>During “treatment” days, the modified routing guided all trips that encountered the pre-selected congested segments toward alternative routes with similar travel times.
Why would they specifically need to route people away from congested segments? Presumably if a segment gets congested enough, it'd be considered slower and therefore won't get picked in the first place?
Because those roads are still maybe 30 seconds or 60 seconds faster on paper and critically they're the major roads with minimal intersections, which all apps prefer.
Traffic apps only know about congestion if someone running the app goes down the congested road. Because of this, I've always suspected that the apps, from time to time, will route someone down a route they haven't gathered data on in a while, just to collect the data, and even if the route is likely to be suboptimal.
>I've always suspected that the apps, from time to time, will route someone down a route they haven't gathered data on in a while, just to collect the data, and even if the route is likely to be suboptimal.
I can't say this actually happened for me. For straightforward routes with no congestion I never saw random alternate routes being proposed. That makes sense, given that it'd probably tip people off. If this is happening, they must only be doing in cases where there's congestion and the difference is marginal, eg. it's rush hour and the "optimal" route takes 30 minutes but the alternate takes 33 minutes. Moreover you don't really need any deliberate effort to see this effect. If nobody is traveling on a side road, the algorithm will probably revert to historical patterns, which might turn out to be overly optimistic in congestion scenarios (eg. there's nearby road repairs and other people are already using it as an alternate), thereby giving you the impression that you got screwed over by the app.
Doesn't have to be true. My state has public camera feeds for various highway stretches. Too low-detail to identify vehicles but easily enough to detect congestion.
One of the things this type of intervention doesn't take into account is that different roads are built with different levels of hardiness based on the amount of traffic they are expected to receive.
For instance, a few years ago, a segment of I-495 in Delaware needed to be unexpectedly shut down for emergency repairs. Drivers were rerouted. But because of the increase in traffic on the less-hardy detour route, that route needed repairs and repaving soon afterward, much more quickly than it would have ordinarily required.
So yes, drivers can be better dispersed to ease congestion, but we also need to consider the secondary effects to the roadways themselves.
A random factoid that will always stick in my brain is that the damage a vehicle does to a road is proportional to the weight on an axel...to the fourth power. I suspect rerouting semis to the roadway is by far the greatest factor.
Another random fact is that Norman Mailer coined ‘factoid’ to refer to a fabrication presented as fact, but now means the opposite (as in, a fact presented as a fact, not a fact presented as fabrication).
So it’s now one of those words like ‘literally’ which can be its own antonym.
My pet peeve is people claiming "literally" is now being used to mean the opposite. It is never used that way. When people use "literally" in the weakened and figurative way, they are not using it to mean "figuratively". They are using it to mean "very much".
I'm actually a fan. It's an excellent exploration of sarcasm: what you literally say in a sarcastic tone might have a metaphorical meaning, or it might be a twice application of sarcasm that loops back to literal meaning, like in deadpan comedy.
Also, pedestrians and cyclists choose lesser traveled roads for safety. Granted you're talking huge roads but on a smaller scale, filling up neighborhood streets with commuter traffic is likely to provoke a backlash.
For over a decade, I imagined that if I ever landed a job at Google, this would be my most significant project. It made me chuckle a bit when I read the announcement, they finally built it! confirming that my thoughts weren’t entirely delusional XD
(I'm not saying I'm the first or only person to think of it, but I did patent it, as well as the extra claim of compensating those people sent on the slower route).
The way to maximise traffic congestion would be to remove trucks off the road during peak times, banning trucks from the fast lane at all times, making it the social norm to toot someone in the fast lane so they move over.
I have a lot of difficulty thinking those changes alone would solve congestion. I’m especially thinking is ski traffic along I70 from Denver to the mountains. The issue is just volume of passenger vehicles, and there are no other realistic routes
Just drive anywhere with more than usual density in traffic and you’ll find trucks in the fast lane when they stop and start create gaps in the fast lane where no traffic can go. If you took out trucks altogether during peak hours you wouldn’t have these slow bubbles of traffic at the worst times..
Edit: let’s think of this from a pure scientific point of view - if you had 3 lanes and split traffic across them based on a range of speed - that would be the most optimised in terms of throughput for all lanes. Now, consider a reverse Amdahl's Law… what’s the worst thing you could do to make the fastest lane crawl which in effect kills total throughput across ALL lanes? Put a slow truck in it! Put a few, and you’ve just turned the lane giving you the highest throughput to most likely the slowest lane.
I just parked my car after another morning of commuting. Though experiments alone in today’s traffic again confirmed my theory.
Contrary to this, if you only have two lanes available, and trucks aren't allowed to overtake, you'll eventually end up with a long train of trucks without any gaps, and it'll become impossible to merge onto the highway from an on-ramp.
If we could copy the traffic laws of a country like Germany to the US, I think that would have the biggest + cheapest effect. I am OK with automated/elevated enforcement if it means stop & go traffic evaporates into free flowing conditions.
We should also take the idea from Finland where the traffic fines scale with each person's ability to pay. $100 for camping the passing lane or failing to maintain a reasonable following distance is not a big consequence for a lot of people. $100k covers the edges a lot better.
I wish there was more police presence to spot lane-camping and fine them in Germany, too many idiots do it and get away with it.
If I ran Google Maps, I'd ask to route stupid drivers away from my routes. The GPS and phone accelerometer should be able to tell us who they are -- "Oh you have Google Maps actively navigating, GPS says you're going 50mph, and the app in focus is WhatsApp and you're using the phone keyboard? Fuck off! Also we recorded 5 swerve events in the last 10 minutes, hard to stay on your lane when you're texting!
There's custom software for Elon's Tesla, I wonder if the system also directs people away from his routes so he can have a ride on emptier roads...
Ticket everyone who deviates from the mean speed too much. You wanna stop at the end of the ramp instead of merge then fine, but it'll cost you the same as the guy who's going 100 in the same stretch.
Just make sure not to fire half of your police forces. Finland has about 130 police officers per 100k people, America has 242 according to Wikipedia. Due to extreme lack of police resources, the enforcement of traffic laws is not good here. Mostly last century tech, like automatic traffic cameras in few fixed locations.
When Google Maps routes me using a smaller secondary road instead of the main road that I would otherwise have used , I've always wondered whether that significantly changes the amount of traffic that smaller road sees. It's funny to consider that arbitrary black-box changes to the routing algorithm can have a noticeable effect to people that live there.
> For this study, the Google Maps algorithm was modified to prefer alternative routes with similar travel times and segment types, effectively guiding trips away from the pre-selected congested segments
> Over a six month period, we adopted a city-wide switchback (also known as crossover) experimental design, alternating between this treatment and the control (unaltered) routing algorithm over consecutive days to appropriately measure the effect of this intervention
> Averaged across cities, we observe a median increase of around 2% in driving speeds on targeted segments, corresponding to a median decrease of 0.5% to 1.0% in fuel consumption rates
The cities were: Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, Seattle.
I read the article and didn't see anywhere if they collaborated with city planners, or just ran this on their own. I get the techno-optimism of making traffic 'better' and also it may be concerning if trucks are being routed through neighborhoods where planners didn't build for it.
When a person driving a large commercial truck relies solely upon Google Maps for routing, they're already on the wrong course.
Google Maps doesn't have a "truck mode." It does not take things like size or weight or blanket restrictions on commercial truck traffic into account.
This means that Google Maps will cheerfully send commercial trucks down roads where they do not belong even on a normal day that is unfettered by whimsical techbro experiments, and the presence of such experiments on any other day doesn't change that.
Truck drivers do have a plethora of truck-centric navigation systems available to use, but Google Maps not amongst them. It never has been.
I think that's already very much a problem, and given that they constrained it to routes that didn't have a significantly different drive time the risk seems low.
Medical/psychological experiments involving human subjects are mandated by federal law to run through a review board. Did that happen here? This isn't a medical experiment, but I don't think its nuts to feel like maybe there should have been some oversight.
Does this apply to Netflix, Amazon, Disneys, and many other streaming providers's "What to watch next? Recommended..." of sorts (or music/podcast streaming services)...
You're acting in bad faith attaching "every change" to what the parent said.
But this isn't that crazy? Most businesses require government approval for changes that have community effects... that's the entire point of government. Stuff like construction permits and regulation around structures, water usage, pollution, building architecture. Mining companies are required to assess environmental impacts. Companies making RF devices need to get confirmation on how the devices affect people and other devices.
And that's not even considering market share/monopoly status, which also regularly invites more scrutiny.
When the government proscribes discretionary permitting to those items you mentioned corruption and scarcity follow. It is exorbitantly expensive and difficult to build a house, a powerplant, or a mine in this country. For which we all currently pay for in cost of living.
That's not what the parent is talking about. You're using the strawman of what appears to be occupancy zoning or something similar to argue that a techno fascists should have free reign to manipulate the mass movements of people within a city for their own purposes.
Generally you need to be pretty competent to get to the level of where these Google maps guys are.
To get to the competence level of a local traffic planner, you need to have stuck it out through a Civ E degree and maybe went through the motions at a firm for for 15 years before getting laid off and then wanting a "cruise control" job with the power you never would have achieved in private industry for the rest of your career.
You end up dealing with guys where you live or die based on the opinion of someone who hasn't bothered to learn anything new since 1991, and have no interest in breaking their "cruise control".
This is also my experience. It would suggest routes that make no sense (to a local) in an attempt to “divert” away from traffic, which ends up costing more time and petrol anyway.
I had a similar question and am generally curious if google has an internal IRB or equivalent for these studies. Given their outsized influence, there is a reasonable chance of uncoordinated interaction between their efforts and other ongoing studies. For a trivial example, consider interaction between google maps rerouting experiment near an event and localized uber surge pricing.
The south SF Bay Area cities of Los Gatos and Monte Sereno have persistent problems with traffic gridlock during summer weekends and holidays due to navigation apps routing drivers off of southbound SR-17 and onto surface streets. It gets so bad that residents literally can't get out of their own driveways and emergency response vehicles can't move.
There actually did used to be train service from San Jose to Santa Cruz but it was abandoned in 1940 due to high costs and lack of use. Rebuilding it would cost >$1B.
It can’t be helped. Roads are not only locally funded and the only thing allowing residents to free-ride on everyone else’s contribution to this commons is the information asymmetry. It’s similar to the fact that San Franciscans and Athertonians have “slow streets / no through streets” which allow a few to retain exclusive road use for themselves.
With increased information comes more efficient utilization and no doubt the free-riders will find that troubling since it’s no longer a free ride with the asymmetric effect where they can use my roads but I can’t use theirs.
In an ideal world, we would use our Fastraks to charge for marginal road use and a locality can recoup capital investments it made by charging appropriately for marginal use.
Do you not have shoulder lanes? I ask because I’ve lived places that don’t and I’ve always wondered if you just die if EMS doesn’t have a lane to get to you.
"just" is doing a lot of work there. Trains are a very (very) expensive way to move people between pre-determined places. We can do a lot better than this in 2026.
Why cant we have smart stop lights. Nothing more annoying than sitting on a street with nobody coming and a red light for some arbitrary time period that's totally incorrect for the time period I'm currently in
Most cities have some intelligence on their traffic lights, and they do have traffic sensors to know where cars are waiting.
You might not see any cars and are annoyed waiting at the light, but you don’t know what downstream things they are trying to control for. Maybe if they send you through the light, you are going to join some other traffic event that will cause an issue.
It could also just be suboptimal, but it very hard to know just from what you observe as an individal
I like XKCD but I don't really agree with the underlying premise of this one.
When I was in the Netherlands, one of the global gold standards in terms of urban planning and design, I noticed it wasn't only more pleasant as a pedestrian or cyclist, it was more pleasant as a driver as well. Lights were smart and did not sit on red forever if you were the only one waiting at an intersection.
This comic suggests there's some "invisible, massively complicated" mesh of signal interactions we can never possibly fathom, and therefore wasting precious hours over the course of our lives sitting at an intersection is the most optimal one.
The Dutch have figured this out, why can't North America?
If you drive the same route frequently you can definitely figure out which intersections/areas are improperly configured. There's a stretch of road I drive on several times a week where the speed limit was dropped from 40 to 30 a couple years ago, but the lights are all still timed for 40. If you speed you get a sea of green, but if you drive the new speed limit you end up stopping at half the lights.
I've lived places where stop lights were all scheduled (unless someone was operating it manually), but most of the lights I experience operate dynamically based on sensors (typically in the road or cameras and ped buttons)
Also, left turn lanes that are too short for the average number of cars wanting to turn left, and left turn signals that are too short to clear the left turn lanes.
Congestion can be solved by charging more for driving. Even a modest amount would start affecting how much people drive. The money could be used for better roads and improving other transit options that aren't so space-inefficient. That said, this would likely be unpopular to implement until the effects were visible. See congestion pricing in NYC as an example.
Won't that just unfairly displace the impact onto the economically disadvanteged as they are the least likely to have the flexibility in their schedule, inadvertently forcing more of the maintenance burden onto those who are int be least place to bear it?
You wouldn't just charge more for driving. You do it in combination with funding public transport, building safer cycling routes, and removing roadblocks from building cheap housing near PT hubs.
Take the revenue generated from congestion pricing, and put it into public transportation. Make public transportation free to use. That would be far more impactful to the folks least able to bear an increase in driving fees.
In most of the US, people are forced to own cars because they don't have public transit available, or the available public transit is too infrequent, or there aren't dense enough routes. The reason behind this is funding.
Additionally, buses are less efficient because they need to sit in the same traffic as everyone else. Reduced traffic makes buses more efficient. Reducing car traffic is a win for basically everyone, and increasing public transit is additionally a win for basically everyone.
Car infrastructure is heavily subsidized, and congestion pricing is one way to make car owners pay for part of the cost. Why is it fair for public transit riders to have to pay per ride, when car owners get to use the infrastructure for free?
The US obviously loses out to places like Japan because you have the chicken and egg problem: to make money back you need enough people but for enough people to use public transport you need to invest in it.
> Every place I’ve lived charges a fuel tax to pay for roads.
Which, ironically, often only covers something like 10% of the cost :)
Sure, I wouldn't expect fuel tax to cover everything. Local roads are quite useful to people who do not drive at all, and major roads and interstates are disproportionately worn by commercial vehicles that also benefit many people who do not drive private vehicles.
Indeed. After all, roads predate the car by thousands of years. But still, often roads are overbuilt and their potential capacity is never close to being reached. The bog standard suburban design we see in america for example is generally severely overbuilt. Plenty of arterials nowhere close to being used to their theoretical throughput limits. If your experience of suburbia is mostly american centric, if you look at say english suburbia where major roads only offer a single lane per direction you'd wonder how society there functions at all. But it does, because those single lane per direction have enough capacity to serve a generally denser version of suburbia than what we might see on the fringes of Dallas, where giant empty roads such as this (1; note how there are barely any cars in frame) are found on standardized 1 mile square grids out of routine more than anything really. Compare with (2) which feels much more right sized for the road demand in this generally denser suburban area on smaller lots with attached housing.
> In my city public transit fares only cover something like 10% of the cost. Isn’t that fairly typical?
Sure, but the budget for transit is also extremely tight, especially compared to car infrastructure.
If only 10% of the costs are covered, that's even more motivation to not charge fees at all, right? Why impose that burden? More people riding public transit means less cars on the road, and less traffic, which is good for everyone.
> charges a fuel tax to pay for roads
For the most part fuel taxes haven't increased to cover the costs of roads (it hasn't increased with inflation at all, federally), and they typically cover highways. Recently, a number of places have been looking at pausing or removing fuel taxes to reduce costs of fuel, due to the Iran war. Most states cover the cost of roads primarily through their general funds.
> Take the revenue generated from congestion pricing, and put it into public transportation.
Public transportation is often not viable for the car-centric design of many American communities. The above is necessarily to do, but development probably also needs to also change to pre-WW2 designs:
We're talking about cities that would benefit from congestion pricing. If there's enough traffic to need congestion pricing, then it could immediately benefit from public transit.
I don't understand why folks always take this as an all or nothing thing. We don't need to redesign the suburbs. They're the ones causing the congestion, and they're also the ones benefiting from free roads. Taxing them to cover the their own externalities makes sense. If public transit is available and better than driving cars, the suburbs will either support them via redesign, or they'll pay the tax for the luxury of driving a car into a city they don't live in.
I disagree with that take generally. What is the difference between say a UK garden suburb and a new build suburb outside dallas? The commuter rail station really. UK suburbs are similarly labyrinthine. But actually, the dallas suburbs have great bones for a potential transit network. Even though the residential streets themselves look like they were laid out by wandering livestock just like they were in the UK, they have the great advantage of being rigidly bounded by generally 1x1 mile square, cardinal, arterial road networks which are very wide public right of ways. One could just lay a network of brt or lrt or heavy commuter rail on top of this space without even needing to acquire any property at all. And if the stations were say on each 1x1 mile intersecting node, everyone in the inner residential portion would theoretically only be a half mile or closer from their nearest transit stop, as the crow flies at least.
The only real issue is that these transit offerings are not being invested in at all. Not at the level of road expansion investment anyhow. Not that they wouldn't be possible to offer or that the built environment somehow precludes them.
I think the bigger thing this making public transport a real alternative to driving - I most American metros using public transport isn’t faster, can be inconvenient (no parking, multiple transfers, etc), comfortable safe.
I guess I’m saying yes you can make driving less attractive, but I think the better answer is to make public transport more attractive.
They are looking at ways they can improve traffic that are actually in their control. They can change how they route traffic that is using their app, they can’t change public policy or driving choices. They are working with what they have.
Much as they have features for walk / bike / transit traffic, they could suggest step-by-step carpool instructions:
"1. meet with (other Google Map carpool user) X at location Y.
2. In one car, both of you drive to location Z."
Obviously, huge challenges here (is person X a serial killer, etc.) But Google can handle moonshots.
Well, duh. Grid design that allows traffic to diffuse is a secret superpower of American cities. Along with stroads that seamlessly blend local and arterial traffic.
One of unforgivable mistakes of Project Zero Vision is sabotage of stroads. If forced more traffic onto local streets, resulting in MORE pedestrian deaths.
Happy that research time is being put towards this, however a fuel use decrease of ~0.75% is a bit underwhelming for this particular endeavor, even when consumer cars/vans are 10% of CO2 emissions.
I think it's a mistake to represent average speed increase instead of characterizing the speed increase as as hours of full, moderate, and low speed traffic per day.
Because an extra ??minutes a day of avoiding stop and go traffic is worth far more than the average speed increase it tells.
I doubt there would be any improvement. What we have seen is traffic is a constant. If you make make the road network higher capacity or faster, people just move further out or drive to further away stores.
People have an amount of time they will tolerate driving for, and adjust everything else around that.
The same things keeps happening every time I find myself stuck in traffic on the interstate. Out of nowhere, a popup appears in Google Maps: a faster route is available! 4 minutes faster! Unless either the passenger or the driver are fast enough to hit "No thanks", the change auto-applies, and Google now wants me to exit the interstate at the nearest exit and drive some random road I had no idea about, to rejoin the interstate a few miles ahead. Of course, a bunch of other vehicles in the same traffic jam got the same
notification, so that minor road now get a sizable fraction of the interstate traffic, all of which then struggles to merge back.
Seeing this again and again. We call it a "Google detour" in the family, and rarely agree to the change of the route.
Same. This is why I switched to Apple Maps. Sometimes the Google detours would end in dangerous situations, like a left turn with no light across a major road. And it would be to save 2 minutes-ridiculous!
I've had Google try to route me across private property (an apartment complex parking lot) to avoid a signaled intersection and save a couple of minutes.
Me too. It’s infuriating and unsafe. I don’t drive often, but when I do it’s out of the city where I’m unfamiliar and need a map.
So I also stopped using Google Maps for driving.
Who at Google seriously believes that it’s good idea to 1) unpredictably change the route someone chose mid-drive, and 2) to distract them while driving with a pop up notification that must be interacted with just to maintain the route.
If I choose a route, I chose it for a reason. Don’t change it while I’m driving.
I’ve just started taking surface roads out of Charlotte at peak hours because I know how to get around, and any route that’s part of Apple/Google maps defaults will invariably be clogged with everyone following their directions. Surface streets tend to be blissfully open these days.
So many god damn unprotected left turns on mapping software. Some of them illegal too like asking you to do it when a sign says no left turns during listed hours.
Yes, I find it ironic that Google is recommending that people take varied routes, when it's their very app that often puts a bunch of people on an obscure, same route. Many times I've taken one of its shortcuts, only to see a bunch of cars in front of me and behind me taking the same shortcut, clearly not one people would normally take.
I've had this experience. 10 minutes in it hit me that we're all only here only because Google suggested so.
It was some kind of dirt road that almost never had this sort of traffic and you could see that from the faces of the locals, as we were passing them by at maybe twice walking speed.
If the original route was to continue on the current road, and the revised one is to come off, then you don't need to interact with the screen at all to reject it. Just continue driving, and the route will reset once you pass the exit.
It once made me exit the highway, using the nearly empty exit ramp, then do a U-turn on the surface street and get back using the lightly used entrance ramp. Wow, all that effort to move about 250m forward in traffic, saving me perhaps 30 seconds of time on my 3 hour drive. Very "over-optimized" software does bizarre stuff that no sane person would ever do.
Surely the top way to avoid traffic congestion would be communities where it's possible to live near where you work, shop, go out, etc. and not doing everything else exactly the same but taking a slightly different highway in your car
This sounds simple, but many people are already living further away because they can’t afford to live downtown near where they work. Add kids into the equation, and many people who could live there without them are also forced out.
The most regressive tax imaginable is a flat fee for every person with no consideration of income. That is exactly the effect of requiring everyone to own a car.
It isn’t a flat fee per se, if only because wealthier people are too prideful. Rich man buys a 100k mercedes. Poor man buys that mercedes 15 or 20 years later for 3k. It still does what it did when it cost 100k.
This is possible if you’re not picky about where you live, where you work, your career options, how crowded your local vicinity is, or how much you pay for your residence.
The more your preferences or financial constraints come into play, the more you have to give up.
Most people settle in for driving because it allows them to pick from more job options than those that happen to be located near their house and more housing options than what happens to be near your job.
This didn’t matter as much 200 years ago when most people’s job options were limited to farming or something in service of farming.
It got much harder when the range of people’s jobs exploded and finding a company hiring in your specialty meant traveling some distance from home.
It gets even harder when there are two earners in a household trying to find two jobs.
> This is possible if you’re not picky about where you live, where you work, your career options,
Yup.
And even if you arent't picky. The amount of surface area you can cover scales quadratically with the distance you can commute (either by traveling longer, or by going faster). So as a first approximation, the amount of competition for your labour also goes up quadratically.
Job-hopping is one of the best ways to get better jobs. And it is a LOT easier if you can commute further.
Tech companies can have more distributed offices and assign employees based on geography instead of teams, go back to WFH, pay employees enough to live close to their mega campuses, or pay out the ass into adding more lanes.
The explosion was also due to the car not only spreading low density housing out that would have been a tough sell previously, but also job sprawl to suburban and exurban greenfield.
There used to be natural agglomeration to central well connected nodes before the car. Many cities enacted height limits in the early 1900s with the specific aim to spread out development that was dense enough to make serving basic infrastructure, such as water, power, transit, and cleaning the mounting horseshit off the roads, increasingly expensive and difficult. Early real estate barons would buy marginal land and develop a streetcar line that ran into the job center, and sell plots off that line now that it finally had some utility in the form of a connection to jobs. Even if you worked in something specialized back then, chances are it was close to where most other people were working. Offices were downtown. Government buildings were downtown. Hospitals were downtown. Manufacturing was downtown. Ports and railheads were downtown. All of that snowballing enjoyed by cities exploded with the car.
The relative price of those cramped urban centers where this is true suggests that at least a few more people would choose this path if it were cheaper.
Most jobs, not all, can take place inside a city. If you build your cities densely, people can live and work within the city and have all their needs met without the need for a car (see: the great cities of the world)
If you design economic hubs properly, businesses can be located within reach of homes without the need for cars.
If you instead prioritize the need for, I don’t know, a monoculture lawn and separation from lower class people, then you’re choosing to build suburbs. Once a city has built enough suburbs, businesses become out of reach without the use of a car.
Since I've moved to my current home, I've had jobs in about 6 different towns and cities. I think for all of them I had colleagues that cycled to work and colleagues that drove for an hour or more.
All these jobs had homes and shops within walking distance. But they are not within walking distance of each other.
What if I want my own garden and not monoculture lawn? What if I want my children to be able to walk in nature near their home? Neither is possible in a densely built city where there are only apartments.
Then there are all the social problems, bad neighbours that become more common in densely built areas. I don't want to deal with that. Suburbs are popular because they provide a superior quality of life for many people.
Of course in an ideal world everyone would be allowed to do fully remote work if possible, and people like me could move to countryside.
They could have everything they want here in my neighborhood of Chicago: easy access to nature, room for a garden. Suburban Americans love to pretend that "cul de sac" and "Manhattan" are the only two types of place
> Most jobs, not all, can take place inside a city. If you build your cities densely, people can live and work within the city and have all their needs met without the need for a car (see: the great cities of the world)
Most people do not want to live in dense cities in high rises.
The number of jobs which cannot be moved into dense city high rises is much higher than you’re thinking. It might seem that way if your world is office jobs and email jobs, but there’s much more to the world of work than that.
Dense cities also have very high turnover as people grow up and want families.
It’s not about having lawns and staying away from “lower class people”. This feels like a poor attempt to cast moral shade on people who choose not to live in a high rise.
Most people who live in dense cities don’t live in high rises…
It is very clear you have never lived in a well functioning city before, and just have no idea what you are talking about. Take the L and admit you just don’t have experience with it. North Americans often don’t because North American cities are extremely bad in this regard.
Absolutely. It’s just the very anti city people never ever seem to use excuses that are actually valid.
Like if “the things that brings me most joy in life require owning lots of land” or “I don’t like people and every day I have to be near them drains me”, those are really valid reasons and there are many more.
What that tells me is either they have a caricature of cities in their head, or (more likely) being anti city is an identity and not based on anything actually about cities per-say.
> This is possible if you’re not picky about where you live, where you work, your career options, how crowded your local vicinity is, or how much you pay for your residence.
Perhaps the problem is the lack of options for those people that want human-centric (versus car-centric) communities. Maybe if we let The Market™ decide, versus forcing low-density sprawl via zoning, more options would be available.
Right now, if you look on any real estate web site, you'll probably find walkable neighbourhoods have higher prices non-walkable ones: there is demand for them, but a fixed supply since they're not being made anymore, and so they get bid up. Perhaps if there were more of them, especially around commuter rail stations, it would help.
Houston is not a free market for housing at all. They don’t have “zoning” because they call it “land use covenants” and “parking requirements” instead, and it ends up amounting to the same thing as “zoning” in other cities.
And the market doesn’t build the streets, sidewalks, or set up public transport routes.
I remember visiting my friend in an 400+ unit apartment complex in Houston. When I got up in the morning I was like “hey I’m going to walk down and get coffee.” My friend said to just Uber Eats it, I was like that’s insane. So I went down to the ground floor and found out there was literaly no way to walk to the coffee shop that was 0.1 miles away less than 30 minutes because of the absolute nightmare that is Huston streets and sidewalks.
For example deed restrictions, where, when a sub-division is created, the use case of the lots can never be changed. See also "residential buffering ordinance", parking requirement ordinance, historic districts, etc.
I am liking the term “car brained” more and more for this type of attitude.
Have you ever heard of trains, busses, bikes? The options for transportation are not binary car or no car. Maybe in North America where they refuse to provide even crappy public transport in most cities it feels this way, but in the rest of the world they are smart enough to build trains and don’t have this problem.
And the easiest way to do this is to lift restrictions on being able to build housing near workplaces (i.e. anywhere housing might reasonably and gainfully be built). Most traffic is caused by building restrictions.
>Surely the top way to avoid traffic congestion would be communities where it's possible to live near where you work, shop, go out, etc. and not doing everything else exactly the same but taking a slightly different highway in your car
I dont even know what this would look like in practice. It feels like an inner city thing, lifestyle priced accordingly.
What Socialists/Communists/Liberals/Conservatives/Local and State Governments/Weird Internet Tech Bros all seem to forget is that people have different priorities, and you cant build 1 house that suits every priority.
I am house hunting at the moment, and houses optimised for walking to shops are at the low end, when what I need is a big yard for my kid to run around in and a shed for my blacksmithing tools (and ideally neighbors far enough away that they dont mind metal being banged on in the morning) while also being within reasonable driving distance of a few of the sites I work at.
It looks like a lot of neighborhoods in American cities that are adjacent or outside the downtown business district or even suburbs on the commuter rail lines. A main commercial street surrounded by 1900-1950s houses and apartments, probably with new built mixed use buildings too. Most smaller cities and even big towns have neighborhoods like this based on my last 10 years of road trips across the US so it's not just NY SF etc where this is possible. This is for the the largest cities like NY DC Chicago etc or even smaller ones like Sacramento or Louisville. Not sure we can work out housing policy to be blacksmith friendly and it seems like a pain even out in the suburbs
B-b-bb-b-bbb-but then how will I have my 3 storey house with a 100 acre backyard, 2 pools, and 14 cars??? Don't you know it's LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE to live without these basics?? What are you, a communist or something??????
Europe addressed the problem by hanging the 2% criminal population each year for about 800 years.
This exerted strong evolutionary and social selection on social perception of safety. Sharing public transportation accelerated.
I won the lottery of life, born in a British colony in the latter half of the 20th century. Unlike the post mass immigration Europe of today, it is perfectly safe for me to catch public transport where I live.
I have the luxury of choosing safe public transport where sufficient patronage exists to make it cost effective.
Where WEF demographic replacement policies are implemented, public transport patronage will continue to plummet.
I've noticed that Google Maps has started sucking a lot lately, routing us onto routes that take 2-4 minutes longer when a faster route is clearly available or taking us on nonsensical detours, and I wonder if this experiment is a reason why.
There's a hidden cost to this, and that's trust in the mapping app. I've stopped using Google Navigation for routine trips where I know how to get to the destination. It used to be worth it for the traffic information, but now that there's a good chance that it'll take you on a slower route for reasons that may be beneficial to Google but detrimental to you, it's not worth it. My brother-in-law switched to Apple Maps for similar reasons: he's finding it simply gives better results nowadays.
I've noticed this too. It has gotten more frequent over last year or so. It will route me to narrow roads which I know for a fact will take me much longer.
I had the worst experience about 3 weeks ago, when I kept driving on very narrow and congested roads for almost 3 hours and the destination was showing still an hour away. If I had just taken the normal route, it would've taken me only 2 hours total. But Google thought let's make this guy drive around for 4 hours because fuck him.
Same. Though it's been happening for maybe a year? Or, at least since I learned where things actually are. I just can't trust the Google maps anymore! Many times I lost 10+ min because it took me through weird alley and then back to the main.
One way is to stop the war on cars. I see many cities basically making driving purposely bad. Super low speed limits, speed bumps, unnecessary bike lanes, poorly timed traffic lights, no right turn on red, etc. It’s all the typical pro bike anti car stuff but it hurts traffic. They never measure travel times in a transparent way as they make these destructive changes.
The only way to stop congestion is to get cars off the road.
Cars are the congestion. There is no other definition, and no other solution.
HOW you get cars off the road is worthy of debate. Pretending that there's a "war on cars" is not and never has been. Cars and their drivers have been subsidized for more than a century, never paying the full cost of the damage that they do to the environment, the roads, etc.
1. Car taxes / registrations should be based on weight and energy usage inefficiency and ratchet up quickly for personal vehicles that are larger than some sensible size based on pedestrian safety at no more than 30 kph. (Drivers of modern pickup trucks and SUVs cannot see pedestrians shorter than ~1.7m at ~5m, and the fact that their fronts are basically walls mean that those pedestrians are more likely to be killed on impact or bounced under the tires.)
2. There should absolutely be congestion pricing to enter downtown locations during the day or other times when vehicular traffic will be high. Yes, that means that most deliveries by transport truck would need to be staged into smaller vehicles and delivered to the businesses needing them, or delivered overnight.
3. Uber, Lyft, and Waymo are part of the problem and should be treated as such.
4. There should be more investment in public transit. Paid for by increased registrations and congestion pricing, preferentially. Fares should be reduced, ideally to free. More use of public transit makes it safer and incentivizes making it faster.
5. There should absolutely be more bike lanes in pretty much every city. It's called induced demand and once the infrastructure is safe, you will see increased usage by all sorts of alternative mobility users (but mini e-motorcycles should be licensed just like regular motorcycles and should not be using the mobility infrastructure).
6. Pedestrian and wheelchair users matter first and foremost over any other road user (bikes, scooters, cars, etc.).
We've had 50+ years of Robert Moses being proved wrong. It's time to design cities around people, not around cars. Call that a war on cars if you want, but it's not: it's a war for peoples' quality of life. Cars can be part of the solution, but they need to be treated like the problem they are first.
Wrong. Cars are high utility and should remain on roads. They increase quality of life by giving you a fast way to get to exactly where you want on your own schedule. And designing for cars IS designing for people, obviously. Who do you think is inside cars?
What is design for single passenger cars? Most cars can fit 5 people and roads also carry buses, ambulances, and trucks that carry every single product* in the economy.
* Probably with the exception of coal and some mining materials.
So you agree that most cars are far larger and heavier than required? First search result for "average car occupancy"[1]:
> In 2022 the Average Number of Occupants Per Trip for Household Vehicles in the United States Was 1.5
This discrepancy is the reason for car pooling, ride-sharing, etc. (Note that Uber, Lyft, etc. are taxi services, not "ride sharing"; since the drivers themselves are not typically intending to travel the routes they drive)
> roads also carry buses
Yes, which is why cars should be removed from such roads, to avoid slowing down buses.
> ambulances
Emergency vehicles can drive in places where cars are forbidden (cycle paths, pedestrianised roads, etc.)
> trucks that carry every single product* in the economy.
Again, you're undermining your own argument: the subsidies given to private car infrastructure are so large, that freight companies exploiting that infrastructure can end up more cost-effective than those which use rail; despite rail being more efficient not only in terms of fuel, but also in terms of labour (since so many trucks would be required to do the job of a single freight train, and each of those trucks require a separate driver). Also note that heavier vehicles degrade the road infrastructure disproportionately; which is even more reason to reduce the number of trucks as far as possible.
My quality of life is increased by having more bike lanes so that I can get around _faster_ and _healthier_ than having to use my car. I'm also able to get where I want and need to be on my own schedule by car, bike, public transit, and walking — which mode matters based on the needs of the destination.
I shop at Costco by bike most of the time. Once every couple of months there's enough that needs to be bought that I use the car.
I have a dental appointment tomorrow: I can walk or cycle there faster than I can drive and find parking. I have another appointment on Monday at a hospital and I'll cycle there far faster than I can take public transit _or_ private car, and I won't have to pay ~$15/hour for parking or park a kilometre away.
Get out of your North American car bubble and look at what Paris and the Netherlands have done: they have not banned private car ownership or use, but they have removed some of them from streets. Utrecht just opened a massive underground _bike parking garage_ but it's also one of the busiest cities in the Netherlands in terms of car traffic.
There is no war on cars; that's something that has been invented out of whole cloth. Those of us who agitate for improved _options_ simply want (1) cars to pay their full freight (they don't, not by a long shot); (2) safer roads for pedestrians, cyclists, and those who want alternative mobility options; (3) more public transit; and (3) fewer cars moving slower because that's the only way to alleviate traffic.
You're not in traffic: you are traffic.
Your claim that designing for cars is designing for people is risible. Designing for people first (that's the goal!) means larger sidewalks, more barriers so that distracted or angry drivers find it harder to find themselves on those sidewalks, and fewer cars with clear rules so that vulnerable road users have absolute priority over people in cars. The larger and faster your vehicle, the more responsibility you should have, both in terms of liability when you inevitably collide with an obstruction and in terms of what you pay to keep the roads and surrounding infrastructure maintained.
No. The reason cities are working so hard to build these kinds of safety measures is that cars are horrendously dangerous for people walking and biking. The “war on cars” is a war for the safety and dignity of everyone outside of cars.
They aren’t dangerous. Road fatalities are still very low per mile driven. And cars are getting safer all the time with their sensors and intelligent features. The war on cars is an irrational safetyism campaign driven by selfish bicyclists more than anyone else.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 115 ms ] threadWhy would they specifically need to route people away from congested segments? Presumably if a segment gets congested enough, it'd be considered slower and therefore won't get picked in the first place?
I can't say this actually happened for me. For straightforward routes with no congestion I never saw random alternate routes being proposed. That makes sense, given that it'd probably tip people off. If this is happening, they must only be doing in cases where there's congestion and the difference is marginal, eg. it's rush hour and the "optimal" route takes 30 minutes but the alternate takes 33 minutes. Moreover you don't really need any deliberate effort to see this effect. If nobody is traveling on a side road, the algorithm will probably revert to historical patterns, which might turn out to be overly optimistic in congestion scenarios (eg. there's nearby road repairs and other people are already using it as an alternate), thereby giving you the impression that you got screwed over by the app.
[1] https://contentpartners.maps.google.com/
At least for Apple, iPhones always report this data, not just when using Apple Maps
For instance, a few years ago, a segment of I-495 in Delaware needed to be unexpectedly shut down for emergency repairs. Drivers were rerouted. But because of the increase in traffic on the less-hardy detour route, that route needed repairs and repaving soon afterward, much more quickly than it would have ordinarily required.
So yes, drivers can be better dispersed to ease congestion, but we also need to consider the secondary effects to the roadways themselves.
So it’s now one of those words like ‘literally’ which can be its own antonym.
Long story short: More public transport sounds like a good idea to prevent more situations like you posted.
https://patents.google.com/patent/US20170184409A1
(I'm not saying I'm the first or only person to think of it, but I did patent it, as well as the extra claim of compensating those people sent on the slower route).
Edit: let’s think of this from a pure scientific point of view - if you had 3 lanes and split traffic across them based on a range of speed - that would be the most optimised in terms of throughput for all lanes. Now, consider a reverse Amdahl's Law… what’s the worst thing you could do to make the fastest lane crawl which in effect kills total throughput across ALL lanes? Put a slow truck in it! Put a few, and you’ve just turned the lane giving you the highest throughput to most likely the slowest lane.
I just parked my car after another morning of commuting. Though experiments alone in today’s traffic again confirmed my theory.
We should also take the idea from Finland where the traffic fines scale with each person's ability to pay. $100 for camping the passing lane or failing to maintain a reasonable following distance is not a big consequence for a lot of people. $100k covers the edges a lot better.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/06/finnish-busine...
If I ran Google Maps, I'd ask to route stupid drivers away from my routes. The GPS and phone accelerometer should be able to tell us who they are -- "Oh you have Google Maps actively navigating, GPS says you're going 50mph, and the app in focus is WhatsApp and you're using the phone keyboard? Fuck off! Also we recorded 5 swerve events in the last 10 minutes, hard to stay on your lane when you're texting!
There's custom software for Elon's Tesla, I wonder if the system also directs people away from his routes so he can have a ride on emptier roads...
Of course the first step of that is I have to gain control of Google Maps...
Terrible drivers cause traffic jams and accidents, who wouldn't want to be segregated away from them?
> Over a six month period, we adopted a city-wide switchback (also known as crossover) experimental design, alternating between this treatment and the control (unaltered) routing algorithm over consecutive days to appropriately measure the effect of this intervention
> Averaged across cities, we observe a median increase of around 2% in driving speeds on targeted segments, corresponding to a median decrease of 0.5% to 1.0% in fuel consumption rates
The cities were: Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, Seattle.
The data and code is also available (https://github.com/google-research/google-research/blob/mast...) from the paper (https://www.nature.com/articles/s44284-026-00443-x).
Kudos Google! Nice to see this kind of work. That said, let's just build more trains?
Google Maps doesn't have a "truck mode." It does not take things like size or weight or blanket restrictions on commercial truck traffic into account.
This means that Google Maps will cheerfully send commercial trucks down roads where they do not belong even on a normal day that is unfettered by whimsical techbro experiments, and the presence of such experiments on any other day doesn't change that.
Truck drivers do have a plethora of truck-centric navigation systems available to use, but Google Maps not amongst them. It never has been.
Netflix personalized recommendations affect only the individual, not those around them who are not using Netflix.
But this isn't that crazy? Most businesses require government approval for changes that have community effects... that's the entire point of government. Stuff like construction permits and regulation around structures, water usage, pollution, building architecture. Mining companies are required to assess environmental impacts. Companies making RF devices need to get confirmation on how the devices affect people and other devices.
And that's not even considering market share/monopoly status, which also regularly invites more scrutiny.
Like compare changing live routing to publishing a paper map showing alternate routes.
In either case it seems to me that the vehicle operator should be most responsible for the impact of the route that they use.
To get to the competence level of a local traffic planner, you need to have stuck it out through a Civ E degree and maybe went through the motions at a firm for for 15 years before getting laid off and then wanting a "cruise control" job with the power you never would have achieved in private industry for the rest of your career.
You end up dealing with guys where you live or die based on the opinion of someone who hasn't bothered to learn anything new since 1991, and have no interest in breaking their "cruise control".
There actually did used to be train service from San Jose to Santa Cruz but it was abandoned in 1940 due to high costs and lack of use. Rebuilding it would cost >$1B.
https://www.goodtimes.sc/isnt-train-san-jose/
With increased information comes more efficient utilization and no doubt the free-riders will find that troubling since it’s no longer a free ride with the asymmetric effect where they can use my roads but I can’t use theirs.
In an ideal world, we would use our Fastraks to charge for marginal road use and a locality can recoup capital investments it made by charging appropriately for marginal use.
"just" is doing a lot of work there. Trains are a very (very) expensive way to move people between pre-determined places. We can do a lot better than this in 2026.
Most cities have some intelligence on their traffic lights, and they do have traffic sensors to know where cars are waiting.
You might not see any cars and are annoyed waiting at the light, but you don’t know what downstream things they are trying to control for. Maybe if they send you through the light, you are going to join some other traffic event that will cause an issue.
It could also just be suboptimal, but it very hard to know just from what you observe as an individal
When I was in the Netherlands, one of the global gold standards in terms of urban planning and design, I noticed it wasn't only more pleasant as a pedestrian or cyclist, it was more pleasant as a driver as well. Lights were smart and did not sit on red forever if you were the only one waiting at an intersection.
This comic suggests there's some "invisible, massively complicated" mesh of signal interactions we can never possibly fathom, and therefore wasting precious hours over the course of our lives sitting at an intersection is the most optimal one.
The Dutch have figured this out, why can't North America?
There are a ton of factors that go into traffic and traffic patterns. For one thing, I would be curious to see total traffic numbers.
Startup Proposal: Intelligent Traffic Signals
https://till.com/articles/smarttraffic
In most of the US, people are forced to own cars because they don't have public transit available, or the available public transit is too infrequent, or there aren't dense enough routes. The reason behind this is funding.
Additionally, buses are less efficient because they need to sit in the same traffic as everyone else. Reduced traffic makes buses more efficient. Reducing car traffic is a win for basically everyone, and increasing public transit is additionally a win for basically everyone.
Car infrastructure is heavily subsidized, and congestion pricing is one way to make car owners pay for part of the cost. Why is it fair for public transit riders to have to pay per ride, when car owners get to use the infrastructure for free?
In my city public transit fares only cover something like 10% of the cost. Isn’t that fairly typical?
> car owners get to use the infrastructure for free
Every place I’ve lived charges a fuel tax to pay for roads.
Quite a few areas have their public transit fully funded by users and some even make a substantial profit. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio)
The US obviously loses out to places like Japan because you have the chicken and egg problem: to make money back you need enough people but for enough people to use public transport you need to invest in it.
> Every place I’ve lived charges a fuel tax to pay for roads.
Which, ironically, often only covers something like 10% of the cost :)
1. https://www.google.com/maps/@33.1890836,-96.7504787,3a,75y,1...
2. https://www.google.com/maps/@51.3698269,-0.1403251,3a,89.7y,...
Sure, but the budget for transit is also extremely tight, especially compared to car infrastructure.
If only 10% of the costs are covered, that's even more motivation to not charge fees at all, right? Why impose that burden? More people riding public transit means less cars on the road, and less traffic, which is good for everyone.
> charges a fuel tax to pay for roads
For the most part fuel taxes haven't increased to cover the costs of roads (it hasn't increased with inflation at all, federally), and they typically cover highways. Recently, a number of places have been looking at pausing or removing fuel taxes to reduce costs of fuel, due to the Iran war. Most states cover the cost of roads primarily through their general funds.
Public transportation is often not viable for the car-centric design of many American communities. The above is necessarily to do, but development probably also needs to also change to pre-WW2 designs:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0
See also Dutch suburbs:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nImFJ7KKjAo
I don't understand why folks always take this as an all or nothing thing. We don't need to redesign the suburbs. They're the ones causing the congestion, and they're also the ones benefiting from free roads. Taxing them to cover the their own externalities makes sense. If public transit is available and better than driving cars, the suburbs will either support them via redesign, or they'll pay the tax for the luxury of driving a car into a city they don't live in.
The only real issue is that these transit offerings are not being invested in at all. Not at the level of road expansion investment anyhow. Not that they wouldn't be possible to offer or that the built environment somehow precludes them.
The ability to do stuff without needing a car.
I guess I’m saying yes you can make driving less attractive, but I think the better answer is to make public transport more attractive.
Perhaps some sort of carpooling profile? That would be a dramatically bigger improvement than, say, routing users through residential neighborhoods.
They are looking at ways they can improve traffic that are actually in their control. They can change how they route traffic that is using their app, they can’t change public policy or driving choices. They are working with what they have.
Obviously, huge challenges here (is person X a serial killer, etc.) But Google can handle moonshots.
Social credit score? I've seen that Black Mirror episode.
One of unforgivable mistakes of Project Zero Vision is sabotage of stroads. If forced more traffic onto local streets, resulting in MORE pedestrian deaths.
Because an extra ??minutes a day of avoiding stop and go traffic is worth far more than the average speed increase it tells.
People have an amount of time they will tolerate driving for, and adjust everything else around that.
Seeing this again and again. We call it a "Google detour" in the family, and rarely agree to the change of the route.
So I also stopped using Google Maps for driving.
Who at Google seriously believes that it’s good idea to 1) unpredictably change the route someone chose mid-drive, and 2) to distract them while driving with a pop up notification that must be interacted with just to maintain the route.
If I choose a route, I chose it for a reason. Don’t change it while I’m driving.
It was some kind of dirt road that almost never had this sort of traffic and you could see that from the faces of the locals, as we were passing them by at maybe twice walking speed.
Reminder: you are not in traffic, you are traffic. :)
Congestion pricing is a regressive tax.
Used car prices are more like 10k now anyway. Used Mercedes, probably 40k.
The more your preferences or financial constraints come into play, the more you have to give up.
Most people settle in for driving because it allows them to pick from more job options than those that happen to be located near their house and more housing options than what happens to be near your job.
This didn’t matter as much 200 years ago when most people’s job options were limited to farming or something in service of farming.
It got much harder when the range of people’s jobs exploded and finding a company hiring in your specialty meant traveling some distance from home.
It gets even harder when there are two earners in a household trying to find two jobs.
Yup.
And even if you arent't picky. The amount of surface area you can cover scales quadratically with the distance you can commute (either by traveling longer, or by going faster). So as a first approximation, the amount of competition for your labour also goes up quadratically.
Job-hopping is one of the best ways to get better jobs. And it is a LOT easier if you can commute further.
Per employee tax = $0.20 * commute_miles * 2 * (commute_miles / 10)^2 * mandated_office_days_per_year * (1 + 2 * share_of_workforce_over_10_miles)^2
Tech companies can have more distributed offices and assign employees based on geography instead of teams, go back to WFH, pay employees enough to live close to their mega campuses, or pay out the ass into adding more lanes.
There used to be natural agglomeration to central well connected nodes before the car. Many cities enacted height limits in the early 1900s with the specific aim to spread out development that was dense enough to make serving basic infrastructure, such as water, power, transit, and cleaning the mounting horseshit off the roads, increasingly expensive and difficult. Early real estate barons would buy marginal land and develop a streetcar line that ran into the job center, and sell plots off that line now that it finally had some utility in the form of a connection to jobs. Even if you worked in something specialized back then, chances are it was close to where most other people were working. Offices were downtown. Government buildings were downtown. Hospitals were downtown. Manufacturing was downtown. Ports and railheads were downtown. All of that snowballing enjoyed by cities exploded with the car.
Most jobs, not all, can take place inside a city. If you build your cities densely, people can live and work within the city and have all their needs met without the need for a car (see: the great cities of the world)
If you design economic hubs properly, businesses can be located within reach of homes without the need for cars.
If you instead prioritize the need for, I don’t know, a monoculture lawn and separation from lower class people, then you’re choosing to build suburbs. Once a city has built enough suburbs, businesses become out of reach without the use of a car.
All these jobs had homes and shops within walking distance. But they are not within walking distance of each other.
Then there are all the social problems, bad neighbours that become more common in densely built areas. I don't want to deal with that. Suburbs are popular because they provide a superior quality of life for many people.
Of course in an ideal world everyone would be allowed to do fully remote work if possible, and people like me could move to countryside.
Most people do not want to live in dense cities in high rises.
The number of jobs which cannot be moved into dense city high rises is much higher than you’re thinking. It might seem that way if your world is office jobs and email jobs, but there’s much more to the world of work than that.
Dense cities also have very high turnover as people grow up and want families.
It’s not about having lawns and staying away from “lower class people”. This feels like a poor attempt to cast moral shade on people who choose not to live in a high rise.
It is very clear you have never lived in a well functioning city before, and just have no idea what you are talking about. Take the L and admit you just don’t have experience with it. North Americans often don’t because North American cities are extremely bad in this regard.
Like if “the things that brings me most joy in life require owning lots of land” or “I don’t like people and every day I have to be near them drains me”, those are really valid reasons and there are many more.
What that tells me is either they have a caricature of cities in their head, or (more likely) being anti city is an identity and not based on anything actually about cities per-say.
Perhaps the problem is the lack of options for those people that want human-centric (versus car-centric) communities. Maybe if we let The Market™ decide, versus forcing low-density sprawl via zoning, more options would be available.
Right now, if you look on any real estate web site, you'll probably find walkable neighbourhoods have higher prices non-walkable ones: there is demand for them, but a fixed supply since they're not being made anymore, and so they get bid up. Perhaps if there were more of them, especially around commuter rail stations, it would help.
And the market doesn’t build the streets, sidewalks, or set up public transport routes.
I remember visiting my friend in an 400+ unit apartment complex in Houston. When I got up in the morning I was like “hey I’m going to walk down and get coffee.” My friend said to just Uber Eats it, I was like that’s insane. So I went down to the ground floor and found out there was literaly no way to walk to the coffee shop that was 0.1 miles away less than 30 minutes because of the absolute nightmare that is Huston streets and sidewalks.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaU1UH_3B5k
For example deed restrictions, where, when a sub-division is created, the use case of the lots can never be changed. See also "residential buffering ordinance", parking requirement ordinance, historic districts, etc.
Have you ever heard of trains, busses, bikes? The options for transportation are not binary car or no car. Maybe in North America where they refuse to provide even crappy public transport in most cities it feels this way, but in the rest of the world they are smart enough to build trains and don’t have this problem.
I dont even know what this would look like in practice. It feels like an inner city thing, lifestyle priced accordingly.
What Socialists/Communists/Liberals/Conservatives/Local and State Governments/Weird Internet Tech Bros all seem to forget is that people have different priorities, and you cant build 1 house that suits every priority.
I am house hunting at the moment, and houses optimised for walking to shops are at the low end, when what I need is a big yard for my kid to run around in and a shed for my blacksmithing tools (and ideally neighbors far enough away that they dont mind metal being banged on in the morning) while also being within reasonable driving distance of a few of the sites I work at.
You could live where you work and suddenly your next job is a 30 min drive away.
How could you ensure that enough companies existing within a 10 mile radius to provided varied employment to all the residents?
This exerted strong evolutionary and social selection on social perception of safety. Sharing public transportation accelerated.
I won the lottery of life, born in a British colony in the latter half of the 20th century. Unlike the post mass immigration Europe of today, it is perfectly safe for me to catch public transport where I live.
I have the luxury of choosing safe public transport where sufficient patronage exists to make it cost effective.
Where WEF demographic replacement policies are implemented, public transport patronage will continue to plummet.
Until you support a feature that simple and obvious, I don't have a lot of interest in your input on this subject.
There's a hidden cost to this, and that's trust in the mapping app. I've stopped using Google Navigation for routine trips where I know how to get to the destination. It used to be worth it for the traffic information, but now that there's a good chance that it'll take you on a slower route for reasons that may be beneficial to Google but detrimental to you, it's not worth it. My brother-in-law switched to Apple Maps for similar reasons: he's finding it simply gives better results nowadays.
I had the worst experience about 3 weeks ago, when I kept driving on very narrow and congested roads for almost 3 hours and the destination was showing still an hour away. If I had just taken the normal route, it would've taken me only 2 hours total. But Google thought let's make this guy drive around for 4 hours because fuck him.
Cars are the congestion. There is no other definition, and no other solution.
HOW you get cars off the road is worthy of debate. Pretending that there's a "war on cars" is not and never has been. Cars and their drivers have been subsidized for more than a century, never paying the full cost of the damage that they do to the environment, the roads, etc.
1. Car taxes / registrations should be based on weight and energy usage inefficiency and ratchet up quickly for personal vehicles that are larger than some sensible size based on pedestrian safety at no more than 30 kph. (Drivers of modern pickup trucks and SUVs cannot see pedestrians shorter than ~1.7m at ~5m, and the fact that their fronts are basically walls mean that those pedestrians are more likely to be killed on impact or bounced under the tires.)
2. There should absolutely be congestion pricing to enter downtown locations during the day or other times when vehicular traffic will be high. Yes, that means that most deliveries by transport truck would need to be staged into smaller vehicles and delivered to the businesses needing them, or delivered overnight.
3. Uber, Lyft, and Waymo are part of the problem and should be treated as such.
4. There should be more investment in public transit. Paid for by increased registrations and congestion pricing, preferentially. Fares should be reduced, ideally to free. More use of public transit makes it safer and incentivizes making it faster.
5. There should absolutely be more bike lanes in pretty much every city. It's called induced demand and once the infrastructure is safe, you will see increased usage by all sorts of alternative mobility users (but mini e-motorcycles should be licensed just like regular motorcycles and should not be using the mobility infrastructure).
6. Pedestrian and wheelchair users matter first and foremost over any other road user (bikes, scooters, cars, etc.).
We've had 50+ years of Robert Moses being proved wrong. It's time to design cities around people, not around cars. Call that a war on cars if you want, but it's not: it's a war for peoples' quality of life. Cars can be part of the solution, but they need to be treated like the problem they are first.
Who do you think are on bikes and in buses?
What is design for single passenger cars? Most cars can fit 5 people and roads also carry buses, ambulances, and trucks that carry every single product* in the economy.
* Probably with the exception of coal and some mining materials.
So you agree that most cars are far larger and heavier than required? First search result for "average car occupancy"[1]:
> In 2022 the Average Number of Occupants Per Trip for Household Vehicles in the United States Was 1.5
This discrepancy is the reason for car pooling, ride-sharing, etc. (Note that Uber, Lyft, etc. are taxi services, not "ride sharing"; since the drivers themselves are not typically intending to travel the routes they drive)
> roads also carry buses
Yes, which is why cars should be removed from such roads, to avoid slowing down buses.
> ambulances
Emergency vehicles can drive in places where cars are forbidden (cycle paths, pedestrianised roads, etc.)
> trucks that carry every single product* in the economy.
Again, you're undermining your own argument: the subsidies given to private car infrastructure are so large, that freight companies exploiting that infrastructure can end up more cost-effective than those which use rail; despite rail being more efficient not only in terms of fuel, but also in terms of labour (since so many trucks would be required to do the job of a single freight train, and each of those trucks require a separate driver). Also note that heavier vehicles degrade the road infrastructure disproportionately; which is even more reason to reduce the number of trucks as far as possible.
[1] https://www.energy.gov/cmei/vehicles/articles/fotw-1333-marc...
I shop at Costco by bike most of the time. Once every couple of months there's enough that needs to be bought that I use the car.
I have a dental appointment tomorrow: I can walk or cycle there faster than I can drive and find parking. I have another appointment on Monday at a hospital and I'll cycle there far faster than I can take public transit _or_ private car, and I won't have to pay ~$15/hour for parking or park a kilometre away.
Get out of your North American car bubble and look at what Paris and the Netherlands have done: they have not banned private car ownership or use, but they have removed some of them from streets. Utrecht just opened a massive underground _bike parking garage_ but it's also one of the busiest cities in the Netherlands in terms of car traffic.
There is no war on cars; that's something that has been invented out of whole cloth. Those of us who agitate for improved _options_ simply want (1) cars to pay their full freight (they don't, not by a long shot); (2) safer roads for pedestrians, cyclists, and those who want alternative mobility options; (3) more public transit; and (3) fewer cars moving slower because that's the only way to alleviate traffic.
You're not in traffic: you are traffic.
Your claim that designing for cars is designing for people is risible. Designing for people first (that's the goal!) means larger sidewalks, more barriers so that distracted or angry drivers find it harder to find themselves on those sidewalks, and fewer cars with clear rules so that vulnerable road users have absolute priority over people in cars. The larger and faster your vehicle, the more responsibility you should have, both in terms of liability when you inevitably collide with an obstruction and in terms of what you pay to keep the roads and surrounding infrastructure maintained.