From the article: “If cities allow, and mandate that we be able to park cars everywhere, why shouldn’t bikes have the same convenience, especially considering they require 10 times less space than cars and offer the enormous efficiency, environmental, cost, and health benefits listed above?”
Alternatively we could drop the entitlement to drive and park cars everywhere and the regulations forcing that choice on the country.
But either way, I’m all for bikes and scooters etc. getting the same benefit that cars get.
Most places in the US at least are not very livable without a car. You majorly hurt commerce and people's quality of life by removing vehicles without completely changing the layout of cities to make them work with other options.
Not that we shouldn't pursue those sorts of changes but that thinking of it as "entitlement" is shallow and not constructive. The entire system was engineered around the car. To remove the car you have to reengineer the system.
> Most places in the US at least are not very livable without a car.
Let me rephrase that for you: In most place in the US public transport is woefully under-funded, under-utilized, and overly stigmatized (as a thing only poor 'others' would use).
That is changing, slowly, as places that basically gave up on public transport are discovering that less and less people in their cities want to own a car.
US cities also tend to be more spread out, which also reduces the appeal of public transit. Contrast this to a Chinese city of the same size, which due to the fact that literally everyone lives in small apartments, is much more compact and easier to serve via public transport.
At some point in our nation's history (namely right after WW2), it was decided that cars, suburbia, and the Interstate highway system was the way forward, and not dense, closely packed cities + public transport + more railways.
Note that we might not think about this now, but cities before WW2 were often disease-ridden, filthy places. The antibiotic revolution did not really come into full swing until after the war. There were reasons people made those choices back then, and some of them we have forgotten since the problems they faced were mitigated.
We're now revisiting whether that choice has outlived its usefulness, but if something took 50 years to build, you can bet replacing it will take just as long.
China never had the luxury of making that choice during its development; it was either public transit or nothing.
We agree on all those points. All I was saying is that people say "cities are spread out so transit won't work" when often the very _reason_ cities are spread out is that they lacked transit, so huge amounts of land were given over to auto infrastructure. It's worth considering that it's self-reinforcing and the causality isn't one-way.
Look at a big box store, for instance - most of the land is parking, not the store itself. A freeway interchange can take as much land as en entire neighborhood. Meanwhile you can have tens of thousands of people in a city centre all within walking distance of one another. But you can't do that if you pave over most of the land.
Also, it's illegal in most of the US to build infrastructure that isn't suited to an auto-first lifestyle, mostly through parking minimums but also Level-of-service considerations that force large, wide streets.
In California, SB827 just died a sad death. It would have allowed buildings up to 5 stories near high-frequency transit stops. Now those people who would have lived in those buildings will have to live farther from transit, so they'll drive. They'll need parking too, so we'll need to use land that would have gone to homes/businesses/etc for their parking. Also gas stations, more road capacity, etc. The homes they end up living in will be harder to reasonably serve with transit, because of course they're farther apart.
Yet old neighborhoods near cities built _before_ those rules are often very expensive, suggesting that more people would like to live in them than are able to. The first thing that comes to mind is the nicer areas of Berkeley, or South Park, San Diego, for instance. It's funny you note railways though because they were largely the original enablers of sprawl (though I have no problem with railway-served suburbs! the problem is largely that we got rid of the rail service).
> All I was saying is that people say "cities are spread out so transit won't work" when often the very _reason_ cities are spread out is that they lacked transit, so huge amounts of land were given over to auto infrastructure. It's worth considering that it's self-reinforcing and the causality isn't one-way.
IIRC, that's ahistorical and getting the causation backwards. American cities used to be denser with more public transit (e.g. trollies) before cars became common. The reason cities are spread out is cars enabled the residents to spread out, since that's what they wanted to do. That established a new pattern of development that makes density more difficult.
True, but those people who moved out found that the externalities of their driving made driving itself less pleasant. It's great to live in the suburbs and drive in to the city when you're the only one doing it. When parking gets scarce or the roads are too narrow or congestion is bad, though, it gets annoying. For the US, the response was to mandate large amounts of parking and large roads that are built so they can move a certain number of cars a certain distance per hour. However, little thought was given to the fact that by doing so, you end up making the distances larger, because everything's farther apart, because it's surrounded by parking (among other reasons), wider streets, larger interchanges, etc.
Those things that make driving more pleasant also make walking less pleasant (walking next to Wilshire blvd in LA isn't exactly pleasant, for instance), so more people drive, so more people demand auto-oriented infrastructure, and so on.
I think you're focusing optimizing lifestyle to suit a desired transit style (public transit and walking), while the historical development mindset was to optimize transit style for a desired lifestyle (suburban living).
I just want to walk and ride my bike places without dying, and be allowed to build a 5 story apartment building near transit without people from miles away coming and yelling at me in city hall not to.
No, American cities are more spread out mainly because many Americans don't want to live in small apartments, and cars enabled that.
Public transit is much less convenient and desirable when the 1) distance between adjacent stops is too large, 2) there are too many stops between different destinations, and/or 3) the stops at a particular location are too infrequent. I think all of those undesirable factors increase as density decreases.
Using a personal car effectively reduces #1 to zero, #2 to zero, and increases #3 to infinity.
We completely agree. Cars did enable that. They also caused people (especially wealthy people) to push for the very things that cause lower density, because driving through high density areas is a pain. I mean, it's not even that complicated. I used to go to my planning board meetings every month. I won't deny an agenda; I rode my Brompton to them. At those meetings people said (paraphrased but close) "We need to limit density because of traffic".
Unsurprisingly those neighborhoods have poor transit service. A shame, because in the example I think of there was once a rail line right through the neighborhood; it's what caused the neighborhood to get built in the first place.
If only _I_ decide to start taking a helicopter to work it's fantastic. If it starts to become popular to do so it will be a hassle, so people might push for rules about minimum helipad counts for buildings and building density because having thousands of people commuting by helicopter causes loads of congestion. As a result of both of those things buildings will need to be even farther apart. In fact, it might push them so far apart that it's impractical to get between them via foot, transit, or maybe even car. As a result, everyone uses a helicopter to get anywhere now, except for the poor chumps who can't afford one and are stuck driving.
A better phrasing would be that in most places in the U.S. public transport simply does not exist. Not everyone lives in the heart of the city where it may be an option.
> In most place in the US public transport is woefully under-funded, under-utilized, and overly stigmatized
You misspelled "in most places in the US public transport cannot meet people's needs". Yes, it can in inner cities, but most of the US is not inner cities.
The Census Bureau’s “urban” is “not rural.” Most people live in metro areas, but in suburban and exurban parts of those metro areas without the density to make public transit good enough to rely on.
> 80.7 percent of the U.S. population lived in urban areas as of the 2010 Census
"Urban areas" includes where I live, which is not dense enough for public transportation to work well. Reading the article you cited, it looks like about half of the population labeled "urban" by the Census Bureau lives in areas that are like mine (or even less dense).
> which is not dense enough for public transportation to work well
You lose me here. I live in a major metro area and public transportation works fine, even out into the suburbs where it is not as dense, but the public transit spokes out to the major hubs and people drive to those transit stations and park for the day.
Public transportation works for the vast majority of the country.
You don't deserve the downvotes. It's not really surprising that the HN crowd doesn't understand how public transport completely fails in sparse metro-areas.
- Walking, biking, etc. are out since there's very little mixed-use land. Getting out of your residential area is already outside what one could reasonably be expected to bike. Your nearest grocery store is even further.
- Fixed path transport is always being proposed but getting the coverage and schedule that would make people give up their cars is always ludicrously cost prohibitive. There are too many areas to hit and few people in each area which makes each stop basically unprofitable.
- Buses face exactly the same problems. Within the densest parts of the city they work well but they don't work well in sparse residential areas because it's not profitable to run them at convenient schedules for small populations that trickle in and out.
And we're talking about millions of people. Rearrange everything isn't exactly a viable path forward.
> You majorly hurt commerce and people's quality of life by removing vehicles without completely changing the layout of cities to make them work with other options.
Cities got that way by fiat, not by choice, and the government engineered the system with no small amount of help from the industrial lobbies that would be best served by having a car-dependent population.
I would love for us to re-engineer the system. The first step is removing the entitlement.
you don’t have to remove the car. But to change things, the first step would be to reframe the car centered infra as legacy, an historic situation that you want to work on.
I interpret GP’s “entitlement” bit as the thinking that cars should be at the center of cities. Good or bad, I think the majority of people are still currently in that mentality.
Someone who is not comfortable/fit enough to bike on an American road should probably bike on a non-crowded sidewalk.
There are over 800 cyclist deaths, from being hit by cars, every year in the United States. How many pedestrians have been killed by a cyclist hitting them?
Forcing someone biking at 7 mph off the sidewalk and onto the street creates more danger then it protects us from.
How many pedestrians have been killed by a cyclist hitting them?
Finding fatality data is oddly difficult; DuckDuckGo finds lots of UK data and news items (e.g. [0]) but little USA data. There are many individual cases, including several well-known in the Bay Area. The official DOT reports count pedestrian and cyclist deaths in collisions with motor vehicles only.
"Overall, 7,904 pedestrians in New York State (including New York City) were treated in a hospital for injuries caused by a person on a bicycle between 2004 and 2011. In California, the number was 6,177 between 2005 and 2011."[1]
And if those pedestrians had to walk in narrow, unseparated lanes, between parked cars, and busy streets, instead of on the relative safety of the sidewalk, I would imagine that fatality rates would be much higher.
There have been several studies showing that you're more likely to get hit by a car biking on the sidewalk then riding on the street. Drivers don't look for bicyclist riding on the sidewalk, you will get right swiped.
Is this adjusted for location? I imagine people may bike on sidewalks more in dangerous-for-cyclist cities.
According to the CDC, most (72%)[1] of bicycle deaths occur outside of intersections, so this may even be an acceptable risk. Most fatal crashes occur near, but not in intersections[2] - biking on the sidewalk completely avoids them.
Also, when you're biking on the sidewalk, your odds of getting doored into traffic go down substantially.
If you had biked in both places, you wouldn't doubt it. Sure not every autocager sees (or drives as if they see) a cyclist in the road, but the cyclist can see and hear everything around in way that's just not possible on the sidewalk. (I say this as someone who is missing one eye.) Also, cars aren't the only things with doors.
I have biked on both places (In more suburban areas). The roads tend to be terrifying (Because try as I might, I can't keep up with 30 mph traffic.) The sidewalks tend to be empty. I also didn't blow through intersections, which minimized the risk of getting hit in one.
Cars aren't the only thing with doors, but they are the only thing that will door you into traffic. Doors flush with buildings are also quite rare, and are quite rarely opened. (Except store doors - but you don't want to bike near them anyways, unless you want to run into a sign, or a table, or an outdoor display.)
I feel like I'm missing something. I can't understand how it's more likely for a car to hit a cyclist on the sidewalk than the road. Cars drive in the road. They do not drive on the sidewalk.
I hit a car while riding on the sidewalk as it was exiting an alley. The problem is that when you are riding on the sidewalk in a city, the corners are too blind. In order to guarantee avoiding an accident you essentially need to stop at each driveway and alley. Most cyclists and drivers aren’t going to do that. On the road you are far enough back that you can see cars exiting; they can see you as well.
Unless they make the same people bike in a randomly decided way during the study, it's likely selection bias to a large extent - more experienced cyclists would ride on roads, less experienced (and on worse bikes without disc brakes) - on sidewalks.
Alternatively we could drop the entitlement to drive and park cars everywhere and the regulations forcing that choice on the country.
But either way, I’m all for bikes and scooters etc. getting the same benefit that cars get.