club run, mad max, grand theft auto, truck simulator, watching Tokyo drift
Cars are everywhere in our culture, huge bits of car infrastructure like traffic lights and roads that run for miles that just connect to a shed are completely normal
The bigger problem for us "anti car" people is that it's so ingrained that people no longer see or care about the determental aspect of car dominance
People look at horrific crashes like a car wedged on a side of a building and they dismiss it as a driver problem
They look at traffic jams and they look at it as an other person problem
They look in their neighbourhood and don't notice that their kids can't safely play in their neighbourhood and then wonder why they're glued to phones
The problem we have is recognition first and foremost then it's education, YouTubers not just bikes and strong towns do an amazing job of that
From many cities I have visited and some I have lived
one of the major problems are sports stadium and related
are located within dense cities.
When you need to shuffle in 10.000 to 100.000 cars
(at worse, none of these have enough parking spaces for it)
you need parking spaces.
Moving these venues outside of the cites is a good solution.
It does not require forced behavioural modifications.
Then the city can arrange busses to and from the stadium
for those that need it. Or a high speed dedicated train.
Any other establishment with a huge number of visitor
should be moved out as well.
Huge hospitals are also entities that take up a huge amount
of space and can have a lot of parking.
These should be moved outside the city to lower density areas.
The space these things take up, and their huge parking lots
can then be converted into parks and green lungs within
the city.
Greed real estate developers who wish to increase density
for big profit should be barred from any activity.
The density is already far too high.
You can also build solutions with public transport hubs.
The Netherlands can have large stadiums and venues without giving their cities to cars.
Look at the Zandvoort grand prix. The media was amazed that the whole (small, historic) town was cleared of the almost 200,000 attendees about an hour after the event.
Compare to the Circuit of Americas in Austin which had people still stuck in the carpark several hours after the race ended, still in a queue to get out to join the traffic jam on the road.
Building roads and carparks to fight your traffic problems only creates more traffic that will become a problem later. It's "just one more lane" type of thinking.
In America, driving is far and away the best UX. You go where you want when you want with up to four passengers even in a very small starter car. With the exception of Manhattan and a few other big cities, cost per mile is far lower than transit. Obviously traffic sucks. Nobody likes traffic. I refuse to sit in traffic unless I am picking someone up from the airport.
Even in the UK, it's often cheaper to drive. The other day I drove into Central London (!) from Cambridge in a VW Polo. I calculated the cost per mile, including the car depreciation and the onerous and ever-increasing vehicle tax, and it was STILL a far better deal than the train.
Not to mention the non-negligible chance of an encounter with a risky, mentally ill passenger on transit. My wife was harassed by a man with piss-soaked sweatpants on the SF Bart and nearly missed her flight because she had to get off early. And that ticket was not cheap. I've been called homophobic and racial slurs on the London tube, for wearing short shorts on the way to go play squash. OF COURSE these events are few and far between but in my car they never happen.
Despite this, the subway is still a better UX in Manhattan and London. When I'm in these places I don't drive (obviously). In the Randstad, I also never drive. Because the UX is great. When I'm in my home in North Carolina, I drive everywhere. It's great. Everything is 10 minutes away. There's always parking. Massive boost to quality of life.
Cars are not some revelations-esque phenomenon and parking lots do not "eat" anything. They can always be converted to decks, as they literally always are when the demand is there. There is nothing wrong with that.
Hate to say it but homeless people and sketch people have ruined west coast cities mass transit for me. Im uncomfortable like 50% of the time riding San Fran, L.A., or San Diego mass transit.
Riding Chicago mass transit is nice because the cold weather eliminates most of the homeless people in one way or another.
One possible solution is a premium model where there are Premium edition trains that you can pay a little extra for and have security and be around normal middle class people and relax and read a book.
I.e. have a capitalist run transit service trains along side the government one.
I'd ride transit a lot more if this was a thing.
I'll stick to my car until west coast mass transit has figured out a way to where I don't have to sit next to a person who has literally peed them selves and looks desperate enough to rob me.
The problem with the premium model is that there likely isn’t going to be someone there enforcing it. The light rail in my city (which is terrible and I don’t plan to ride again) has people getting on without tickets all of the time. Only occasionally will someone show up on the train to enforce tickets and kick the free loaders off.
Transit advocates should take seriously that nobody cares if this is true. The modal American will accept an increase in rare, catastrophic risk to avoid the extreme levels of disorder on American public transit. You're not going to statistics-lecture people out of avoiding intolerable levels of disorder. We evolved a special fear of interpersonal violence and being around unstable strangers makes most people extremely uncomfortable. That's not going away.
A lot of US cities still have parking minimums. If you want to build a store that has capacity for X you need to have Y parking. And the cheapest way to do that is a lot by far. This has the effect of spreading everything out because you need all this space for parking which then makes it more necessary to drive everywhere because everything is so spread out and it's a vicious cycle that encourages car usage.
> In America, driving is far and away the best UX. You go where you want when you want with up to four passengers even in a very small starter car
Not for children/young people. In the Netherlands it's common for young people to develop independence using bicycles and public transport.
I think that is far more mentally healthy than the US's car centric infrastructure, which excludes young people, making them overdependent on their parents, or dependent on being online in order to socialise.
Public transport and free roaming children are contradictory. Where there is public transport, you won’t want your kids running around. If you want to live somewhere where you can let your children roam with relative safety, it’s going to be somewhere where public transport doesn’t exist.
I'm reading in the comments on this HN story about how things like lack of showers or longer distances or hills make bicycling impractical. As a lifelong cyclist and a recent electric bike owner, I view recent technological advancement in electrified micro-mobility to be a game changer. I've made a significant investment in a custom-built steel frame electric bike that I have outfitted with racks and panniers for shopping trips and commuting to the office.
As a former Trek customer who hasn't been inclined to purchase another bike from them, they still send me their new product line magazines. Maybe I haven't been paying close enough attention, but I was astonished when I grabbed the latest edition from my mailbox yesterday and thumbed through it. Trek is going ALL IN on electric bicycles. Pages 4-5 have a big flow chart helping people decide what type of electric bike to buy, depending on factors such as whether you're on dirt trails or paved streets, whether you will be transporting cargo and children, whether you value speed or comfort, and so on.
Non-electric bikes are now sort of an afterthought. If you flip to the back of the magazine you'll still find them, but the electric versions of several models are still interspersed. For example they have the Domane SLR (a model I still have in my garage), but on the next page they pimp the electric Domane+. Their blitz on electric bikes might be working for me, since I'm seriously considering being a Trek customer again and "trading up" for it, in spite of the bad experiences I've had trying to get them to support the Domane SLR they sold me in 2017.
America is facing a reckoning with its transportation infrastructure and car culture. Electric bikes are so compelling in terms of cost, convenience, fun, and practicality, more and more people will be riding them on the "stroads" and will be demanding changes so they feel safer doing so. If that means taking away lanes and parking spots from vehicular traffic, adding separated cycle tracks, reducing speed limits, adding traffic-calming measures, introducing safe-passing laws, and stepping up enforcement and penalties, then in my book that can't happen soon enough.
We have a long way to go. In the US I think bikes are still primarily seen as toys for either children or upper middle class adults. Car culture is deeply ingrained here, and discouraging personal automobile use is going to be seen by a large part of the population as practically anti-American. There's also the fact that we have a flood of low quality and outright dangerous electric micro-mobility devices catching on fire.
On the hopeful side, I see e-bikes as being part of the wave towards sustainability, a swing back towards childhood independence, and increased interest in fitness. We'll see how far it goes, but there's going to be resistance every step of the way.
342 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 322 ms ] threadUltimately I do wish we had more biking trails and pedestrian friendly cities in Ohio. And I'd trade my car in for an electric bike if my city made it happen.
The space needed for these parking lots basically guarantees you can not walk or bike to get anywhere. I believe that unless there's big investment in public transportation, there might be no way for these cities to break out of this vicious circle. And that seems to be politically unfeasible at the moment, for reasons that elude me.
The hyperloop, a ridiculously bad alternative to a subway, garnered so much attention even with its obvious downsides, so having actually useful public transportation should be a no-brainer imho.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31723197
GP said Boston.
Sidewalks and bike paths will take days to be down to pavement and some bike paths aren’t salted or plowed at all so become safe to use again when the snow naturally melts.
This is a choice, not an inevitability.
So does Finland. See "Why Canadians Can't Bike in the Winter (but Finnish people can)":
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU
Also "Why Winter Cities Need to Reconsider Car Dependence":
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFkI3eglT1M
If things can be taken car of so cars can operate in winter there's no reason why they can't be for bicycles (as someone who lives in Toronto, Canada).
The standards of snow removal needed to permit 2 wheel vehicles to operate safely are quite a bit stricter than those for 4 wheelers.
Boston is great for recreational biking for part of the year, sure. There are lovely bike trails.
But it is not great for commuting on a bike, nearly ever. And definitely not during winter.
There is oodles of parking at the office (was built for commuters) and I already have to park the car near home. Eliminating a parking space on either end won’t move any of the existing buildings closer.
My e-bike is significantly cheaper to maintain than my car. It uses something like .7KWH for a full charge which handles over 30 miles. Thats less than 10 cents for a full charge at my rate. Other consumable goods like tires, chains, tubes, break pads are all similarly 10x-100x cheaper than their car counterpart. The only expensive wear item is the battery pack, which admittedly cost $550. I'd estimate my personal usage of the device to be around $0.05/mile.
It's cheaper to own both and maintain both if you are going to use both. Using simple linear math, the ebike will save you over $2000 in ongoing costs (initial price) within 3850 miles or 235 commutes. A pretty good ROI.
For example: most car oriented American suburbs simply require a car for anything other than visiting a neighbor, whereas in a transit oriented city you might use transit to commute to work, but be able to walk to some local shops and services.
I think many people who are familiar only with car dependent lifestyles make the mistake of imagining a car-free lifestyle that involves replacing all of the car trips they make one-to-one with bus or train trips, which would indeed be really cumbersome, but isn’t really how things work (at least in my experience growing up in a rural small town in the US and having lived in a couple of European cities and NYC).
'Improving' car-oriented development has been observed to make things worse:
> It is a paradox in that improvements in the road network will not reduce traffic congestion. Improvements in the road network can make congestion worse if the improvements make public transport more inconvenient or if they shift investment, causing disinvestment in the public transport system.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downs–Thomson_paradox
Improving things for non-car users can actually make things better for drivers:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8RRE2rDw4k
* https://fortune.com/2015/09/30/best-country-drive-waze/
* https://archive.ph/S4FKM
If you can't imagine how public transport can work in a big city, just try to visit a big city where it works (there are plenty outside the US). Seems more constructive to me than being extremely vocal about how you think it cannot exist.
* If you assume that public transport is only for those who can't afford driving, you basically guarantee that it's going to be bad. If you want good public transport, you must design it for the middle class.
* 15 minutes of walking is a very long distance to the nearest station. If you are in an area served by reasonable public transport, you should be able to reach the next station in at least one direction in that time.
At least in most cities. The one in NY has slow driving trains compared to any other cities I've seen.
With the train I need to transfer to another train. This could be a 10 minute wait at the platform before the train arrives, plus its an end of the line stop for this particular line so it will sit for another 5-10 mins while it changes operators. Then once it gets moving, another 15 mins since there are a few at grade crossings with this line and then a 10 min walk. I do it over driving because I can zone out half asleep in the mornings.
The transfering and frequencies are where transit enters a world of pain and these are expensive, complex issues to fix compared to an interchange ramp. Anytime I bring someone unfamiliar on the train, they basically swear off the system for good and moan why we didn’t just pay for the surging uber.
EU's metros are a bit dated compared to that, but still very useful.
In the NY one, I was sometimes thinking walking is about as fast if you add up the slow train speed with the waiting time. In SF, there is none?!
It is fine to say that US has evolved for the individual car, and it's very hard to change. But I don't get why you say that it's the same everywhere else...
2. I don't know anyone that leaves their home for three separate trips on transit a day. Two tops, and usually it's just one. It's rare to leave the home three times in one day with a car if one of the trips is an eight hour workday. Usually people combine trips.
3. Again, walking is good. We should be walking. It's fantastic to have places to walk to. This isn't a bad thing or a chore.
And no, going to gym is not easier. It costs money, it is time consuming and it does not have the same effect as normal walking.
Is not this the problem with transit? Your traveling is so cumbersome that you seem to be restricting yourself to the bare minimum. Of course, you can also claim "that's a good thing!" but can you talk from the both sides of your mouth and claim that transit is faster and more convenient while also limiting your travel options?
> Take just three trips and your day just turned into a 22 and a half hour one only factoring the walk on the home side.
The exact same thing goes if you go to the same place with a car. But, first, you did not had that healthy factor of walking. Second, if you are tired, overworked, have troubles you need to think about or want to listen some educational tape, you are becoming hazard on road as a bonus.
Just look at 248 mi of track in NYC vs 17.4 in LA.
There's also the consideration that all those point to point journeys and parking at each end is a fairly inefficient way to enable a city's worth of people to move around. There's no way a city like NYC could exist at all if everyone relied on cars for transportation. A point-to-point personal car journey in NYC may in theory be faster than taking public transit, but it would be impossible for everyone to do that as the car transit times would trend towards infinity as everyone is stuck in traffic. And because of the increased density a non car-centric city allows, you can actually shrink public transit times too because things can be closer together and transit can run more often and have more routes. And the increased density also allows point to point personal transport other than cars to be practical, like walking or cycling.
The same with most big Chinese cities (smaller cities have taxis, so you still don’t need your own car). Tokyo’s system works ok as well, although I’m not sure if taxi would be faster since it is too expensive for me to try. The subway/loop lines are good enough to get places as quickly as I don’t think taking a taxi would save much time.
You’d be hard pressed to lay rail based transit so densely where everyone in the metro area has a 15 min walk to a station much less one going somewhere relevant for them. Simple bussing upgrades are much more realistic for us to see comprehensive transit in our lifetimes. Things like signal priority and a protected lane would go a long way for little cash and time. Too bad the bus is invisible to most people and politicians.
Unfortunately, in the US, we let a bunch of politicians who claim the government is bad at everything run the government. They have a vested interest in making sure it's not well run. For goodness sake, we had a president who said, "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government, and I'm here to help." A sitting US president, who according to Wikipedia, is part of the government. We should have demanded his resignation then and there, and got someone who wasn't terrified of the organization he was a head of.
The most immediate solution to this is stop relying on contractors and let the government at every level build up public planning departments and a construction workforce that doesn't get let go when the project is finished.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/Q17EFxjLKd85PYRv6?g_st=ic
This is how improving public transportation is actually one of the most effective ways to benefit drivers.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downs%E2%80%93Thomson_paradox
You said "most places, not just in the US", I suppose they were included?
The US needs to drop the contractor model and just directly staff labor for public works. If there is enough work going around to maintain a contracting company, then there’s therefore enough work to staff a public rail building division, and build out some standardized and therefore cheaper designs for this infrastructure.
It's not like it's the natural state of things that 25% of the Atlanta city center is dedicated to parking so we just have to accept the downsides.
There's a reason everything is so spread out and so it's difficult to walk places or design efficient public transit, and it's the same reason driving and parking your car is the most efficient transportation method.
As soon as they proliferate at scale, the risk profile changes such that you can bike everywhere safely, and parking is no longer a major urban issue, because the fleet is going to have a more flexible usage pattern whether or not individuals own the vehicles: instead of one space per vehicle per destination, it's going to be compressed down to parking space for the neighborhood plus drop-off zones.
So to me, it's obvious that the market is going at the problem just about as fast as it can, and once the adoption S-curve hits, "need to drive" relaxes because other potential uses aren't being suppressed. You'll still have many instances where mass transit and active transit present a lower cost structure than taxi, and they'll have a lot of leeway to grow.
It might be nice if they deliver on this promise though.
There's places elsewhere in the developed world where there's no public transportation, and everyone uses a car for longer trips.
You can usually still cross the street safely as a pedestrian, and expect to reliably find a sidewalk next to the road.
US roads, intersections, parking spots etc. are also absurdly large by the standards of most other countries, it all adds up.
Public transport is not a self-goal, but it’s the best way by far to reduce the spatial requirements for transportation. In particular subways and commuter trains can move an absolutely insane amount of people for even the largest metropolitan areas, without obliterating the ability to walk and getting quickly from point A to B.
Others include having motorcycles and bicycles for individual transport. That can work in small cities but usually impact walkability anyways. If you look at south east asia for instance, often lacking in good public transport, but having a lot of motorcycles in large cities making pedestrian movement hard.
The big problem there was the lack of sidewalks for pedestrians so you kinda had to go into traffic even if you were just following the streets.
Crossing even the busiest boulevards was actually easy, if a bit nerve racking. The flow of scooters just parts around you as you cross, giving you the “I am Moses” feel - you only have to be visible and consistent with your movement.
Honestly they should just get rid of all the zebra crossings and pedestrian lights - those don’t work anyway, and just build lots of pedestrian islands everywhere and they would be golden, oh and ban cars.
The amount of people those scooters move throughout hanoi is just staggering - even if they are a bit slow, they make up for it being like an organic flow that doesn’t stop for anything as it can just ride around it.
The problem is that people need a place to store their single-occupancy-vehicles. which means that each individual with a car takes up a permanent ~100 Sqft. They also need places to put that car. If you remove the parking lots, and the roads, admittedly, you'll create a more walkable city that means people don't need cars. But people will still want something for longer distances. And that something is public transit.
Your private taxi cab is never going to compete with the people-moving capacity of a bus, or a train. A road with 100s of cars on it, is a demonstration of how many people are heading in a common direction. If you want them to move faster in that direction, find a denser form of transportation that doesn't take up the space of 100s of cars.
Is parking an unsolved problem? I think in most cities it's a solved problem, and the consequence is traffic. But I would be curious of your take given that it's the question you asked. What is there to solve for parking?
edit: Also, Public Transportation, arguably, fixes both traffic and parking.
But ya, if we could eliminate parking, we have some more space for some nice things, but having lived it, it doesn’t solve the main problem at all if private transportation is still viable.
I'm having trouble parsing that sentence, could you clarify?
"[A developed city isn't one where poor people take cars but where rich people take public transit.]"
Do folks realize that walking somewhere in a city is like running a gauntlet to some of the population?
Domestic violence is not a reason why our cities should be filled with 1-ton death machines that spew soot, carbon monoxide, and nitrous oxide. Cars don’t solve that problem.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/americas-deadly-epidemic-vi...
Which is more of a reason to have more people walk: the more people in area going hither and thither the less isolated and vulnerable a person will feel.
People often feel most vulnerable when they feel isolated, which is what happens on a lifeless street. If a street has a sidewalk cafes, bars, restaurants, and people waiting in lines to get into clubs, then there is a feeling of community.
My wife and I a couple years back moved to the very edge of the suburbs. Like, across the street is forest preserves, and behind us is a river. We have only spoken with fewer than 10 neighbors since we moved in 2 years ago.
Her, and her sisters all talk about it being like a "serial killer neighborhood". Even my fishing buddy nextdoor sort of rolls his eyes about how his wife says similar things sometimes.
But I tell my fishing buddy: You'll never understand how vulnerable women feel. Ever. Honestly, being afraid of a place where nobody is around is statistically safer - people don't lock their doors in my neighborhood. I've started also not locking doors. It's that kind of place. That has been a point of friction for my wife and I too - I have been really diligent prior to this, because I always lived in really populous areas.
My wife, thankfully, has never been a victim of any kind of violence. But she has had experiences where she avoided that. Once time some big guy late at night followed her into her apartment building asking to use her phone to call for a tow truck or some nonsense. She knew it was BS, but gave it to him anyways. He ran away.
Men will never be able to understand how vulnerable women feel. We simply do not experience the world in the same way. I'll give another example to help anyone still reading get it: I once went to a haunted house (the Rob Zombie one in Chicagoland) with my buddy and his wife. Probably 10 times, actors working there tried to jump-scare her, and not me or my buddy. Every goddamned time. Whether she was in front, or behind, or between us. She does not scare easily, so she was just really annoyed. Predatory men see women as easy victims in ways they do not other men.
> females
They prefer "women", just FYI.
I live a city and neither do I, at least during the day. Only when I go to sleep I try to remember to check it to make sure it's locked.
And cities are often measured to be safer than suburbs:
* https://science.time.com/2013/07/23/in-town-versus-country-i...
* https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-oped-your-children-ar...
* https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/130724-su...
There's no slam dunk case for either.
Ouch! That bit ruined a good read.
The idea was for the Hyperloop was to do the 400 miles straight shot from LA to San Francisco at speeds up to 300mph. I don't see how a subway could do anything comparable.
https://www.hyd.gov.hk/en/road_and_railway/railway_network/x...
Ever see that monorail episode of The Simpsons? Yeah that's where we're at. There's a strong desire from many people to slow things down and be more deliberate and careful before any more big changes. There's a sense of disillusionment about "progressivism" amongst even those who crave the most righteous of vibes. This is a weird time to be alive and people just don't want to wake up to construction crews ironically destroying their cities to make way for yet another wave of gentrification pretending not to be.
Because the majority of the people in the US don’t actually want to ride public transportation and they like houses. It’s not that difficult to grasp.
It's very nearsighted to think our model is the penultimate in structuring society. Plenty of people are happy, fulfilled, and productive living in apartments & townhouses while taking trains to work.
People can be happy in an apartment but most would trade that in for a house they could afford it.
Why would someone prefer to live like a snail?
> Moving from a large place with a forest backyard to a tiny apartment is a lower standard of living. You live in an apartment and trade away personal space and still have to take a train to work where you get little personal space.
A house does not imply a large backyard. Suburbs are the bigger problem, and they don't usually have much forest.
And apartments don't have to be tiny. If you're comparing against a house in a similar location, that buys a lot of apartment space.
Unnecessarily inflammatory wording. (Don't use the popular "shoebox" either.)
> Moving from a large place with a forest backyard
Most Americans live in suburban houses and over 90% of suburbs don't have a forest backyard. You're painting a sunny caricature.
> tiny apartment
Apartments come in a range of sizes, easily from 300 sq ft to 2000 sq ft. You get what you pay for. With houses, the minimum size is so large that many people have no choice but to overpay for space they don't need.
> lower standard of living
Being in proximity to people, shopping, and businesses, as well as having a shorter commute to work, contribute to a higher standard of living.
I live in a suburb. I'm in proximity to people, shopping and businesses. In fact, I'm in closer proximity to shopping and businesses than most residential areas in the closest city. Most of the large employers in my area are also in the suburbs so, commuting would be even longer living in the city since it would involve taking public transportation or driving from the city to the suburbs. Even if I lived and worked in the city walking, taking a bus or the subway from residential areas to the employment centers would take longer than my 15-minute commute.
You give up space by living in a dense city but gain walkability and more public amenities, and on the other hand if you lived in the suburbs you would give that up for more personal space and - at least in the case of the US - better school districts. If you're rich you can have the plusses of all.
Living in an apartment is a compromise. Unfortunately, most apartments in the US do not have much to offer.
Most are not well insulated, particularly for sound. The overwhelming majority are rentals; and most of those are managed by landlords who charge an arm and a leg, only to be less than helpful.
Public transit relies on good apartments, and good apartments rely on public transit. It's symbiotic. The US has largely failed at providing both.
People don't choose what is available in the market. They choose from what is available in the market.
You have a limited view of 'urban living'. Want a front yard, back yard, and garage (attached to a laneway)? Plenty of that was built pre-WW2, and there's no reason why it couldn't be again:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0&t=1m8s
The Oh the Urbanity channel has a video on the (misguided) idea that "urban living" = Manhattan / Hong Kong apartment blocks:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCmz-fgp24E
Examples (Streetview) of urban tree-lined streets which can support transit and where cycling is practical (and where a car is an option versus a necessity):
* https://www.google.com/maps/place/125+Hampton+Ave,+Toronto,+...
* https://www.google.com/maps/place/50+Geoffrey+St,+Toronto,+O...
* https://www.google.com/maps/place/70+Jackman+Ave+Toronto,+ON
See also:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cO6txCZpbsQ&t=9m28s
Fifteen minutes pedalling in one direction is downtown, fifteen minutes in the other is farm land.
Pharmacy - seconds (right in the next building)
Bar - seconds
Supermarket - 1 minute
Bakery - 1 minute
Greengrocer's - 1 minute
Children's playground - 1 minute
Beach - 1 minute (OK, not representative of every apartment dweller, I'm privileged) :)
Stationery shop - 2 minutes
Bookshop - 2 minutes
Bank branch with ATM - 3 minutes
Amazon locker - 3 minutes
My son's school - 4 minutes
High school - 4 minutes
Health center - 6 minutes
Park - 7 minutes
Library - 7 minutes
Theatre - 13 minutes
Cinema - 15 minutes
Commute - 3 minutes walk to bus stop, buses every 5 minutes, 15-minute trip
Train station - 25 minutes
For me, moving to a house where I would need a car or much longer walks for most of those things would be a huge downgrade in standard of living, not an upgrade. Sure, I would have more space. Not worth it at all.
I think you're underestimating how nice it is to have space.
> I think you're underestimating how nice it is to have space.
This isn’t a trade we need to make. You can have space and be able to walk to things if we just build right. Take the suburb you live in now. Pick 5 houses randomly and turn those into some of the things the OP mentioned. Now you have your space and walkability. Throw in an apartment and some variations of housing so young and old and people with various incomes can live there too and there you have it. Now we’ve reduce car usage so you aren’t driving 5 miles in a 2,000 lb machine to get a loaf of bread and you still get to keep your car and your space.
Also, I would like to point out people don't drive 5 miles to get a loaf of bread. They buy stuff for the whole week/month in one go, which you just can't do by foot.
Yes and I’m keenly honing on on the benefits they highlighted and how those benefits don’t have to be unique to (as they are describing) a dense urban center with apartment only dwellers. Also the OP could just live in an apartment in a mixed-use, medium density neighborhood. They could be your neighbor even!
> Also, I would like to point out people don't drive 5 miles to get a loaf of bread.
Hey there! Yes it’s me. Fellow suburbanite for many years who can tell you first hand as a 100% fact that people do in fact drive distances like this for a single loaf of bread. You can to it for other items too. “Whoops forget sour cream for taco night”, “oh I’m going to make a beer run”, “better grab milk and eggs for that snow storm!”. Etc.
> They buy stuff for the whole week/month in one go, which you just can't do by foot.
You don’t need to do that and they likely do that (most make multiple trips) because you have to go drive a while to make it to the grocery store and deal with traffic. There’s nothing wrong with walking 10 minutes to grab a few things a few times/week. It’s better and healthier. You’re describing “how things are” and not using your imagination to understand how things could be.
Saving this for last:
> What you're proposing (making 5 random houses into apartments), would probably still have most people living in apartments
I just told you that you can take an existing neighborhood and modify it by transforming a few houses so that they have different functions. This is only limited by zoning. Why in the world would that result in “most people living in apartments”? No apartments would be required!
My building is reinforced concrete/steel construction. There's proper insulation. The issue in the US is that construction is poor. Construction of single family homes is actually considerably worse than apartments, but you have the benefit of distance.
Better construction is the right answer here, rather than more sprawl.
I think this is well said. The other dimension is public schools since US school funding comes from property taxes so more expensive areas have more funding for their schools, which usually means a higher quality education.
1. Does school funding come mostly from property taxes?
The answer here in Seattle is yes having seen some breakdown chart in some government document a while back.
2. What determines the amount of property tax?
Thanks for sharing that link about how in Canada the tax collection amount works backwards from a goal amount.
My understanding is that in the US, your property tax is assessed annually and the person doing it presumably uses market comparables to determine the taxable price - I don’t know if they work backwards from a target, but that sounds odd to me.
In my county they will definitely work back from a goal. The county will determine the budget for the coming year and adjust the tax rate to meet that budget. If assessed values go up 8% but the budget only goes up 4% the board of supervisors will lower the tax rate so the increase in property taxes only meets the 4% needed. This is politically easier than doing the reverse, but they have at times increased the tax rate when assessed property values have not risen enough to bring in the funds needed for the desired budget.
No they don’t. People consistently give up better commutes for more space.
> It's very nearsighted to think our model is the penultimate in structuring society. Plenty of people are happy, fulfilled, and productive living in apartments & townhouses while taking trains to work.
100% agree. But Americans want houses more than a public train ride. Figure out how to solve the issue of living in shoeboxes with people still getting space to have a personal garden, a wood shop, etc and you’ll be onto something.
We have shared wood/etc shops, even in small towns. "Makerspace" is one common name for them. Major issues include: storage, tool quality/maintenance, limited hours, staffing, high cost, clashing personalities.
In either case, you'd likely need to drive to get to them. Some apartment complexes have shared gyms, but most of my landlords have been pathologically worried about insurance risks. I'm not sure they would be eager to go along with installing a communal lathe. As for gardens, I once lived somewhere that had small tin beds on the roof, but the landlord rented them out for $300/mo each...there were people who paid to use them, but I thought it was a ridiculous ask for a couple sqft of soil.
There's a reason we call our abode our own "neck of the woods" :)
Wood shops are pretty expensive but not crazy so. The quality of the tools leaves a lot to be desired though
That's a sign there ought to be larger units with better soundproofing in multi-family buildings.
I don't want to force a lifestyle on anyone, but for me it is glorious just popping on a skytrain or a subway, listening to my music, and watching the world go by. I don't have to buy a car, pay for insurance, get gas every week, change the oil, repair it when it inevitably breaks down or things wear out, thus easily doubling the initial cost, find parking, and wash and clean it. I don't like dealing with different vehicle sizes, pedestrians on their phone, and drivers who think their time is worth my safety.
“They made the best of a shit scenario, which is way too many people living in one place. It’s better than the way the US dealt with the people that have to live like that, but it’s still worse than being able to have an acre to yourself in the middle class.” The US optimized for people who are in that camp.
Americans not liking public transportation, and not willing to fund public transportation are two different things.
If you live in a large suburban area (like many Americans), then biking distance is a huge problem.
Sure, making an actually tractable amount of public transit in every suburb would resolve that problem, but that's a huge investment, and the overwhelming majority of Americans can't even imagine what the result might look like.
And how long for a car? 5min? 15min?
If you have a car, then you will likely use it for some percentage of trips. That's a pretty serious motivation to not become "a fit cyclist".
All of these problems work together. This also works in the inverse: a good solution would do something to resolve all of these problems.
Bicycles are neither safe nor efficient enough for a daily commute in the US.
That's because you are looking from the outside in.
Every person who has grown up in the US has grown up in this situation. Having to drive nearly everywhere is our version of normal.
Public transit in the US sucks. In practically every city that even has it, it's the worst way to get anywhere. It's often a last resort: a tool for the desperately poor.
On top of that, most of the US is made up of small towns that public transit wouldn't make any sense for. A significant percentage of Americans must regularly travel between a major city and a small town. That means they must have a car, and a place in the city to park it. It's a fool's errand to convince most people that they should drive and take public transit all in one trip, even if it would save them time and gas.
There is more to this situation than the vicious cycle that perpetuates it. If we can be clear about how we intend to accommodate that reality, we might be able to do something about it politically.
Hang on though: I can't tell my neighbouring city to push for more housing because, while I want to live there in the future, the people that live there now like their lack of housing. Similarly, why can't the people that currently live in the city tell their local politicians that spending all this space for parking the residents don't need is stupid?
Ironically in a "you are the problem" sort of way, the demographics doing most of the complaining about parking lots and a general lack of density are the same demographics who are in favor of fine grained management and regulation of what people do on their land that causes this situation. You reap what you sow.
Big structures are expensive. Who is going to fund them save for the people who are incentivized not to?
"Yup, this big country was spread out by parking lots."
I will say that public transit in the US could be a lot better. However, over about forty years it has largely been how I got to work. (Washington, DC, area.)
And you think other other countries are not the same?
The story the other day about GM dropping CarPlay and AA support was alarming for their reason why. They want to know everything about how you use your car, so they can make you "subscribe" to things like climate control and power seats/windows. The future of the automotive industry in consumer hostile. In another decade or so, it's going to be really hard to find parts for the "dumb" cars of old and Americans are going to be screwed.
I can dream all day about having enough buses and trains to replace 90% of city commutes. That dream includes more work than simply emulating an island nation's infrastructure.
Suburbs became a thing after the car industry worked very hard to make sure subways and train cars can't be used. And this was also after the great interstate highway project and explicit city planning meant to mitigate the fallout of a nuclear attack by having a huge urban sprawl. All of this in the 50s and 60s.
What outsiders don't see is the massive scope and efficiency of the US interstate highway system which is the artery of the US economy. Discussions about public transport don't consider freight. You can't have freight trains to every big store and warehouse but you can get 18wheelers from any part of america to any other part of america (continental) within a day or two at most.
At the same time, explicit effort was made to make cities difficult to drive or bike in. A lot of this again goes back to the sentiment of the 50-60s where "white flight" was still a big deal and making suburbs inaccessible to certain types of people who live in cities but occupy the lowest social classes was also important.
It's expensive to be poor but cars means mandatory insurance and car payments, gas, repair bills and parking fees. And if you manage to overcome all that, cops can pull you over and search you without a warrant because you are driving and of course traffic fees and all that is nothing compared to one's safety. Childcare, food or rent? Which one should you sacrifice for that court fee? And somehow you must maintain mental fortitude to not use drugs or alcohol to cope with all that stress. Take out cars and suddenly so many problems are solved (including crime rates).
My point is, much of this is by design decisions made at a different time and era and the hostility is intentional. It is possible to have both a walkable and drivable city with much less parking lots, especially by having less single family housing concentrations (condos instead of large communities of houses that require cars to access).
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2015/5403... skip to page 15, and section 4
In the US everything international (except americas) comes by ship and you have large distances between population centers. It isn't just the size and the amount of freeways but the way they are interconnected that allows all kinds of truck routes between ports and production centers (e.g.: veggies and fruit in cali or florida) to not just big cities but middle of nowhere montana or dakotas as remote and underpopulated as they may be, they all have easy access to the same interlink.
If this was networking, europe would be like a very large campus network but the US would be a metropolitan area network with a similar physical size but connecting all types of buildings.
Honestly, I think you just have to drive around and see what I mean. Many americans also don't get this. I don't mean just the roads but go to random walmarts or targete in the middle of the desert or mountains that get the same goods as big city stores and they're just as large. You can easily spend half a day shopping in a walmart.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_City_Lines
Can you understand why I avoid public transport at all costs and don’t wish to expose my family to it?
Self-driving cars will fix this, no?
A combo of taxis, automatic parking garages, and just driving itself home to wait.
It’s terrible for the environment and leads to soulless shitty suburbs rather than vibrant, dense neighbourhoods.
Scenario 2: less land dedicated to parking, people live closer together, commutes are shorter and can more often be done by bike/transit/walking
It's pretty clear which of those is better for the environment.
* Concrete and asphalt EVERYWHERE. Ask yourself about the carbon cost of all that concrete - which, in the northeast, requires constant repair.
* Street lighting - I mean, you can see dense, urban areas from freaking space - think about all the energy that takes. Is that environmentally friendly and efficient?
* Heat islands - Dense, urban areas concentrate so much heat they literally change local weather.
* I've got an entire ecosystem of nature right in my back yard. Trees, wildflowers, grass, an array of wildlife, even a small garden growing local food (that the deer and groundhogs are determined to eat). What do dense, urban environments have? A practical monoculture of pigeons and rats?
That's exactly the problem. Any asphalt and concrete you add is sustaining 1 person. Any asphalt and concrete in an urban place is sustaining 1000s of people.
You burn more fossil fuels in the winter to stay warm. You burn more fossil fuels to provide 1 source of light that only you use.
The multiplier you're missing is the number of people we service with the things we're doing in an urban environment.
Having a 1,000s crammed into small spaces is China and that populatin density caused covid, sars, etc to spread. It's not health physically or for your psychology to live in an endless noise, light polluting environment.
What non-US cities do most people like to visit?
You can look up suburban fossil fuel usage per capita vs urban fossil fuel usage per-capita just as well as I can.
I wonder why the USA, with all its fantastic green suburbs and private motor transport, had a much higher COVID case rate and death rate per capita than other countries that have denser urban living?
Concrete and asphalt: If you add up all the parking lots and roads in a suburb and divide it by the number of people, the area is much larger than the amount of concrete per apartment dweller.
Street lighting: Again, much higher in the suburbs due to the low density. An apartment building with 100 units might have 10 street lights. Each house could very well have 1 street light in front of it. Not to mention all the arterial stroads where no one lives.
Extra topic - heating: A house is surrounded on 5 sides by cold. An apartment is surrounded on 5 sides by apartment.
All that open space means things are farther apart and you have to expend more energy to get from Point A to Point B. Less density means more joules per capita for transportation:
* https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter4/environment...
Does it take more energy to drive 5 minutes to the store to pick up some milk and eggs, or to walk (or cycle) 5 minutes to the store?
* https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/1/26/14388942/bu...
If instead, every person took up 800 sqft in an apartment building, and assuming absolutely no vertical building, we would take up ~1/7th of that space (7,346,189 acres, 0.38% of the Continental US). That would free up ~44 Million acres of open space. Every level up you build, you get to increase the amount of open space by A further 6/7ths of the previous value.
Now, Admittedly, this is back-of-the-envelope math that doesn't work for all scenarios (farms and whatnot are a separate thing). But pretending that suburbanism is better for "open space" is a load of BS. Urbanism provides more open space.
average yard size is ~4x that. So that's 4x less open space. You're also assuming that all parts of the US are equally habitable. We're doing a lot of work to try and let people live in increasingly inhospitable deserts.
https://housemethod.com/lawn/average-yard-size/
Some people fix that problem by driving drunk (the stats aren't pretty), but I fix it by living somewhere where there are bars within walking distance, and will not countenance the idea of living in a suburb even if it would cost me 3x less for the same space.
Lots of people write glowingly about the "gritty, vibrant" streets of 1970s New York City too. Places like that helped spur the move to the suburbs - ask yourself why.
Strawman. No one said anything about 40 floor high shoeboxes.
Turns out 2 large yards are plenty for even 100 families, and lawn care is super affordable when split 100 ways!
My car gets under 100 miles of use a week. Excluding commuting to work, during the summer months I literally do not have to drive if I don't want to. Within walking distance of me there is a public library, 2 bakeries, 3 grocery stores, a public pool, a wading pools, 2 very large parks, 1 of which has equipped with grills, and 1 smaller neighborhood park. If I want to ride a bike, and extend my range out to all of 3 miles, then that list gets absurdly long.
I don't even live in a dense part of Seattle, I just happen to live in the city proper.
You have a limited view of 'urban living'. Want a front yard, back yard, and garage (attached to a laneway)? Plenty of that was built pre-WW2, and there's no reason why it couldn't be again:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0&t=1m8s
The Oh the Urbanity channel has a video on the (misguided) idea that "urban living" = Manhattan / Hong Kong apartment blocks:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCmz-fgp24E
Examples (Streetview) of urban tree-lined streets which can support transit and where cycling is practical (and where a car is an option versus a necessity):
* https://www.google.com/maps/place/125+Hampton+Ave,+Toronto,+...
* https://www.google.com/maps/place/50+Geoffrey+St,+Toronto,+O...
* https://www.google.com/maps/place/70+Jackman+Ave+Toronto,+ON
See also:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cO6txCZpbsQ&t=9m28s
Fifteen minutes pedalling in one direction is downtown, fifteen minutes in the other is farm land.
The article is explicitly about city centers, not suburbs let alone outer ones.
People who want fiscally responsible government? "The Many Costs of Too Much Parking":
* https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/11/20/the-many-cost...
And that's not even getting into high(er) density areas subsidizing low(er) density areas:
* https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason...
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI
* https://usa.streetsblog.org/2015/03/05/sprawl-costs-the-publ...
* https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/4/16/when-apartment...
Want to live in low(er) density areas? Go ahead: but stop externalizing the costs onto others.
The Washington D.C metro is a multi-billion dollar money pit from hell that's mismanaged and filled with graft, death and delays. California built a 1 billion dollar bus station that nearly collapsed on itself. In the US, some of the most fiscally un-responsible transportation is public government run transportation.
So no different than highway construction then? The seventh annual report of Highway Boondoggles:
* https://frontiergroup.org/resources/highway-boondoggles/
And let's not forget that it's been empirically measured for decades that building more roads/highways doesn't decrease congestion:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand
And that car-oriented 'improvements' makes things worse for drivers and worse for those for those taking public transit (often due to not being able to afford a car):
> It is a paradox in that improvements in the road network will not reduce traffic congestion. Improvements in the road network can make congestion worse if the improvements make public transport more inconvenient or if they shift investment, causing disinvestment in the public transport system.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downs–Thomson_paradox
And that improving things for non-car users can actually make things better for drivers:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8RRE2rDw4k
* https://fortune.com/2015/09/30/best-country-drive-waze/
* https://archive.ph/S4FKM
In no instantiation of the multiverse does the data show that focusing on car-centric development and private automobile transportation is more efficient, from a fiscal or energy point of view, or better for individuals' health and things like climate change.
Certainly roads are useful for commerce and trade, but personal transportation? Not so much.
You do realize that much of that parking exists because of mandates and subsidies, right? If Americans want something else then let them. Does your interest in letting people make their own choices extend to other people's choices as well as your own?
A whole lot of Americans don't want that. You can tell by how much more expensive it is to live in walkable city centers than in suburbs.
Sadly the rooftop lot was removed with the rear X ramps blocked off, and the store is now a relatively generic Kolhs. In Southern California though a lot of the parking lots are getting retrofitted with solar, which while still taking up space, at least providing energy and shade.
1. https://www.gruenassociates.com/project/millirons-department...
Edit: This is relevant because US cities tend to include a large amount of residential areas that don't have parking lots. When city centers are commercial areas that serve the city and surrounding areas inside and outside of the city, people are going to drive there and they need a place to park. There are potential ways to make parking less concentrated in the center though, which includes public transportation, one thing we're often not great at in the US.
I also would have liked to compare street parking options in various cities, but this doesn't seem to document it. Street parking can have just a big of an impact as garages and lots, as it leads to wider roads, people hunting for a spot, and a hazard for bicyclist.
Street parking has always seemed slightly insane to me. You take a dense city that's already tough to get around by road and then you sacrifice half your road area for people to park on. Instead of one car park entrance you have to keep an eye on for emerging vehicles, any one of a thousand cars could suddenly move into the road with no notice. It's a safety and efficiency nightmare.
And I'm not trying to be glib. Off hours especially, parking garages can be places people don't want to go.
Anti-car posts are fun because they are escapism from the worst part of the suburbs. However, you lose all of the best parts when you switch to the current alternatives (expensive density and shared public transportation).
I think the thing about Public Transit, is if you truly love driving your car, you should still be in favor of public transit, because better public transit means less traffic for you.
Questionable:
"Why Gas Taxes Aren't Paying the Bills Anymore"
* https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-02-15/gas-ta...
"Gas Taxes Don't Cover the Costs of Our Roads"
* https://www.onthecommons.org/gas-taxes-dont-cover-costs-our-...
"Ten Years of Highway Trust Fund Bankruptcy: Why Did It Happen, and What Have We Learned?"
* https://www.enotrans.org/article/ten-years-of-highway-trust-...
Further, expanding roads for car-centric use just makes things worse:
> It is a paradox in that improvements in the road network will not reduce traffic congestion. Improvements in the road network can make congestion worse if the improvements make public transport more inconvenient or if they shift investment, causing disinvestment in the public transport system.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downs–Thomson_paradox
There is decades of empirical evidence that building more roads/highways does not improve congestion (but makes it worse):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand
(Well, additionally by the way US military and foreign policy revolves around fossil fuel supply. Which lots of people around the world pay for, and not just US taxpayers.)
https://youtu.be/wfxJhX8Y4QI
This content is literally about how US cities are dispersed.
Since the 1940s, the vision sold to society is one of private motor transport, free-flowing highways, and houses on big lots. The past 80 years have seen the execution of this plan with little to no reflection or criticism.
We're finally starting to wake up to the reality that we find ourselves living in. We're questioning the choices made by our forebears and the infrastructure that has been constructed. If we want to change how cities are designed, we have to recognize the problem first. Only then can we embark on a decades-long transformation where we slowly replace buildings and roads with ones that reflect a new vision.
The fact that US cities are dispersed is a red herring. Most cities will have expensive areas that people want to move into but are prevented from doing so due to a lack of available housing. The demand to densify already exists. By adjusting zoning laws, parking minimums, and transportation networks, housing can be added in those areas, and no one would be coerced to move to somewhere they don't want to be.
Curious to hear from people who use the bus or train daily, how do you get to and from the bus stop in a timely manner and in the cold.
Beyond that, I think the most honest answer is, "Wear a coat, and give yourself more time."
2. There's rooms for lots of scooters on buses. It's pretty common for there to be places for bicycles on buses too. Have you been inside of a city bus? There pretty big.
3. Real estate near train stations is almost always more expensive. This is a type of amenity you have to look into while choosing your home.
According to the public transit authority around here, if you remove a bus stop (due to, say, a drop in transit usage) and try to bring it back later (after usage of transit goes back up), it can take up to five years to see ridership recognize that, and start to use the stop at the same rate as when it was removed. It may be cheaper to leave the stop there long-term.
I would suggest something you enjoy :).
Accessibility is something else to consider for a lot of this... But it's not really an argument I feel people make in good faith. I would be okay with some car usage for people with accessibility needs for first/last mile transportation.
You need a parking space for your car permanently, and one for every place you might visit. (up to as many people as are likely to be visiting it). In a popular place to visit, that could be a lot if people don't have some other way to get there. So, you have to build in extra space between you and that place to account for parking, and the roads required to get there.
If the law that requires an absolute minimum number of parking spaces hasn't increased, then the total number of parking spaces hasn't increased?
People can build more parking spaces than the parking minimums? Also, Parking minimums themselves increase parking for new businesses? Any new structure you build being subject to parking minimums contributes to the loop I'm describing.
Step 1 is to deprioritize cars. No more free parking, no single family home zoning, free-for-all zoning around train stations and bus stops.
Step 2 is to keep deprioritizing cars. Ban highway expansion beyond 2 lanes in both directions. Match demand and supply with tolls. Excess revenue goes towards funding public transit.
Step 3 is to fund public transit. Private sector will see massive opportunity to build out private bus lines and trains (see Brightline in Florida). The real play is not ticket revenue, but real estate appreciation around public transit. Republicans should get around this idea with private equity guys. This is a no brainer to me.
In conclusion, the key to this morass to make car owners suffer and switch to real estate appreciation to incentivize private development of transit systems.
The rest of the world fixes this by banning cars in these areas, making it a nice place to be, providing out-of-town link-transport (eg Park & Ride) for people driving in.
The car is eating US cities but only because people don't have a better option.
https://parkingreform.org/resources/parking-lot-map/
Mind, the root cause that only office towers and their associated parking can really be built in that CBD...that's the big problem
The maps themselves are interesting and potentially even useful, on the other hand.
Mostly, it's a lot of people complaining about cars. Which is fine, I mostly agree. But the anti-car stuff is becoming extremely toxic and parroting half-remembered tweets about induced demand, finding slightly different ways to describe cars as death machines, and good old-fashioned liberal American self-flagellation.
We're past the point where it's transgressive to point out the problems with cars, we need to actually have some kind of a sensible discussion that involves practical considerations. In particular, anti-car people need to have a good handle on why people actually like cars. Otherwise, it'll just be more of trying to punish people, like the guy in this thread who says "the key to this morass to make car owners suffer". We've got to do better than that!
That has been my story at least. My bus is late and slow, because it's stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic from all these people driving motor vehicles with a single occupant. I need ear protection on my commute because the 14th Street Bridge into DC pairs pedestrians and cyclists side-by-side with 60mph motor traffic with no noise protections. I lost a day at work because I got hit on my bike by a truck driver who was on his phone, and had to go to the ER. I am shaken and my heart rate is pounding and I am pondering my own mortality because someone gunned their engine through a left turn while I was walking across the street with a pedestrian signal - they accelerated instead of stopping to yield and I had to jump out of the way to save my own life while they sped off.
If you recognize how awful cars are for the environment and how they make city life inconvenient, unpleasant and expensive, and so you make the personal decision to forgo them to be part of the solution rather than the problem, you are taking a step into a life that will nudge you more and more to truly despise motor vehicles because your daily life will be filled with only negative interactions with them.
The drawback, if you can call it that, is that I am radically anti-car, as a direct result of the lived experiences that that life gives me.
My issue is not with people who are anti-car, but with people who cannot understand why other people have different priorities and who make different trade-offs. That's key to building a better world.
A lot to say here for why I think the number of people who can legitimately claim it is a morally neutral matter of priorities and trade-offs for them is small.
For one, there are stigmas around transit and biking. Funnily enough they are contradictory: that only the poor get around with transit and biking, and that only upper class elitists get around with transit and biking. It is extremely common for people to oppose new infrastructure or denser housing on the grounds that it will either A) cause "undesirables" to come to the neighborhood and destroy property values, or B) induce gentrification.
For two, for a lot of people, living car-centrically is an automatic habit because it was a deeply ingrained assumption all throughout their upbringing that you just need a car and that owning a car is an important rite of passage and social signifier in adulthood.
For three, lots of people who were steeped in driving growing up are intimidated by the thought of learning to navigate a transit system or learning to ride a bike.
The last and to me most important thing is that the politics of car dependency are destructive to everyone. It is a negative-sum game to widen all the highways, and increase all the parking minimums, and zone for low density, and block bike lanes. It is extremely wasteful in terms of public resources and environmental destruction and it harms everyone's quality of life.
A lot of people don't really grasp the danger and unpleasantness that their car imposes on others. Seeing, smelling, hearing, tiptoeing around motor vehicle traffic are all deeply unpleasant and you have to place an enormous amount of trust in motor vehicle operators not to kill you where you stand. This is one thing that makes me not sympathetic to the "different priorities and trade-offs" argument. The internal logic is about pros and cons to one's own self, not about the pros and cons to everyone else, and motor vehicles have many properties that put this in stark relief: they are getting bigger and heavier making them safer to the driver and more deadly to whoever they hit; their horns are loud enough to cause ear damage and cause a giant fright to bystanders but are muffled inside the cabin; and of course huge, huge tracts of even walkable cities like NY are dedicated to motor vehicle traffic with many lanes while people walking, biking, scootering, dining outdoors and so on are forced to fight for scraps of space at the margin.
For me living without a car is not just about the benefits it offers to me personally but also the full understanding of the harms to others I am refusing to inflict, or even run the risk of inflicting, by opting out.
Some pushback on your facts:
Firstly, cars are getting significantly better as they go electric. Smell is eliminated, while noise and environmental impact will be significantly reduced - without any changes to our road infrastructure. Anti-car people tend to push back on the idea that electric cars are significantly more environmentally friendly, but they're flat-out wrong. A Tesla Model 3 is 5x more efficient than the average new gas car. Four people driving in that same Tesla emit less greenhouse gas than if they were traveling on UK rail. Cars are also are pushing forward electrification technology in other domains. Impact from mining for battery materials is improving. That mining is necessary anyway for grid storage if we're to switch to renewable energy, not to mention that EV batteries are 99%+ recyclable, so we don't have to mine this material forever, either.
It's also not the case that cars are only getting safer for the passengers. Technologies like automatic emergency braking that always watch out for pedestrians and bikers is now standard, and will continue to improve as cars become more autonomous.
In the US, average weight of cars is basically the same as it was in 1975, and per-capita pedestrian deaths have halved over the same period.
The status quo is that the external costs of car dependent lifestyles are almost entirely pushed onto other people via highways slicing through the middle of cities, roads being paid for mostly via the general fund, larger vehicles protecting occupants at the cost of everyone else, sound isolated cabins protecting drivers from the noise they create and requiring louder emergency sirens...it just goes on and on.
EVs are better for the environment than ICE vehicles, but the noise, air pollution via tire dust, and physical danger they present is the same. The real EV is an e-bike, but most people don't want to bike because sharing roads with cars feels too dangerous. As a result, cars on the only choice.
I want 90% of my city streets to block through traffic with physical barriers, just like the suburbs. Many intersections should allow ONLY pedestrians, cyclists, transit, and service vehicles through, so the fastest and most pleasant ways from point A to point B are walking, cycling, or transit.
At the time he was a long way off but by the time I crossed he had accelerated to the point he could have hit me
Electric cars will still cut up my local town into little isolated islands the same way normal cars do
Car alternatives need so much more support than they get right now it's unreal
The issue with the road infrastructure is also that it necessitates cars to begin with. With wide, sprawling networks of roads where motor traffic is too fast for people to comfortably walk and cycle, you end up with huge amounts of suburban sprawl. Things are located far apart; tons tons tons more infrastructure needs to be built to provide roads, water, electricity, gas, Internet, police, fire response, schooling and wastewater treatment to those people living in sprawling exurban developments. All the parking lots and strip malls and highways mean that it is simply impossible to make a trip by any way other than car, which triggers orders of magnitude more motor vehicle trips of orders of magnitude longer distance than in a mixed-use walkable neighborhood, so it's not even really useful to draw a comparison between the marginal emissions of four people in a Tesla vs. the amortized emissions of four people on a train.
> Technologies like automatic emergency braking that always watch out for pedestrians and bikers is now standard, and will continue to improve as cars become more autonomous.
I hope this will save lives, but it will never be enough to break the environment of fear and the lurking danger of death that comes with navigating cities with motor traffic, especially since you can never assume that a car is equipped with it (and that it will function correctly). You need to have an incredibly high level of trust, one that just doesn't exist when you are interacting with someone using a different means of spatial displacement. Bikes and scooters are light, slow, small, maneuverable, and offer such good visibility, both to and of the cyclist, that every single risk factor is extremely low.
Or to put another way: in the aggregate it will save lives, but will you always be able to count on it to save yours?
There are other considerations too: a person in any vehicle can, and (in my experience) many do, park or drive in bike lanes or fail to yield to bike lane traffic when making turns. Here you have not the physical threat of the car itself but the fact that by doing this the motorist can force other people to execute dangerous maneuvers, like merging into high-speed motor traffic, splitting the lane or hopping onto the sidewalk to avoid the car.
And as for noise - firstly the tire noise is still there and actually worse due to vehicle weight. The honk is still there, it is still loud enough to trigger a bystander's fight or flight response, and hoo boy is there a lot of it! The people driving in DC and NY seem endlessly upset about the fact that they are doing so.
> In the US, average weight of cars is basically the same as it was in 1975, and per-capita pedestrian deaths have halved over the same period.
There is a lot going on with these numbers. For one, the main cause of this trend was the mass adoption of cars: people are simply walking a lot less than they did half a century ago. For two, the downward trend has sharply reversed since 2009: pedestrians deaths are rising very quickly, rising 50% between 2009 and 2020[1], coinciding modestly with the rise in popularity of mass market pickup trucks and SUVs.
[1]https://www.statista.com/chart/17194/pedestrian-fatalities-i...
I have a motorcycle and I don’t feel comfortable driving to/through the city because of the number of times I’ve been run off the road, almost hit, or getting rammed while stopped at a traffic light in an SUV.
The motorist's insurance paid for that. For incidents where that doesn't happen, this is stuff I have my own insurance (including critical accident insurance) for. Also as I keep riding, my judgment gets better, my knowledge of the area gets better, and I can anticipate/avoid danger more easily. I can't really speak to motorcycles because, due to their higher weight and beefier motors (compared to, say, a scooter or e-bike), they are subject to significantly different rules and cannot use separated infrastructure like multi-use paths, cycletracks, protected bike lanes and sidewalks. My commute from Arlington to DC is about 90% covered by separated infrastructure. I have to deal with cars when running errands inside the city but typically speeds are much lower and there are usually low-stress routes available.
I mean ultimately there is a nonzero risk, both financial and bodily, much as there is when you are in a motor vehicle. I've had plenty of friends facing surprise three- or four-digit bills due to mechanical issues or damage with their car. In the DC area, motorists frequently crash into other cars while on highways or stroads, sometimes killing themselves or others. Vehicle manufacturers have superbly played the public by using the fatalities of their own vehicles as a marketing point to sell even larger and heavier vehicles under the guise of "safety" that cause even more fatalities in a collision scenario. It's an arms race and I have absolutely no desire to play a role in it.
Cars are the designated post-hoc rationalization for an environment that is almost exclusively built for them.
If the "transgressive" tone of the conversation is the only takeaway you have, then perhaps you are not listening closely enough.
You're trying to present the argument in exactly the same way I'm objecting to, like you're opening my eyes that I'm in the Matrix. That it's surprising or interesting to learn that the US is built around cars in many ways, and that's affecting my thinking such that I could not consider that cars are bad. Maybe I need to "listen" more closely, like I can't understand the secrets of the world that you are privy to.
This is all intellectually dishonest masturbatory fluff.
Is there anything you'd like me to clarify further for you?
There's decades of revealed preference for larger, more private housing, rather than density and mass transit, and that dynamic strongly correlates to income.
Median household income in the states is nearly double of said demographic's mecca, the Netherlands, and I would bet my lunch money that car ownership and utilisation there goes up with income as well. So relatively dense places with relatively poor-er population will optimize towards mass transit and biking and what not, because people can't afford cars and larger houses to begin with.
The anti-car stuff is extremely toxic because a large segment of society refuses to listen. Induced demand is how every lane-widening project is a huge money sink while failing to deliver on the promise of reduced congestion. You think complaining about death machines is comparable to the thousands of people inside and outside of cars who have near-death experiences every day due to cars? Or people losing autonomy and dignity by losing the ability to drive is not toxic? These topics have been politely brushed under the rug for too long.
Is it wrong for disenfranchised people to express their frustration? Are they required to empathize and understand their abusers?
Sensible solutions? They've been put forth ad nauseum already. Ending single-family exclusive zoning. Enabling mixed residential-commercial areas. Reducing commute distances. Funding public mass transit. Ending parking minimums. Tolling roads and mileage. Recognizing that roads are overbuilt and there is not enough tax base to maintain them.
Anti-car people know very well why people like cars. The dominant culture is kind of hard to ignore. The most common reasons are a sense of autonomy, the fact that working and doing errands without a car will increase travel time by several multiples, and the fact that it's a comfortable norm that almost everybody has accepted (can't go wrong with the herd right?).
This is a wildly uncharitable and disingenuous reading of their comment. I stopped reading yours at that point, I'm sure you can do better.
> the anti-car stuff is becoming extremely toxic and [...] finding slightly different ways to describe cars as death machines
I'm refuting the complaint about the anti-car conversation being extremely toxic because the reality of car-dominant culture is toxic.
If you stopped reading my comment, aren't you choosing polarization over reconciliation?
Want to see toxic? Here are a couple of posts plucked from the r/FuckCars front page:
https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/comments/128yjd9/i_just_wa... - The norm of cars parked on and blocking the sidewalk. Do pedestrians and wheelchair users not have rights?
https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/comments/1291pfo/my_foot_g... - Car-ped collision, driver brushes it off as "oops wrong pedal".
https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/comments/128qx21/cue_the_p... - Employee gets hassled for storing bike at workplace, no such treatment for storing a car.
https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/comments/129iogc/for_the_p... - One driver having an accident inconveniences many thousands of people. Is this not a lopsided power structure?
Car culture is the dominant default. It's too easy to brush off non-drivers' problems as trivial and not worth solving.
I know exactly why people like cars, because I was one, I grew up playing with toy cars, micro machines, garages, play mat with roads, Sim city for car planning, building cars in Lego, playing need for speed, gran turismo, midnight club run, mad max, grand theft auto, truck simulator, watching Tokyo drift
Cars are everywhere in our culture, huge bits of car infrastructure like traffic lights and roads that run for miles that just connect to a shed are completely normal
The bigger problem for us "anti car" people is that it's so ingrained that people no longer see or care about the determental aspect of car dominance
People look at horrific crashes like a car wedged on a side of a building and they dismiss it as a driver problem
They look at traffic jams and they look at it as an other person problem
They look in their neighbourhood and don't notice that their kids can't safely play in their neighbourhood and then wonder why they're glued to phones
The problem we have is recognition first and foremost then it's education, YouTubers not just bikes and strong towns do an amazing job of that
When you need to shuffle in 10.000 to 100.000 cars (at worse, none of these have enough parking spaces for it) you need parking spaces.
Moving these venues outside of the cites is a good solution. It does not require forced behavioural modifications. Then the city can arrange busses to and from the stadium for those that need it. Or a high speed dedicated train.
Any other establishment with a huge number of visitor should be moved out as well.
Huge hospitals are also entities that take up a huge amount of space and can have a lot of parking. These should be moved outside the city to lower density areas.
The space these things take up, and their huge parking lots can then be converted into parks and green lungs within the city.
Greed real estate developers who wish to increase density for big profit should be barred from any activity. The density is already far too high.
It is a win win situation all the way around.
No one will walk anywhere if you keep artificially spacing everything out
Watch videos from not just bikes and strong towns there are plenty of solutions
That don't amount to build more expensive tarmac that has to be replaced every 25 years
The Netherlands can have large stadiums and venues without giving their cities to cars.
Look at the Zandvoort grand prix. The media was amazed that the whole (small, historic) town was cleared of the almost 200,000 attendees about an hour after the event.
Compare to the Circuit of Americas in Austin which had people still stuck in the carpark several hours after the race ended, still in a queue to get out to join the traffic jam on the road.
Building roads and carparks to fight your traffic problems only creates more traffic that will become a problem later. It's "just one more lane" type of thinking.
Even in the UK, it's often cheaper to drive. The other day I drove into Central London (!) from Cambridge in a VW Polo. I calculated the cost per mile, including the car depreciation and the onerous and ever-increasing vehicle tax, and it was STILL a far better deal than the train.
Not to mention the non-negligible chance of an encounter with a risky, mentally ill passenger on transit. My wife was harassed by a man with piss-soaked sweatpants on the SF Bart and nearly missed her flight because she had to get off early. And that ticket was not cheap. I've been called homophobic and racial slurs on the London tube, for wearing short shorts on the way to go play squash. OF COURSE these events are few and far between but in my car they never happen.
Despite this, the subway is still a better UX in Manhattan and London. When I'm in these places I don't drive (obviously). In the Randstad, I also never drive. Because the UX is great. When I'm in my home in North Carolina, I drive everywhere. It's great. Everything is 10 minutes away. There's always parking. Massive boost to quality of life.
Cars are not some revelations-esque phenomenon and parking lots do not "eat" anything. They can always be converted to decks, as they literally always are when the demand is there. There is nothing wrong with that.
Riding Chicago mass transit is nice because the cold weather eliminates most of the homeless people in one way or another.
One possible solution is a premium model where there are Premium edition trains that you can pay a little extra for and have security and be around normal middle class people and relax and read a book.
I.e. have a capitalist run transit service trains along side the government one.
I'd ride transit a lot more if this was a thing.
I'll stick to my car until west coast mass transit has figured out a way to where I don't have to sit next to a person who has literally peed them selves and looks desperate enough to rob me.
(This doesn't seem to be a high bar)
I said 'robbed' and 'sitting next to someone who has peed themselves'.
Of which the chance is infinitely higher on mass transit than your own vehicle.
Unless you date sketch people then either of those is possible ;)
Also, road taxes would increase, making public transit more affordable by comparison.
This website provides a good counter argument:
https://www.strongtowns.org/
> In America, driving is far and away the best UX. You go where you want when you want with up to four passengers even in a very small starter car
Not for children/young people. In the Netherlands it's common for young people to develop independence using bicycles and public transport.
I think that is far more mentally healthy than the US's car centric infrastructure, which excludes young people, making them overdependent on their parents, or dependent on being online in order to socialise.
The real problem with letting kids roam free is that we banned / defunded mental health care and gun regulations, and also gutted the middle class.
> In Japan, small children take the subway and run errands alone, no parent in sight.
As a former Trek customer who hasn't been inclined to purchase another bike from them, they still send me their new product line magazines. Maybe I haven't been paying close enough attention, but I was astonished when I grabbed the latest edition from my mailbox yesterday and thumbed through it. Trek is going ALL IN on electric bicycles. Pages 4-5 have a big flow chart helping people decide what type of electric bike to buy, depending on factors such as whether you're on dirt trails or paved streets, whether you will be transporting cargo and children, whether you value speed or comfort, and so on.
Non-electric bikes are now sort of an afterthought. If you flip to the back of the magazine you'll still find them, but the electric versions of several models are still interspersed. For example they have the Domane SLR (a model I still have in my garage), but on the next page they pimp the electric Domane+. Their blitz on electric bikes might be working for me, since I'm seriously considering being a Trek customer again and "trading up" for it, in spite of the bad experiences I've had trying to get them to support the Domane SLR they sold me in 2017.
America is facing a reckoning with its transportation infrastructure and car culture. Electric bikes are so compelling in terms of cost, convenience, fun, and practicality, more and more people will be riding them on the "stroads" and will be demanding changes so they feel safer doing so. If that means taking away lanes and parking spots from vehicular traffic, adding separated cycle tracks, reducing speed limits, adding traffic-calming measures, introducing safe-passing laws, and stepping up enforcement and penalties, then in my book that can't happen soon enough.
On the hopeful side, I see e-bikes as being part of the wave towards sustainability, a swing back towards childhood independence, and increased interest in fitness. We'll see how far it goes, but there's going to be resistance every step of the way.