"Buffalo, like many other cities, let builders request special permission to deviate from city-determined parking ratios."
Having an exception process seems like a very logical approach to rolling back parking mandates gradually. I've seen both massive lots with no cars (clearly an outdated mandate in effect) as well as brand new suburban neighborhoods inundated with packed street parking (clearly a miss by the builder). It feels to me like rolling these rules back thoughtfully will be important to avoid companies from dropping parking from new low income housing that may legitimately need it.
Most cities have had parking minimums for a while, so any new housing without parking is competing against existing housing with the imposed parking ratio.
Meaning, if you are shopping around for housing, you can choose housing with more parking. Which means that to compete with it, housing with less parking will have to compete in other ways, like, say, lower prices. Which is more important than automobile storage in a lot of places with a housing shortage and the consequent skyrocketing prices.
I heard a slightly different version of the jar story in which after the sand, the professor pours a beer into the jar, then the rest of the analogy is the same until the end when a student asks what the beer is supposed to represent, to which the professor says "That just shows that no matter how busy your life is, there's always time for a beer"
Suburbs don't have this problem, there is plenty of parking automatically since people have more space there.
I've started to notice that all the car problems are just in dense cities: Nowhere for kids to play, noise, lack of parking, cost, safety, etc etc.
None of those issues exist in suburbs and rural.
(PS. They don't need more parking just because they have larger units.)
Once the city is dense enough then it's all mass transit. If it's not dense you use cars and there is no trouble with them. It's those cities right in the middle that have all the problems.
Why would you want to? The people in low density like it that way, and the people in high density like it that way. It's a good thing that it's hard to change the city from under them!
Leave the density alone and let people move to whichever they like better.
Just be extra cautious about the medium density cities.
There are lot of people in low density who would _like_ to be in high density. However, these places are absurdly expensive (despite often being more efficient and cheaper to provide with services) because they've been illegal to build for 70 years, so the stock has been stagnant or declined while the population has grown.
Suburbs definitely have car problems, just not parking. Can't afford a car? A kid trying to get to a friend's house? Anyone trying to walk or bike anywhere? Traffic jams? Car deaths and accidents? Architecture centered around parking lots? Runoff filled with tire and brake runoff? Wildlife deaths and habitat destruction? Climate change? A massive military budget to ensure cheap oil prices?
That’s a location, industry, and categorization of urban/suburban/exurban/rural discussion. And things can change over time. In the late 90s for example almost all of the tech jobs around Boston were in the suburbs and many still are outside of the outposts of west coast companies.
Having an exception process is ripe for abuse. We have laws for a reason: it is generally a good thing for the same rules to apply to everyone. When you require an exception, you can easily threaten and extort whatever you want, because the "default" is to deny an exception to a rule. We see this all the time with planning: planning commissions extract expensive "concessions" from developers all the time. "Oh, you technically can build that much, but it won't be profitable with all that parking we mandate. We'll gladly grant an exception, if only you capped heights, and have fewer studios."
Some percentage of people don't have a car. It's safe to assume that trends to lower income.
So parking mandates are also a form of (hidden) economic apartheid. If my city mandates say 2 spaces per apartment, it's intrinsically reducing housing stock for "poor people" - hence "more exclusive neighborhoods."
Which sounds good, except that the services needed (often done by the poor) get hard to supply.
Cynical me suggests that selective zoning creates 'pockets of poor' - but pragmatically me points out this is good for clustering car-alternatives making them more effective.
On balance I think it's a win - and frankly is good for everyone.
The history of zoning is very much about keeping certain people out of the "nice" neighborhoods after Buchanan v. Warley declared explicitly racial zoning to be unconstitutional.
This book has a concise and very readable history of zoning in the US:
Everything is interconnected. People who commute to work need a car. If parking is unavailable, then commuters cannot live there. If workers can't live there, then property taxes are lower and less money enters the local economy. You can't apriori say what impact these parking policies have.
Quite a lot of lower income workers can't afford to commute by car. Breaking that "need" relation is the #1 priority for people trying to design lower-car cities.
The article does a good job of addressing the nuance, but the headline and most attention grabbing parts of it don't.
Most of the new housing built may have been illegal under previous parking rules, but it doesn't logically follow that similar housing couldn't have been built without the parking rules change, just that it's cheaper to build without it.
The article/quotes acknowledge this,
> “It’s impossible, really, to tie a specific code change to changes in the market,” explained Brennan Staley, a strategic advisor for Seattle’s Office of Planning and Community Development. Other local regulations, housing prices, and international finance markets all play a part in the real estate market. Michael Hubner, who works on long range planning in Seattle, agreed: “It’s very difficult to point to a causal relationship.”
and also note that off street parking is still present in the majority of new housing
> In both cities, the majority of new buildings still included off-street parking voluntarily
> but it doesn't logically follow that similar housing couldn't have been built without the parking rules change, just that it's cheaper to build without it.
Yes, you can build anything with an infinite budget. In practice, budgets aren't infinite and increasing costs means fewer projects will get built.
> but it doesn't logically follow that similar housing couldn't have been built without the parking rules change, just that it's cheaper to build without it.
Cost is a very real and important constraint. You can't just throw more money at a problem if the problem is that you cannot profitably provide a good at a price that is affordable. You cannot change the price the market will bear, but you can cut your costs by lobbying your city government to cut parking minimums.
I hope people don't take from this that no parking at all is necessary, since that's not what they found.
They simply found that you have have a bit less parking than what the code required if you implement it in a way where you need an exception - presumably to show that in this case you don't need it.
The code is a bit of a blunt instrument and giving some flexibility to it seems logical. Getting rid entirely of parking minimums does not.
Also nowhere in this do I see a survey of residents to see how they like living in these lower-parking homes. People might be very very annoyed, but just deal with it because they have no other good option.
Maybe I’m missing something, but in the context of housing+parking, what is the market failure that requires the excessive minimums? VS letting the market solve the problem? Seems like a developer has an incentive to provide enough (and only just enough) to sell/rent the new units. If there isn’t enough, people will look elsewhere.
The usual theory is that developers would underspec the number of private parking spaces relative to residence requirements (and of course residents and requirements can change over time). Common parking would then be oversubscribed including for residents/visitors in the area who don't have private off-street parking.
Information is often imperfect especially during a quick buying/renting process. A buyer could easily figure they'll use the private spot for one car and they can always use on-street permit parking for the second car even though there are a bunch of houses that depend on that parking for their vehicle.
(Or whatever scenario--don't get hung up on the details of that specific one. The general concern is that new construction may lean on a shared resource to keep its own costs down.)
If every house needs two spots - on off street, one on street right in front of the house, all is well.
Then someone says "Why should I pay for a parking spot or a garage? I'll just park on-street by my neighbor!"
That only works if a couple people do it. Once too many do it you have unhappy residents - they paid for their off-street spot but the other guy didn't!
The alternatives are not necessarily free to the neighborhood as a whole. A lot of places would have to build a bunch of garages if they were to eliminate any on-street parking. So now you have more garages everywhere. Maybe that's a good tradeoff. Maybe it's not. But I'm familiar with urban neighborhood with on street (mostly permit or metered) parking that have very few garages or parking lots at all.
Paid permits and meters are fine - that solves the “stealing all the free spaces” problem mentioned above. The point is a some close to a market solution should be feasible and desirable.
In the cities I’m familiar with essentially all street parking is metered or resident. There’s a cost for resident parking but it’s typically a lot less than a monthly garage spot would be.
When a lot of people talk about “free” parking I think they’re mostly lumping those in. Resident parking spots are certainly an oversubscribed common resource in many areas.
Everyone pays, either in time or money. The point is to decouple this from the payment for housing. If every apartment comes with two spots, why not have two cars (and drive more). If you have to pay a market rate (in time or money) to park each car you may well decide to make due with one car.
And the usual answer is eliminating free on-street parking. Developers will build whatever parking is cost-effective to build. Residents will need a permit for on-street parking, while visitors pay hourly rates. The prices vary by area, and they are set to a level that ensures a high occupancy rate, while people with a permit can still find a space near their homes.
What usually happens is that parking will be cheap enough to make dedicated parking structures commercially unviable. But even that cheap enough price will be too expensive for some people that they decide to get rid of their cars instead.
The market can't solve this because the housing developer wants to maximize profit. Building less parking allows them to squeeze in more units, thus more profit. So that's what they will do.
In an idealized world people would be entirely rational and not go live there if they need a car and can't park. But us people tend to push off problems, so it is common to think we'll move in and just park on the street somewhere, we'll figure it out. Except everyone in that development was thinking the same thing and when everyone moves in after the units get built, there's a big problem.
Having lived in such an area, it is obvious how unpleasant it becomes for everyone. Fistfights over parking, keyed cars, etc. But the builder took their profit so it was a win for them.
Not really. Near me that added meters so you pay for parking in front of the commercial areas. So people just drive up the block and park in the resedential areas which have no meters.
Paying for parking only works in places where you park temporarily and then move elsewhere, you can't exactly add meters in front of people's homes, unless, I suppose every house had off street parking?
I guess that's one way to have a city. Something similar is done by making overnight street parking illegal - I've seen that a lot, and then yes, the free market will make sure every house has its own parking area.
It's hard on visitors though.
Parking minimums are actually the least bad option from all of those.
Most places I've lived (not many) use zones for residential parking so a residential parking permit gives you no right to park a car in residential spaces outside your neighborhood.
Regardless, the consideration needs to take into account that requiring parking minimums increases cost to develop and decreases density, making it harder to live without a car. If it were a given that everyone has a car and drives it everywhere, I think indeed it probably does make sense to have (reasonable) parking minimums and I think it's clear that parking minimums do certainly make for ample parking. But in today's world where we are trying to shift away from car primacy in cities because they are dangerous and polluting and scale poorly, the goal shifts from "make there be enough parking" to "make it easy to get around the city" and for that goal, parking minimums have proven to be ineffective.
> Paying for parking only works in places where you park temporarily and then move elsewhere, you can't exactly add meters in front of people's homes, unless, I suppose every house had off street parking?
Serious question: why not?
I loathe the idea, personally, of yet more rent, but I'm having a tough time refuting the parent comment myself.
You're trying to avoid people using on-street because they didn't build off-street. But even if a minimum build is required, it seems to me that people would still prefer utilizing the on-street parking? As it is free, assuming the landlord charges for off-street, and why wouldn't the landlord charge? (Mine does; that's a $70/mo incentive to park on-street. Our garage is, unsurprisingly, mostly empty.)
(The whole thing seems horridly regressive, given the requirement for transportation; even though I'm technically in a major megalopolis, I cannot cut a car from my life for a variety of reasons which amount to "sufficient services are not accessible by public transit". I prefer public transit, when I can, but I cannot 100% of the time.
Also, sometimes travel, and renting is absurdly expensive.)
(Like, ultimately, the landlord is never going to utilize the build spaces fully if he believes that an increased price will fetch more $ overall, even if some spaces are then unused. Or worse, we get price discrimination, possibly due to information asymmetry in the pricing. Those forced out are probably then using on-street.)
I anticipated your question and answered it in my next paragraph. You can do it if you want, but you have to start the city that way. Instead of money you do it with overnight parking restrictions, it ends up the same.
Personally I find it to be a worse solution. And the rest of your message talks about some of the reasons why.
This is why the residential areas should also not have free parking. If you want to privatize a public resource, space in this case, you should pay an appropriate price to reflect the fact that you are doing so.
Space which gets more expensive with density right? The density that you're trying to increase. This just makes it illegal for poor to middle class people to have cars.
No, it just means that if you don't need parking you don't have to pay for it. And reducing parking requirements makes it easier to not need a car (and thereby parking) which is great if you're poor to middle class.
Because market is unlikely to be efficient. Or cost will be higher. Such as people parking on sidewalks or any green space. And likely cost of housing won't be any lower effectively...
Then again, why should there be sidewalks. Lot of money to be saved if those were up to free market as well...
I live in Australia, like America, it's a really big place that doesn't have the European benefit of having the roman empire putting down footpaths everywhere for a thousand years.
Cars are required. But I do agree, I think the trend should be towards smaller cars. And I try and live my values, I share 1 hatchback with my wife.
That's a more understandable way of living: not requiring a car for most of the time, share one if needed, demand better public transit infrastructure to not depend on a car for most of your day-to-day trips.
As much as Australia and the USA are big, most of the trips are very much under 30-50 km of distance, those are easily covered by intercity trains, and in cities mass transit is a much more efficient way to transport people inside of their borders. If there's need to go somewhere unpopulated in a large landmass where this system doesn't cover, I'm totally ok with cars, the issue comes from not having other options that reduce the car dependency.
Comparatively to the total population, in the USA, Canada or Australia very few people are using a car most of their time to cover large distances in swaths of undeveloped land, being a big place correlates to almost never going to the very far off unconnected places exactly because it's so far away and inconvenient.
Cars are required due to urban development policies and lack of passenger rail connecting cities, not because the place is big, in Australia most of the population live relatively close by [0].
I also live in Australia, I'm one of the minority that doesn't live in an urban sprawl ala Brisbane | Sydney | Melbourne | Adelaide | Perth like the overwhelming majority of the Australian population.
"It's a really big place" isn't the reason for many having cars in Australia, it's largely due to cities that sprawl beyond the reach and capacity of public transport, it's due to a love of long weekend trips outside cities, etc.
Smaller cars and better use of suburban space would go a long way to reducing Australian personal use of fossil fuels .. which is a relativel small part of the larger use of fossil fuels here.
The best place, to me, was the largest remnant of this plateau that dates from the Tertiary age. It’s kind of rolling country, not flat, and when you get to the edge of it you find these ravines that cut very steeply in to cliff-like drop-offs and there was even a waterfall there... That summer there were too many people around my cabin so I decided I needed some peace. I went back to the plateau and when I got there I found they had put a road right through the middle of it... You just can’t imagine how upset I was.
It's not so easy to go out in nature and breath when every piece of land is changed to a gigantic concrete and steel wasteland just so people can use 2-3 ton 2x5 metres boxes to get somewhere while somewhere worth getting to gets farer and farer away from where they live.
Problem: I want to live somewhere where I have space around my house, and I'm not very close to the neightbor. Car: I have that solved.
How did the car cause this problem? And what's the unmeasured cost?
I want space to live, I don't want to be packed in close to the neighbors. So any alternate solution you offer must also solve that.
PS. Please don't give me "strongtowns" links claiming that suburbs cost the city more, because it's not actually true. Strongtowns lives in a weird world where only expensive services "count" as providing value to a city. Places with manufacturing or farming are unimportant to them because those things don't generate as much in tax.
They should rename themselves "Strong Towns Weak County" to be more accurate with their mission statment. (One of their delcared goals is less interstates.)
There are are significant externalised costs with how you want to live. So you have preference to live in the country, but would you be willing to bear the actual cost? E.g. the cost of infrastructure like roads, electricity, hospitals, schools etc. is much more expensive per user in the country and is thus cross subsidised by urban tax payers.
So the question becomes how much would you be willing to pay for your preferences or why should others pay for your preferences.
> is much more expensive per user in the country and is thus cross subsidised by urban tax payers.
This is not actually true. The cost is a wash because the roads last longer.
And the urban tax payer plans to eat what exactly, and buy what goods, without the suburbs? Just because the tax value of what suburbs make is lower that doesn't make it less needed.
> > is much more expensive per user in the country and is thus cross subsidised by urban tax payers.
> This is not actually true. The cost is a wash because the roads last longer.
Is that's why providers are falling all over themselves to build fiber infrastructure in the country? Ah no they don't, instead the government created big subsidy programs to get rural areas connected. You seriously don't understand how infrastructure is build finances and ages if you think the cost of infrastructure in the country is the same as in urban areas. And I'm not even talking about infrastructure like hospitals that require staff to run.
> And the urban tax payer plans to eat what exactly, and buy what goods, without the suburbs? Just because the tax value of what suburbs make is lower that doesn't make it less needed.
Since when is food grown in the suburbs? Also just because food is grown in the country does not mean that lots of people need to live there.
You keep randomly switching between suburban and rural as it suits your argument.
Fiber infrastructure is well available in suburbs, much earlier than in cities because it's much cheaper in the suburbs.
And rural areas grow food, and depend on the nearby suburbs for services.
> Also just because food is grown in the country does not mean that lots of people need to live there.
Sounds miserable for the "sacrificial" people who you'll put there to grow food for you. Do you not realize that if you want people to live there, you need nearby suburbs and small cities?
Strongtowns actually want fewer interstates, to really make sure farm dwellers have no opportunity to go anywhere else.
> Strongtowns lives in a weird world where only expensive services "count" as providing value to a city. Places with manufacturing or farming are unimportant to them because those things don't generate as much in tax.
I originally found their arguments convincing but what you wrote made me reconsider. Could you elaborate?
Strongtowns does all their calculation on the worth of a city/town etc based on how much tax revenue it produces.
Cities are expensive places to live and mostly produce services with high taxes. The city costs a lot, but also generates a lot. And cities are necessary, because we do need those services. (Programmers, accountants, lawyers, doctors.)
But it completely ignores that a suburb where the locals commute to a warehouse or a factory also provides value. The tax value is lower - so in strongtowns' mind it's worthless.
But I hope it's obvious that without those employees all the cities would have nothing to eat (all those packaged foods are made somewhere after all) and nothing to buy (cities for the most part manufacture nothing).
You need both types of places in the world, and I think people should be allowed to live where they chose without people pressuring them to move to a city.
They make an "exception" for rural areas because farms are an obvious need, but they want the farms to exist without any cities nearby. The farmers are expected to travel to the nearest large city when they need city services (obviously not something they can do very often).
They also have a goal of less interstates - they don't want people driving around a lot. How they expect to ship things I'm not sure (trains maybe?) But also how they expect people to get any enjoyment out of life I'm also not sure. Just stay put in your area and do your job I suppose?
There's so much more to criticize:
He's the usual city growth plan: The edge of a city becomes those "hated" suburbs. As the suburb fills up with people it becomes worth it to subdivide lots and build more houses, over time it becomes dense like a city.
They instead want to skip the suburb step and just directly build very densely on the edge of the city.
Their calculations on roads:
Suburbs need way more roads per person. But suburban roads cost a lot less per mile - like way less. Suburban roads also last much much longer (far less traffic). The net result is that the cost per person is basically a wash. They ignore that though.
They don't like having to run long water pipes to the houses, but the costs of those water pipes is minimal over time, they last 100 years. It's just not an expensive enough problem to worry about.
Police have a larger area to deal with, but there's also less crime to deal with.
> They don't like having to run long water pipes to the houses, but the costs of those water pipes is minimal over time, they last 100 years. It's just not an expensive enough problem to worry about.
My reading of their materials was that according to them the pipes last 30 years and taxes from the entire county are not enough to cover for that, but I have no way to falsify that claim.
Anyway, in my corner of the world people have been moving to the suburbs as well, but the reason is that the same credit score allows one to get approximately twice the living space in the suburbs, which sounds like a lot until it's mentioned that we're talking about 112m2 or 1200sq ft houses.
I mean no disrespect by this, but I get the feeling that they're catering to a specific demographic and I'm not in it.
> PS. Please don't give me "strongtowns" links claiming that suburbs cost the city more, because it's not actually true. Strongtowns lives in a weird world where only expensive services "count" as providing value to a city
How is it not actually true?
Suburbs are not providing value to their nearby cities, they are not factories nor agricultural lands, they are low density housing which require expensive public services like sewers, roads, water pipes, electricity, fire department coverage, policing, while not having enough population density to actually sustain the costs of maintaining the infrastructure.
Can you provide data that shows that most people living in the suburbs work in the suburbs themselves? Hmm?
If they work in the cities it's just the same argument from Strong Towns, live in higher density housing, with services and shops nearby so their way of living is sustainable and not a drain to the city's coffers to provide infrastructure where it's not sustainable.
I’m not in a position to look things up right now but around Boston, while a substantial number of people commute into the city, a lot of people work in suburban office parks especially from the less close-in suburbs. I’ve lived in an exurban small town for about 25 years and I only worked downtown for about 18 months. Heck, 15 years or so ago there was essentially no major tech company in the city proper any longer. All the computer companies were out by Routes 128 or 495.
ADDED; And my experience over a few decades is that almost no one at those companies lived in the city.
It appears that all around the world, whatever we do, we just can't coax people to have children in dense city centres.
In extreme cases like in South Korea, where Seoul is basically cannibalizing the rest of the country, it leads to a demographic collapse. I think this is a point that is not mentioned often enough.
Suburbs here in Stockholm are a very different beast than suburbs in the USA.
I live in a suburb of Stockholm and lived in a few others previously, the model for a lot of them is to have a small centre with shops, grocers, healthcare, a mass transit station, sports facilities, culture centres, with dense housing around the station with increasingly less dense housing towards the edges of the suburb: smaller apartment buildings, followed by row houses and villas towards the edges. This is much more sustainable model than American suburbia, to the point I've never required a car to live here.
In the USA, Canada, Australia and other extremely car-dependent societies this is not the model for a suburb.
> manufacturing or farming are unimportant to them
Farms aren’t typically in the suburbs. (Manufacturing, yes.)
Rural life has historically been one of deep poverty or aristocracy. Suburban living is different, but we’re seeing costs being redistributed to them. Which is fine. I live in a rural suburb, and it should be expensive. It’s a luxury. I probably quintupled my carbon footprint by choosing it. But that’s the trade off.
> any alternate solution you offer must also solve that
More money. I want an aircraft hangar and a horse, that doesn’t mean society owes me one. If you want isolation and access to civilisation, you pay more money. (Hermitting is the alternative.)
> Farms aren’t typically in the suburbs. (Manufacturing, yes.)
Farms are actually usually adjacent to suburbs. As the suburb ends it switches to farm land. So when the farmer wants services he doesn't need to go in the city, he can go to the suburb. He can't go to the city anyway, there's nowhere to park his car, and he has no other way to get there.
> I live in a rural suburb, and it should be expensive. It’s a luxury. I probably quintupled my carbon footprint by choosing it
Suburbs are cheaper than cities. Just look at the salaries of the people that live in both places. And your carbon footprint is probably lower than a city, cities are very wasteful places because they can be: People have more money there.
A small example: In a suburb you buy in bulk and store it. In a city you buy for a day or two. The carbon footprint difference between those two options is huge, it takes an enormous amount of energy to keep the city constantly stocked with retail products because you have to distribute small quantities of everything to so many places, as opposed to a central area with bulk quantities.
I've been in both places. In a city you can buy paper plates for so cheap (relative to your salary) it simply doesn't make sense to have real dishes - you don't have room for them anyway. People waste enormous amounts of goods (relative to suburbs) because the cost of "things" is very low relative to their salary.
They are, but they are not doing it very often. You go to a Costco type store monthly, not daily. And you combine trips and basically have a monthly "shopping day".
You end up using less energy than your city dwelling friends.
And your carbon footprint is probably lower than a city, cities are very wasteful places because they can be.
This (and basically your entire argument) is flat out incorrect. A McMansion uses vastly more energy to build and maintain than an apartment, and apartment dwellers in a city don't need to drive to work, to school, to the shops, for a night out, etc.
Nice study - but it forgets to "bill" urban areas for the energy used by mass transit, and it doesn't bill them for the extra energy it takes to provide services to them. Shipping things to urban areas whether to a house or a store takes far more energy than to a suburban area because you have to ship smaller quantities more frequently (due to lack of storage).
But this study doesn't include that.
It's really not hard to check for yourself: Compare the prices of some item in an urban store vs a suburban store - it's way cheaper out of the city. That extra cost is there because of the extra energy it takes.
No, farmers aren't living in Houston, Phoenix or Sunnyvale.
Surburbs abut cities. Our farms are in rural territory, closer to industry (specifically: logistics) than cul-de-sacs.
> Suburbs are cheaper than cities. Just look at the salaries of the people that live in both places
Look at disposable incomes. Cities have higher-earning, more-productive and lower (on average) cost-paying residents. (Slimmer ones, too [1].) What masks that is the variance and split housing. Go to a suburb, and the dispoable income is around a Ruby Tuesday's tab because it's an inefficient mode of living.
> In a city you can buy paper plates for so cheap (relative to your salary) it simply doesn't make sense to have real dishes
I've rarely eaten a meal on a paper plate in a city. Only in suburbs, frequently at get-togethers. It's tedious to go out and buy bulky crap, so you buy durable dishes once.
> In a suburb you buy in bulk and store it
See above about the incentives around purchasing disposable crap wastefully, as well as unhealthy processed (albeit shelf stable) foods.
Again, I agree with rural/suburban living. But it should be expensive. With most of the world now in cities, we'll see those costs increasingly redistributed. (Exhibit A: congestion pricing.)
Some. My exurban town outside of Boston has orchards and farms. Not big industrial farms obviously but farms. My neighbor literally right next door has 100 tree apple orchard and a horse pasture. There’s a farm stand a mile down the road where they grow vegetables. This is about an hour west of Boston. A bit beyond classic suburbs but not by that much.
> No, farmers aren't living in Houston, Phoenix or Sunnyvale.
That's not even true. They live right next to it. I pulled up Houston on Google Maps and there was an ad for "Dewberry Farm" right there.
The center of Houston is dense city, surrounded by a ring of suburb, surrounded by a ring of farms.
Are we not looking at the same map?
(Phoenix doesn't count, it's a desert, no farms there.)
A get together doesn't count in terms of dishes, I'm talking about day to day. Every person I've visited in a city uses far more disposable stuff that the suburban person I've visited.
I've lived in all kinds of places (not farm though), and I've found suburban to be the least wasteful, and cities to be the most wasteful. Rural is hard to categorize - they tend to be more self sufficient.
It seems like a poor faith argument to refuse to address people's attempts to offer differing views (and data).
Among many, many, many "unmeasured" costs is the fact you're stealing people's freedom. I want to live in a flat above a shop in a 5 story building with no car and you propose making it effectively illegal to build such a structure because it's infeasible unless you tear down neighbouring buildings (ruining the neighbourhood in the process) to build parking.
Quite the opposite, I want people to be able to live wherever they like and stop pressuring them to move to cities. Where do you see me advocate anything else?
I am pretty selfish even though I haven't had a car for years...
That said, as a regular user of public transport in two Czech cities that have excellent and well-funded public transport (Prague and Ostrava), you probably don't realize many of the downsides.
Public transport works best for mass movements of people from point A to point B. E.g. young students going from dormitories to lectures at 8 AM, or many people traveling from a big residential neighbourhood to an industrial plant that employs them. The student thing is still real, the industrial plant isn't anymore. When I was a kid in the 1980s, full buses of workers went to steelworks at the outskirts of Ostrava, nowadays these are either gone, or have automatized to the degree that they employ 5 per cent of the people as before.
There is a lot of tangential relations that public transport doesn't service well. A teacher I know teaches in one village and lives in another. By car, that is 15 minutes. By public transport, some 90 and the route is physically almost three times as long. So selfish of her not to take it, eh! /s
And I can already hear all the good advice: she should "just" find a job closer to her home. Not easy if schools are closing down for lack of kids, and she is a specialist (singing).
Or: the public transport authority should "just" introduce more buses, even if they are inefficient in certain routes. It should "just" pay bus drivers much more to attract some (there is a shortage). Not easy if already a third of the municipal budget goes towards public transport, taxes in CZ are not exactly low and the population is growing older, thus losing its tax base. The costs are very real and a small country with an expensive healthcare system, an expensive pension system and now threatened with Russia cannot really shower much more money on everything at once.
Public transport may yet gain some strength from fully autonomous driving, IF it is ever solved. Unwillingness of people to get into the driver career (the money isn't that bad, but getting up at 4 am and being responsible for dozens of human lives on board are two major negative factors) is a big factor in its overall economy.
But it is, at best, a significant help. Not a panacea. Our lives have grown too disorganized for that. Gone are the days when everyone started their work at 6 am at the sound of the factory whistle and lived in the same worker's colony. (Some of which are still extant here in Ostrava, and now protected as cultural heritage.)
I think you make a lot of good points. However, I'm not sure a shortage of bus drivers can be just down to unwillingness. As far as non-office jobs go, I'd imagine it's on the comfortable end: a heated/air-conditioned space, a moderate amount of human contact, respect in the community - nothing dramatic, but not rock-bottom in the grand scheme of things. Factories have a reputation for having a more 'adversarial' culture where I live, and outdoors jobs like working for the post involve trogging off in the driving rain occasionally.
The negatives in turn: getting up at 4AM - wouldn't the preference for early hours and late hours even out over a whole city's population? I know some people who get up really early by choice, and I personally like it at night. Being responsible for dozens of human lives - that can be worn as a badge of pride. Of course you're right that it might put people off, but you just have to look to airline pilots to see an example of a culture where responsibility is held in high esteem.
Do I have a theory of my own? I don't think I can answer it, but I'd guess training and logistics might have something to do with the driver shortage problem. In Czechia, do you have to pay for your own qualification before you get the job? Also, where I am, bus operators will usually only employ people who already live near a depot - that excludes many potential drivers.
The contact with passengers is sometimes very unpleasant (basically in every bigger city there is a neighbourhood where drivers don't like to serve, given the risk of being robbed or at least spat and cursed upon)...
Consistent getting up at 4 AM would be probably better than the irregular shifts that are the norm. You get up at 4 AM three days in a row, then you only have duties in the afternoon, because someone fell ill etc.
Driver shortage problem is pretty much across Europe, with poorer countries and cities being somewhat, but not crushingly worse off. I sort-of doubt that there is some low-hanging fruit waiting to be picked. This is a highly diverse market, with thousands of public and private sphere organizations competing for workforce across the entire EU, and having quite a lot of latitude to provide better conditions. Still, the average age of an extant bus driver is slowly creeping into the late 50s and early 60s. The disinterest of the younger generation in a driving career is palpable.
I take it you live in an area with good public transportation, or maybe you work from home and have shops within cycling distance of where you live.
Workers need to get to work, and there are tradeoffs. Unless you want your local sewage treatment plant, the fat rendering factory, or the refuse landfill within walking distance of your house.
> Workers need to get to work, and there are tradeoffs.
I think the GP's point was that there _are_ tradeoffs, _and_ that we as a society ignore and avoid actually measuring and confronting the actual harms this way of life brings (possibly because they are actually standing and overwhelming to face; possibly because the problems seem depressingly intractable; possibly because of the effects of propaganda imposed on us our whole lives by big oil and the auto industry).
Like GP said, problems caused by cars. Why isn't there good public transport? Because of cars. Why aren't there shops within cycling distance? Because of cars. Why do people live so far away from work? Because of cars. Etc etc.
Here's one of sewage treatment plants in Copenhagen [1]. As you can see, there are bus stops about 3 minutes walk away on Stamholmen, and Avedøre Station is about 10 minutes walk (or a brief cycle) north.
Workers can get to work without needing cars. Buses and trains exist. The reason why they don't in many cities is because people in the 40s and 50s collectively decided that cars are better, entire cities were designed around them, and designing cities for cars complicates public transportation planning.
> The only problems cars solve are problems caused by cars.
Can you explain? If I want to visit a friend 60mi away and I choose to drive my car, how did my car cause the problem?
An argument could be made that if cars didn't exist then I wouldn't know that friend at all, which I suppose does in a sense mean that a car caused my problem, but I don't think that's a great argument.
> The convenience you get comes at an unmeasured cost.
Are you referring to city planning, climate change, or something else?
> Car owners are selfish.
Everyone, by necessity, is selfish. For example, every month I have the choice of paying my rent or donating that same money to charity. I (very understandably) choose to pay my rent, which is a selfish decision. This isn't a bad thing. The key is to not be overly selfish.
Owning a car is not overly selfish, though I'd like to know why you think it is.
> The only problems cars solve are problems caused by cars.
This is obviously not true. Proof by contradiction: Assume this is true. Thus, when cars were invented, nobody would've been interested since they don't solve any problem anyone had at the time.
But we know that's not the case. Cars had widespread adoption because turns out convenient transportation is a huge need for most people.
If you want to successfully advocate against cars you need to acknowledge the problems they solve and promote pragmatic alternatives that fill the same need for most people.
I think everyone should watch the Not Just Bikes YouTube channel especially their series on Strong Towns [1]. It shows just how bad parking mandates are and just how bad American car centric city planning is. As they article pointed out, you need such vanguard cities to pave the way for better cities, with less parking and fingers crossed, fewer cars.
Parking takes space. Outdoor parking keeps everything far apart, less walkable and unpleasant for anyone outside of a car. It also costs a fuck ton of money and is environmentally damaging.
If you want good parking you gotta be willing to shell out its real unsubsidized cost of $10-$20/h in a multilevel garage.
GP was probably referring to the value of the land. There are very few places in the world where land is rented for ~$1500/sqm/month. I don't live in the US but took San Francisco as a reference for an expensive city in terms of land and parking.
A quick look on real estate websites [0] suggests you can buy land in San Francisco quite central for $10k-15k per square meter.
If we take the value of the service, parking prices for San Francisco [1] are as high as $7/h and as low as free (at night).
Unless I looked in all the wrong places or my math needs triple checking, the numbers you're very adamant about look wildly misaligned with reality even for peaks, let alone for average or median. That doesn't bode well at all for any opinion based on them. And it encourages the other side of the conversation to come with equally unrealistic claims about the cost and impact of "my biking lanes".
In your top comment you recommended the Not Just Bikes YouTube channel. But it either didn't correct these views or worse, it encouraged them. Not a stellar recommendation.
[0] Zillow but the URL us ungodly long. Easy to check it by yourself though.
Fair enough but I don't need to tell you that if SF is "too cheap" and you have to pick the highest prices on the continent to make your point about general prices, you're making the wrong point.
Not even getting into the whole "subsidized parking" gem, as if the normal price is "peak price" or else it's subsidized. This kind of ludicrous statements undermine any point one might try to make along side. Curious about their opinion on their own heavily subsidized bicycle, down from the normal price of $500k [0].
Bonus, there are more places to park for under $10/h in Manhattan than there are for $50 [1].
The point of view is that even garage parking prices are depressed due to wide availability of on-street parking and parking space mandates in the country. Those serve, effectively, as subsidies for car owners. All that public space is wasted and made available for free to car owners, and the burden is shared by the rest of society. All that is just talking real estate - don’t forget the high environmental impact of concrete/asphalt, water runoff/evaporation issues, urban heat islands due to taking up greenery etc., higher incidence of accidents due to view obstruction and every other health and environmental issue that comes with encouragement of cars.
I don’t know exactly what a fully unsubsidized cost of parking is, but I’m not using hyperbole. It’s closer to $10-20/h than the ridiculously low prices people have grown accustomed to.
I live in Europe. If I even tried to commute with my children to music school using public transport it would take me additional 3 hours a week.
That's why I am asking, is really car equal to cancer? Or is it this "I cannot see other people's needs if they are different than mine" or maybe "I will use law to ban other people from thinking otherwise" attitude?
Wouldn't it be nice if the only other car traffic on the road was there because of use cases similarly niche to yours? Public transportation is great at eliminating the need for using a car for completely overkill trips like commuting and basic shopping.
Having said that, given good cycling infrastructure, chances are you could either bring your kids along on a cargo bike [1] or they could just ride there themselves [2].
In North America, motorists generally believe that any place not accessible by car is inaccessible. When you have a culture so deeply attached to driving, it reinforces the need to drive. This is why I call it a cancer. Motorists cannot live in a vacuum while also demanding that they be able to drive everywhere out of "convenience". That, and the fact that cars produce a huge number of carcinogens for people living in cities.
Here's how the needs of drivers usually work: I want to live outside the city center, therefore I create the need to drive because I chose to live away from transit. This problem is mostly self inflicted out of a privilege of choice. So I am not particularly empathetic towards it.
As far as using laws to ban natural human behaviour, what are your thoughts on: jaywalking? pedestrians crossing against red lights when there is no car traffic in sight? people walking on the shoulder of highways (sometimes the only infrastructure available)? Mandatory use of sidewalks? Parking minimums when building a house? There are laws governing all of these in the US (and some apply in Europe too) which ban the free movement of pedestrians. If cars are so dangerous that we have to enforce laws around simply walking in order to maintain safety, there's something wrong.
>In North America, motorists generally believe that any place not accessible by car is inaccessible.
This sounds more like a projection than actual fact. Do you seriously believe that motorists generally believe that Hawaii is inaccessible? Puerto Rico? England? Japan? China? Or do you mean on a smaller scale - ski slope tops, trails, parks, and other pedistrian-only areas in the cities? How did you figure this?
Mostly referring to ie. public access parks that are closed to cars, streets that have been closed to traffic, temporary bike lanes. Drivers feel as though these are punishments foisted upon them simply because they exist and do not serve them as motorists.
These are my observations as a pedestrian, cyclist, and motorist.
I have never seen motorist expressing these feelings. On the other hand, cyclists complain about lack of bike lanes all the time (e.g. on this very site), they become livid when the existing bike lane is removed. They are actually quite upset when the existing lane is merely obstructed by, say, a parked car. Projection, as I suspected.
Because good parking encourages car use, increased car use encourages wide, high-speed roads, and bike routes are impediments to the development of wide, high-speed roads.
I think everyone should be wary that this channel is extremely biased and hands out rose tinted glasses for a lot of things. There are better channels out there if you truly care about planning. This one is just an emotional mess at most times.
Nope, I disagree. It should be the first thing you watch before you move onto more technical videos. The videos are pleasant to watch and are made by a Canadian who moved to the Netherlands. They've got excellent A and B roll footage that truly shows you the contrast between American/Canadian and European cities.
And it should be emotional because a commute isn't just about efficiency. One spends a sizeable portion of their life commuting. The human aspect of it can't be ignored. The depressing feeling you get while standing in the middle of a Walmart parking lot is real. At least it was for me.
FWIW, Chris Arnade of "Walking the World" fame has a few things to say about planning in the Netherlands:
There is almost a complete lack of anything that feels commercial mixing with anything that feels residential, beyond especially designated spaces, usually the very center of town.
These suburbs are not conventionally pretty, certainly not in the way downtown Amsterdam, Haarlem, or Leiden are. They are both monotonous and discordant, because the Dutch have perfected an architectural style of varied repetition. They will build twenty to fifty of the exact same weird thing, then next door build a hundred to two hundred of a very different weird thing.
While they can have very clashing outward appearances, they are united in a utilitarian practicality with a focus on providing almost everyone an elementary apartment.
The result of this is that there are two very different urban Netherlands — the older downtowns, with exquisite row homes along canals, medieval churches, cafe-heavy central squares that are frozen into place by historical preservation, and jammed with tourists, and then there are the outer rings of bizarre Lego-like perfunctory two-story apartment complexes, with few if any shops, beyond an Aldi, a hair saloon, a weed store, and maybe a bike-repair stand.
I don't refute that things can be poorly designed in the Netherlands or in Europe in general. It is not a utopia. I'll give it a 6/10, okay on-average, can do better.
The thing is that US cities and suburbs are much worse. Let me quote the title of article
> Walking the Netherlands: From Amsterdam to The Hague
Is walking something you can do in the US except in some rare exceptions? There are suburbs in the US i.e. residential ONLY places where there aren't any side walks. And the closest grocery store may be 10-15 minutes away by car. Doesn't that feel suffocating to have a home but not be allowed to walk out on your own two feet?
> Is walking something you can do in the US except in some rare exceptions?
Depends on where you live
> And the closest grocery store may be 10-15 minutes away by car.
For some people, that's a feature and not a bug. Anecdote - I had a colleague who used to commute from nearby hills because he wanted a house where he can't even see his neighbors.
> Doesn't that feel suffocating to have a home but not be allowed to walk out on your own two feet?
Again, different strokes for different folks. There should be different kind of options catering to different tastes. You want density and walkable cities? Go live in NYC or Boston. You want complete rural wilderness where you don't have to see another fellow human being if you don't want to? There is Alaska or mountain West. You want a big house with a yard in a community where everyone is of the same class and all the daily needs are met (grocery, gas, schools, parks), while being close to a major city to tap into urban amenities (eg. airport)? Go live in a generic suburbia.
> Is walking something you can do in the US except in some rare exceptions?
Depends. Between kindergarten and eighth grade, I caught the school bus for part of sixth grade, otherwise walked or biked. Ninth grade on, I was where the schools were farther away, but I could walk to stores of various sorts.
I don't use a car much these days, though I get to work more by bus than by walking.
If the closest grocery store (essential need) is 10-15 minutes by car, why would anyone walk? That's a long distance to drive for a grocery store and you are no doubt located in quite a low density place to begin with. Infrastructure to walk makes no sense when cars are that much better. In places where your local grocery store is 15 minutes away, congestion (the main drawback of cars) doesn't exist.
Eh. The word I would use to describe these suburbs is bland. They're not particularly ugly, but there's nothing interesting about them either.
This, though:
>there are two very different urban Netherlands the older downtowns [...] jammed with tourists, and then there are the outer rings of bizarre Lego-like perfunctory two-story apartment complexes, with few if any shops, beyond an Aldi, a hair saloon, a weed store, and maybe a bike-repair stand."
is taken to such an extreme I would almost call it a lie. Firstly, there are a lot of beautiful inner cities (and villages) not inundated by tourists. Leiden, which he mentions and is one of the most beautiful cities in the Netherlands, sees very little tourists (I've lived there for 10 years). Secondly, I do not recognize his description of the outer rings at all. They may very well exist as described, but I don't know them. These suburbs are bland an boring, sure, but there's plenty of variety in building-types to be found and there usually are pleny of shops within walking/biking distance.
Not Just Bikes is a convincing advocacy channel. But just because you agree doesn't mean you should ignore that he is trying to convince you of a certain viewpoint. Specifically, urbanization is good, cars are bad (and unfun to drive), bikes are great.
Rewatch the videos, you'll note you can only enjoy many of the changes if you're an advid year round cyclist who lives in a flatish city with nice weather (and who doesn't need anything too far away, most of the time). Buses need roads. Not everyone can cycle, not even with (very, very expensive, even on the low end) ebikes.
I don't need to be convinced of their viewpoint, I live it. I live in another European country, in a city with over million people. I live midway between the middle of the city and the outskirts. Practially everything one needs is available within a 10 minute bike ride. The weather is atrocious sometimes but everyone deals with it by wearing a rain poncho. People who can't bike are on mobility scooters and e-wheelchairs (paid for by health insurance) who share the bike lane. Sometimes I'm too lazy and I take buses, trams, subways and trains which are ubiquitous. And I am not an avid cyclist, wish I was. My bike for me is a tool, a $150 second-hand tool.
Is that the same everywhere in the country or even the city? No. But it's common enough that you'll see parents carrying their kids around in cargo bikes practically anywhere in the country.
P.S. I was generalizing when I said everything's within a 10 minute bike ride to account for all people who live along the same radius as I do. For me personally, everything's available within a 5 minute *walk* - grocery stores, cafes, restaurants, bars, gym, park, playgrounds, kindergartens, schools, train station, doctor, dentist.
His channel is literally called not just bikes. He likes bikes, but is not a bike supremicist. He has videos talking about how driving is more pleasant in Amsterdam (true from my experience), he has videos about how awesome Swiss trains are, he has videos about how a walkable city is good for health.
Really his channel should be called “not just cars.” Bikes are just one option he likes as an alternative.
Nobody says they can and not everyone can drive either (:O). In fact, more people can cycle than drive, funny that.
> (very, very expensive, even on the low end) ebikes
Show me a calculation that results in ebikes being in any way expensive compared to a car. In any case, arguing about the expense of biking is absolutely hilarious when you can get a perfectly adequate commuter bike for $50.
Nobody's saying cycling is the miracle solution that works for every person in every situation, everywhere. What they are saying is transportation in dense cities must be efficient and the only way to achieve that is a combination of walkability, cyclability, and public transport. Oh, and you can just use a car if you'd like to, just prepare to pay for the burden you place on others by doing so.
I moved to the Netherlands for most of the reasons NJB did and it's hard not to get emotional when you're saying "I moved here so a driver wouldn't kill my daughters while they bike to school."
Because at the core of it, giving my kids freedom and independence and not having a driver kill them shouldn't require moving to a tiny country below sea level.
According to data from 2020, the Netherlands has 30 road fatalities per million inhabitants, slightly below the EU average of 42. For comparison, the USA (when all states are considered as a whole) has 117 fatalities per million inhabitants. I'm not sure where to look for per-state statistics.
Anecdotally, even though the Netherlands and my home country of the UK are just next to each other on the ranking of motor vehicle per capita (40th and 37th), during a stay in Limburg I felt that the difference was much more stark. I saw far fewer people driving than I would have done in an equivalent area of Britain. I wonder if that means that the average Dutchman is likely to have a car, but also uses it less frequently than car users in other countries. That might partly account for the low fatality rate.
> Anecdotally, even though the Netherlands and my home country of the UK...
Statistics paint a different picture.
"Mobility on Dutch roads has grown continuously since the 1950s and now exceeds 200 billion km travelled per year. With a population of 16.8 million people, this comes down to an average of 32 kilometres (20 mi) per person per day" [1]
Avg UK car mileage per day in 2022 was 18[2]. Given cars are fewer than people, per capita mileage driven will be even lower.
That is also reflect in safety stats. Netherlands has death rates of 3.8/100K people, 4.7/1B vehicle-km. For UK, those numbers are 2.9 and 3.8 respectively [3]. So Netherlands just seems to have a reputation divergent from the actual reality? (I mean, no one talks about how awesome UK is for biking or public transport).
He seems to have some sort of aggressive blindness to "why" these places aren't like the Netherlands. It helps sell the point and get people outraged. There are great points made but just reaches a level of absurdity by the end of the videos.
It is so weird when people describe the removal of regulation as a government conspiracy to control.
Single family homes and parking are not being banned. You can still build them in all of these zones. The difference is now you have a choice between building that or denser housing, you can choose the amount of parking to build.
If anything the single use suburbia is even more controlling, meant to keep captive suburban consumers at the teat of the chains in shopping malls, and the auto and oil corporations.
Is it impossible to you that removal (and addition) of legislation could form part of a coordinated thrust towards implementing certain other goals?
Every local government has plans to achieve sustainable development goals (SDGs). Did you put anyone choose/vote for this? You might cheer it, but were you given a choice? You were not. Most simply think this is fine and go along with the effective transfer of power from local government, to the UN. It is global government applied locally.
You could literally describe all representative government actions as a conspiracy this way. It’s so vague and baseless to be meaningless.
If anything, Seattle (one of the subjects of TFA) is in a state where the governor has been directly elected to three terms with larger margins each time, where one of his signature policies is dealing with climate change, and his largest base of support is the Seattle metropolitan area.
I doubt you were old enough to be around and voting for councillors pushing for parking minimums back in the 1950s. You were born into a lot of rules you never chose or voted for. But you happen to like these parking rules.
This article is about freeing you from having to build parking spaces even if you don't want to. This article is about restoring property rights and property freedom.
Yet you managed to take away the opposite, that the government forcing you to build parking spaces on your property is "freeing" somehow.
You are right, I suspect this triggered an allergic reaction to an adjacent topic, the "walkable cities" meme. Sounds innocent enough, the reality is that if you try to ban cars from cities (and there are nuances and trade-offs here), you
a) create a dependency on public transport, which you can then be denied eg during Covid
b) remove the basis of what makes business and having a family possible
essentially turning your city into an open-air museum, to be looked at by tourists (it is worth looking at).
Both points seem shallow and reactive rather than considered.
a) Roads can be closed just as easily during a pandemic, attempted coup or major government crisis. Dependency on roads necessitates a car - an enormously greater barrier of entry than the price of a subway, tram or bus ticket. Fewer citizens using public transport leads to a death spiral in which public transit is continually underinvested, becomes more expensive to build and maintain and eventually ghettoised into a small number of prestige projects and a much larger number of decaying and even dangerous services, serving only the poorest and most socially excluded citizens - as has happened in so many US citizens. The reverse is observably true in cities built around vibrant public transport networks - Berlin, Tokyo, Copenhagen, Singapore, Utrecht etc. These cities aren't constructed around one key piece of crumbling infrastructure (like the NYC subway), but coherent and growing networks of trains, buses, trams etc.
Reliance on a car also makes you much more vulnerable to economic shocks - be they rising oil prices or personal issues that deprive you of the ability to drive (accidents, health problems, criminal convictions etc). Your mobility within the city becomes locked to a large capital investment which can be taken away in numerous ways.
b) Clearly car free or low car cities - like the ones listed above - worldwide have thriving businesses and families. To suggest otherwise is simply orthogonal to reality. They're highly desired places to live. Perhaps you're conflating the US suburb's with 'business and having a family'? A city littered with playgrounds, safe walkable pavements and on street businesses (like say Berlin), offers a far safer environment for young children than a series of shopping districts separated by dangerous unpassable roads, or low density suburban mass housing served by Wallmart style megastores - lacking cultural facilities, access to exercise or community amenities (many small US cities and also most small to medium sized Irish towns, like the one in which I was unfortunate enough to grow up).
'Walkable cities' are literally just places where the city is constructed around the social, economic and environmental needs of its citizenry rather than anachronistic modernist utopian ideas of vast highways and infinities of commuters streaming into colossal towers.
I was responding to a comment that is supportive of strong cities etc.
Really, what I object to, is this unstated transfer of power, from governments to the UN. The UN decides policy, local government implements it - changing legislation etc as required. But who made the UN god? Why do all states across the world follow the same plans? Are you a 'stakeholder' in the decision/strategy process? You and I are not. It simply moves power to a level so that it is untouchable and unknowable. Voting already does nothing, because the folk we see already just implement what they are told.
Somehow traffic and parking is a political topic, where the left supports free market and deregulation, and the conservative right supports central planning, regulation and subsidies.
You can't take anything away from people. We get stuck in local optima ridiculously easily. You can give people ten improvements and they'll still find the one sacrifice and throw their toys out the pram.
Your comment is conspiratorial nonsense. Although I guess I should at least be happy it doesn't have any racism or homophobia or any claims of lizard people/aliens. Actually building enough housing stock so that people don't spend most of their salary on housing is a good thing as is nearby shopping and walking more. Surveillance isn't great but better housing policy has nothing to do with surveillance
Do you really think housing is cheaper? That people don't spend most of their salary on their tiny flat?
The whole thing is a wheeze to make people spend even more on (crappy) housing, energy etc, but to feel good doing so, cos they are saving the environment. It plays on the innate 'religious' impulse people seem to have, that of avoiding sins (pollution) as determined by priests (experts).
The world needs more walkable cities. What prevents more walkable cities form being built, is zoning laws, parking regulations, and industrialized housing production. Walkable cities is good for the economy, environment and people... in the long run. Too bad so few sees the long term business opportunity in building cities like this.
I see the confusion. I was not pushing to add parking minimums in places without them.
Rather I was pushing not to remove them in a place that already has them, because I'm against artificially forcing a city to change underneath people who are already there.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 255 ms ] threadHere's another article from Catie on some possibilities opening up in Oregon now that we did parking reform ourselves: https://www.sightline.org/2023/06/30/parking-mandates-are-va...
I was proud to speak in favor of my city's implementation of this when it went through city council.
Having an exception process seems like a very logical approach to rolling back parking mandates gradually. I've seen both massive lots with no cars (clearly an outdated mandate in effect) as well as brand new suburban neighborhoods inundated with packed street parking (clearly a miss by the builder). It feels to me like rolling these rules back thoughtfully will be important to avoid companies from dropping parking from new low income housing that may legitimately need it.
Meaning, if you are shopping around for housing, you can choose housing with more parking. Which means that to compete with it, housing with less parking will have to compete in other ways, like, say, lower prices. Which is more important than automobile storage in a lot of places with a housing shortage and the consequent skyrocketing prices.
I wrote up something using that corny professor and the rocks analogy: https://bendyimby.com/2022/05/11/cities-are-for-people/
I've started to notice that all the car problems are just in dense cities: Nowhere for kids to play, noise, lack of parking, cost, safety, etc etc.
None of those issues exist in suburbs and rural.
(PS. They don't need more parking just because they have larger units.)
Once the city is dense enough then it's all mass transit. If it's not dense you use cars and there is no trouble with them. It's those cities right in the middle that have all the problems.
Leave the density alone and let people move to whichever they like better.
Just be extra cautious about the medium density cities.
Suburbs are built on externalities.
Cars are not that expensive.
> A kid trying to get to a friend's house?
Hardly a problem - just bike there. Just how far apart do you think the houses are?
> Anyone trying to walk or bike anywhere?
It's wonderful!! Have you ever actually been in one? There's basically no traffic, you have lovely quiet streets.
> Traffic jams?
Non-existent.
> Car deaths and accidents?
Very very few, it's just not that dense, so the accident rates are dramatically lower.
> Architecture centered around parking lots?
That's cities, not suburbs.
> Runoff filled with tire and brake runoff?
Again, that's cities, not suburbs. Suburbs don't have much car traffic.
> Wildlife deaths and habitat destruction?
Almost none - the houses are embedded in nature.
> Climate change?
Cities cause much more of that.
> A massive military budget to ensure cheap oil prices?
Yah, that's not what it's for. And cheap energy is used for a lot more than transportation.
> Suburbs are built on externalities.
You talk like someone who's never actually lived in one.
That seems like a miss by the city planners, not the builder.
So parking mandates are also a form of (hidden) economic apartheid. If my city mandates say 2 spaces per apartment, it's intrinsically reducing housing stock for "poor people" - hence "more exclusive neighborhoods."
Which sounds good, except that the services needed (often done by the poor) get hard to supply.
Cynical me suggests that selective zoning creates 'pockets of poor' - but pragmatically me points out this is good for clustering car-alternatives making them more effective.
On balance I think it's a win - and frankly is good for everyone.
This book has a concise and very readable history of zoning in the US:
https://islandpress.org/books/arbitrary-lines
https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9780801479878/zone... has a deeper dive into the history of zoning here compared with other countries.
Quite a lot of lower income workers can't afford to commute by car. Breaking that "need" relation is the #1 priority for people trying to design lower-car cities.
Most of the new housing built may have been illegal under previous parking rules, but it doesn't logically follow that similar housing couldn't have been built without the parking rules change, just that it's cheaper to build without it.
The article/quotes acknowledge this,
> “It’s impossible, really, to tie a specific code change to changes in the market,” explained Brennan Staley, a strategic advisor for Seattle’s Office of Planning and Community Development. Other local regulations, housing prices, and international finance markets all play a part in the real estate market. Michael Hubner, who works on long range planning in Seattle, agreed: “It’s very difficult to point to a causal relationship.”
and also note that off street parking is still present in the majority of new housing
> In both cities, the majority of new buildings still included off-street parking voluntarily
Yes, you can build anything with an infinite budget. In practice, budgets aren't infinite and increasing costs means fewer projects will get built.
Cost is a very real and important constraint. You can't just throw more money at a problem if the problem is that you cannot profitably provide a good at a price that is affordable. You cannot change the price the market will bear, but you can cut your costs by lobbying your city government to cut parking minimums.
They simply found that you have have a bit less parking than what the code required if you implement it in a way where you need an exception - presumably to show that in this case you don't need it.
The code is a bit of a blunt instrument and giving some flexibility to it seems logical. Getting rid entirely of parking minimums does not.
Also nowhere in this do I see a survey of residents to see how they like living in these lower-parking homes. People might be very very annoyed, but just deal with it because they have no other good option.
(Or whatever scenario--don't get hung up on the details of that specific one. The general concern is that new construction may lean on a shared resource to keep its own costs down.)
Then someone says "Why should I pay for a parking spot or a garage? I'll just park on-street by my neighbor!"
That only works if a couple people do it. Once too many do it you have unhappy residents - they paid for their off-street spot but the other guy didn't!
[yes I realize that’s a change to 70+ years of urban design and can’t happen ovrrnight]
When a lot of people talk about “free” parking I think they’re mostly lumping those in. Resident parking spots are certainly an oversubscribed common resource in many areas.
What usually happens is that parking will be cheap enough to make dedicated parking structures commercially unviable. But even that cheap enough price will be too expensive for some people that they decide to get rid of their cars instead.
The market can't solve this because the housing developer wants to maximize profit. Building less parking allows them to squeeze in more units, thus more profit. So that's what they will do.
In an idealized world people would be entirely rational and not go live there if they need a car and can't park. But us people tend to push off problems, so it is common to think we'll move in and just park on the street somewhere, we'll figure it out. Except everyone in that development was thinking the same thing and when everyone moves in after the units get built, there's a big problem.
Having lived in such an area, it is obvious how unpleasant it becomes for everyone. Fistfights over parking, keyed cars, etc. But the builder took their profit so it was a win for them.
Parking minimums are a reaction to this problem.
It's a tragedy of the commons issue, which is something the free market is known not to be able to handle.
Paying for parking only works in places where you park temporarily and then move elsewhere, you can't exactly add meters in front of people's homes, unless, I suppose every house had off street parking?
I guess that's one way to have a city. Something similar is done by making overnight street parking illegal - I've seen that a lot, and then yes, the free market will make sure every house has its own parking area.
It's hard on visitors though.
Parking minimums are actually the least bad option from all of those.
Regardless, the consideration needs to take into account that requiring parking minimums increases cost to develop and decreases density, making it harder to live without a car. If it were a given that everyone has a car and drives it everywhere, I think indeed it probably does make sense to have (reasonable) parking minimums and I think it's clear that parking minimums do certainly make for ample parking. But in today's world where we are trying to shift away from car primacy in cities because they are dangerous and polluting and scale poorly, the goal shifts from "make there be enough parking" to "make it easy to get around the city" and for that goal, parking minimums have proven to be ineffective.
Serious question: why not?
I loathe the idea, personally, of yet more rent, but I'm having a tough time refuting the parent comment myself.
You're trying to avoid people using on-street because they didn't build off-street. But even if a minimum build is required, it seems to me that people would still prefer utilizing the on-street parking? As it is free, assuming the landlord charges for off-street, and why wouldn't the landlord charge? (Mine does; that's a $70/mo incentive to park on-street. Our garage is, unsurprisingly, mostly empty.)
(The whole thing seems horridly regressive, given the requirement for transportation; even though I'm technically in a major megalopolis, I cannot cut a car from my life for a variety of reasons which amount to "sufficient services are not accessible by public transit". I prefer public transit, when I can, but I cannot 100% of the time.
Also, sometimes travel, and renting is absurdly expensive.)
(Like, ultimately, the landlord is never going to utilize the build spaces fully if he believes that an increased price will fetch more $ overall, even if some spaces are then unused. Or worse, we get price discrimination, possibly due to information asymmetry in the pricing. Those forced out are probably then using on-street.)
I anticipated your question and answered it in my next paragraph. You can do it if you want, but you have to start the city that way. Instead of money you do it with overnight parking restrictions, it ends up the same.
Personally I find it to be a worse solution. And the rest of your message talks about some of the reasons why.
Parking minimums are just better.
Then again, why should there be sidewalks. Lot of money to be saved if those were up to free market as well...
Car ownership is objectively, measurably bad. Are you pretending it's not?
https://www.strongsactown.org/2024/03/17/suburbs-drive-sacra...
Cars are required. But I do agree, I think the trend should be towards smaller cars. And I try and live my values, I share 1 hatchback with my wife.
As much as Australia and the USA are big, most of the trips are very much under 30-50 km of distance, those are easily covered by intercity trains, and in cities mass transit is a much more efficient way to transport people inside of their borders. If there's need to go somewhere unpopulated in a large landmass where this system doesn't cover, I'm totally ok with cars, the issue comes from not having other options that reduce the car dependency.
Comparatively to the total population, in the USA, Canada or Australia very few people are using a car most of their time to cover large distances in swaths of undeveloped land, being a big place correlates to almost never going to the very far off unconnected places exactly because it's so far away and inconvenient.
Cars are required due to urban development policies and lack of passenger rail connecting cities, not because the place is big, in Australia most of the population live relatively close by [0].
[0] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EW9YTD2XsAIFYNx?format=jpg&name=...
"It's a really big place" isn't the reason for many having cars in Australia, it's largely due to cities that sprawl beyond the reach and capacity of public transport, it's due to a love of long weekend trips outside cities, etc.
Smaller cars and better use of suburban space would go a long way to reducing Australian personal use of fossil fuels .. which is a relativel small part of the larger use of fossil fuels here.
How did the car cause this problem? And what's the unmeasured cost?
I want space to live, I don't want to be packed in close to the neighbors. So any alternate solution you offer must also solve that.
PS. Please don't give me "strongtowns" links claiming that suburbs cost the city more, because it's not actually true. Strongtowns lives in a weird world where only expensive services "count" as providing value to a city. Places with manufacturing or farming are unimportant to them because those things don't generate as much in tax.
They should rename themselves "Strong Towns Weak County" to be more accurate with their mission statment. (One of their delcared goals is less interstates.)
So the question becomes how much would you be willing to pay for your preferences or why should others pay for your preferences.
This is not actually true. The cost is a wash because the roads last longer.
And the urban tax payer plans to eat what exactly, and buy what goods, without the suburbs? Just because the tax value of what suburbs make is lower that doesn't make it less needed.
> This is not actually true. The cost is a wash because the roads last longer.
Is that's why providers are falling all over themselves to build fiber infrastructure in the country? Ah no they don't, instead the government created big subsidy programs to get rural areas connected. You seriously don't understand how infrastructure is build finances and ages if you think the cost of infrastructure in the country is the same as in urban areas. And I'm not even talking about infrastructure like hospitals that require staff to run.
> And the urban tax payer plans to eat what exactly, and buy what goods, without the suburbs? Just because the tax value of what suburbs make is lower that doesn't make it less needed.
Since when is food grown in the suburbs? Also just because food is grown in the country does not mean that lots of people need to live there.
Fiber infrastructure is well available in suburbs, much earlier than in cities because it's much cheaper in the suburbs.
And rural areas grow food, and depend on the nearby suburbs for services.
> Also just because food is grown in the country does not mean that lots of people need to live there.
Sounds miserable for the "sacrificial" people who you'll put there to grow food for you. Do you not realize that if you want people to live there, you need nearby suburbs and small cities?
Strongtowns actually want fewer interstates, to really make sure farm dwellers have no opportunity to go anywhere else.
I originally found their arguments convincing but what you wrote made me reconsider. Could you elaborate?
Cities are expensive places to live and mostly produce services with high taxes. The city costs a lot, but also generates a lot. And cities are necessary, because we do need those services. (Programmers, accountants, lawyers, doctors.)
But it completely ignores that a suburb where the locals commute to a warehouse or a factory also provides value. The tax value is lower - so in strongtowns' mind it's worthless.
But I hope it's obvious that without those employees all the cities would have nothing to eat (all those packaged foods are made somewhere after all) and nothing to buy (cities for the most part manufacture nothing).
You need both types of places in the world, and I think people should be allowed to live where they chose without people pressuring them to move to a city.
They make an "exception" for rural areas because farms are an obvious need, but they want the farms to exist without any cities nearby. The farmers are expected to travel to the nearest large city when they need city services (obviously not something they can do very often).
They also have a goal of less interstates - they don't want people driving around a lot. How they expect to ship things I'm not sure (trains maybe?) But also how they expect people to get any enjoyment out of life I'm also not sure. Just stay put in your area and do your job I suppose?
There's so much more to criticize:
He's the usual city growth plan: The edge of a city becomes those "hated" suburbs. As the suburb fills up with people it becomes worth it to subdivide lots and build more houses, over time it becomes dense like a city.
They instead want to skip the suburb step and just directly build very densely on the edge of the city.
Their calculations on roads:
Suburbs need way more roads per person. But suburban roads cost a lot less per mile - like way less. Suburban roads also last much much longer (far less traffic). The net result is that the cost per person is basically a wash. They ignore that though.
They don't like having to run long water pipes to the houses, but the costs of those water pipes is minimal over time, they last 100 years. It's just not an expensive enough problem to worry about.
Police have a larger area to deal with, but there's also less crime to deal with.
Anyway I'll stop here.
Have you got a citation on that? I was under the impression that most road wear is caused by heavy trucking and water/frost heaves.
> They don't like having to run long water pipes to the houses, but the costs of those water pipes is minimal over time, they last 100 years. It's just not an expensive enough problem to worry about.
My reading of their materials was that according to them the pipes last 30 years and taxes from the entire county are not enough to cover for that, but I have no way to falsify that claim.
Anyway, in my corner of the world people have been moving to the suburbs as well, but the reason is that the same credit score allows one to get approximately twice the living space in the suburbs, which sounds like a lot until it's mentioned that we're talking about 112m2 or 1200sq ft houses.
I mean no disrespect by this, but I get the feeling that they're catering to a specific demographic and I'm not in it.
How is it not actually true?
Suburbs are not providing value to their nearby cities, they are not factories nor agricultural lands, they are low density housing which require expensive public services like sewers, roads, water pipes, electricity, fire department coverage, policing, while not having enough population density to actually sustain the costs of maintaining the infrastructure.
That is simply not true. Suburbs is where all the manufacturing and warehousing is.
They are just wrong, but they'll never admit it.
If they work in the cities it's just the same argument from Strong Towns, live in higher density housing, with services and shops nearby so their way of living is sustainable and not a drain to the city's coffers to provide infrastructure where it's not sustainable.
ADDED; And my experience over a few decades is that almost no one at those companies lived in the city.
Industrial areas are very different from suburbs. The only thing they have in common is both exist outside the city center.
They're providing people:
https://www.demographic-research.org/volumes/vol21/31/21-31....
It appears that all around the world, whatever we do, we just can't coax people to have children in dense city centres.
In extreme cases like in South Korea, where Seoul is basically cannibalizing the rest of the country, it leads to a demographic collapse. I think this is a point that is not mentioned often enough.
I live in a suburb of Stockholm and lived in a few others previously, the model for a lot of them is to have a small centre with shops, grocers, healthcare, a mass transit station, sports facilities, culture centres, with dense housing around the station with increasingly less dense housing towards the edges of the suburb: smaller apartment buildings, followed by row houses and villas towards the edges. This is much more sustainable model than American suburbia, to the point I've never required a car to live here.
In the USA, Canada, Australia and other extremely car-dependent societies this is not the model for a suburb.
Farms aren’t typically in the suburbs. (Manufacturing, yes.)
Rural life has historically been one of deep poverty or aristocracy. Suburban living is different, but we’re seeing costs being redistributed to them. Which is fine. I live in a rural suburb, and it should be expensive. It’s a luxury. I probably quintupled my carbon footprint by choosing it. But that’s the trade off.
> any alternate solution you offer must also solve that
More money. I want an aircraft hangar and a horse, that doesn’t mean society owes me one. If you want isolation and access to civilisation, you pay more money. (Hermitting is the alternative.)
Farms are actually usually adjacent to suburbs. As the suburb ends it switches to farm land. So when the farmer wants services he doesn't need to go in the city, he can go to the suburb. He can't go to the city anyway, there's nowhere to park his car, and he has no other way to get there.
> I live in a rural suburb, and it should be expensive. It’s a luxury. I probably quintupled my carbon footprint by choosing it
Suburbs are cheaper than cities. Just look at the salaries of the people that live in both places. And your carbon footprint is probably lower than a city, cities are very wasteful places because they can be: People have more money there.
A small example: In a suburb you buy in bulk and store it. In a city you buy for a day or two. The carbon footprint difference between those two options is huge, it takes an enormous amount of energy to keep the city constantly stocked with retail products because you have to distribute small quantities of everything to so many places, as opposed to a central area with bulk quantities.
I've been in both places. In a city you can buy paper plates for so cheap (relative to your salary) it simply doesn't make sense to have real dishes - you don't have room for them anyway. People waste enormous amounts of goods (relative to suburbs) because the cost of "things" is very low relative to their salary.
Nah … they’re burning gasoline
You end up using less energy than your city dwelling friends.
This (and basically your entire argument) is flat out incorrect. A McMansion uses vastly more energy to build and maintain than an apartment, and apartment dwellers in a city don't need to drive to work, to school, to the shops, for a night out, etc.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2014/01/suburbanites-lead-th...
But this study doesn't include that.
It's really not hard to check for yourself: Compare the prices of some item in an urban store vs a suburban store - it's way cheaper out of the city. That extra cost is there because of the extra energy it takes.
No, farmers aren't living in Houston, Phoenix or Sunnyvale.
Surburbs abut cities. Our farms are in rural territory, closer to industry (specifically: logistics) than cul-de-sacs.
> Suburbs are cheaper than cities. Just look at the salaries of the people that live in both places
Look at disposable incomes. Cities have higher-earning, more-productive and lower (on average) cost-paying residents. (Slimmer ones, too [1].) What masks that is the variance and split housing. Go to a suburb, and the dispoable income is around a Ruby Tuesday's tab because it's an inefficient mode of living.
> In a city you can buy paper plates for so cheap (relative to your salary) it simply doesn't make sense to have real dishes
I've rarely eaten a meal on a paper plate in a city. Only in suburbs, frequently at get-togethers. It's tedious to go out and buy bulky crap, so you buy durable dishes once.
> In a suburb you buy in bulk and store it
See above about the incentives around purchasing disposable crap wastefully, as well as unhealthy processed (albeit shelf stable) foods.
Again, I agree with rural/suburban living. But it should be expensive. With most of the world now in cities, we'll see those costs increasingly redistributed. (Exhibit A: congestion pricing.)
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/05/08/7213737...
Maximum efficiency would be racks of sleeping capsules stacked in a back room of the office where you work.
I'm glad maximizing efficiency isn't the one and only criteria for housing.
That's not even true. They live right next to it. I pulled up Houston on Google Maps and there was an ad for "Dewberry Farm" right there.
The center of Houston is dense city, surrounded by a ring of suburb, surrounded by a ring of farms.
Are we not looking at the same map?
(Phoenix doesn't count, it's a desert, no farms there.)
A get together doesn't count in terms of dishes, I'm talking about day to day. Every person I've visited in a city uses far more disposable stuff that the suburban person I've visited.
I've lived in all kinds of places (not farm though), and I've found suburban to be the least wasteful, and cities to be the most wasteful. Rural is hard to categorize - they tend to be more self sufficient.
Among many, many, many "unmeasured" costs is the fact you're stealing people's freedom. I want to live in a flat above a shop in a 5 story building with no car and you propose making it effectively illegal to build such a structure because it's infeasible unless you tear down neighbouring buildings (ruining the neighbourhood in the process) to build parking.
That said, as a regular user of public transport in two Czech cities that have excellent and well-funded public transport (Prague and Ostrava), you probably don't realize many of the downsides.
Public transport works best for mass movements of people from point A to point B. E.g. young students going from dormitories to lectures at 8 AM, or many people traveling from a big residential neighbourhood to an industrial plant that employs them. The student thing is still real, the industrial plant isn't anymore. When I was a kid in the 1980s, full buses of workers went to steelworks at the outskirts of Ostrava, nowadays these are either gone, or have automatized to the degree that they employ 5 per cent of the people as before.
There is a lot of tangential relations that public transport doesn't service well. A teacher I know teaches in one village and lives in another. By car, that is 15 minutes. By public transport, some 90 and the route is physically almost three times as long. So selfish of her not to take it, eh! /s
And I can already hear all the good advice: she should "just" find a job closer to her home. Not easy if schools are closing down for lack of kids, and she is a specialist (singing).
Or: the public transport authority should "just" introduce more buses, even if they are inefficient in certain routes. It should "just" pay bus drivers much more to attract some (there is a shortage). Not easy if already a third of the municipal budget goes towards public transport, taxes in CZ are not exactly low and the population is growing older, thus losing its tax base. The costs are very real and a small country with an expensive healthcare system, an expensive pension system and now threatened with Russia cannot really shower much more money on everything at once.
Public transport may yet gain some strength from fully autonomous driving, IF it is ever solved. Unwillingness of people to get into the driver career (the money isn't that bad, but getting up at 4 am and being responsible for dozens of human lives on board are two major negative factors) is a big factor in its overall economy.
But it is, at best, a significant help. Not a panacea. Our lives have grown too disorganized for that. Gone are the days when everyone started their work at 6 am at the sound of the factory whistle and lived in the same worker's colony. (Some of which are still extant here in Ostrava, and now protected as cultural heritage.)
The negatives in turn: getting up at 4AM - wouldn't the preference for early hours and late hours even out over a whole city's population? I know some people who get up really early by choice, and I personally like it at night. Being responsible for dozens of human lives - that can be worn as a badge of pride. Of course you're right that it might put people off, but you just have to look to airline pilots to see an example of a culture where responsibility is held in high esteem.
Do I have a theory of my own? I don't think I can answer it, but I'd guess training and logistics might have something to do with the driver shortage problem. In Czechia, do you have to pay for your own qualification before you get the job? Also, where I am, bus operators will usually only employ people who already live near a depot - that excludes many potential drivers.
Consistent getting up at 4 AM would be probably better than the irregular shifts that are the norm. You get up at 4 AM three days in a row, then you only have duties in the afternoon, because someone fell ill etc.
Driver shortage problem is pretty much across Europe, with poorer countries and cities being somewhat, but not crushingly worse off. I sort-of doubt that there is some low-hanging fruit waiting to be picked. This is a highly diverse market, with thousands of public and private sphere organizations competing for workforce across the entire EU, and having quite a lot of latitude to provide better conditions. Still, the average age of an extant bus driver is slowly creeping into the late 50s and early 60s. The disinterest of the younger generation in a driving career is palpable.
Workers need to get to work, and there are tradeoffs. Unless you want your local sewage treatment plant, the fat rendering factory, or the refuse landfill within walking distance of your house.
I think the GP's point was that there _are_ tradeoffs, _and_ that we as a society ignore and avoid actually measuring and confronting the actual harms this way of life brings (possibly because they are actually standing and overwhelming to face; possibly because the problems seem depressingly intractable; possibly because of the effects of propaganda imposed on us our whole lives by big oil and the auto industry).
And this is a good thing, or bad?
[1] https://maps.app.goo.gl/i2ywzokrGMaZSJnR9
Can you explain? If I want to visit a friend 60mi away and I choose to drive my car, how did my car cause the problem?
An argument could be made that if cars didn't exist then I wouldn't know that friend at all, which I suppose does in a sense mean that a car caused my problem, but I don't think that's a great argument.
> The convenience you get comes at an unmeasured cost.
Are you referring to city planning, climate change, or something else?
> Car owners are selfish.
Everyone, by necessity, is selfish. For example, every month I have the choice of paying my rent or donating that same money to charity. I (very understandably) choose to pay my rent, which is a selfish decision. This isn't a bad thing. The key is to not be overly selfish.
Owning a car is not overly selfish, though I'd like to know why you think it is.
This is obviously not true. Proof by contradiction: Assume this is true. Thus, when cars were invented, nobody would've been interested since they don't solve any problem anyone had at the time.
But we know that's not the case. Cars had widespread adoption because turns out convenient transportation is a huge need for most people.
If you want to successfully advocate against cars you need to acknowledge the problems they solve and promote pragmatic alternatives that fill the same need for most people.
[1] https://youtu.be/y_SXXTBypIg?si=N8PF71wMhVv6aH9G
A quick look on real estate websites [0] suggests you can buy land in San Francisco quite central for $10k-15k per square meter.
If we take the value of the service, parking prices for San Francisco [1] are as high as $7/h and as low as free (at night).
Unless I looked in all the wrong places or my math needs triple checking, the numbers you're very adamant about look wildly misaligned with reality even for peaks, let alone for average or median. That doesn't bode well at all for any opinion based on them. And it encourages the other side of the conversation to come with equally unrealistic claims about the cost and impact of "my biking lanes".
In your top comment you recommended the Not Just Bikes YouTube channel. But it either didn't correct these views or worse, it encouraged them. Not a stellar recommendation.
[0] Zillow but the URL us ungodly long. Easy to check it by yourself though.
[1] https://www.sfmta.com/demand-responsive-parking-pricing
Not even getting into the whole "subsidized parking" gem, as if the normal price is "peak price" or else it's subsidized. This kind of ludicrous statements undermine any point one might try to make along side. Curious about their opinion on their own heavily subsidized bicycle, down from the normal price of $500k [0].
Bonus, there are more places to park for under $10/h in Manhattan than there are for $50 [1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_Trek_Madone
[1] https://www.parkme.com/new-york-city-parking
I don’t know exactly what a fully unsubsidized cost of parking is, but I’m not using hyperbole. It’s closer to $10-20/h than the ridiculously low prices people have grown accustomed to.
That's why I am asking, is really car equal to cancer? Or is it this "I cannot see other people's needs if they are different than mine" or maybe "I will use law to ban other people from thinking otherwise" attitude?
Having said that, given good cycling infrastructure, chances are you could either bring your kids along on a cargo bike [1] or they could just ride there themselves [2].
[1]: https://youtu.be/rQhzEnWCgHA?t=84
[2]: https://youtu.be/oHlpmxLTxpw?t=18
Here's how the needs of drivers usually work: I want to live outside the city center, therefore I create the need to drive because I chose to live away from transit. This problem is mostly self inflicted out of a privilege of choice. So I am not particularly empathetic towards it.
As far as using laws to ban natural human behaviour, what are your thoughts on: jaywalking? pedestrians crossing against red lights when there is no car traffic in sight? people walking on the shoulder of highways (sometimes the only infrastructure available)? Mandatory use of sidewalks? Parking minimums when building a house? There are laws governing all of these in the US (and some apply in Europe too) which ban the free movement of pedestrians. If cars are so dangerous that we have to enforce laws around simply walking in order to maintain safety, there's something wrong.
This sounds more like a projection than actual fact. Do you seriously believe that motorists generally believe that Hawaii is inaccessible? Puerto Rico? England? Japan? China? Or do you mean on a smaller scale - ski slope tops, trails, parks, and other pedistrian-only areas in the cities? How did you figure this?
These are my observations as a pedestrian, cyclist, and motorist.
And it should be emotional because a commute isn't just about efficiency. One spends a sizeable portion of their life commuting. The human aspect of it can't be ignored. The depressing feeling you get while standing in the middle of a Walmart parking lot is real. At least it was for me.
There is almost a complete lack of anything that feels commercial mixing with anything that feels residential, beyond especially designated spaces, usually the very center of town.
These suburbs are not conventionally pretty, certainly not in the way downtown Amsterdam, Haarlem, or Leiden are. They are both monotonous and discordant, because the Dutch have perfected an architectural style of varied repetition. They will build twenty to fifty of the exact same weird thing, then next door build a hundred to two hundred of a very different weird thing.
While they can have very clashing outward appearances, they are united in a utilitarian practicality with a focus on providing almost everyone an elementary apartment.
The result of this is that there are two very different urban Netherlands — the older downtowns, with exquisite row homes along canals, medieval churches, cafe-heavy central squares that are frozen into place by historical preservation, and jammed with tourists, and then there are the outer rings of bizarre Lego-like perfunctory two-story apartment complexes, with few if any shops, beyond an Aldi, a hair saloon, a weed store, and maybe a bike-repair stand.
https://walkingtheworld.substack.com/p/walking-the-netherlan... (paywalled, alas)
The thing is that US cities and suburbs are much worse. Let me quote the title of article
> Walking the Netherlands: From Amsterdam to The Hague
Is walking something you can do in the US except in some rare exceptions? There are suburbs in the US i.e. residential ONLY places where there aren't any side walks. And the closest grocery store may be 10-15 minutes away by car. Doesn't that feel suffocating to have a home but not be allowed to walk out on your own two feet?
Depends on where you live
> And the closest grocery store may be 10-15 minutes away by car.
For some people, that's a feature and not a bug. Anecdote - I had a colleague who used to commute from nearby hills because he wanted a house where he can't even see his neighbors.
> Doesn't that feel suffocating to have a home but not be allowed to walk out on your own two feet?
Again, different strokes for different folks. There should be different kind of options catering to different tastes. You want density and walkable cities? Go live in NYC or Boston. You want complete rural wilderness where you don't have to see another fellow human being if you don't want to? There is Alaska or mountain West. You want a big house with a yard in a community where everyone is of the same class and all the daily needs are met (grocery, gas, schools, parks), while being close to a major city to tap into urban amenities (eg. airport)? Go live in a generic suburbia.
Sure, but that's not a suburb.
Depends. Between kindergarten and eighth grade, I caught the school bus for part of sixth grade, otherwise walked or biked. Ninth grade on, I was where the schools were farther away, but I could walk to stores of various sorts.
I don't use a car much these days, though I get to work more by bus than by walking.
This, though:
>there are two very different urban Netherlands the older downtowns [...] jammed with tourists, and then there are the outer rings of bizarre Lego-like perfunctory two-story apartment complexes, with few if any shops, beyond an Aldi, a hair saloon, a weed store, and maybe a bike-repair stand."
is taken to such an extreme I would almost call it a lie. Firstly, there are a lot of beautiful inner cities (and villages) not inundated by tourists. Leiden, which he mentions and is one of the most beautiful cities in the Netherlands, sees very little tourists (I've lived there for 10 years). Secondly, I do not recognize his description of the outer rings at all. They may very well exist as described, but I don't know them. These suburbs are bland an boring, sure, but there's plenty of variety in building-types to be found and there usually are pleny of shops within walking/biking distance.
Rewatch the videos, you'll note you can only enjoy many of the changes if you're an advid year round cyclist who lives in a flatish city with nice weather (and who doesn't need anything too far away, most of the time). Buses need roads. Not everyone can cycle, not even with (very, very expensive, even on the low end) ebikes.
Is that the same everywhere in the country or even the city? No. But it's common enough that you'll see parents carrying their kids around in cargo bikes practically anywhere in the country.
P.S. I was generalizing when I said everything's within a 10 minute bike ride to account for all people who live along the same radius as I do. For me personally, everything's available within a 5 minute *walk* - grocery stores, cafes, restaurants, bars, gym, park, playgrounds, kindergartens, schools, train station, doctor, dentist.
Really his channel should be called “not just cars.” Bikes are just one option he likes as an alternative.
> advid year round cyclist
So all the women, children, and parents doing utility trips each day on their $50 bikes in the Netherlands are "avid cyclists". Got it.
> flatish city
Bikes have had gears for a looong time. Ebikes are nice too.
> with nice weather
Because the Netherlands is known for its excellent weather? Anyhow, public transport is needed too.
> and who doesn't need anything too far away, most of the time
Yes, we're talking about cities here. Also, trains. Small trains are fun too (trams).
> Buses need roads.
...yes. Thankfully nobody's proposing removing roads.
> Not everyone can cycle
Nobody says they can and not everyone can drive either (:O). In fact, more people can cycle than drive, funny that.
> (very, very expensive, even on the low end) ebikes
Show me a calculation that results in ebikes being in any way expensive compared to a car. In any case, arguing about the expense of biking is absolutely hilarious when you can get a perfectly adequate commuter bike for $50.
Nobody's saying cycling is the miracle solution that works for every person in every situation, everywhere. What they are saying is transportation in dense cities must be efficient and the only way to achieve that is a combination of walkability, cyclability, and public transport. Oh, and you can just use a car if you'd like to, just prepare to pay for the burden you place on others by doing so.
See his video "Why Canadians Can't Bike in the Winter (but Finnish people can)":
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU
See also Oh The Urbanity!'s various videos on the topic:
* "Winter Isn't a Good Argument Against Bike Lanes": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6153xn_seac
* "Bike Lane Haters Are Wrong About Winter": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdtR3T2Pg4s
* "What Biking in the Winter is Really Like": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sokHu9bhpn8
* "2,000 People Told Us Their Biggest Winter Cycling Challenges": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXETjLqHJmA
And most recent (April 2024), "How Winter Cycling Finally Clicked for Us":
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7vickY3yG0
Of course ones doesn't necessarily have to cycle 100% of the time either: do it when you feel most comfortable with it.
Because at the core of it, giving my kids freedom and independence and not having a driver kill them shouldn't require moving to a tiny country below sea level.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_territor...
Anecdotally, even though the Netherlands and my home country of the UK are just next to each other on the ranking of motor vehicle per capita (40th and 37th), during a stay in Limburg I felt that the difference was much more stark. I saw far fewer people driving than I would have done in an equivalent area of Britain. I wonder if that means that the average Dutchman is likely to have a car, but also uses it less frequently than car users in other countries. That might partly account for the low fatality rate.
https://road-safety.transport.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2023...
https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/2020-fatality-data-show...
Statistics paint a different picture.
"Mobility on Dutch roads has grown continuously since the 1950s and now exceeds 200 billion km travelled per year. With a population of 16.8 million people, this comes down to an average of 32 kilometres (20 mi) per person per day" [1]
Avg UK car mileage per day in 2022 was 18[2]. Given cars are fewer than people, per capita mileage driven will be even lower.
That is also reflect in safety stats. Netherlands has death rates of 3.8/100K people, 4.7/1B vehicle-km. For UK, those numbers are 2.9 and 3.8 respectively [3]. So Netherlands just seems to have a reputation divergent from the actual reality? (I mean, no one talks about how awesome UK is for biking or public transport).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_transport_in_the_Netherla...
[2] https://www.nimblefins.co.uk/cheap-car-insurance/average-car...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
I actually don't think the Netherlands is "good" really, just that almost everywhere else is hellishly bad.
That's life.
It doesn't help to mix your life choices with planning choices as one emotional mass. That's why the videos need to be viewed with that in mind.
But I agree with you in some extent. I prefer his earlier videos because he's become very undiplomatic and I think he's alienating newer watchers.
Single family homes and parking are not being banned. You can still build them in all of these zones. The difference is now you have a choice between building that or denser housing, you can choose the amount of parking to build.
If anything the single use suburbia is even more controlling, meant to keep captive suburban consumers at the teat of the chains in shopping malls, and the auto and oil corporations.
Every local government has plans to achieve sustainable development goals (SDGs). Did you put anyone choose/vote for this? You might cheer it, but were you given a choice? You were not. Most simply think this is fine and go along with the effective transfer of power from local government, to the UN. It is global government applied locally.
If anything, Seattle (one of the subjects of TFA) is in a state where the governor has been directly elected to three terms with larger margins each time, where one of his signature policies is dealing with climate change, and his largest base of support is the Seattle metropolitan area.
Yet you managed to take away the opposite, that the government forcing you to build parking spaces on your property is "freeing" somehow.
a) create a dependency on public transport, which you can then be denied eg during Covid
b) remove the basis of what makes business and having a family possible
essentially turning your city into an open-air museum, to be looked at by tourists (it is worth looking at).
a) Roads can be closed just as easily during a pandemic, attempted coup or major government crisis. Dependency on roads necessitates a car - an enormously greater barrier of entry than the price of a subway, tram or bus ticket. Fewer citizens using public transport leads to a death spiral in which public transit is continually underinvested, becomes more expensive to build and maintain and eventually ghettoised into a small number of prestige projects and a much larger number of decaying and even dangerous services, serving only the poorest and most socially excluded citizens - as has happened in so many US citizens. The reverse is observably true in cities built around vibrant public transport networks - Berlin, Tokyo, Copenhagen, Singapore, Utrecht etc. These cities aren't constructed around one key piece of crumbling infrastructure (like the NYC subway), but coherent and growing networks of trains, buses, trams etc.
Reliance on a car also makes you much more vulnerable to economic shocks - be they rising oil prices or personal issues that deprive you of the ability to drive (accidents, health problems, criminal convictions etc). Your mobility within the city becomes locked to a large capital investment which can be taken away in numerous ways.
b) Clearly car free or low car cities - like the ones listed above - worldwide have thriving businesses and families. To suggest otherwise is simply orthogonal to reality. They're highly desired places to live. Perhaps you're conflating the US suburb's with 'business and having a family'? A city littered with playgrounds, safe walkable pavements and on street businesses (like say Berlin), offers a far safer environment for young children than a series of shopping districts separated by dangerous unpassable roads, or low density suburban mass housing served by Wallmart style megastores - lacking cultural facilities, access to exercise or community amenities (many small US cities and also most small to medium sized Irish towns, like the one in which I was unfortunate enough to grow up).
'Walkable cities' are literally just places where the city is constructed around the social, economic and environmental needs of its citizenry rather than anachronistic modernist utopian ideas of vast highways and infinities of commuters streaming into colossal towers.
Really, what I object to, is this unstated transfer of power, from governments to the UN. The UN decides policy, local government implements it - changing legislation etc as required. But who made the UN god? Why do all states across the world follow the same plans? Are you a 'stakeholder' in the decision/strategy process? You and I are not. It simply moves power to a level so that it is untouchable and unknowable. Voting already does nothing, because the folk we see already just implement what they are told.
The whole thing is a wheeze to make people spend even more on (crappy) housing, energy etc, but to feel good doing so, cos they are saving the environment. It plays on the innate 'religious' impulse people seem to have, that of avoiding sins (pollution) as determined by priests (experts).
In my country we have maximum parking requirement, not minimum.
Rather I was pushing not to remove them in a place that already has them, because I'm against artificially forcing a city to change underneath people who are already there.