This is the correct answer. The article already shows a bunch of pictures from Freiburg, and this something they also do, especially in its relatively new "eco quarter" Vauban: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vauban,_Freiburg
Essentially, you have a big shared car park at one of the "entrances", and lots of narrow streets otherwise. It works pretty well, really.
edit: Some bigger blocks also have their own underground car park.
Do as they do in Japan. Dig deep, and have an entrance that looks like a single car garage, with an underground robotic silo that'll hold as many cars as you've allowed it to. They're pretty ubiquitous in Tokyo and dense areas of other cities.
A better solution is not to have cars in the first place.
Moreover the simpler solution would be to build up. The article just dismisses that in one sentence saying "nobody wants" it, but do people want entire new microblocks built in the middle of streets?
Plus, narrowing streets would come at a significant cost to the city to reconfigure the roads and infrastructure. Not only tearing up sidewalks and paving new roads, but also burying all the wires on those telephone poles and lord knows whether the gas and sewer lines under the street could support construction on top of them (and how would you service them after?). We'd also lose/downsize trees. On the other hand, building taller is entirely privately funded and quite economical in comparison.
I'm also not convinced on the OP's idea, although I found it very interesting how the street cross section diagrams highlighted just how much space is consumed by streets. By it's also very interesting to see how public opinion goes in circles by comparing the 1850 Paris example. Some of the examples of slums that were demolished (eg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann%27s_renovation_of_Par...) were obviously very run down, but are precisely the sort of places that have been gentrified and are now worth crazy money and considered very desirable places to live.
Wouldn't the sale of the property by the city offset the cost of reconfiguring the infrastructure? It seems even likely to make a profit considering property values.
Moving sewer, water & gas lines? Burying electrical & telecom? I don't know without running the numbers, but that is hugely expensive and disruptive in exchange for a relatively small amount of low-rise development. Just the planning process alone... (shudder). Whereas building up would increase property taxes at basically no cost to the city.
50% more houses will need 50% more parking spaces and 50% more traffic on that now-one-way pedestrian/car lane. Perhaps what San Fransiscans want is actually no increase in the number of residents because of these problems they bring?
And that is the problem that is choking US cities. All of the pictures in the article show cities built around the concept of walking, cycling, and bus/train-ing to where people need and want to go. Private car ownership is lower and is far less useful.
It does not (and, IMO, should not) follow that building more residences requires more legally-mandated turning over of public right-of-way to store private automobiles. Even forcing parking minimums on private lots drives the cost of housing ever skyward because those spaces take up space that could be used for housing or are located underground and, thus, even more expensive to build.
Judging by the occupied parking spaces in his photo, I think residents want cars. Whether parking is private or public, it'll still need to be there in some form for people to be happy living in that street.
For people to walk/bus to work, shops, friends, they'll need much higher density housing, with workplaces mixed in and new public transport. So this single change won't help that.
As a SF resident, former car owner, and roommate of a current car owner, I can say that we never use our car unless we either
1) Have to go somewhere that's both out of the city and out of public transit range
2) Have to get something heavy and/or bulky that can't be easily shipped to the apartment
The car gets pulled out of the nearby parking garage once a month, on average.
If parking wasn't such a nightmare, the car would probably get used more often. The only way to improve the parking situation is to either level housing for more parking lots (ha!), or to install more parking garages. The only palatable way to make more garages is to make the garages underground. I don't see that happening anytime soon. :)
So very, very many people in SF walk, bike, bus, or Lyft/Uber to work. Very few residents drive to work if their place of work is actually in the city.
Of course very, very many people also drive to work if their work is not downtown, outside the city, or otherwise difficult to access via public transport (which is a lot of places in the bay area). Or if they live outside of SF and commute in to work.
I have a car and dont drive it to work, but use it daily for transporting my child. I'd say people who use a car only once a month are definitely a tiny minority. Regardless of whether that is a better way to live, it's not enough people to support eliminating as much parking as the article suggests.
Both the 2000 and 2010 census indicate that 16% of households in SF have children. [0] Compared to other cities where 25->30% of their households have children, households with children are a tiny minority in SF. :)
I agree that folks who go to destinations in the Bay Area that are outside of SF often will use a car to make the trip. Public transit in the Bay Area is shitloads better than in most of the rest of the country, but -for medium-length-to-long trips- it's still not nearly as good as renting or owning a car.
I also agree that many folks drive to work if they commute in from outside the city. [1] I don't see what that has to do with parking space allocation policy inside the city. We can always set aside space on the outskirts for Park N' Rides for inbound commuters. There's no need to clutter up the streets with cars of non-residents.
The Census Bureau indicates that 13.4% of SF's workers walk or bike to work. [2] That's nearly the same fraction of the city's population that has and lives with children. I wonder what the numbers would look like if it removed folks who work outside of the city.[3]
If Muni went more places more frequently and more quickly [4], it's pretty obvious that even more folks would choose it over their private car. Compare New York's numbers to SF's [5]. (SF is on the left half of the table, and NYC is on the right.) Note both the percentage that choose transit over auto, and the percentages of households that don't have cars.
[3] If you check the link after the text "View more commuting statistics for San Francisco online:", you see that ~23% of the workers surveyed work outside of SF. I wonder if cutting out 23% of the workers who travel by car would give us a reasonable look at the commute habits of those who both live and work in SF. If it does, then ~21% of SF resident workers commute by car, ~32% bus, and ~13% walk or bike.
[4] For some routes (e.g. Caltrain -> Polk Gulch), if you miss a bus, it's often faster to just walk the couple of miles to your destination. This is complete horseshit.
[5] http://factfinder.census.gov/bkmk/table/1.0/en/ACS/13_5YR/S0... (I hope that this link lasts for a long time. I'm not totally confident that this will be a permanent link.) (Also, note that the "How do we adjust the car-commute numbers to account for city residents that have jobs out of the city?" game gets harder here, as NYC is made up of like five counties or something, and I'm not sure how that's reflected in the Census Bureau's numbers.)
I dont really understand what you are arguing here. Why would you "remove folks who work outside the city" from the numbers? Those people still exist and need a place to park their car. And there are a lot of them, judging by rush hour traffic. Likewise for people who commute into the city from elsewhere.
My point is there are not enough people who live identical lifestyles as you to make removing substantial amounts of parking feasible. It would be great if there were, but that's just not the case at the moment. Most people in SF need a car. I lived in New York for a while and when I moved back to SF one of my big disappointments was needing to get a car again. It was a bummer, but it definitely was a necessity.
Yes, IF the city (and surrounding region) made sweeping policy and infrastructure changes to improve muni, bart, park-and-ride etc, then less people would need to drive. But I've lived in SF most of my life, and I guess that's made me pessimistic about the ability of the city to ever make those kinds of changes. It's not going to happen on any reasonable time scale.
Also consider that additional housing requires additional utility service: water, sewage and electricity. Could the existing local infrastructure handle the load even if the cost of running additional power lines, drains and white-water pipes were negligible?
Car ownership in US cities is high for a reason: lack of good public transport (compared to the European cities in the article) and the sprawl of cities in the US. Narrowing the streets would require a fundamental change in the rate of automobile ownership, which would not happen unless public transport is improved.
Car ownership in the US is actually lower than most other industrialized countries. [1] Sprawl is a policy, not a law of nature, and it can change with a change in policy.
That's relevant when discussing how to travel between cities, but really doesn't seem to have much to do with the tendency towards suburban sprawl. I believe the structure of modern American cities has largely be determined by policies, not geography.
Given the very predictable grid layout of many US cities, SF included, an awful lot of space could be reclaimed if many streets were made single lane traffic, one-way only.
The section for cars to drive down looks to be about 15' vs 24'. Even that is fairly big, in a lot of cases there is only room for one car to drive at a time or only one side is parking. The pavement is a lot narrower too, around 6' vs 15'.
This is a nice model, generally, for the currently drearily car-centric US - however I would have reservations about it specifically in SF, as wide streets are desirable there as fire-breaks and places for buildings to fall into, rather than each other, in the case of quake.
You'd also need public transit, which is something cities built prior to the car have generally invested in, but is virtually absent in the US, as part of the equation is getting people out of their cars. You could always have the new buildings over the street comprise a mix of commercial and residential, so that people don't have to drive to the nearest WalMart to buy everything, instead they can nip across the street to the butcher, the baker, and even the chandler.
I've not owned a car in over a decade (with the exception of the odd banger I buy to drive take on a rally), as I simply don't need one here. Every service I need, including my place of work, is in walking distance.
Oh, one last benefit of this that the OP missed - Urban Heat Island removal. City temperatures are usually higher than the surrounding countryside as black asphalt absorbs and radiates heat like nobody's business, and narrower streets tend to be better shaded, and even on a hot summer's day, hold nothing fiercer than a cool breeze. The upshot here being both a nicer environment in which to live and work, and lower energy requirements, as without a noisy street outside, and with cool air outside... shock, horror, one could open a window rather than running the AC!
My personal anecdotal experience contradicts the latter. On a hot day in Amsterdam, the narrow streets hold the heat reflected off the buildings and no wind gets there to remove it. In a densely built up city, the heat isn't going anywhere.
"explains why Traditional Cities generally feel more pleasant than American cities."
Fine, I'll call them out. Is there a culturally significant rate of immigration from American Sprawl Cities to ancient Euro Cities, or for that matter a culturally significant immigration from american sprawl cities to non-sprawl cities? Culturally significant means property values are imploding in emptying sprawl areas, not five guys on HN echo chamber each other's love for that style.
Property values in the U.S. do seem to be appreciating the fastest in denser urban areas. I'm not sure it's precisely a sea change in favor of urbanism, but it's certainly a different trend than, say, the '70s, when urban property was losing value relative to suburban property in many cities.
This extends even to cities that aren't traditionally very urbanized, like Houston: in the past 15 years, inside-610 property has been a much hotter market than outside-610 property.
Markets do not operate in a vacuum. There are fiscal, regulatory and financial incentives for sprawl. A new equilibrium with less sprawl and more walkable places is possible.
Like most cities, whether American or European, with "decent" public transportation it's easier and faster to travel between some locations than others partly because of the hills. Certainly it's faster to take a car on many routes than it is to take public transportation.
There's something of a stereotype of public transportation being almost universally absent in US cities and being some sort of nirvana that rapidly whisks you anywhere in western Europe. In general, European public transit does tend to be better than in the US--especially compared to newer and more spread out US cities away from the coasts--but the contrast can also be exaggerated.
It is ok-ish, but not great. I think at this point it may actually be worse than LA's, which has improved its system considerably in the past 20 years.
Among various complaints: SF Muni is rarely on time and very slow, especially if you need to go east/west. The two main crosstown routes, the N-Judah streetcar and 38-Geary bus, travel just slightly faster than a brisk walk, and are badly overcrowded. The connections to even nearby areas outside of SF proper are fairly spotty also; BART and Caltrain (and to a lesser extent, ACE and Amtrak) combine to make something halfway between a subway and a commuter-rail network, but not one sufficient for ~8 million people. A lack of integrated tickets between all the systems is an annoyance. On the Valley side of things, the lack of success of the Santa Clara VTA Light Rail hampers overall ability for people to commute to/from SF and the Valley without cars—the VTA built 42 miles of track but much of it on a very odd choice of alignment that makes it not useful to that many people.
Great ideas for major, youthful cities full of young, fit childless bike riders heading home in the sunny and dry environs of California with a convenience store on every corner and without sacks of shopping to carry and toddlers running around.
But living in an English market town myself and being heavily involved in community life and discussion, I know the cramped confines of many older English towns and villages are a total nut-ache for a sizeable share of residents and people are endlessly campaigning for more parking, better traffic management, and more spacious estates.
Let me offer the perspective of a not so young, not so childless resident of the not so sunny eastern US: dense, walkable cities are awesome for people with young children.
Weekends in the city with our toddler are awesome. We have brunch at one of the dozen restaurants we can get to within a few blocks' walk. We can walk to the park, walk to the drugstore to get the diaper cream we forgot to buy. We can have impromptu, unscheduled social events just by running in to the 3-4 other couples with kids our age who live in our apartment building. And narrow little pedestrian-oriented streets, which we don't have where we live but would love to, are a whole lot more toddler friendly than ones primarily designed for cars.
If anything, the advantages of city living are magnified for people with kids. When I was single, I thought nothing of driving 15-20 minutes on a weeknight to meet some friends for dinner. That's a non-starter with kids. These days, 70-80% of our social interaction is hanging out with people from our building.
Has anyone else noticed that safeway.com doesn't sell their in-store brand of sandwich bread, which usually costs $1.99? You can only buy loaves of bread that are $4.00 or more. Their entire online store is stocked only with crappy, expensive, name-brand items.
So, yeah, in theory you can get your groceries delivered to you, but none of those services are intended for cash-strapped families and/or conscientious shoppers.
The prospect of lugging 4 bags of groceries plus 3 kids on a late, crowded MUNI bus is just sooooo inviting...
It makes sense that not all items can be delivered. They still have to retain their profit margins. As automation ramps up and demand for services like this ramps up, the overhead for the markets will go down and it will be easier to offer the cheaper items as well.
I realize this is a bit of a chicken and egg problem but we have seen how quickly startups or even technology being implemented by existing players can respond to increased demand.
However it's also not that common for people here to carry lots of groceries at a time, unless you're planning a party. It's a lot more common to just pick up a few things each day: instead of one "big" shopping trip a week, most people make a short 10-minute stop every day or two, often on the way home from work. Partly for convenience, but partly also because that way your food is fresher. If you're shopping in that style, your groceries will fit in a regular bike's cargo basket.
So you don't actually have narrow streets where you live. That's not really a counter-perspective to someone who's actually lived with them.
Are narrow streets really toddler friendly in practice? Cars are less frequent and slower, but when they do come through the spacing is much much tighter and more dangerous. You are basically sharing a sidewalk with a car. If you're lucky there's a few stubby bollards separating you from traffic -- which are meaningless to a toddler. If you have a squirmy/dashy toddler I would be very concerned about them breaking loose and dashing into traffic.
Another kid-related reason that living in the city is popular here (Copenhagen) is that it really simplifies transportation of older kids, since they become more self-sufficient. In a car-dependent area, kids are basically completely dependent on mom and dad to get anywhere, until age 18-19 or so. That is not convenient for either the kids or the parents, especially if both parents work (which they usually do). In the city, by contrast, kids can begin getting around on their own with bikes and/or transit by late elementary age. The exact age depends on how conservative parents are, and it's common to start out accompanying them on longer or less familiar trips, but by age 13-14 or so most kids have graduated to getting around entirely on their own.
This doesn't strictly require a city; a compact town where kids can walk/bike everywhere would also be fine. But it does serve as a disincentive to raising kids in areas that are very car-oriented.
The people I see benefiting more from walkable and narrow streets are not the young and fit, but the elderly, who often can no longer drive but still maintain their independence by walking to the grocery shop, to the park, etc.
It's sort of a self fulfilling prophecy. If you take a car everywhere and barely move then by the time you hit 65 you will be in pain all the time and won't be self-sufficient. If you are constantly active you will usually have much better health outcomes and mobility later in life.
However, part of the problems you mention are entirely due to us Europeans adopting the American way of life: huge malls outside town centres, reachable only by cars; a general de-investment in public transport (because you can get everywhere faster by car, right? That's what Jeremy Clarkson keeps repeating...); entire cities being ripped apart to build motorways in the last century (Manchester, Birmingham...); people buying huge SUVs (because that's what Hollywood says you want) to stroll around roads built for horses... and so on and so forth.
If we thought a bit harder about what we actually want from life, beyond consumption of glamourized objects, we might find that our old Eurotowns are actually much more liveable than we assume.
Anyone can get a car and live outside the city. Having "all those things" living in the city is obviously a problem (with the limited supply), as the op clearly put it about SF.
I'm not a fan of very narrow streets for residential housing. People need a sense of space, and narrow residential roads often mean you're overlooked by homes opposite the street. There needs to be enough space between each side of the street so that residents don't feel hemmed in or claustrophobic.
Here is a random Victorian residential street (in a very expensive part of London) that I think has a good scale and width. The road is not too wide, but not too narrow either. Cars are parked on the street rather than in garages; and the houses are of fairly high density too.
You have to change all trucks to accomodate such a street. Firefighters, paramedics, even some cops have cars/trucks that are too wide to fit those streets. There is a huge difference in size between european and american fire trucks. Paramedics and some firefighters in europe use something like a Sprinter or Transit, both of which are narrower and smaller than their american counter part.
This is very interesting. It would certainly helps with housing costs if the city was more dense. Denser cities can also be more ecological (less travel needed, less cost for heating etc.) and it's not sustainable to have everyone live in suburbs.
However, I think it makes two subjective assumptions:
- Empty space is useless. "Useless greenery (not a park, but landscaping where nobody goes), Areas around buildings which are not “destinations,” and often have no real purpose". As in web design, I think that empty space is important. It allows a city and its inhabitant to breathe. It gives buffer space to avoid living with your neighbors (eg. seeing, hearing everything that happens in their apartment). It reduces noise reverberation.
- Narrower streets are nicer. Granted, the pictures there look good. I have lived in the US for a while and I'm now in Paris, France. I can tell you that if narrower streets can be cute, they also let less light go in the building, and can be stressful when too crowded. Also I don't think that SF is a good example of a city that doesn't look good. A lot of Europeans would want to live there because it looks amazing.
"It gives buffer space to avoid living with your neighbors (eg. seeing, hearing everything that happens in their apartment). It reduces noise reverberation."
This can be solved by technical means (employing the needed construction materials).
"I can tell you that if narrower streets can be cute, they also let less light go in the building, and can be stressful when too crowded."
If by "crowded" you're not referring to the actual amount of people on the streets but rather to the ambient feeling, then this is solved by requirements on the building architecture level. On narrow streets each floor higher then the 2nd should take a little bit less space than the one underneath it. This allows more light and gives a spacious feeling on the street level, even if the space there stays the same.
It would absolutely not help with housing costs. What do you think will happen, all the sudden because some new building can be jammed into the space where a street used to be the prices will somehow come down? That never happens. In the bubbles that were insulated from the recession all kinds of condos and apartment building were built, none of which were ever cheaper or pushed the price down. That's simply not how it works. Until you can somehow trigger a massive spurt of apartment and condo construction that creates a glut for a sustained period, you will NEVER have anything that is even remotely close to "help with housing costs". Any new building will always ask at the very least a little more than a comparable older building.
Am I wrong? I don't know, look at the dense cities. Paris, NYC, London, etc. are any of those the expected cheap meccas you would have predicted? Look at Austin, TX the more is built the more people are attracted and the more people drive into town and drive every single price up up up. Humans are kind of stupid and make nothing even remotely close to rational decisions that economics would like you to believe we make, otherwise the market would function and companies would not be starting in cities, people would not be moving to cities. Hell, we wouldn't really be co-locating in offices in specific cities and limiting our talent pool by geographic location.
It is true that housing prices are sticky, because property owners are generally content to simply wait until prices rise rather than selling. There's little you can do to push housing prices down once they've risen, though you can get the same effect through inflation and through economic growth causing salaries to rise.
What you can do, however, is help create and sustain conditions where prices don't rise, thus giving inflation a chance to do its work while property owners hold and wait. You do this by upzoning, which makes formerly unattractive properties become possibilities for profitable development, and by loosening restrictions on the kinds of properties that may be developed. (Dropping parking minimums, FAR limits, setback requirements, etc.)
When new houses are popping up all over the place, owners of older houses will have difficulty competing if they raise prices, so prices of existing buildings will tend to stagnate. This is about as close as you can get to dropping housing costs.
Maybe there's a reason, a really good reason why streets in the U.S., built hundreds of years after the streets in Europe, are wider. Could it be that people already learned that vehicle traffic needs width?
Think about this. Your ability to venture out to the Big Box store in the suburbs is what keeps pressure on local prices. Once lack of mobility isolates you, guess who will raise prices.
Well, you're assuming that streets need vehicle traffic. If zoning were relaxed on the narrow streets so that people could run shops and small businesses then you wouldn't really need to drive to buy stuff.
Regarding pricing, much of the good pricing is due to manufacturing scale, which you would still have with a distributor or a cartel consolidating orders. I don't see how big box stores are the only way to have low prices.
In terms of traffic, any faster traffic needs space. Could be electric bikes going 30mph, you can't ride that speed on a side-walk like street and in Europe I never get going that fast unless it's by a river (tend to be wider paths).
On pricing, manufacturing does help a lot. But retail is part of the cost (always >10% of it) and the restriction of movement will apply to people going out or goods coming in.
Unless there's raised or multi-level paths. That's honestly the real solution here; building up.
An interesting question is why we build up without interconnection? Purely ownership reasons? Structural stability reasons?
If you're talking about interconnecting separate buildings at other than ground level, it can be done. In downtown Minneapolis most buildings are connected by second-level walkways called the Skyway in aggregate. This is done to accommodate foot traffic off the street, especially during the winter when the climate control is welcome. I suspect the reason it isn't universal is simply the cost.
> Well, you're assuming that streets need vehicle traffic. If zoning were relaxed on the narrow streets so that people could run shops and small businesses then you wouldn't really need to drive to buy stuff.
You still need to drive fire trucks and ambulances...
Retailers tie price of consumables to convenience. Hence the bodegas that charge $1 or even $1.50 for a 1/2 liter bottle of water, while the big box store gives you 35 of them for $6. (PS I personally use a reusable water bottle, filled from a home filter)
When your city is transit-locked so no cars can get in, retailers will up their convenience charge, because they'll know that you have to spend 3 hours on the bus, and rent a ZipCar to get to Costco. And they'll also know you will only be able to bring home as much as you can fit in your fold up grocery cart. You really need to look no further than Manhattan, and one of the suburbs in Bergen County, NJ to see this effect in action.
"When we multiply the width of the lanes (38′ 9″) by the length of the block (425′), the result is more than 15,000 square feet of space for cars, just on a single block of McAllister Street."
Wow! That's amazing. Add that to the 425 x 425 square feet of the block, which is 180,625 square feet and you'd really have some more square footage! Why, it's...
8% more.
I don't think you're going to solve SF's housing crisis by raising the amount of square footage on a few select streets where this works by 8%. The math on this doesn't work when put in proper context. 15,000 square feet isn't anywhere near as much as it sounds.
You need to solve the core problem, which is probably something more like politically-mandated stasis because everybody's really excited about somebody else solving the problem but doesn't want anything they interact with to change moreso than "the streets are just too darned big".
Why don't they just build up if land prices support the construction costs? Seems to work in a lot of places.
Also, does anyone know why we don't have more- interconnected skyscrapers or underground connections? I see that on rare occasion. I know there are some city regulations which ban it in order to generate street travel but those must be rare. Is it a structural-stability and hard-to-long-term-plan-several-buildings thing?
Because the same people who bitch about the cost of living going up in the city where their family has lived for n generations will also flip their shit if you try to build anything that doesn't look like the 3 story Victorians they have giant fetishes for.
Of course, that's a bit exaggerated (there are skyscrapers going up downtown and some neighborhoods have the occasional modern-looking condo). Still, the problem is fairly untractable in the current climate. There's an endless stream of people ready to wait in line to bitch at every one of the multi-year stretch of town hall meetings needed to do anything that meanders away from the well-established status quo. (For reference, see all the FUD spread about Polk Street that led to the eventual neutering of that project).
No, the people who have owned property for decades are not bitching about cost of living. They love the rise in property prices and they still get their quaint homes. It's newcomers and renters who struggle.
I think you can shorten that to "You can't build in SF" :-) for a lot of reasons, mostly political. I met with the property manager of a very large REIT once who was looking at the housing market in SF. They had made a couple of runs at it (trying to get permits to build stuff both in existing lots and in the area where the old Embarcadero freeway used to be and were held hostage by the city council both times.
I live in Seattle, where it seems like at any given point in the city you can see a crane or some active construction. I was struck by the relative lack of construction in SF, despite the huge demand for housing there. It's just an observation.
You also can't just put a building down where the road is either. As long as we're discussing magical solutions, "build up" seems as feasible as permanently closing the 1400 block of McAllister Street.
Yeah the cross-section images in the article are very misleading, because they cut off the full width of the buildings on either side. A typical San Francisco lot is 100 feet deep, of which 2/3 or more is usually house and the rest is yard space in back. Put the actual full depth of the houses on either side of those images and it's much more obvious that you'd be just be creating tiny little houses in the middle of the street. They wouldnt contribute that much to the total amount of housing space and wouldnt have the property value of the surrounding larger houses with real backyards.
I think the approach is slightly wrong in that what you seem to be doing is removing road space, rather than re-allocating it. Though you might think a 15ft wide street is great it imposes big issues on the interaction between different types of users. You should segregate people walking, cycling and people driving.
Sharing space is not a "good thing" even though it seems to be the the thing that architects seem to be advocating at the moment. I'm still not convinced that a blind person and a bus can share space. Just like the tower blocks of the 1960's, I see shared space becoming the architectural white elephant of the 2010's.
What you should be considering is creating great living spaces where the road design "slows" down the speed at which cars travel through the space. Where priority is given to walking and cycling. Where each mode of transport is segregated from each other.
You transform a city by persuading people that the easiest way to get around the city is not by car.
As soon as you segregate traffic by type, you create the feeling of exclusivity that automatically entitles drivers to carelessness and higher speeds. This happens for any type of traffic: some bike lanes in London are incredibly dangerous for passers-by.
In this sense, shared spaces force drivers to actually slow down and think about what they are doing. This is what even most motorists advocate, btw: less obstacles forcing cars to slow down, and more publicity of what a driver could expect from the area they are passing through.
> You transform a city by persuading people that the easiest way to get around the city is not by car.
You can easily do that by removing all parking space at hotspot destinations. Job done. Businesses will scream blue murder though, so you need a plan for that.
I just think that mixing different modes of transport create unnecessary conflicts. Yes a person cycling can mix with people walking, but at walking pace. That isn't the desire of the person cycling and the people walking have to deal with "inconsiderate" people cycling. The blame is never placed on the urban designers who live in this idealised world where different modes of transport can mix harmoniously.
I think the author doesn't want to mix the different types of transportation. He allows them to be mixed but users won't because it's not convenient. That does not mean it is not good. In Paris we have a lot of street that are very narrow but still used by cars (not used like a highway, used when you really need to go there).
From a walking Parisian point of view I can tell you that no bus can use these narrow streets but you can be sure there's a bus stop in the next avenue (which is usually close). Thus by using both big avenues (mostly used by cars and with big empty sidewalks) and small streets (full of life, shops and well, some cars) you can achieve a very good "ambiance".
Bikes usually have a small lane on both sides of the road and don't really bother anyone.
I can't recall the name of a famous architect who was working on street dynamics and security but it is basically the opposite of what big names did in cities built for cars like Brasilia, Washington etc... The moral being that if you concentrate people in the streets you will need a much smaller police force because you're always "close" to other people.
Hmm, seems to me that comparing the ratio of "place" to "non-place" in newer vs. older cities is misleading. Those ratios are all about transportation. Many U.S. cities were founded and designed around wheeled transportation from the beginning, whereas many, if not most, European cities were founded at a time when foot and horse traffic was the norm. If the way that people get around changes then the cities will follow along over time. Personally I think that the conversion to autonomous vehicles will have a tremendous impact on vehicle size, road density, road layout, etc. It will enable cities to be very different from the way they are now.
> We need space for a lot more units than we have, and no one wants to build up.
I don't understand this phobia against building up. The only city in the US that seems to have actually embraced building higher is New York, and they seem to be doing alright. With a bit of planning you can build mixed use Shops / Restaurant / Office / Residential and make far better use of the space. A big part of the reason cities like SF and Boston are suffering a housing crisis is because of the zoning committees and entrenched residents, and their misguided belief that medium-density semi-cities are somehow nicer than real cities. I would prefer if we let the cities be cities, and let those who want to live in a big house move to the suburbs.
New York has made it very difficult to build up in the last many years. Chicago is really the only city in the US that seems to have embraced building up recently. And it's no surprise that it's one of the easier large cities to find housing at a reasonable cost.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but what do you mean by that? There are those new super tall high rises going on up 57th street. Are there other instances where developers have been prevented from building up?
I'm not a bay area resident, but one thing I find amusing about the HN posts about the SF affordability crisis is that they all focus on the supply side rather than the demand side. Making communities in South Bay or East Bay more attractive to the same sorts that want to live in SF will relieve some of the pressure on the SF market while improving the lot of even more people. Its a longer term solution (bringing in quality public transport, denser development, and changing perceptions takes time) but it is ultimately more feasible than creating enough housing in SF for everyone who wants to live there.
Love the idea of "place" versus "not place". We should really be optimizing for "place" everywhere, not just SF, and street-narrowing is a good place to begin. That, to me, is the main point of this, not "increasing housing supply" or anything like that. It's increasing place supply.
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[ 7.2 ms ] story [ 183 ms ] threadEssentially, you have a big shared car park at one of the "entrances", and lots of narrow streets otherwise. It works pretty well, really.
edit: Some bigger blocks also have their own underground car park.
A better solution is not to have cars in the first place.
http://www.expatsingapore.com/content/view/1152
Moreover the simpler solution would be to build up. The article just dismisses that in one sentence saying "nobody wants" it, but do people want entire new microblocks built in the middle of streets?
Plus, narrowing streets would come at a significant cost to the city to reconfigure the roads and infrastructure. Not only tearing up sidewalks and paving new roads, but also burying all the wires on those telephone poles and lord knows whether the gas and sewer lines under the street could support construction on top of them (and how would you service them after?). We'd also lose/downsize trees. On the other hand, building taller is entirely privately funded and quite economical in comparison.
It's literally a pipe dream.
And that is the problem that is choking US cities. All of the pictures in the article show cities built around the concept of walking, cycling, and bus/train-ing to where people need and want to go. Private car ownership is lower and is far less useful.
It does not (and, IMO, should not) follow that building more residences requires more legally-mandated turning over of public right-of-way to store private automobiles. Even forcing parking minimums on private lots drives the cost of housing ever skyward because those spaces take up space that could be used for housing or are located underground and, thus, even more expensive to build.
For people to walk/bus to work, shops, friends, they'll need much higher density housing, with workplaces mixed in and new public transport. So this single change won't help that.
1) Have to go somewhere that's both out of the city and out of public transit range
2) Have to get something heavy and/or bulky that can't be easily shipped to the apartment
The car gets pulled out of the nearby parking garage once a month, on average.
If parking wasn't such a nightmare, the car would probably get used more often. The only way to improve the parking situation is to either level housing for more parking lots (ha!), or to install more parking garages. The only palatable way to make more garages is to make the garages underground. I don't see that happening anytime soon. :)
So very, very many people in SF walk, bike, bus, or Lyft/Uber to work. Very few residents drive to work if their place of work is actually in the city.
I have a car and dont drive it to work, but use it daily for transporting my child. I'd say people who use a car only once a month are definitely a tiny minority. Regardless of whether that is a better way to live, it's not enough people to support eliminating as much parking as the article suggests.
I agree that folks who go to destinations in the Bay Area that are outside of SF often will use a car to make the trip. Public transit in the Bay Area is shitloads better than in most of the rest of the country, but -for medium-length-to-long trips- it's still not nearly as good as renting or owning a car.
I also agree that many folks drive to work if they commute in from outside the city. [1] I don't see what that has to do with parking space allocation policy inside the city. We can always set aside space on the outskirts for Park N' Rides for inbound commuters. There's no need to clutter up the streets with cars of non-residents.
The Census Bureau indicates that 13.4% of SF's workers walk or bike to work. [2] That's nearly the same fraction of the city's population that has and lives with children. I wonder what the numbers would look like if it removed folks who work outside of the city.[3]
If Muni went more places more frequently and more quickly [4], it's pretty obvious that even more folks would choose it over their private car. Compare New York's numbers to SF's [5]. (SF is on the left half of the table, and NYC is on the right.) Note both the percentage that choose transit over auto, and the percentages of households that don't have cars.
[0] http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/counties/SanFranciscoCounty....
[1] I guess I didn't make it sufficiently clear that I was speaking as an SF resident, as opposed to an inbound SF commuter. :)
[2] http://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2014/cb14-r09....
[3] If you check the link after the text "View more commuting statistics for San Francisco online:", you see that ~23% of the workers surveyed work outside of SF. I wonder if cutting out 23% of the workers who travel by car would give us a reasonable look at the commute habits of those who both live and work in SF. If it does, then ~21% of SF resident workers commute by car, ~32% bus, and ~13% walk or bike.
[4] For some routes (e.g. Caltrain -> Polk Gulch), if you miss a bus, it's often faster to just walk the couple of miles to your destination. This is complete horseshit.
[5] http://factfinder.census.gov/bkmk/table/1.0/en/ACS/13_5YR/S0... (I hope that this link lasts for a long time. I'm not totally confident that this will be a permanent link.) (Also, note that the "How do we adjust the car-commute numbers to account for city residents that have jobs out of the city?" game gets harder here, as NYC is made up of like five counties or something, and I'm not sure how that's reflected in the Census Bureau's numbers.)
My point is there are not enough people who live identical lifestyles as you to make removing substantial amounts of parking feasible. It would be great if there were, but that's just not the case at the moment. Most people in SF need a car. I lived in New York for a while and when I moved back to SF one of my big disappointments was needing to get a car again. It was a bummer, but it definitely was a necessity.
Yes, IF the city (and surrounding region) made sweeping policy and infrastructure changes to improve muni, bart, park-and-ride etc, then less people would need to drive. But I've lived in SF most of my life, and I guess that's made me pessimistic about the ability of the city to ever make those kinds of changes. It's not going to happen on any reasonable time scale.
http://www.thestar.com/business/real_estate/2015/03/16/condo...
http://www.thestar.com/life/homes/2014/11/14/no_parking_cond...
There has been talk of what to do with unused parking spaces in other buildings (e.g., turning them in to work spaces for artists, etc.).
Here's an article saying Vancouver has unused parking spaces:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/unused-...
[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/08/its...
https://letzterkunstgriff.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/harrow...
The section for cars to drive down looks to be about 15' vs 24'. Even that is fairly big, in a lot of cases there is only room for one car to drive at a time or only one side is parking. The pavement is a lot narrower too, around 6' vs 15'.
[1] http://narrowstreetssf.com/primer/
You'd also need public transit, which is something cities built prior to the car have generally invested in, but is virtually absent in the US, as part of the equation is getting people out of their cars. You could always have the new buildings over the street comprise a mix of commercial and residential, so that people don't have to drive to the nearest WalMart to buy everything, instead they can nip across the street to the butcher, the baker, and even the chandler.
I've not owned a car in over a decade (with the exception of the odd banger I buy to drive take on a rally), as I simply don't need one here. Every service I need, including my place of work, is in walking distance.
Oh, one last benefit of this that the OP missed - Urban Heat Island removal. City temperatures are usually higher than the surrounding countryside as black asphalt absorbs and radiates heat like nobody's business, and narrower streets tend to be better shaded, and even on a hot summer's day, hold nothing fiercer than a cool breeze. The upshot here being both a nicer environment in which to live and work, and lower energy requirements, as without a noisy street outside, and with cool air outside... shock, horror, one could open a window rather than running the AC!
Fine, I'll call them out. Is there a culturally significant rate of immigration from American Sprawl Cities to ancient Euro Cities, or for that matter a culturally significant immigration from american sprawl cities to non-sprawl cities? Culturally significant means property values are imploding in emptying sprawl areas, not five guys on HN echo chamber each other's love for that style.
This extends even to cities that aren't traditionally very urbanized, like Houston: in the past 15 years, inside-610 property has been a much hotter market than outside-610 property.
London has narrow and wide streets, but you can get to anywhere by public transport, at a reasonable cost, within 1 hour more or less.
Holland has segregated roads for cycles and cars, and brilliant public transport
There's something of a stereotype of public transportation being almost universally absent in US cities and being some sort of nirvana that rapidly whisks you anywhere in western Europe. In general, European public transit does tend to be better than in the US--especially compared to newer and more spread out US cities away from the coasts--but the contrast can also be exaggerated.
Manhattan has a great metro, but buses for the last mile are non existent. However they are not as critical as say in london.
Among various complaints: SF Muni is rarely on time and very slow, especially if you need to go east/west. The two main crosstown routes, the N-Judah streetcar and 38-Geary bus, travel just slightly faster than a brisk walk, and are badly overcrowded. The connections to even nearby areas outside of SF proper are fairly spotty also; BART and Caltrain (and to a lesser extent, ACE and Amtrak) combine to make something halfway between a subway and a commuter-rail network, but not one sufficient for ~8 million people. A lack of integrated tickets between all the systems is an annoyance. On the Valley side of things, the lack of success of the Santa Clara VTA Light Rail hampers overall ability for people to commute to/from SF and the Valley without cars—the VTA built 42 miles of track but much of it on a very odd choice of alignment that makes it not useful to that many people.
But living in an English market town myself and being heavily involved in community life and discussion, I know the cramped confines of many older English towns and villages are a total nut-ache for a sizeable share of residents and people are endlessly campaigning for more parking, better traffic management, and more spacious estates.
Weekends in the city with our toddler are awesome. We have brunch at one of the dozen restaurants we can get to within a few blocks' walk. We can walk to the park, walk to the drugstore to get the diaper cream we forgot to buy. We can have impromptu, unscheduled social events just by running in to the 3-4 other couples with kids our age who live in our apartment building. And narrow little pedestrian-oriented streets, which we don't have where we live but would love to, are a whole lot more toddler friendly than ones primarily designed for cars.
If anything, the advantages of city living are magnified for people with kids. When I was single, I thought nothing of driving 15-20 minutes on a weeknight to meet some friends for dinner. That's a non-starter with kids. These days, 70-80% of our social interaction is hanging out with people from our building.
Other supermarkets do this a lot cheaper. Or free.
So, yeah, in theory you can get your groceries delivered to you, but none of those services are intended for cash-strapped families and/or conscientious shoppers.
The prospect of lugging 4 bags of groceries plus 3 kids on a late, crowded MUNI bus is just sooooo inviting...
I realize this is a bit of a chicken and egg problem but we have seen how quickly startups or even technology being implemented by existing players can respond to increased demand.
However it's also not that common for people here to carry lots of groceries at a time, unless you're planning a party. It's a lot more common to just pick up a few things each day: instead of one "big" shopping trip a week, most people make a short 10-minute stop every day or two, often on the way home from work. Partly for convenience, but partly also because that way your food is fresher. If you're shopping in that style, your groceries will fit in a regular bike's cargo basket.
Are narrow streets really toddler friendly in practice? Cars are less frequent and slower, but when they do come through the spacing is much much tighter and more dangerous. You are basically sharing a sidewalk with a car. If you're lucky there's a few stubby bollards separating you from traffic -- which are meaningless to a toddler. If you have a squirmy/dashy toddler I would be very concerned about them breaking loose and dashing into traffic.
This doesn't strictly require a city; a compact town where kids can walk/bike everywhere would also be fine. But it does serve as a disincentive to raising kids in areas that are very car-oriented.
An article about how walking speed predicts life expectancy: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/walking-speed-surv...
If we thought a bit harder about what we actually want from life, beyond consumption of glamourized objects, we might find that our old Eurotowns are actually much more liveable than we assume.
Here is a random Victorian residential street (in a very expensive part of London) that I think has a good scale and width. The road is not too wide, but not too narrow either. Cars are parked on the street rather than in garages; and the houses are of fairly high density too.
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.556208,-0.165162,3a,75y,36...
However, I think it makes two subjective assumptions:
- Empty space is useless. "Useless greenery (not a park, but landscaping where nobody goes), Areas around buildings which are not “destinations,” and often have no real purpose". As in web design, I think that empty space is important. It allows a city and its inhabitant to breathe. It gives buffer space to avoid living with your neighbors (eg. seeing, hearing everything that happens in their apartment). It reduces noise reverberation.
- Narrower streets are nicer. Granted, the pictures there look good. I have lived in the US for a while and I'm now in Paris, France. I can tell you that if narrower streets can be cute, they also let less light go in the building, and can be stressful when too crowded. Also I don't think that SF is a good example of a city that doesn't look good. A lot of Europeans would want to live there because it looks amazing.
This can be solved by technical means (employing the needed construction materials).
"I can tell you that if narrower streets can be cute, they also let less light go in the building, and can be stressful when too crowded."
If by "crowded" you're not referring to the actual amount of people on the streets but rather to the ambient feeling, then this is solved by requirements on the building architecture level. On narrow streets each floor higher then the 2nd should take a little bit less space than the one underneath it. This allows more light and gives a spacious feeling on the street level, even if the space there stays the same.
Am I wrong? I don't know, look at the dense cities. Paris, NYC, London, etc. are any of those the expected cheap meccas you would have predicted? Look at Austin, TX the more is built the more people are attracted and the more people drive into town and drive every single price up up up. Humans are kind of stupid and make nothing even remotely close to rational decisions that economics would like you to believe we make, otherwise the market would function and companies would not be starting in cities, people would not be moving to cities. Hell, we wouldn't really be co-locating in offices in specific cities and limiting our talent pool by geographic location.
What you can do, however, is help create and sustain conditions where prices don't rise, thus giving inflation a chance to do its work while property owners hold and wait. You do this by upzoning, which makes formerly unattractive properties become possibilities for profitable development, and by loosening restrictions on the kinds of properties that may be developed. (Dropping parking minimums, FAR limits, setback requirements, etc.)
When new houses are popping up all over the place, owners of older houses will have difficulty competing if they raise prices, so prices of existing buildings will tend to stagnate. This is about as close as you can get to dropping housing costs.
Think about this. Your ability to venture out to the Big Box store in the suburbs is what keeps pressure on local prices. Once lack of mobility isolates you, guess who will raise prices.
Regarding pricing, much of the good pricing is due to manufacturing scale, which you would still have with a distributor or a cartel consolidating orders. I don't see how big box stores are the only way to have low prices.
On pricing, manufacturing does help a lot. But retail is part of the cost (always >10% of it) and the restriction of movement will apply to people going out or goods coming in.
Unless there's raised or multi-level paths. That's honestly the real solution here; building up.
An interesting question is why we build up without interconnection? Purely ownership reasons? Structural stability reasons?
In California, among other places, seismic safety may be a concern.
You still need to drive fire trucks and ambulances...
When your city is transit-locked so no cars can get in, retailers will up their convenience charge, because they'll know that you have to spend 3 hours on the bus, and rent a ZipCar to get to Costco. And they'll also know you will only be able to bring home as much as you can fit in your fold up grocery cart. You really need to look no further than Manhattan, and one of the suburbs in Bergen County, NJ to see this effect in action.
In other words, it's probably OK for side streets, but you probably don't want to do this for major thoroughfares.
Wow! That's amazing. Add that to the 425 x 425 square feet of the block, which is 180,625 square feet and you'd really have some more square footage! Why, it's...
8% more.
I don't think you're going to solve SF's housing crisis by raising the amount of square footage on a few select streets where this works by 8%. The math on this doesn't work when put in proper context. 15,000 square feet isn't anywhere near as much as it sounds.
You need to solve the core problem, which is probably something more like politically-mandated stasis because everybody's really excited about somebody else solving the problem but doesn't want anything they interact with to change moreso than "the streets are just too darned big".
Also, does anyone know why we don't have more- interconnected skyscrapers or underground connections? I see that on rare occasion. I know there are some city regulations which ban it in order to generate street travel but those must be rare. Is it a structural-stability and hard-to-long-term-plan-several-buildings thing?
Of course, that's a bit exaggerated (there are skyscrapers going up downtown and some neighborhoods have the occasional modern-looking condo). Still, the problem is fairly untractable in the current climate. There's an endless stream of people ready to wait in line to bitch at every one of the multi-year stretch of town hall meetings needed to do anything that meanders away from the well-established status quo. (For reference, see all the FUD spread about Polk Street that led to the eventual neutering of that project).
Sharing space is not a "good thing" even though it seems to be the the thing that architects seem to be advocating at the moment. I'm still not convinced that a blind person and a bus can share space. Just like the tower blocks of the 1960's, I see shared space becoming the architectural white elephant of the 2010's.
What you should be considering is creating great living spaces where the road design "slows" down the speed at which cars travel through the space. Where priority is given to walking and cycling. Where each mode of transport is segregated from each other.
You transform a city by persuading people that the easiest way to get around the city is not by car.
In this sense, shared spaces force drivers to actually slow down and think about what they are doing. This is what even most motorists advocate, btw: less obstacles forcing cars to slow down, and more publicity of what a driver could expect from the area they are passing through.
> You transform a city by persuading people that the easiest way to get around the city is not by car.
You can easily do that by removing all parking space at hotspot destinations. Job done. Businesses will scream blue murder though, so you need a plan for that.
Bikes usually have a small lane on both sides of the road and don't really bother anyone.
I can't recall the name of a famous architect who was working on street dynamics and security but it is basically the opposite of what big names did in cities built for cars like Brasilia, Washington etc... The moral being that if you concentrate people in the streets you will need a much smaller police force because you're always "close" to other people.
I don't understand this phobia against building up. The only city in the US that seems to have actually embraced building higher is New York, and they seem to be doing alright. With a bit of planning you can build mixed use Shops / Restaurant / Office / Residential and make far better use of the space. A big part of the reason cities like SF and Boston are suffering a housing crisis is because of the zoning committees and entrenched residents, and their misguided belief that medium-density semi-cities are somehow nicer than real cities. I would prefer if we let the cities be cities, and let those who want to live in a big house move to the suburbs.
Policy probably hasn't quite caught up with modern architectural realities, but it isn't just based on desire for medium density.
This isn't unique to North America, look at the downtown core of Lisbon, for example.
The problem is building up is expensive. So the cost of building up has to be lower than just building sideways.