I think the thing that really struck a chord with me about car-centric development, as someone who lives in a city with fairly poor public transport (by certain standards, it would actually be quite good if it were in the US) and where driving is the norm for getting around -
Prioritising cars actually makes things worse for drivers. We spend many tens of billions of dollars a year on roads in my state and traffic in the cities (and the highways between the biggest population centres in the south east corner where most of the people live) just keeps getting worse. When you give people real alternatives (convenient, frequent public transport, more cycling infrastructure, better planned cities so you can walk and cycle to things you need nearby) that actually gets people off the road and that is the one thing that can reduce traffic (apart from somewhere having a dwindling population).
Focusing all out infrastructure spend and making cars the primary mode continues to make car driving worse, but people get angry when too much money is spent on public and active transport, because “not enough” is being spent on road infrastructure. So politicians spruik their “congestion busting” road spending, and it keeps getting worse. It’s wild.
As someone for whom driving was just the default, I came around full circle.
In Norway the public transportation in Oslo has become so bad that it's essentially no longer reliable. If I want to get somewhere in time, I have to use a car or a bicycle.
Also, the violence and sexual assaults on public transport is getting worse, the times that it does work it's completely overloaded, and the prices are insanely high and quite frankly becoming unaffordable with the insanely high inflation and interest rates.
A city that was altered greatly to accommodate pedestrians has become a city that does not accommodate anyone. This is likely to be the outcome in other cities that take similar measures, governments always fail eventually, once it becomes impractical to use cars the country's economy will suffer greatly as a result, because there will come a time when the government just decides they don't care about public transport anymore and it can be as horrible as possible because nobody has any choices anymore.
I was just in Oslo and public transport was fantastic and the city was fantastic.
> Also,
Those sound like a bunch of far-right wing talking points. Do you have statistics to back any of this up?
And they don't match my own experience even a little bit. Because in most countries cars tend to cost more overall and are generally less safe.
> A city that was altered greatly to accommodate pedestrians has become a city that does not accommodate anyone.
t was an absolutely delight walking around the city, being able to walk on the roads or crossing roads because traffic has been reduced so much. That a fantastic policy that made the city more attractive.
The city was extremely welcoming and navigating on food or by bus or train was fantastic. There were tons of people around and lots of people in all the restaurants and museums. Plenty of people hanging out at the beautiful water-front.
The claim that it 'doesn't work' is just pure nonsense. It only doesn't work if you want to drive in from the subburbs on a daily basis.
> governments always fail eventually
So we should have cities without governments? If you want to privatize the operations of some public transit, that is potentially reasonable. But 'governemnt=bad does not mean therefore we need cars everywhere'.
> once it becomes impractical to use cars the country's economy will suffer greatly as a result
This has been stupid quite a bit, there is literally a field of urban studies, and it universally find the exact opposite.
> , because there will come a time when the government just decides they don't care about public transport anymore and it can be as horrible as possible because nobody has any choices anymore
Ah here it is. That's the '15 min city is a globalist conspiracy to make us prisoners in our own city' nonsense. You have dipped deep into it haven't you?
Please anybody that reads this, go to Oslo and enjoy the beautiful, vibrant, save city it actually is.
> I was just in Oslo and public transport was fantastic and the city was fantastic.
More than half of the times I want to use the train to get to work it's cancelled or delayed on one of the busiest train routes in the city during peak time. Quite often the train is so full, due to delays and cancellations, that I have to either go back home and bicycle, or wait for the next train, which again may be delayed or cancelled.
This is with the trains being out of commission for the whole of July for "repairs".
I almost entirely avoid the train and public transport now because, unlike the government, if I'm not on time or don't do my job, it actually does have negative consequences for me.
Your experience as a tourist has no weight. A city should not be built for tourists, but for it's citizens.
It's all fine and dandy until you realize that economy pays a big buck for faster and more comfortable ways of transporting a body. (And it's been this way since time memorial).
You either transport your body fast, or you are missing out. And the greatest thing to miss out is an opportunity. While programmers can live in one room for years and just use Zoom for everything, others can't.
Sorry to say, but most of my European friends who were much anti-car, have changed their opinion after... buying a car. Being able to move in whatever direction at whatever time and being able to carry some stuff in your trunk makes your life convenient. Add to that the privacy and your personal AC and you won't be able to top it off. In South Africa personal vehicle means security at night.
The only places where this works are the places where:
1. People live for retirement and pleasure.
2. The road infrastructure is just straight hell. (Like Portugal. It's bad in Lisbon. It is terrible in there).
3. Where you are not under any circumstances can be robbed by a random person on a street.
So, the so-called cars problem is not something solvable. You just have to handle other factors to and cars will follow. I've seen cities where improvement in economic and social conditions led to the development of nice pedestrian and bike infrastructure.
This is really amazing to see trending on HN. I spent a couple days in Pontevedra this summer while walking the Camino de Santiago. It was absolutely delightful and what I experienced aligns with the article. The old town was filled with wide streets almost exclusively for walking, cafes and restaurants that sprawled into plazas, and people young and old enjoying the car free public space. It was one of the first stops on our trip through Spain and as an American it was stunning.
In America the contrast is stark. Most of our public spaces prioritize cars instead of people. I’m lucky to live near the beltline in Atlanta. It’s incredible to see how people flock to the beltline for a car free experience. It’s such a rare thing in America. Where it exists you can see that there is tremendous demand for it. Supply on the other hand is unfortunately very difficult to deliver.
I was in Spain last month and what stood out is that walkability requires mom and pop stores as well as more integrated neighborhoods with small commercial shops mixed into residential. Small shops seemed to be the majority in the city centers. The only large store I saw was a Lidl. They have largeish indoor markets that are more like a mini mall of individual shops like a butcher, produce, baker, cheese, even restaurants and bars. And these are located in a neighborhood center serving the surrounding community.
The thing that kills walkability in the USA are the hyper scale stores and malls where everyone wants a mega store that has everything - one stop shops. They are too big to fit in small neighborhoods so they have to be built in a commercial district or large strip mall. And since they are big and house many shoppers at once they need big parking lots. Then they need big streets to feed those big parking lots. These big ass stores DEMAND cars and are very much a part of the problem.
If you want more walkability then incentivize lots of small shops over single giant shops. I would also argue that neighborhoods that are all residential for blocks and blocks are another problem so zoning should force a minimal commercial allotment to ensure walkable neighborhoods.
There is another practical reality that separates the US from Europe specifically with respect to walkability. The US has much more extreme weather in many places. What would be called severe heat or cold in much of Europe, which I've suffered through for the week if need be, is normal weather in many parts of the US for several months on end. You need alternative transportation for those extended periods.
Few people enjoy being outside in a tropical swamp with a double-digit UV index. Same with the extreme cold that you get in the central US far from the ocean.
I live in Seattle, where many people walk everywhere all year (myself included), no car needed. But that is because the weather is perfect for that kind of thing, being 5-25°C with limited precipitation virtually the entire year. If I lived in Houston, for example, I would be driving in the summer regardless of how walkable the city is.
I am Spanish, so I grew up with what you describe.
I now live in rural Japan, a country that outside of the big cities also suffers from awful American-style urban sprawl, and holy guacamole, how can people live like this? The area where I live is just big box stores and houses scattered everywhere, and you need a car to do anything. It has made me really appreciate my homeland...
My favourite thing about living in the Netherlands is that kids have freedom. They can bike to school, their friends’ houses, sports, town etc and parents aren’t their taxi.
Growing up in suburban California I was basically in an outdoor prison until I could drive.
I really wish the US could get more of this. I know here in Boston this has been a hot issue with the summer shutdown of Newberry on Sunday.
Drivers will come out of nowhere and complain, will start suddenly caring about people with disabilities (of course in no car areas we will figure out how emergency vehicles, deliveries, and people with disabilities will get around).
Sure our public transit system needs a lot of work, but that is not an argument for keeping the current car centric system we have in place now.
Cars obviously have their use cases and I can also understand why most of the US will never do this. But the car culture within cities is insane.
Taking car transport to the extreme is bad, but the narrative that life in a small flat and commute by public transport is the future is dystopian, too.
The "air pollution" argument is disappearing fast as well with the ongoing transition to EVs.
What we need is a good balance. Pedestrians, bicycles, public transport, and cars.
North Americans visiting Europe often grapple with why they enjoy European cities more than North American ones. It's often perceived as an architecture issue ("Europe has historical buildings that we don't have") but very few notice that the main difference is the urban scale and the resulting walkability. The Netherlands has plenty of modernist and even brutalist architecture yet every city there is a pretty nice place to be. This is because they know how to scale cities to human centric proportions. The layout of buildings together with the connective tissue of tram lines, bike lanes and sidewalks is what makes their cities alive and safe, not elaborate building facades (although they have some of that as well).
Not all European cities live up to the stereotype. I've been to Germany a couple of times; most of the cities I've stayed in were quite nice, but Stuttgart came across as an American-style car hell and Frankfurt seemed quite dirty. (Berlin has a strange charm to it, actually, from a combination of modern architecture and historical preservation.)
That’s cute. But if you don’t have the public transportation infrastructure & enough housing it’s totally infeasible. People who drive the cars are not the city residents. They are the ones who cannot afford living in the city and have to commute from far away.
I was walking in a narrow street in Granada, Spain yesterday and two guys on their scooters where going at 40mph, on a street meant mostly for pedestrians. They pollute like cars (the stink is the same, even if smaller engine.) When people talk about cars ruining cities designed for walking, they should include scooters. They look cute in movies but they are not so pleasant to have around in practice. I don't mind the electric scooters the type you stand on because if you're going really fast on a narrow pedestrian and you hit someone it won't be so fatal, and you will get hurt probably equally, so people generally don't ride them at maximum speed. Also, they're essential for take-away food delivery.
Pontevedra has around 80K inhabitants, so it's practical to design it this way. But when cities are much bigger, problems start to arise. Not everyone can afford to live in the center (nor is there space for them, and building taller than a certain number of meters or floors is often forbidden for various reasons), so people begin moving farther out.
Sure, there's public transport... but only until it takes six times longer than driving a car - and that's not even counting all the issues public transport has in many places, which some people deny even exist, although doesn't matter to me because I just experienced them first hand way too many times (I have never owned a car until recently).
At that point, you might as well move farther out to a nicer house, less expenses and just drive a bit longer.
The problem that car solved years ago, is the following: you can develop a city without cars up to a point where the distance that you have to move to get to your work, or the supermarket, the hospital, etc is at max some km, let's say not more than 10/20.
That has the consequence that all people wants to live in the city center, and not in peripherals areas. This has the consequence of making the cost of an house (or rent) go up to a point where most people can't even afford it, while the salary that you get in the city rests more or less the same. Having a lot of people concentrated living in a small place produces also other unwanted effects, that lower the quality of living.
Cars allow us to develop our society not in big cities, but in rather small towns, without ugly skyscrapers of 20 floors but with nice houses where everyone can afford, for example, to have its own property, with its own garden, its own peace, without having being forced to share its living space with people he didn't choose.
To me cars, and now also remote work, are a benefit because they allow us to live in a more sustainable way. Thanks to car we can think of reclaiming villages where all the population migrated to the cities in the past years.
Example in Italy, where I live, why should I go to live in Milan, where houses cost 10 times the rest of the country, while having a car and a job that allows me to remote work at least half the week I can live in a small village near Milan and reach it by car when needed?
To me a society without cars is a less free society, in fact the development of the USA to me is to take as an example, while where they didn't have cars is the Soviet Union, and look at it...
So a tax financed site telling how it's great to have more tax and regulations.
Not surprising.
Find it very weird to have government trying to gerrymander things just as we are on the cusp of EV transition and autonomy.
Go take a ride in a Tesla with FSD, the future is here, let it come in, get out of the way.
In a few years with autonomous vehicles the need for vehicle ownership wild radically decrease and with that a huge need for parking space will simply vanish.
What I suggest instead:
make electricity super cheap use all the ways possible
create space for charger system but let brands compete( don't over regulate)
Allow autonomous system to operate, be a trailblazer in the field.
One factor here is the perception of safety. To choose public transit over a car, you have to feel safe walking to/from the station and you have to feel safe riding the train. This is especially true if you are at a physical disadvantage because of gender, disability, age, whatever. Because it's a perception thing, this is not just about statistics. A dirty, chaotic subway station just feels threatening to passengers.
I've ridden public transit in a bunch of cities, and this makes a huge difference to how welcoming the experience is. Hong Kong is #1 for me. The trains and stations are clean enough to eat off of - probably cleaner than my car. On/off boarding is fast and orderly even during peak travelling hours. This is not a universal, and there are definitely cities where I would hesitate to take public transit if I had some other choice - which is the root of the problem when you're trying to convince a population to fund and use such a system instead of bringing their cars.
There are (at least) two Youtube channels, Ray Delahanty | CityNerd and Not Just Bikes, that really drive home the point in their videos that car-centric cities really stink.
As nice as it is to see reviews of transit systems and urban planning in various cities worldwide, NJB's commentary style gets really obnoxious at times. He comes across as someone who believes that everyone who doesn't see things his way is irredeemably, irrationally evil and the reason we can't have nice things (tm).
I'm always wondering how Americans feel traveling to Europe and being able to walk in cities. It must be so surreal that they either have to move, or they can't fathom that these cities are practical to live in.
84 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 81.2 ms ] threadPrioritising cars actually makes things worse for drivers. We spend many tens of billions of dollars a year on roads in my state and traffic in the cities (and the highways between the biggest population centres in the south east corner where most of the people live) just keeps getting worse. When you give people real alternatives (convenient, frequent public transport, more cycling infrastructure, better planned cities so you can walk and cycle to things you need nearby) that actually gets people off the road and that is the one thing that can reduce traffic (apart from somewhere having a dwindling population).
Focusing all out infrastructure spend and making cars the primary mode continues to make car driving worse, but people get angry when too much money is spent on public and active transport, because “not enough” is being spent on road infrastructure. So politicians spruik their “congestion busting” road spending, and it keeps getting worse. It’s wild.
As someone for whom driving was just the default, I came around full circle.
Also, the violence and sexual assaults on public transport is getting worse, the times that it does work it's completely overloaded, and the prices are insanely high and quite frankly becoming unaffordable with the insanely high inflation and interest rates.
A city that was altered greatly to accommodate pedestrians has become a city that does not accommodate anyone. This is likely to be the outcome in other cities that take similar measures, governments always fail eventually, once it becomes impractical to use cars the country's economy will suffer greatly as a result, because there will come a time when the government just decides they don't care about public transport anymore and it can be as horrible as possible because nobody has any choices anymore.
> Also,
Those sound like a bunch of far-right wing talking points. Do you have statistics to back any of this up?
And they don't match my own experience even a little bit. Because in most countries cars tend to cost more overall and are generally less safe.
> A city that was altered greatly to accommodate pedestrians has become a city that does not accommodate anyone.
t was an absolutely delight walking around the city, being able to walk on the roads or crossing roads because traffic has been reduced so much. That a fantastic policy that made the city more attractive.
The city was extremely welcoming and navigating on food or by bus or train was fantastic. There were tons of people around and lots of people in all the restaurants and museums. Plenty of people hanging out at the beautiful water-front.
The claim that it 'doesn't work' is just pure nonsense. It only doesn't work if you want to drive in from the subburbs on a daily basis.
> governments always fail eventually
So we should have cities without governments? If you want to privatize the operations of some public transit, that is potentially reasonable. But 'governemnt=bad does not mean therefore we need cars everywhere'.
> once it becomes impractical to use cars the country's economy will suffer greatly as a result
This has been stupid quite a bit, there is literally a field of urban studies, and it universally find the exact opposite.
> , because there will come a time when the government just decides they don't care about public transport anymore and it can be as horrible as possible because nobody has any choices anymore
Ah here it is. That's the '15 min city is a globalist conspiracy to make us prisoners in our own city' nonsense. You have dipped deep into it haven't you?
Please anybody that reads this, go to Oslo and enjoy the beautiful, vibrant, save city it actually is.
More than half of the times I want to use the train to get to work it's cancelled or delayed on one of the busiest train routes in the city during peak time. Quite often the train is so full, due to delays and cancellations, that I have to either go back home and bicycle, or wait for the next train, which again may be delayed or cancelled.
This is with the trains being out of commission for the whole of July for "repairs".
I almost entirely avoid the train and public transport now because, unlike the government, if I'm not on time or don't do my job, it actually does have negative consequences for me.
Your experience as a tourist has no weight. A city should not be built for tourists, but for it's citizens.
You either transport your body fast, or you are missing out. And the greatest thing to miss out is an opportunity. While programmers can live in one room for years and just use Zoom for everything, others can't.
Sorry to say, but most of my European friends who were much anti-car, have changed their opinion after... buying a car. Being able to move in whatever direction at whatever time and being able to carry some stuff in your trunk makes your life convenient. Add to that the privacy and your personal AC and you won't be able to top it off. In South Africa personal vehicle means security at night.
The only places where this works are the places where: 1. People live for retirement and pleasure. 2. The road infrastructure is just straight hell. (Like Portugal. It's bad in Lisbon. It is terrible in there). 3. Where you are not under any circumstances can be robbed by a random person on a street.
So, the so-called cars problem is not something solvable. You just have to handle other factors to and cars will follow. I've seen cities where improvement in economic and social conditions led to the development of nice pedestrian and bike infrastructure.
In America the contrast is stark. Most of our public spaces prioritize cars instead of people. I’m lucky to live near the beltline in Atlanta. It’s incredible to see how people flock to the beltline for a car free experience. It’s such a rare thing in America. Where it exists you can see that there is tremendous demand for it. Supply on the other hand is unfortunately very difficult to deliver.
The thing that kills walkability in the USA are the hyper scale stores and malls where everyone wants a mega store that has everything - one stop shops. They are too big to fit in small neighborhoods so they have to be built in a commercial district or large strip mall. And since they are big and house many shoppers at once they need big parking lots. Then they need big streets to feed those big parking lots. These big ass stores DEMAND cars and are very much a part of the problem.
If you want more walkability then incentivize lots of small shops over single giant shops. I would also argue that neighborhoods that are all residential for blocks and blocks are another problem so zoning should force a minimal commercial allotment to ensure walkable neighborhoods.
Few people enjoy being outside in a tropical swamp with a double-digit UV index. Same with the extreme cold that you get in the central US far from the ocean.
I live in Seattle, where many people walk everywhere all year (myself included), no car needed. But that is because the weather is perfect for that kind of thing, being 5-25°C with limited precipitation virtually the entire year. If I lived in Houston, for example, I would be driving in the summer regardless of how walkable the city is.
I now live in rural Japan, a country that outside of the big cities also suffers from awful American-style urban sprawl, and holy guacamole, how can people live like this? The area where I live is just big box stores and houses scattered everywhere, and you need a car to do anything. It has made me really appreciate my homeland...
The bible did warn ye: "Speak of the devil and he shall appear."
Growing up in suburban California I was basically in an outdoor prison until I could drive.
Drivers will come out of nowhere and complain, will start suddenly caring about people with disabilities (of course in no car areas we will figure out how emergency vehicles, deliveries, and people with disabilities will get around).
Sure our public transit system needs a lot of work, but that is not an argument for keeping the current car centric system we have in place now.
Cars obviously have their use cases and I can also understand why most of the US will never do this. But the car culture within cities is insane.
The "air pollution" argument is disappearing fast as well with the ongoing transition to EVs.
What we need is a good balance. Pedestrians, bicycles, public transport, and cars.
Sure, there's public transport... but only until it takes six times longer than driving a car - and that's not even counting all the issues public transport has in many places, which some people deny even exist, although doesn't matter to me because I just experienced them first hand way too many times (I have never owned a car until recently).
At that point, you might as well move farther out to a nicer house, less expenses and just drive a bit longer.
That has the consequence that all people wants to live in the city center, and not in peripherals areas. This has the consequence of making the cost of an house (or rent) go up to a point where most people can't even afford it, while the salary that you get in the city rests more or less the same. Having a lot of people concentrated living in a small place produces also other unwanted effects, that lower the quality of living.
Cars allow us to develop our society not in big cities, but in rather small towns, without ugly skyscrapers of 20 floors but with nice houses where everyone can afford, for example, to have its own property, with its own garden, its own peace, without having being forced to share its living space with people he didn't choose.
To me cars, and now also remote work, are a benefit because they allow us to live in a more sustainable way. Thanks to car we can think of reclaiming villages where all the population migrated to the cities in the past years.
Example in Italy, where I live, why should I go to live in Milan, where houses cost 10 times the rest of the country, while having a car and a job that allows me to remote work at least half the week I can live in a small village near Milan and reach it by car when needed?
To me a society without cars is a less free society, in fact the development of the USA to me is to take as an example, while where they didn't have cars is the Soviet Union, and look at it...
Most European villages and town are unreachable without cars.
Some can already consider themselves lucky if there is a daily connection into one direction.
Everyone likes to think we are all living in Paris, Berlin within city boundaries.
It is dangerous for pedestrians to walk on sidewalks, because cyclists on their electric motorbikes are driving there 30 mph!
Aggresive off-leash dogs are everywhere! Entire cities, parks and streets are one big dog toilet!
What I suggest instead: make electricity super cheap use all the ways possible create space for charger system but let brands compete( don't over regulate) Allow autonomous system to operate, be a trailblazer in the field.
I've ridden public transit in a bunch of cities, and this makes a huge difference to how welcoming the experience is. Hong Kong is #1 for me. The trains and stations are clean enough to eat off of - probably cleaner than my car. On/off boarding is fast and orderly even during peak travelling hours. This is not a universal, and there are definitely cities where I would hesitate to take public transit if I had some other choice - which is the root of the problem when you're trying to convince a population to fund and use such a system instead of bringing their cars.
https://www.youtube.com/@CityNerd
https://www.youtube.com/@NotJustBikes
https://www.youtube.com/@ClimateTown
https://www.youtube.com/@OhTheUrbanity
https://www.youtube.com/@CityBeautiful
more bike oriented, but that often overlaps with city planning and design:
https://www.youtube.com/@Shifter_Cycling